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Australia’s Darling River is running dry

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Re: Australia’s Darling River is running dry

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Perhaps the problem is that there's too much water on the market, due to the government handing out too much too cheaply? Edit: Ah, looks like yes; the government was working on undoing this mistake by buying back water rights at large expense, but stopped because, errr, politics. Although it sounds to me like the real mistake here was maybe giving away rights to use water in perpetuity in the first place (whic…

> Nice! Perhaps the problem is that there's too much water on the market, due to the government handing out too much too cheaply? No, the original design was done by CSIRO, the government scientific arm. AFAICT, is was pretty well done. The problem is entirely political. The river system is about 3000km long, and passes through 4 states. The state politicians suffer almost no repercussions by white anting the agreeme…

The problem is always political. By "violating the agreement" you mean drawing water without paying for the required allocations (eg. disconnecting water meters), or?

And the state politicians allow this because of competition, basically subsidizing local water by letting people draw it for free, while externalizing the cost to other states?

Re: Australia’s Darling River is running dry

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I disagree with the price of a potato, I can buy rice. Food is price elastic in so far as I have options in what food to buy for what purpose. That said, indeed in my country and a number of others there are certain food stuffs which may not be legally taxed via VAT as they are considered necessary for daily survival. Water is completely price inelastic economically. There is no alternative to it and it is essenti…

Demand for drinking water is inelastic. That's a tiny fraction of a fraction of usage. The majority of fresh water is used for farming, as coolants, solvents, reagents in industrial processes. These uses certainly do have alternatives, whether switching to alternative crops, developing more efficient manufacturing methods, building desalination plants. If that happened there would be more water available for essentia…

Absolutely, this is the ideal. All the examples you mentioned are what I would class in my previous comment as non-essential use cases (as in there are alternatives).

Certain alternatives such as desalination and water reclamation in industrial processes don't change the elasticity of water economically; it's still required. They just increase the amount available in the pool (excuse the pun) and even then these too bear cost for implementation and maintenance and would not be provided free (which makes sense).

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