> it's not humans that are consuming the vast majority of potable water, but companies and industry that are depleting what's available for the rest of us.

companies only make what they can sell. The sell what consumers want. So it is humans. Humans want meat. If they stop wanting meat companies will stop making meat.

A huge reason companies use so much water is that it's artificially cheap. Companies typically pay 10% or less of the cost per gallon a resident does in their home.

Usually because the grade and location of the water is not suitable for residential use.

Farmers don't need drinking-safe water but that doesn't justify the price difference.

There should be three grades of water:

1) Untreated.

2) Salty (desalinated, but not to full freshwater standards), used for toilets, showers and the like.

3) Potable.

What you're doing with the water should have no bearing on the price and the price difference should only reflect the additional cost of going from #1 or #2 to #3.

You also pay a separate charge for delivering water to your place, this is omitted if you're getting it from a well and don't need delivery.

The base rates are standardized across a watershed (in this case, every place served by the Colorado river), the delivery charge is based on the cost to provide it to you. (Thus the cabins on the other side of the mountain here that lost their water in a wildfire--when the trees burned it not only damaged the pipe but caused land slippage that destroyed said pipe--pay a whopping delivery charge, but otherwise the same price per cubic foot we do.)

Why should someone pay a ‘Colorado aquifer watershed price’ for a gallon of water they pump from their own well on their own land, if that aquifer doesn’t meaningfully participate in that watershed, and isn’t even drawn on by other people?

Most of Central California for instance isn’t in a watershed that connects to the Colorado in any way.

> If they stop wanting meat companies will stop making meat.

If companies start paying the total costs (water, carbon)—including externalities—of their raw materials, and pass those costs onto consumers, perhaps things will rebalance.

Consider having militaries do externality accounting. First obvious thing to discover is the engine pollution controls are deleted 'because war'.

If this happened, I believe it’s most likely that the main immediate effect would be that low-income people could no longer afford meat, while middle- to high-income people (the largest contributors) would simply continue to consume meat almost as often as they already do at the higher price, since it is relatively price inelastic.

If you think the cost of meat has no impact on its consumption, you're dreaming.

That's not entirely true. Supply, demand and culture have some complexities in them. Humans want meat, but the kind of meat they consume is based on what is available. And then it seems to follow that what they want to consume in the future is based on what was available in the past, not on what is most economical now. A kind of cultural feedback loop which results in most of the shellfish around England being sold in Europe because the English don't want to eat it.

I'm sure this kind of feedback loop happens in a lot of industries. Companies don't just make what people want, they also make people want things. Throw in regulation too, which limits the shape of what can be produced. I think what it boils down to is that when you say people want X, that want is not unshaped by those providing it plus other external factors, so there can be a path to people not wanting it that doesn't just involve their individual decisions.

Just because some people may not grasp this: it is still individual humans consuming the water. Companies and industry don’t burn resources for no reason, they become products that consumers buy.

The only real solution is that we consumers consume less, and probably spend more for the same products, period.

> The only real solution is that we consumers consume less, and probably spend more for the same products, period.

I couldn’t disagree more. We need more regulation and taxation, and the real cost of the externalities added to the end product. The public is subsidizing and paying for private industry to pollute and use resources without accountability. That needs to end. The idea that the problem is solely due to personal consumption by individuals is a greenwashing tactic used by corporations to avoid responsibility for their products. The real solution is to put up barriers to producing these products and make the companies pay for their impact on the planet. This strange, antisocial idea that companies aren’t part of the social contract and don’t have to follow the rules of governments and civilization needs to be called out.

It doesn’t look like you disagree to me. The result of such taxes or regulations is less and more expensive consumption.

I read that the original comment was laying the blame at the feet of individual consumer choices - implying that if people simply bought/consumed less of … whatever is causing the Colorado river to be depleted then things would fix themselves. And the reply is saying that there need to be explicit regulations to cause this, presumably because people have really no way to know the what environmental impact each dollar they spend has and where.

I read it the same way, similarly to PR campaigns that tell Californians to water their lawns less and take fewer and shorter showers, even thought that usage uses by far less water than ag or industrial uses.

We should all do our part. Less ag and industrial products means a higher cost for us all.

I think you’re reading the wrong thing into my comment. I would absolutely agree the problem is that externalities aren’t priced in. The result of pricing those in would be that everything gets more expensive and consumers get to consume less.

I don’t like the idea of blaming companies anymore than blaming individual consumers. They’re working in the same market

> Companies and industry don’t burn resources for no reason, they become products that consumers buy.

If companies start paying the total costs—including externalities (water, carbon)—of their raw materials, and pass those costs onto consumers, perhaps things will rebalance.

This isn't whats happening at all, at least in ag. There is a huge amount of deadweight loss to extremely wealthy long time ag landlords who own water rights. At this time, they have extremely inefficient water uses because water is costless to them. If water prices were to be raised, they would install various methods of water conservation (drip irrigation instead of flooding, etc) and maintain production levels, resulting in similar prices and availability for consumers.

Is the chip industry in these metrics? Big Intel plant being built in Ohio on land which had been farms.

https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2022/06/30/intel-i...

"The average semiconductor fab uses somewhere between 2 million and 4 million gallons of water per day"

Aren’t many of these fabs self-contained - ie they “use” a lot but treat and then re-use it

No, they usually don’t reuse the water

I was thinking of an HN submission or comment a while ago that described how Arizona did this, I found this which appears to agree: https://sustainablewater.com/water-and-fabs-in-arizona/

> Arizona has [some non-water requirements for Semi fab location]; however, it faces water challenges. Semiconductor fabs require tremendous quantities of highly pure water, using between two and four million gallons daily.[1] The fact that Arizona has become a semiconductor fab given these high water requirements may seem bewildering.

> ... Although these companies use vast amounts of water, they also recycle aggressively

It was greenwashing if I remember correctly. They had to do ‘water credits’ to improve watersheds elsewhere in AZ, which they used to claim they were doing good things in the area they were in. When really, they weren’t.

Oh damn, so something like the carbon credits thing Tesla did? In that case what on earth are they doing putting such a facility in such a water-poor locale.

Cheap labor already familiar with chip manufacturing, cheap land, good tax treatment, and tax credits from the gov’t if I remember correctly.

That part of Ohio is a drained swamp land, and is projected to get more water due to global warming.

The chip plants being built in the southwest are fed from the Colorado River, and are using scarce water.