Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.
You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably commercially viable.
And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?
"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".
What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.
As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.
I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.
Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.
I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?
There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.
Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
The grading is assumed.
There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.
But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about
Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.
> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.
Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?
> is it just a mispricing of the water?
...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
The market is typically not a great place to solve conflict. Unless you're the richer party, of course.
> Having it generate a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
> 10 to 50 queries consume about 2 litres of water (½ gallon).2