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“It is silly that you think that price doesn’t matter, especially when it comes to the costs of routine life, electricity, water, food.”

Of course price matters, but the entire thread had been about the shortage of MONEY that people are willing to allocate to gaining access to sufficient water of suitable quality. However, the shortage of MONEY has been called a shortage of water!

In truth, there is no place on earth that water cannot be provided to. It is only a matter of cost, for money can buy the equipment and manpower to facilitate the provisions. Part of the reason it can cost $1 million a year to keep a single soldier in a forward base in Afghanistan is because of the pallet loads of water that the military hauls by multiple air cargo hops and then makes final delivery by a helicopter escorted by Cobra gun ships.

Indeed, while water is carefully managed on the ISS, the crew can have as much as they want. It costs ten thousand of dollars a pound to haul it up there. [1] But like any other person who has the costs of routine life, electricity, water, food to allocate from their finite income, the cost of water forces people to make decisions about use and priority. The ISS is no different.

Indeed, where government distorts the costs of water, it can cause massive mis-allocation of capital and activity. This is part of the legacy of water rights in the western US. I live in the central US and at this very moment the public debate about water management is about how many millions of gallons a second should the Missouri River be allowed to flush into the Mississippi River. In most years, the Missouri is managed by flushing sufficient water into it so it is deep enough to run barge traffic for a certain number of months. This year parts of the Mississippi are almost too low for barge traffic. At St. Louis, that river is normally about a mile wide and it flows faster than you can walk.

If water was in “shortage” we would be running millions of truckloads of that water to the rest of the country. But that costs too much! Simple economics dictates that less expensive sources be exploited first. Again, the root issue is cost not availability.

Indeed, since the oceans are as full as ever, there literally cannot be a shortage of water, ever.

[1] http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-launch-costs.htm