Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere.
Pointer from Don Boudreaux, who recommends the entire essay.
My one criticism is that it not an essay written to convince people to change their minds. To me, the most interesting challenge is to find a way to explain to environmentalists that markets are a subtle, sophisticated calculation mechanism for sustainability. (Incidentally, I am not certain that desalinization is quite at the point where it meets the market test.) Of course, markets can and do come up with imperfect answers. But people who claim to have better answers often do not.
was the linked article written by Rush Limbaugh?
Seriously, little to no discussion of fifth generation Central Valley agripublicans destroying the state for a measly 2% of GDP? Nope. Must be the salmon…
Central Valley agripublicans destroying the state for a measly 2% of GDP
So do you:
1. Grandfather them (the agribussinesses) in
2. Just start charging them a real price.
3. Give them water rights on some reasonable basis and that they can sell.
Thanks to the Coase theorem, any of these work so long as they can sell the water.
It is truly mind-boggling how everyone immediately applies force to deal with this problem when markets will handle it just fine.
Isn’t the difference between (1) and (3) simply that they can’t sell what has been “grandfathered in”?
And yet (1) sounds the most politically plausible. It even sounds like the one with the least use of force. “Just let them have what they have always had”.
I’m not sure whether desalinization meets the market test in California, especially in comparison to any hypothetical free market in water, but in Israel they built so much capacity during a particularly severe drought that now that the rains have come back they are struggling to deal with the surplus and the cost required to keep the plants minimally operational.
In Southeast Australia they are building very large projects of wind-turbine-powered desalination, since it’s good match up of something that can be stored to provide on-demand supply (fresh water), but which takes lots of energy to produce, the wind supply of which is intermittent.
If environmentalists were prepared to embrace “subtle, sophisticated calculation mechanisms” they wouldn’t be environmentalists. There’s an inherent laziness in green thinking, driven by puritanical whims rather than a desire for outcome or success. Remember, if their goal was to find the best solution, they would spend effort to find it. An appeal on grounds of /difficulty/ or /eliteness/ will be rejected.
You’d probably be better off appealing to privilege: The rich can afford to reject the markets and capitalism, but the poor depend upon it. The rich are going to get their water, and get their green golf courses no matter what political barriers you throw up, the best you can achieve is gouging them rather than pushing them into abusing political or legal processes that the poor don’t have access to.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
Letters to the editor in California constantly decry allocating water by price, complaining that the rich will just buy all the water and the poor will die of thirst. It apparently never occurs to these people that the poor will pay more per gallon for a few gallons of drinking water than the rich will pay per gallon for acre-feet of irrigation water.
Instead we have water allocated politically through untradable claims, and farms flood almond groves while nearby towns using the same groundwater go dry. It’s insane.
I’m sympathetic.
As a ray of hope, notice that environmentalists are the first to appreciate the environment as being a very complicated system that no human is really going to understand. It does so, despite all the individual organisms in it having no idea of the overall system they are part of.
In that sense I’m an environmentalist myself, and I find it provides a helpful metaphor for markets. A market, like an ecosystem, can learn things about what works that are beyond the ken of any individual participant in the market.
Don’t underestimate the degree to which the left sees markets – not state intervention – as the “one size fits all” policy driven by ideology and a lack of understanding of complexity.
No, at triple the current cost, desalination is not economic, though it would be nice not to have to hear about shortages. Even then, it would be hardly noticeable in bills which are dominated by capital and distribution. Recycling and especially conservation are far far less expensive. The basic issue is farmers own most of the water and their need rises in drought. Tripling the price wouldn’t persuade many to sell but would make desalination attractive. There is an active water market already though much is under long term contracts and subject to availability.
Pricing also rewards conservation. Desalination seems a little far fetched but there is some price where it makes sense. Crunchy granola farmers are already building swales out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe that is a good soluton or maybe there are better solutions. Perhaps organic and permaculture techniques will show out during a drought or maybe people will decide those are unaffordable luxuries. Only the market can decide. Pricing helps people question assumptioms and unlocks distributed creativity.