6 ms·

In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff

89 points by fern12 9y ago

vpribish 9y ago
Definitely need to check back after the novelty has worn off.
- gitgreen 9y ago
  In a city as sensitive to water issues as Tucson this isn't novelty at all. I participated in the student group that helped install cisterns at the UofA visitors center back in 2006 and 2007. We got most of our ideas from a local named Brad Lancaster who'd been doing it far longer.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    Yeah, Tucson takes this sort of thing seriously for a number of reasons, 1) it is small enough (and relatively isolated) that there is a sense of community 2) people are willing to experiment 3) the people that have lived there the longest care deeply about the environment 4) the environment can kill you easily if you are not attentive (lighting strikes, flash floods, africanized bees, and dehydration to name a few) and 5) it gets really freaking hot for 8 months of the year
jxramos 9y ago
I'm really digging this WaterDeeply website by the way. Lots of interesting topics I've been slowly researching in the background over time. Looks like they have pretty informative interviews, nice clean writing style too.
- hydrox24 9y ago
  WaterDeeply is just one 'single-topic platform' that NewsDeeply[0] creates. I follow their Syria deeply platform and find that incredibly helpful when I see a bit of mainstream news coverage, but it doesn't provide enough context or detail for me. [0]: https://www.newsdeeply.com/ https://www.newsdeeply.com/
  - frandroid 9y ago
    Wow thanks for that.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I'm always interested in how and why things are designed. The article highlights a simple+cheaper way of putting trees in a parking lot at Target that as far as I can tell wasn't previously done because it's likely the designs were done in a different climate.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  They were probably designed to direct the water out of the parking lot because it's not a whole lot of fun coming out of a store after a good monsoon and having your car parked in the middle of a lake. Yep, been there, done that...
mcone 9y ago
Native New Mexican here. Rainwater collection is more nuanced than this article suggests. Water that runs off a roof of a building isn't "wasted." It typically drains into an aquifer or a river. This is well-known in Tucson, a city that pumped so much groundwater that the Santa Cruz river dried up decades ago. [1] There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation. [1] https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/Content?oid=1068331 https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/C... [2] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-in-new-mexico/ http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-i...
- kkylin 9y ago
  I just heard from someone that rainwater collection is banned in parts of Colorado. Can someone with actual knowledge comment?
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    It used to be illegal to do anything except direct the rainwater, e.g. direct a downspout into your flower garden. You are now allowed 2 55-gallon rain barrels. The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels. At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.
    - fludlight 9y ago
      That might be the cost of the water today, but history suggests that the price of water can fluctuate wildly. This is doubly true of the marginal cost beyond a certain baseline, which, again, fluctuates. Even without a drought or increase in regional population, you are vulnerable to (utility price, not CPI) inflation after ~5 years. The math for computing a break even period thus becomes squishy. There are many people that place great value on being partially-off-the-grid, on (conspicuous) conservation, and enjoy DIY projects.
eigen-vector 9y ago
This is fantastic. When I lived in one of the southern states of India—where water scarcity is a real problem—the government made it mandatory to have rainwater harvesting systems installed in all government and residential buildings. This happened in the year 2001. Since they didn't follow the incentive model like in Tuscon, there was some resistance initially. However, it took off—albeit grudgingly—and a plethora of 10 and 15 year studies proved that the scheme singularly altered the water table in most parts of the state avoiding potential droughts. I don't understand why any region that faces water scarcity doesn't simply make it a necessity.
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  I'm not being sarcastic, but for some things, democracy is a hinderance. For instance, in China, everybody is pretty much forced to learn Mandarin (generally). The schools are taught in it, and if you don't do well in school you won't get a good job and will be shown your way to irrelevance. In India, I believe there are hundreds of languages being spoken. Imagine their economic and political power if the government one day just said "All government free education will be taught in English. There will be no Hindi, Bengali, Keralan, etc etc for schools that receive government funding. Also, all government forms will only be available in English and all government offices will only speak English. If you don't speak English at least decently, you will be fired." You cannot get away with that in a democracy. In a dictatorship it's the stroke of a pen. Which is ultimately better for the economy?
  - hydrox24 9y ago
    > Which is ultimately better for the economy? Only asking this question will naturally lead you to hypotheticals where dictatorships give better results. There are absolutely some systemic disadvantages to democratic systems, but I don't think this is one of them. There is enormous cultural richness and benefit and the multiplicity of languages. The stroke of the pen would help the economy immensely, but also destroy an extraordinary amount of culture and wealth, much of it intangible.
    - 9y ago
stretchwithme 9y ago
Rather than subsidizing this or that conservation solution, wouldn't it be better to charge a price for water that reflects the actual cost of depleting the aquifer? Like shipping water in from elsewhere? Water is another tragedy of the commons. Government often charges for the cost of piping the water from the source, as if the water source had no value itself. Imagine if fish could be taken from the ocean for just the cost of taking it from the ocean. Oh, wait. That's what we do! And overfishing is also another tragedy of the commons in many populations. It would be better if a water source was turned into a for-profit corporation with the all the users of the aquifer each entitled to a share of the profits based on past usage. Then they'd break even if they keep their usage the same, but profit if they cut their usage. New residents and companies would pay the market price for anything more than personal use, which nobody would have to pay for. It would have to cover all the users of the aquifer. Otherwise, those with cheap access to it will profit at everybody else's expense. That way, the people keep the water, nobody has to pay for personal use, but everybody has a built in incentive to avoid uses of water that aren't worth using up the valuable resource.
- kaikai 9y ago
  Subsidies help pay installation costs, making people more likely to install systems. Inflating water prices would also disproportionally affect renters, who are often lower-income, because they don't have the ability to make changes like that for their homes.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    Electricity prices are another example of something similar: they soar during peak hours, but government keeps the price flat during the day. If the price fluctuated, people would adjust their usage; but instead, a lot of games are played to go about smoothing demand, and they don't work well. The result is higher emissions and higher prices. General carbon emissions are another example. The price burdened by society is higher than the privatized cost. Imagine we had a system that automatically rewarded cyclists, or people who just take a cold shower--any of the millions of small things--for curbing pollution. Well, price signals in supply and demand are already such a system. The problem with subsidies, public policy initiatives, and awareness campaigns is that they can't do as good of a job as simple supply and demand economics in organizing human behavior efficiently--for the same reasons why command and control economies don't work as well as market-based ones. Price signals work very well. And besides this argument for economic efficiency, there is the argument that people's privatized incentives should be aligned with other's, if possible, and policy should reward or punish decisions which bear benefits or costs on society. And if we want to help the poor, we should really just give them money to help cover their expenses rather than adopting bad economic policy just because it just so happens to be the one that is more kind to the poor. In other words, it's not necessary to bake a smaller pie just in order for us to be able to share it.
nraynaud 9y ago
when I arrived in Phoenix, it took me a while to understand what was wrong with the roofs here: often there is no gutter. other oddity: some people water the lawn by simply flooding it (some front lawns are specifically lower than the sidewalk for that). At first I though it was stupid, then I saw people "watering" their lawn with sprinklers in the middle of the afternoon. I am curious what ratio of the water even reaches the grass.
- s0rce 9y ago
  Flooding might be a bit excessive but its better to water less frequently with more water as the water penetrates deeper and encourages root growth so the plant becomes more tolerant of lower water conditions. Watering the lawn during the hot parts of the day is silly in any climate. Best solution is to get rid of most/all of your lawn if you live in the desert with limited water, ie. no large river or something.
drtillberg 9y ago
I liked that at the top the publisher put "Read time Approx. 7 minutes".

