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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious? You want WATER to have its price raised to reflect the realities in California? All that would do is screw all the poor and middle class people and it would do nothing to solve the shortage.

Put down Atlas Shrugged for a minute and look at reality. The whole state of California has always been on water welfare, and if it weren't life there would be untenable for anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy.

If you really think "OK, so what? People can move." You are totally detached from reality. That's not what would happen. There would be riots.

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Guess who uses 80% of the water in CA? It's not the poor and middle class, it's agriculture, typically run by large corporations. Guess how much agriculture contributes to CA's GDP? 2%.

It's possible to alter the way water is used in the state in ways that benefit the residents and don't screw the poor and middle class.

The poor and the middle class, screwed by lower food prices.

Agriculture (food) actually does have benefits for nearly everyone, you know.

If you have to, you can subsidize food costs for the poor later on.

Right now, the subsidy is going to the wrong place.

If you're subsidizing food costs "later on", the money is still going to the large corporations.

> If you really think "OK, so what? People can move." You are totally detached from reality. That's not what would happen. There would be riots.

So, there isn't enough water, people don't want to move to where there is water, what's your solution?

Water costs, whether thats to pump it out of the ground, import it from places that do have water, or desalinate it. Someone has to pay for that. Would it not be those who use the water?

There isn't an easy solution that I can write up in a short paragraph in the HN comments. That's the point. It's a complex issue.

/u/timtadh summed it up perfectly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198672

"From my perspective the problem with water in the US is that no one is charged for the actual water. You are only charged for the processing costs. This means that the market never acts to regulate how much water you use. People will use less water if it costs them more."

So write two long paragraphs. At some point there's simply not going to be any water. What then? Wouldn't it be better to do something before we reach that point?

From my perspective the problem with water in the US is that no one is charged for the actual water. You are only charged for the processing costs. This means that the market never acts to regulate how much water you use. People will use less water if it costs them more.

However, changing to a market system for water would never happen overnight. People are not used to paying for water and cannot move on a dime. However, long term I think it is our only solution. The midwest, who many on HN seem to have a bad impression of, has the world's largest fresh water reserve in the world (the great lakes). Meanwhile, the plain states and California will have continuing water difficulties moving forward. Long term, people are going to need to move to where there is abundant water. It is not sustainable for so many people to live in marginal areas.

One way to encourage people to move is by having market forces act. If the price of water is cheaper in the great lakes region there will be a slow but steady migration there over time. This will in turn ease the brewing crisis in the west. This isn't the only action which should be taken but we should consider (from a policy perspective) the idea of allowing market forces to act in the water market.

Water is already priced based on the type and quantity of usage. The more you use, the more it costs. You can raise prices for farms without "screw[ing] all the poor and middle class."

If you raise farm water prices, you will find that water-intensive crops will be less profitable (even with raised prices) and farms will switch to crops which use less water.

Rationing may have the same effect, or it may instead have the effect of fewer crops being produced and prices going up.

Sure, put down Atlas Shrugged, but pick up any economics textbook, or Google some statistics about water usage in California. I absolutely do want water's price to reflect the realities in California. It would not screw the poor and middle class, and it would solve the shortage.

>and it would do nothing to solve the shortage

Sure it would, it would decrease usage. You can easily subsidize poor people's water if that's a serious problem. It's a tiny amount anyway as the overwhelming majority of water usage is agricultural.

> The whole state of California has always been on water welfare

You're right, it has always been stupid to farm in California. Now it's coming back to bit people in the ass.

No, that's not the correct conclusion. It used to be cheap enough to send water there that once you did that the sunny climate made it ideal for a lot of crops.

It just so happens that climate change and population explosion has made it uneconomical now.

Here's a pro tip, if you think complex issues like water distribution for an entire state have easy, trite answers you're missing something.

"once you did that the sunny climate made it ideal for a lot of crops."

By this the Sahara or Arabian peninsula are some of the best farmland on the planet. I mean, all you have to do is bring in the key ingredient of life.

This is not a new problem for California. It's been ignored for so long because it used to be cheap. It was always stupid to farm in a desert, it doesn't matter how cheap it used to be to bring water in.

It turns out, large parts of California are arid for a reason, and the reason isn't recent climate change. But we as a species can't think past right now. California was populated when we didn't think we were ruled by nature anymore and our new found genius would meld nature to bend to our will. It's biting us in the ass now.

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