Native New Mexican here. Rainwater collection is more nuanced than this article suggests. Water that runs off a roof of a building isn't "wasted." It typically drains into an aquifer or a river. This is well-known in Tucson, a city that pumped so much groundwater that the Santa Cruz river dried up decades ago. [1]
There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation.
> Rainwater collection is more nuanced than this article suggests. Water that runs off a roof of a building isn't "wasted." It typically drains into an aquifer or a river.
Doesn't the article address this nuance?
"It doesn’t rain often here, but when it does it can rain very hard. And the ground doesn’t soak up water very well. So rainwater harvesting is a way to deal with stormwater runoff."
Some kinds of soil are limited in their ability to absorb water (in terms of rate). I believe these are soils with lots of clay in them. So having rainwater collection systems, though it would hurt groundwater recharge, probably on balance is better since it relieves demand on pumping out more groundwater.
Where does the article suggest the water is wasted? It seems to focus on the savings in terms of reduced demand on the municipal water plant- rainwater doesn't need to be treated- and in terms of changed behavior:
once they got that rainwater harvesting system, the way they’re irrigating is completely different, and they’re paying a lot more attention to how they irrigate. It really changes behavior. Definitely people are more careful with how they use that rainwater than how they were using the potable water to irrigate beforehand.
Certainly - the laws are messy due to the importance of water, but the amount collected in these systems tends to be trivial in the scheme of things and ends up going straight to the same ground anyway, albeit in a more distributed fashion (and one that has less runoff.)
I'd argue that it'd be in the southwest's best interest, in general, to move to clearly legalizing rainwater collection of modest amounts - say 200 gallons.
It used to be illegal to do anything except direct the rainwater, e.g. direct a downspout into your flower garden. You are now allowed 2 55-gallon rain barrels.
The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels.
At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.
That might be the cost of the water today, but history suggests that the price of water can fluctuate wildly. This is doubly true of the marginal cost beyond a certain baseline, which, again, fluctuates. Even without a drought or increase in regional population, you are vulnerable to (utility price, not CPI) inflation after ~5 years. The math for computing a break even period thus becomes squishy.
There are many people that place great value on being partially-off-the-grid, on (conspicuous) conservation, and enjoy DIY projects.
All good points, and certainly if you went entirely off-grid, avoiding a water tap fee is big savings. Though, 110 gallons isn't going to get you very far if you're totally off-grid.
It's basically because someone else might be using that water. So in the same way that if a creek is on your property in most states you probably aren't allowed to just siphon it all off to water your corn.
Rather than subsidizing this or that conservation solution, wouldn't it be better to charge a price for water that reflects the actual cost of depleting the aquifer? Like shipping water in from elsewhere?
Water is another tragedy of the commons. Government often charges for the cost of piping the water from the source, as if the water source had no value itself.
Imagine if fish could be taken from the ocean for just the cost of taking it from the ocean. Oh, wait. That's what we do! And overfishing is also another tragedy of the commons in many populations.
It would be better if a water source was turned into a for-profit corporation with the all the users of the aquifer each entitled to a share of the profits based on past usage. Then they'd break even if they keep their usage the same, but profit if they cut their usage. New residents and companies would pay the market price for anything more than personal use, which nobody would have to pay for.
It would have to cover all the users of the aquifer. Otherwise, those with cheap access to it will profit at everybody else's expense.
That way, the people keep the water, nobody has to pay for personal use, but everybody has a built in incentive to avoid uses of water that aren't worth using up the valuable resource.
> wouldn't it be better to charge a price for water that reflects the actual cost of depleting the aquifer
Water is sufficiently important to poor people (and their children) that you can't reasonably price them out of the market. Same reason utility companies can't cut off your water in many places.
> Water is sufficiently important to poor people (and their children) that you can't reasonably price them out of the market.
Where does it stop? Things cost what they cost. For instance, during famines, food shoots up in price exponentially. It's unclear whether you're talking about redistributive taxation and subsidies or price controls.
