This (briefly, the article is about rerouting winter runoff to flood fields as a way of refilling the rapidly-depleting water table) seems really exciting, beca

This (briefly, the article is about rerouting winter runoff to flood fields as a way of refilling the rapidly-depleting water table) seems really exciting, because it's a rare example of a coordination trap with a practical solution. The coordination trap is that farmers are using more groundwater than is sustainable: farmer A drills a 100' well, farmer B drills 120', and so on, until every dollar of profit in the farming business is spent entirely on wells and pumps. They could agree to stop at some point, but as long as most farmers cooperate, the few who don't will outcompete them. In fact, it's essentially the same problem seen in international corporate tax rates. Ireland lowered its corporate tax rate to entice multinats to repatriate there, which worked, and led to other countries adopting an even lower rate, in a "race to the bottom" scenario. The proposed solution[0] is basically a cartel: all countries agree to some non-zero minimum value that they won't go beneath, and to punish anyone who defects from the agreement. Unfortunately, that can't work for farmers; it's unrealistic to expect all farmers to come together and find an equitable way to share well-water and detect and punish cheaters. And for the government to enforce water usage would require a lot of heavy-handed regulation: checking farms to make sure they're metering correctly, calculating which crops deserve how much water, etc. Ugh. That's what makes this exciting: a government program to replenish the aquifer represents a way that the farmers could solve their problem and share the cost in a way that's (roughly) equitable and not very easy to cheat on, without micro-managing which farm gets how much water. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/01/nations-agree-to-support-us-proposal-for-global-minimum-tax-on-corporations.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/01/nations-agree-to-support-us-...