89 points by fern12 9y ago

vpribish 9y ago

Definitely need to check back after the novelty has worn off.

gitgreen 9y ago
In a city as sensitive to water issues as Tucson this isn't novelty at all. I participated in the student group that helped install cisterns at the UofA visitors center back in 2006 and 2007. We got most of our ideas from a local named Brad Lancaster who'd been doing it far longer.
- itronitron 9y ago
  Yeah, Tucson takes this sort of thing seriously for a number of reasons, 1) it is small enough (and relatively isolated) that there is a sense of community 2) people are willing to experiment 3) the people that have lived there the longest care deeply about the environment 4) the environment can kill you easily if you are not attentive (lighting strikes, flash floods, africanized bees, and dehydration to name a few) and 5) it gets really freaking hot for 8 months of the year

jxramos 9y ago

I'm really digging this WaterDeeply website by the way. Lots of interesting topics I've been slowly researching in the background over time. Looks like they have pretty informative interviews, nice clean writing style too.

hydrox24 9y ago
WaterDeeply is just one 'single-topic platform' that NewsDeeply[0] creates. I follow their Syria deeply platform and find that incredibly helpful when I see a bit of mainstream news coverage, but it doesn't provide enough context or detail for me. [0]: https://www.newsdeeply.com/ https://www.newsdeeply.com/
- frandroid 9y ago
  Wow thanks for that.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

I'm always interested in how and why things are designed. The article highlights a simple+cheaper way of putting trees in a parking lot at Target that as far as I can tell wasn't previously done because it's likely the designs were done in a different climate.

UncleEntity 9y ago
They were probably designed to direct the water out of the parking lot because it's not a whole lot of fun coming out of a store after a good monsoon and having your car parked in the middle of a lake. Yep, been there, done that...

mcone 9y ago

Native New Mexican here. Rainwater collection is more nuanced than this article suggests. Water that runs off a roof of a building isn't "wasted." It typically drains into an aquifer or a river. This is well-known in Tucson, a city that pumped so much groundwater that the Santa Cruz river dried up decades ago. [1] There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation. [1] https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/Content?oid=1068331 https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/C... [2] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-in-new-mexico/ http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-i...

kkylin 9y ago
I just heard from someone that rainwater collection is banned in parts of Colorado. Can someone with actual knowledge comment?
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  It used to be illegal to do anything except direct the rainwater, e.g. direct a downspout into your flower garden. You are now allowed 2 55-gallon rain barrels. The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels. At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.
  - fludlight 9y ago
    That might be the cost of the water today, but history suggests that the price of water can fluctuate wildly. This is doubly true of the marginal cost beyond a certain baseline, which, again, fluctuates. Even without a drought or increase in regional population, you are vulnerable to (utility price, not CPI) inflation after ~5 years. The math for computing a break even period thus becomes squishy. There are many people that place great value on being partially-off-the-grid, on (conspicuous) conservation, and enjoy DIY projects.