I'm ok with the former, and definitely not ok with the latter. Price controls are the easiest ways to guarantee shortages of a finite scarce good. Fortunately scarcity hasn't really been a problem for water in the Western world.
Yemen, however would beg to disagree.
Their most profitable crop, qat, requires huge amounts of water, and their capital is completely out of water[0]. Because they held the price of water artificially low, it was overused and now is gone.
When everything is a fundamental human right nothing is a fundamental human right. After a flood, do you want to get food, water, and shelter in there or do you want to be fiddling with fiber cables?
My whole point is that you might want certain things over other things.
None of those things you want is a human right. Want water? Dig a well. Want to eat? Grow some food. Want shelter? Build something. If somebody helps you out, its out of the goodness of their heart or a pre-existing obligation.
Saying something is a human right places demands on others which you have no right to do.
Subsidies help pay installation costs, making people more likely to install systems.
Inflating water prices would also disproportionally affect renters, who are often lower-income, because they don't have the ability to make changes like that for their homes.
Electricity prices are another example of something similar: they soar during peak hours, but government keeps the price flat during the day. If the price fluctuated, people would adjust their usage; but instead, a lot of games are played to go about smoothing demand, and they don't work well. The result is higher emissions and higher prices.
General carbon emissions are another example. The price burdened by society is higher than the privatized cost.
Imagine we had a system that automatically rewarded cyclists, or people who just take a cold shower--any of the millions of small things--for curbing pollution. Well, price signals in supply and demand are already such a system.
The problem with subsidies, public policy initiatives, and awareness campaigns is that they can't do as good of a job as simple supply and demand economics in organizing human behavior efficiently--for the same reasons why command and control economies don't work as well as market-based ones. Price signals work very well.
And besides this argument for economic efficiency, there is the argument that people's privatized incentives should be aligned with other's, if possible, and policy should reward or punish decisions which bear benefits or costs on society.
And if we want to help the poor, we should really just give them money to help cover their expenses rather than adopting bad economic policy just because it just so happens to be the one that is more kind to the poor. In other words, it's not necessary to bake a smaller pie just in order for us to be able to share it.
> Imagine we had a system that automatically rewarded cyclists, or people who just take a cold shower--any of the millions of small things--for curbing pollution.
Several prominent conservative Republicans proposed about a year ago a system that would do that [1]. They were James Baker (Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Secretary of State under GHW Bush), Martin Feldstein (chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors), George Shultz (Secretary of State under Reagan), Henry Paulson, (GW Bush's Treasury Secretary), and N. Gregory Mankiw (chairman GW Bush's Council of Economic Advisers), and others.
Their proposal was for a revenue-neutral carbon tax starting at $40 per ton. It would be collected at the source (such as at oil refineries), and the money collected would be returned to to the taxpayers. They estimated that would be about $2000 back to a family of four.
If the rate is set right, it would be break even for a person who is carbon neutral. The tax would raise the prices on things they buy and use that produce carbon, but their share of the distribution should be about the same amount.
Dismissing political affiliations I think people can agree this would be good public policy in the sense that it increases human welfare (for example, Mankiw influenced my economics education positively, even if I do dislike some of his politics. Another: Musk also supports a carbon tax, but is not politically affiliated with the GOP).
Taxing what you don't want makes sense if the market cannot solve a problem. It's more flexible than an outright ban, as it's easier to make trade offs. Cap and trade can also work.
If the rate is set right, it would be break even for a person who is carbon neutral.
That doesn't sound right. Wouldn't it depend on using the average amount of carbon? If you're above average you pay out more than you get back, if you're below average you get more than you pay. Probably depends on the exact way the money is returned.
I don't know about this particular scheme, but some use the proceeds to offset regressive taxes, making the scheme progressive overall.
Have you read my proposal? As owners of the water, even renters would get paid the extra money for water use as well as being charged a market price for its use. So I'm not sure how they would wind up worse off.
