England is facing an imminent water crisis | Hacker News Reader

England is facing an imminent water crisis

theguardian.com

22 pointsgus_leonel10 comments

The UK is not getting drier. In fact I believe that statistics and models show and predict that it is getting wetter. What is changing is the seasonality with more rain in automn and winter and less rain in summer, and as the article mentions there is high geographical variability.

This means that there are some solutions but they would require large scale infrastructure projects... which are not materialising and which the country is terrible at and so we get floods in winter and water restrictions in summer.

"A new potable water reservoir hasn’t opened in the UK since 1992" (2022) [1]

During that time population went from 57 to 69 million... So there is also the general lack of investment in infrastructure, nevermind climate change, which is a common pattern in the country.

And, food for thought:

"There is a seemingly direct link between the 1989 privatisation of water companies in the UK and the ceasing of new reservoirs being built"

[1] https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/the-challenge-of-bui...

Privatising utilities like this (and electricity etc.) has never made any sense to me. It all happened in the UK well before I was old enough to understand that sort of thing. I have grown up very aware of the failings of privatising public infrastructure.

Can someone explain what the problems were with this stuff being owned and run nationally that privatisation was supposed to fix?

In the Netherlands the same happened with the railway and healthcare coverage. The motivation was that market pressure would lead to increased efficiency. In practice, there's a tendency towards monopoly and a forest of product variants leading to more confusion and people buying sub-optimal. The net effect over here is negative, in my opinion.

The thing is there is no market pressure for water/sewage, which is a monopoly and even a natural monopoly.

There are very good argument to have a working market wherever possible but obviously that does not work with natural monopolies. In those cases it makes more sense to make it a state-owned company and to drive investment while keeping costs down for the benefits of all. Nothing new as this has been a recognised issue since the 19th century.

> what the problems were with this stuff being owned

If you're a director of a publicly owned company and you loot it, you go to prison.

You can bet your bottom dollar (pound) that someone will make money from this “crisis”

The media is probably just setting the stage for significant water rates increases.

Someone has looked at my £30/mo bill and thought: there’s plenty more to squeeze out of you, just like gas/electric

That already happened with the raw sewage dumping combined with huge dividend payouts to shareholders and bonuses for directors.

The crisis is real. But it's essentially a crisis of greed and shortsightedness which is trashing the one common ecosystem we have and impoverishing most of the population in search of short-term profit - just numbers on a ledger "owned" by a tiny minority, which will never be turned into anything tangible, never mind beneficial.

"An analysis for the Financial Times suggests that since privatisation the companies have taken on a combined £51bn in debt, and paid out £56bn in dividends."[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50802783 (2019)

I heard that cloud seeding and other weather controls are affecting the natural rainfall of the water cycle, meaning that water that would usually fall in these places, is not. Is it really feasible that cloud seeding programs are causing less rainfall elsewhere in the world?

It's just kind of incredible that so many parts of the world have problems with something as basic as water. We've truly lost the mandate of heaven.

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