eigen-vector 9y ago

This is fantastic. When I lived in one of the southern states of India—where water scarcity is a real problem—the government made it mandatory to have rainwater harvesting systems installed in all government and residential buildings. This happened in the year 2001. Since they didn't follow the incentive model like in Tuscon, there was some resistance initially. However, it took off—albeit grudgingly—and a plethora of 10 and 15 year studies proved that the scheme singularly altered the water table in most parts of the state avoiding potential droughts. I don't understand why any region that faces water scarcity doesn't simply make it a necessity.

jimmywanger 9y ago
I'm not being sarcastic, but for some things, democracy is a hinderance. For instance, in China, everybody is pretty much forced to learn Mandarin (generally). The schools are taught in it, and if you don't do well in school you won't get a good job and will be shown your way to irrelevance. In India, I believe there are hundreds of languages being spoken. Imagine their economic and political power if the government one day just said "All government free education will be taught in English. There will be no Hindi, Bengali, Keralan, etc etc for schools that receive government funding. Also, all government forms will only be available in English and all government offices will only speak English. If you don't speak English at least decently, you will be fired." You cannot get away with that in a democracy. In a dictatorship it's the stroke of a pen. Which is ultimately better for the economy?
- hydrox24 9y ago
  > Which is ultimately better for the economy? Only asking this question will naturally lead you to hypotheticals where dictatorships give better results. There are absolutely some systemic disadvantages to democratic systems, but I don't think this is one of them. There is enormous cultural richness and benefit and the multiplicity of languages. The stroke of the pen would help the economy immensely, but also destroy an extraordinary amount of culture and wealth, much of it intangible.
  - 9y ago

stretchwithme 9y ago

Rather than subsidizing this or that conservation solution, wouldn't it be better to charge a price for water that reflects the actual cost of depleting the aquifer? Like shipping water in from elsewhere? Water is another tragedy of the commons. Government often charges for the cost of piping the water from the source, as if the water source had no value itself. Imagine if fish could be taken from the ocean for just the cost of taking it from the ocean. Oh, wait. That's what we do! And overfishing is also another tragedy of the commons in many populations. It would be better if a water source was turned into a for-profit corporation with the all the users of the aquifer each entitled to a share of the profits based on past usage. Then they'd break even if they keep their usage the same, but profit if they cut their usage. New residents and companies would pay the market price for anything more than personal use, which nobody would have to pay for. It would have to cover all the users of the aquifer. Otherwise, those with cheap access to it will profit at everybody else's expense. That way, the people keep the water, nobody has to pay for personal use, but everybody has a built in incentive to avoid uses of water that aren't worth using up the valuable resource.

kaikai 9y ago
Subsidies help pay installation costs, making people more likely to install systems. Inflating water prices would also disproportionally affect renters, who are often lower-income, because they don't have the ability to make changes like that for their homes.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Electricity prices are another example of something similar: they soar during peak hours, but government keeps the price flat during the day. If the price fluctuated, people would adjust their usage; but instead, a lot of games are played to go about smoothing demand, and they don't work well. The result is higher emissions and higher prices. General carbon emissions are another example. The price burdened by society is higher than the privatized cost. Imagine we had a system that automatically rewarded cyclists, or people who just take a cold shower--any of the millions of small things--for curbing pollution. Well, price signals in supply and demand are already such a system. The problem with subsidies, public policy initiatives, and awareness campaigns is that they can't do as good of a job as simple supply and demand economics in organizing human behavior efficiently--for the same reasons why command and control economies don't work as well as market-based ones. Price signals work very well. And besides this argument for economic efficiency, there is the argument that people's privatized incentives should be aligned with other's, if possible, and policy should reward or punish decisions which bear benefits or costs on society. And if we want to help the poor, we should really just give them money to help cover their expenses rather than adopting bad economic policy just because it just so happens to be the one that is more kind to the poor. In other words, it's not necessary to bake a smaller pie just in order for us to be able to share it.

nraynaud 9y ago

when I arrived in Phoenix, it took me a while to understand what was wrong with the roofs here: often there is no gutter. other oddity: some people water the lawn by simply flooding it (some front lawns are specifically lower than the sidewalk for that). At first I though it was stupid, then I saw people "watering" their lawn with sprinklers in the middle of the afternoon. I am curious what ratio of the water even reaches the grass.

s0rce 9y ago
Flooding might be a bit excessive but its better to water less frequently with more water as the water penetrates deeper and encourages root growth so the plant becomes more tolerant of lower water conditions. Watering the lawn during the hot parts of the day is silly in any climate. Best solution is to get rid of most/all of your lawn if you live in the desert with limited water, ie. no large river or something.

drtillberg 9y ago

I liked that at the top the publisher put "Read time Approx. 7 minutes".