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> It's a good financial incentive to better your installations. No it is not. The cost of water is so tiny compared to anything else on earth humans make that
by mmanfrin 6y ago
> It's a good financial incentive to better your installations.
No it is not. The cost of water is so tiny compared to anything else on earth humans make that every single country on earth should be able to provide it to their citizens.
This is not a problem the market needs to solve. This has been solved since prehistory, and some of the first non-religious constructions celebrated in human history are waterworks.
This is a solved problem. All futures do is allow traders in faraway places make money off of a substance every human on earth ought to have a fundamental right to.
- pseingatl 6y agoSolved? If you mean by energy-intensive, billion dollar solutions, you are correct. Look at the UAE, Saudi Arabia; no rivers, no lakes, and the aquifers were long ago exhausted.
- sideshowb 6y agoSolved? Um. why then are there droughts currently, and why are they projected to increase under all plausible climate change scenarios? Like you though I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a futures market
- emteycz 6y agoThe same was said about food and toilet paper.
- kortilla 6y agoIt’s not a solved problem. The Colorado river is oversubscribed and people are more or less fucked because we didn’t think paying for water in a bidding system was a good idea so now farmer Ted gets priority to grow his Almonds in the California desert for free while people in Nevada can’t get enough just to drink from the Colorado.
- adrianN 6y agoRight now the cost of water is tiny in many regions because we deplete fossil water reservoirs without properly accounting for the externality.
- Aerroon 6y agoThe cost of water might be tiny if you're drinking it, but it's not tiny when you're using it to grow food or use it for other industrial processes. One almond kernel requires 3-4 days worth of drinking water to grow. Also, humans in many places are using groundwater that's thousands of years old. In those places we can't observe any effect humans have had, because we're effectively tapping into reservoirs that predate human usage of that water. Eventually that's going to run out.