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.