Let's Not Be All Wet About Water

Which is worse, paying for stuff you use . . . or being constantly harassed for using it?

There is talk of drought, these days, in several states of our union. And governments, local and state, are becoming draconian. Further, the moralistic crowd is out, telling us to conserve water as if it were a moral imperative on the order of Do No Murder or Thou Shalt Not Steal.

This is the world of hyper-regulation of hydro-usage, the penalizing — even criminalizing — of consuming “too much” H₂O.

To deal with its drought, California now regards it as criminal to “waste” water. Don’t hose down that sidewalk! Las Vegas tries to save water by paying people to rip out their lawns. No more making deserts bloom, make room for the desert at one’s doorstep. The EPA is developing technology to force hotels to monitor guests’ specific water usage. Did you really need to flush that?

Nowadays, perhaps under the influence of the ideology of Anthropogenic Global Warming, a lot of folks seem resigned to accept droughts and city desertification as inevitable, as just a natural consequence of “runaway civilization.” But there’s a problem here. More than one.

First, and contrary to Al Gore, a slightly warmer planet does not necessarily mean a universally drier climate. Talk to a real climate scientist, and she is likely to inform you that warmer temperatures will lead to more precipitation in many places. Desertification is not a global phenomenon, and there is no reason to accept drought as somehow “natural” or “what we deserve” for living in cities.

Second, a depletion of resources is an economic problem. That goes for water as well as widgets. And economic problems arise from incentives and disincentives based on government policy. Perhaps most folks today forget the great lesson of my youth: that the worst droughts in third world countries almost ineluctably hit Marxist countries.

Socialism isn’t good for water. Or crops. Or even pollution reduction. Socialism wastes resources, because government bureaus cannot handle the dispersed information that would allow us to direct resources to their most-valued uses.

The truth is, in too much of America, water resources are run and managed by governments, and government bodies — as if they were mythically competent Soviet boards — set “prices” of water.

Allocating water not by price, really, but pricing to allocate to favored constituencies.

Yes, and I repeat: the failure to charge market prices for water leads to shortages, and then to all the bullying about water usage. How muchbetter would it be were we to give up on politicizing water rationing, and, instead, ration by price. Using the costs associated with prices on open markets as the guidance for conservation.

We really shouldn’t have needed a special domain of economic thought — a whole school — to understand this. (But we do have a special domain, and at least one very interesting school of economics devoted to resources, institutions, and property rights, this latter having devoted several decades now to the study of just these problems I am now addressing.) In unhampered markets, sudden and big drops in supply tend to cause sudden and big rises in prices. People economize without being forced. If you must pay more for orange juice because of frozen crops, you either buy less juice or buy less of something else (if orange juice is your favorite thing). But the shelves don’t go bare.

The worse supply problems that arise (let’s say, as a result of growth, or unexpected weather change), the higher the prices, the more customers economize, the more producers produce. So when there’s a local drought, what will a water company do (as opposed to an overweening water authority)?

And other solutions I can’t think of offhand . . . because I’m not running a water company. I lack the direct incentive that the possible profit from solving the problem provides.

Let people cooperate with each other. Let prices “float,” according to supply and demand. That is how we will solve our water problems. Without governmental bullying.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/

On a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved.

Worldwide, some 700 million people don’t have access to enough clean water. In 10 years the number is expected to explode to 1.8 billion. In many places, squeezing fresh water from the ocean might be the only viable way to increase the supply.

The new plant in Israel, called Sorek, was finished in late 2013 but is just now ramping up to its full capacity; it will produce 627,000 cubic meters of water daily, providing evidence that such large desalination facilities are practical. Indeed, desalinated seawater is now a mainstay of the Israeli water supply. Whereas in 2004 the country relied entirely on groundwater and rain, it now has four seawater desalination plants running; Sorek is the largest. Those plants account for 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. By 2016, when additional plants will be running, some 50 percent of the country’s water is expected to come from desalination.

The traditional criticism of reverse-osmosis technology is that it costs too much. The process uses a great deal of energy to force salt water against polymer membranes that have pores small enough to let fresh water through while holding salt ions back. However, Sorek will profitably sell water to the Israeli water authority for 58 U.S. cents per cubic meter (1,000 liters, or about what one person in Israel uses per week), which is a lower price than today’s conventional desalination plants can manage. What’s more, its energy consumption is among the lowest in the world for large-scale desalination plants.

The Sorek plant incorporates a number of engineering improvements that make it more efficient than previous RO facilities. It is the first large desalination plant to use pressure tubes that are 16 inches in diameter rather than eight inches. The payoff is that it needs only a fourth as much piping and other hardware, slashing costs. The plant also has highly efficient pumps and energy recovery devices. “This is indeed the cheapest water from seawater desalination produced in the world,” says Raphael Semiat, a chemical engineer and desalination expert at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, in Haifa. “We don’t have to fight over water, like we did in the past.” Australia, Singapore, and several countries in the Persian Gulf are already heavy users of seawater desalination, and California is also starting to embrace the technology (see “Desalination Out of Desperation”). Smaller-scale RO technologies that are energy-efficient and relatively cheap could also be deployed widely in regions with particularly acute water problems—even far from the sea, where brackish underground water could be tapped.

Earlier in development are advanced membranes made of atom-thick sheets of carbon, which hold the promise of further cutting the energy needs of desalination plants.

—David Talbot

The eco-nuts talk as if water can be used only one time. Once it goes down the drain it goes into a black hole or something.

I live near Lake Michigan. Our water comes from the lake. Our waste water is (usually) treated then put back into the lake. Lake levels remain relatively stable.

In CA their rain water comes from snow melt that is captured in reservoirs. Do they treat their waste water and pump it back to the reservor? I'm willing to bet they just send it to the Ocean.

In addition, we don't hear other residents of desert states crying about drought, they understand they live in the desert. True not all CA is desert, but enough is. There was even a song about “It never rains in Southern CA”, one of the reasons people move there; yet the expect water to be plentiful?

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