- Emily Green draws some lines between god, water and lawns in a thoughtful post. My comment:
Surely a perverse church that’s in charge now, that they sell you cheap water and then pay you to not use it. I’d prefer a single message: water is precious and we will charge you for it. People can then make their own financial and moral decisions on how to behave.
- Circle of Blue continues to do good work on utility water prices, which are rising quickly. Not to prevent shortage, sadly, but to pay for deferred system repairs.
- An Australian case study on rainwater tanks [PDF] that shows that they have a negative environmental impact (from capital costs and pumping water from the tank into the house water system). Is this the next corn ethanol?
- A paper discussing the different institutional responses (supply side, economic incentives) to water scarcity, as applied to Chile. Related, A really good essay on the definition of water scarcity at the Global Water Forum (lots of resources).
- An update on oceanic health (not good) and a paper showing that groundwater overdrafting (mining) has a bigger impact on sea level rise than melting glaciers!
31 May 2012
Speed blogging
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7 comments:
Thanks for the mention. I will add that after years of pushing for conservation in LA because of the manifest benefits and huge environmental imperatives, I'm coming around to believe that you're right. By hiding the true cost of water, we hide all the moral, environmental and social arguments with it. The default reality now with lawn removal rebates is that waste is necessary to the current system, so in times of shortages, water managers can use rebates to secure extra water. Hence rebates come and go with perceived shortages and in essence are props to the current system and can't exist without chronic waste as policy. How to raise prices when a core principle of LA County's 88 local governments is to keep water cheap may mean pushing moral, scientific and environmental buttons, but nothing will focus attention on those arguments like a realistic water bill. In the meantime, I want to be paid rebates for not playing my stereo loudly, or kicking frail people or robbing banks.
@Emily -- FWIW, I used your lament "selling water cheap and paying people to not use it" for my TEDx talk. It got some people's attention... Slowly we go!
Hey David, I see scope here for ´groundwater mining trading´ on a global scale, just like ´carbon emissions trading´: groundwater mining affects us globally. What do you think?
@Joan - I disagree, since costs/benefits of g/w mining are local...
David, are c/b of gw mining not just as local as emitting carbon? Secondary impacts though (for gw seawater rise and for co2 temperature rise) are global. As I see it, there is a good parallel.
@Joan -- MOST g/w impacts are local; MOST CO2e emissions are global. Action, thus, will be taken @ different levels...
Thanks for reacting on this thought of mine. You´re right indeed, g/w extraction impacts are more local. Good examples of this in Spain (natural reserves dried up ,etc). I work in SE-Spain on estimating g/w extractions in irrigated areas from water balance (most simple form is: Precipitation + Irrigation = Evapotranspiration). ET can be estimated from remote sensing. We are seeing here that the area is loosing competitiveness (especially with Morocco, where water is still relatively abundant in some areas): pumping is getting really costly, also because of rising energy prices.
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