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This stuff is economics 101.
The full quote is:
“”Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s who in January will become the chief executive, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a model of water pricing that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere, because you can’t run a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “That would apply to the globe." “”
I remember learning in elementary school that you're not allowed to charge for water.
So it's either putting a price on these resources or careful regulation. The latter is not very popular in today's political climate.
Has never worked very well. Government bureaucracies are very bad at pricing and allocating things appropriately. A case study is in the 70's the government decided gas allocations for every gas station. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the country.
Reagan ended all that as his first Executive Order, and overnight the gluts and shortages vanished along with the gas lines.
The line between small, local, "good" farmers and large "evil" corporations is all but clear cut.
Agreed there's not a bright line, but we're clearly at one undesirable end of the spectrum.
> farmers sell their produce for profit
And that means they can pay for the resources they use!
I’m not advocating charging necessarily, but using up a limited resource with reckless abandon seems short sighted. What am I missing? Is it not a very important resource to manage?
paying for water is not a dystopia. and taking a totally normal part of life and calling it "dystopian" with no further explanation is one of the laziest arguments ever.
History also shows us that when the government runs collective farms that have no profit, people starve.
Yes? I'm not sure what you're implying here.
The argument isn't "farms shouldn't profit", the argument is "farms should pay for the water they're turning into profits".
If we're talking about basic necessary water for humans, that's a tiny little fraction of use and easy for cities to provide.
For anything else the water doesn't need to be free or actively should not be free, depending on which use you look at.
Water used to grow food goes in the second category.
Using a scare resource in an unsustainable way results in bad incentives and thus bad outcome for people.
I hardly considered water a costly resource
On "city" water now in suburbs, I followed a similar pattern for grass on a 1/4 acre lot, and heavily watered the lawn one month, and I had a $300 water & sewer bill -- on top of my $100 electric bill.
Water went from being something I hardly considered to something I am far more careful about 'wasting'.
Just looking at water usage when I owned a house, irrigation uses a ridiculous amount of water relative to everything else individuals use to live--including laundry, bathing, dishes, etc. If memory serves, sewage costs are significantly more than the water itself (and sewage as metered off of water consumption--so you're likely paying sewage feeds on water you're irrigating with).
The actual cost of enough clean drinking water for people is very small. Enough that drinking fountains are common and people shouldn't need to ration drinking water.
This is why we need a democracy with human rights being protected [1,2].
If not even fundamental things like water (or air) is free, you have to ask yourself how did we get here and how do we leave?
1: https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s... 2: https://truthout.org/articles/un-declares-water-and-sanitati...
Whenever you use water it is tracked and you pay the market price. All of that is then collected and put into a pot. It is then given back equally to everyone.
Everyone is thus incentivized to use less and those that use less than the average amount of water - a huge majority of people since the heaviest users use so much - will receive more money than they spent.
Use it to fund the government.
Or ripping up the lawn to plant something more sensible.
Or just not living somewhere where an HOA can tell me what to do with my own house
All that said, I mean, if your HOA requires this, is the problem with the city charging for water use to upkeep the infrastructure required to deliver it? Or is the issue really just that your HOA has rules that it shouldn't?
And this is why I don't live somewhere where I'm ruled by an HOA
That's a different regulation issue. We shouldn't be overdrawing from those deep wells at almost any price, outside of extreme emergency.
Water being "free" from a well probably doesn't help with aquifer longevity, at least at larger scales.
It saves me a ton on water bills and lawn maintenance time & expense. As a bonus, the deer won't eat the native plants.
So yes, dystopian. Not a trial run.
A bucket of water from river or lake somewhere can likely be free in many places. Even ground water if you exclude building a well.
It is not unreasonable to charge everyone using water when it is treated, delivered and sewage is taken care of. As long as the price paid for minimal daily use is not exploitative.
It's obviously about inefficient overuse by businesses. Having water for individual people free for basic personal use wouldn't be a problem.
Operating the water system to deliver water is expensive. If you want to put out a rain barrel and collect rain, it's free.