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Politicians, at least in the U.S., really don't have the power to move agriculture development elsewhere. They can make the water more expensive / less availab

Politicians, at least in the U.S., really don't have the power to move agriculture development elsewhere. They can make the water more expensive / less available to encourage movement, but that's about it. Viewed through that lens, I come back again and again to: We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water, particularly marginal-use water, and a lot of problems in this space are reduced or eliminated.

worik 4y ago
> We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water.... Marginal analysis. Must have done an economics course. Marginal analysis only works on the margins. If the Colorado river is producing 2/3 of the water that is actually being used (if I read the article correctly) they are a long way from the margins and marginal analysis will not help. If they had set the prices correctly at the beginning, but the silly people probably relied on market mechanisms, which only work on short time frames. The actual problem, fundamentally, is that our engineering capabilities ran away from our economic and political control mechanisms a century ago, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Even more fundamentally our problems are cause by the greed and hubris of a small but powerful section of the population tat will not listen to reason
- xbar 4y ago
  Colorado River water is priced too low.
- Panzer04 4y ago
  How do higher water prices not solve the problem? If farmers were beholden to trade offs about their water use they would likely be using substantially less water than they are now. Crops that use twice the water without a matching increase in profitability would disappear and water use would go down.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    Do they even pay for their water? And can they sell it if they don’t want to use it? If neither of those is true, higher prices don’t do anything.
- lumost 4y ago
  Higher water prices translate to higher food prices without replacement. The southwest has ideal growing conditions when irrigated. Replacement won’t be 1:1. Changing the water prices in the southwest will hit consumers across the US.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    > Replacement won’t be 1:1. What do you mean by this? We would surely produce more calories per gallon of water if we, say, swapped beef with chicken (or plants). I guess we might not replace beef with beef, but that wouldn't be a replacement, so that wouldn't make sense.
    - czbond 4y ago
      I'm excited / interested in what replacement ("faux") meat will do for water savings.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    Closing your eyes to the cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't there. For example, maybe lettuce grown and sold from California can be bought at $2/head. If you were to truly factor in the misuse of water, maybe the cost should be $3. Maybe at $3, lettuce grown in Florida, Oregon, Vermont and Iowa is cost-competitive. A lot of maybes, sure, but the point is that if you were to charge for the water what the water actually should cost, then that cost actually gets built into the system, and the market can work. You can't have your cake and eat it - for a market system to work, you need to actually allow pricing to reflect the actual costs.

worik 4y ago

> We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water.... Marginal analysis. Must have done an economics course. Marginal analysis only works on the margins. If the Colorado river is producing 2/3 of the water that is actually being used (if I read the article correctly) they are a long way from the margins and marginal analysis will not help. If they had set the prices correctly at the beginning, but the silly people probably relied on market mechanisms, which only work on short time frames. The actual problem, fundamentally, is that our engineering capabilities ran away from our economic and political control mechanisms a century ago, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Even more fundamentally our problems are cause by the greed and hubris of a small but powerful section of the population tat will not listen to reason

xbar 4y ago
Colorado River water is priced too low.
Panzer04 4y ago
How do higher water prices not solve the problem? If farmers were beholden to trade offs about their water use they would likely be using substantially less water than they are now. Crops that use twice the water without a matching increase in profitability would disappear and water use would go down.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  Do they even pay for their water? And can they sell it if they don’t want to use it? If neither of those is true, higher prices don’t do anything.
lumost 4y ago
Higher water prices translate to higher food prices without replacement. The southwest has ideal growing conditions when irrigated. Replacement won’t be 1:1. Changing the water prices in the southwest will hit consumers across the US.
- powerhour 4y ago
  > Replacement won’t be 1:1. What do you mean by this? We would surely produce more calories per gallon of water if we, say, swapped beef with chicken (or plants). I guess we might not replace beef with beef, but that wouldn't be a replacement, so that wouldn't make sense.
  - czbond 4y ago
    I'm excited / interested in what replacement ("faux") meat will do for water savings.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  Closing your eyes to the cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't there. For example, maybe lettuce grown and sold from California can be bought at $2/head. If you were to truly factor in the misuse of water, maybe the cost should be $3. Maybe at $3, lettuce grown in Florida, Oregon, Vermont and Iowa is cost-competitive. A lot of maybes, sure, but the point is that if you were to charge for the water what the water actually should cost, then that cost actually gets built into the system, and the market can work. You can't have your cake and eat it - for a market system to work, you need to actually allow pricing to reflect the actual costs.