Rivers are rapidly warming, losing oxygen; aquatic life at risk, study finds
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
The UK government privatised water companies in England. In Scotland the water remained nationalised.
In recent years, the UK government started measuring water quality, by installing measurement devices absolutely everywhere in England. The measurement devices then show that the rivers have lots of shit in them. But the point is, the shit is not a new development - they always had shit.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the rivers are not monitored, there's a pathetically small quantity of measurement devices installed. Hence there's no scandal in Scotland because ignorance is bliss I suppose, not because nationalised water is somehow amazingly better.
Somehow people with a narrative to push turn this into a tale of how privatisation is terrible despite there being no evidence to back this up whatsoever.
> show that the rivers have lots of shit in them
irrelevant to Scotland, isn't it in itself indication that water privatization was shit?
Monitoring is a good thing to have, and clean water is a good thing to have. Those are valid metrics, but what also must be considered are the costs of providing those services, how available/accessible the services are to the public, the price the public pays for them, etc.
I'd love to see an in depth analysis the impacts of privatization in the UK, but I'd be surprised if the public was better off because of it.
In the end, privatization tends to be the worst option because of one simple fact: in addition to total compensation of all the costs required to provide the service to the public, the private entity also demands that they make a profit on top of that.
A government can provide a service without any pressure to charge anything more than needed to keep the system going. Governments can even run essential services at a loss if needed. The government, unconcerned with personal enrichment, only has to worry about providing the best service to everyone.
The private corporation only cares about profits and the endless growth of those profits so they will do anything to enrich themselves even at the expense of the public.
Government is incentivized to provide what the public wants because when it fails they risk being voted out of office. Corporations are incentivized to provide as little as possible, spending as little as possible to provide it, while charging the public as much as possible and they are not accountable to the public at all.
This applies to all private efforts. Yet history shows the private sector can compete with public initiatives. The difference is competition. Water utilities don't have competition. They're born into a mode of market failure. For natural monopolies, public management seems to work best.
The public is unlikely to be better off when the service being provided doesn't really allow for competition and utilities and infrastructure are great examples of that. For products and services where competition is desirable, easy, and plentiful I want those options and the government's role should be limited to regulating where necessary to ensure that competition stays strong and the public is protected.
What makes you think so? If the government can't incentivize a private company with a natural monopoly so that it provides an effective service, why would it inherently be easier for it to incentivize public employees to provide an effective service?
It's not like it's immediately obvious from superficial inspection either, it seems to me like there are relative success cases and failure cases of both publicly and privately run natural monopolies. For example, taking rail transport: the UK has privatized it trains and the result is lack-luster, France has a state run railway company which seems to do a pretty good job, and Japan has at least notionally privatized it's railways and provides famously world-class rail service).
I can avoid eating a pizza but not avoid taking a specific road. Besides it seems like any domain where the initial investment is large seems to be places where one monopoly eventually emerge.
At least in my opinion healthcare (hospitals and such not including drug development) should not be private or of there is there should be a strong public hospital network for providing care
Internet, cellphone, electricity, trash, healthcare, insurance... if the vast majority needs the same thing, the local, state, or federal government should provide it. We need to put an end to all the rent seeking behavior, it's parasitic and slowly destroying our economy.
> if the vast majority needs the same thing
It's more that if you privatize certain necessary infrastructure, the owners either end up as monopolies and/or require heavy regulation, which means the customer can't just buy from someone else and/or new companies can't unseat dysfunctional incumbents.
Also, the utility doesn’t have to provide everything. MVNO, which are cellular providers on top of other provider, could work with mobile provider utility. Internet is the other ones where in some countries multiple providers sit on top of phone company.
(Not to be confused with a publicly-traded company)
The US has whole categories of 503c non-profit organizations, with 503c3 tax-exempt charities the most well known. I can't tell if there category for non-profit utilities. I think there should be room for companies between government-owned and for-profit, companies that do a service without making money.
Like how you can hire private bodyguards, and not leave your safety to the police.
Or course your trash stopping being "picked up reliably" and the presence of alternative private services are often not independent events (either the government/local government decides to not put in the effort and leave it to the public to pay for third party services, or they're actively encouraged to do so with under the table bribes).
buy water company -> dump shit in rivers rather than treat it -> profit
That by itself doesn't add or remove any credit to the study.
Expect things to continue to get worse. Fish stocks are already on the brink of collapse and I'm almost certain it will happen in my lifetime.
I am curious to hear your insights. I watch the traffic like this too and try to tally up as many as I can as I try to count 1000 cars. How do you record what you find?
We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.
Plenty of those EV's will have been charged at home on Solar, people tend to do both.
The advantage of (small) electric cars is moving emissions away from people, not in total carbon emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
The reality is, you're moving in the right direction about as fast as you can.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
We didn't get into this mess over night, and we're not getting out of it overnight either.
"Sometimes the things you do impact other people" is something we learn in very early childhood.
> Would you rather see us on a bus or something?
Yes?
It’s very “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll like it” energy.
"You'll own nothing, and you won't like it" is a whole bunch of folks' future if we continue to pretend our decisions don't have externalities.
Or maybe, "You'll stop engaging in activities that objectively harm those around you, and you'll like it".
Just some alternate phrases for you to explore placing between quotes.
If we want to maintain our exponential increase of CO2 emissions in the face of EV adoption, we need to get people to tear out and replace existing construction.
One way to do that is to rapidly build up low-cost, low-efficiency housing near bus and train lines.
> Incinerates the planet
"You can fit so many corpses in this model!"