I'm always interested in how and why things are designed. The article highlights a simple+cheaper way of putting trees in a parking lot at Target that as far as I can tell wasn't previously done because it's likely the designs were done in a different climate.
They were probably designed to direct the water out of the parking lot because it's not a whole lot of fun coming out of a store after a good monsoon and having your car parked in the middle of a lake.
This is fantastic. When I lived in one of the southern states of India—where water scarcity is a real problem—the government made it mandatory to have rainwater harvesting systems installed in all government and residential buildings. This happened in the year 2001. Since they didn't follow the incentive model like in Tuscon, there was some resistance initially. However, it took off—albeit grudgingly—and a plethora of 10 and 15 year studies proved that the scheme singularly altered the water table in most parts of the state avoiding potential droughts.
I don't understand why any region that faces water scarcity doesn't simply make it a necessity.
I'm not being sarcastic, but for some things, democracy is a hinderance.
For instance, in China, everybody is pretty much forced to learn Mandarin (generally). The schools are taught in it, and if you don't do well in school you won't get a good job and will be shown your way to irrelevance.
In India, I believe there are hundreds of languages being spoken. Imagine their economic and political power if the government one day just said "All government free education will be taught in English. There will be no Hindi, Bengali, Keralan, etc etc for schools that receive government funding. Also, all government forms will only be available in English and all government offices will only speak English. If you don't speak English at least decently, you will be fired."
You cannot get away with that in a democracy. In a dictatorship it's the stroke of a pen. Which is ultimately better for the economy?
Only asking this question will naturally lead you to hypotheticals where dictatorships give better results. There are absolutely some systemic disadvantages to democratic systems, but I don't think this is one of them. There is enormous cultural richness and benefit and the multiplicity of languages. The stroke of the pen would help the economy immensely, but also destroy an extraordinary amount of culture and wealth, much of it intangible.
> The stroke of the pen would help the economy immensely, but also destroy an extraordinary amount of culture and wealth, much of it intangible.
Maslov's pyramid. Does a starving peasant care about culture and intangible "wealth" if trading that for food is what we're talking about? The Communists rammed through a whole new writing system to replace a ~5k year old one and nobody complained too much, even though it's ugly as heck.
I'm really digging this WaterDeeply website by the way. Lots of interesting topics I've been slowly researching in the background over time. Looks like they have pretty informative interviews, nice clean writing style too.
WaterDeeply is just one 'single-topic platform' that NewsDeeply[0] creates. I follow their Syria deeply platform and find that incredibly helpful when I see a bit of mainstream news coverage, but it doesn't provide enough context or detail for me.
when I arrived in Phoenix, it took me a while to understand what was wrong with the roofs here: often there is no gutter.
other oddity: some people water the lawn by simply flooding it (some front lawns are specifically lower than the sidewalk for that). At first I though it was stupid, then I saw people "watering" their lawn with sprinklers in the middle of the afternoon. I am curious what ratio of the water even reaches the grass.
Flooding might be a bit excessive but its better to water less frequently with more water as the water penetrates deeper and encourages root growth so the plant becomes more tolerant of lower water conditions. Watering the lawn during the hot parts of the day is silly in any climate.
Best solution is to get rid of most/all of your lawn if you live in the desert with limited water, ie. no large river or something.
In a city as sensitive to water issues as Tucson this isn't novelty at all. I participated in the student group that helped install cisterns at the UofA visitors center back in 2006 and 2007. We got most of our ideas from a local named Brad Lancaster who'd been doing it far longer.
Yeah, Tucson takes this sort of thing seriously for a number of reasons, 1) it is small enough (and relatively isolated) that there is a sense of community 2) people are willing to experiment 3) the people that have lived there the longest care deeply about the environment 4) the environment can kill you easily if you are not attentive (lighting strikes, flash floods, africanized bees, and dehydration to name a few) and 5) it gets really freaking hot for 8 months of the year
There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation.
[1] https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/C...
[2] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-i...