My water bill in Texas is insane and they keep building more apartments in places with drought warnings and keep making deals with tech titans to build water-consuming data centers Moving back to Seattle in a few months
How can England possibly be running out of water?
311–320 of 524 posts
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#312As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
"Thanks, Thatcher"
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#313I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government bonds are considered lower risk and the interest rate is lower, i.e they will attract the same money for less. Private shareholders are more expensive. This also doesn't consider "debt recapitalisation" where these private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers and then suck out dividend cash "de-risking" their holding in the company. The government can bail it out or…
Government bonds are only low risk in economic theory. In real world practice lending to left wing countries can be high risk as they like to accumulate too much debt and then default. That's why the UK government is paying 5.8% on its bonds at the moment despite being able to print its own money, which is the same average interest rate paid by Thames Water. Lending to Thames is not seen as riskier than lending to th…
It's interesting it's at the same rate, I imagine as everyone knows the government would have to bail them out.
So the question remains why do it? It doesn't actually benefit the general public then. Increased risk for government and like you mentioned increased hurdles for running the utility.
Of course government do that, but they're left holding the bag regardless, so the incentive is very different.
These are not counterpoints.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are misrepresenting Thatcherism. Thatcher was pretty pragmatic and did not want to privatise everything - e.g. Royal Mail and the Post Office - those were done by the very non-Thatcherite coalition government in 2013. They were also messed up (e.g. private ownership of the postcode database). https://www.ft.com/content/1057f722-75d5-11e1-9dce-00144feab... A lot of NHS privatisation was done by Blair and B…
It's the problem with ideological thinking - from what I can see some privatisations worked well (e.g. Rolls Royce) and others went terribly (rail, water in England) - unfortunately they tend to get treated as all bad or all good.
The privatisations that go bad are usually monopolistic.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.
Their voters obviously don't agree. Not only have they defected to Reform on a massive scale, but Reform recruiting former Tories like Dorries is hugely controversial within the party base, exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing.
that's like saying the CDU in germany is left because CDU voters started voting AfD. people flocking to an even more conservative party does not mean that the original party is somehow left.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#317It looks like we will be forever looking for solutions when we keep on ignoring animal farming in these conversations. Not even a single mention of the orders of magnitude more of water that is required for animal agriculture vs just growing plants directly for human consumption.
Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so a few oil countries can squish some extra money so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
although a good point, there is obvious surface level nuance though; oil companies hid the research of climate change for a decade or two, they also lobbied (and still do) against subsidies for renewable energy and for oil and gas subsidies (in development in most countries, and even end customer price subsidies in others). and of course there's further nuance below the surface as well.
Once the hidden research was revealed to the public, we all started curbing our carbon emissions, right?
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#319Don't worry about it. Just lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and reduce regulations, the magic hand of the market will fix everything!!! :D
Last I heard the rich are leaving the UK eroding your tax base. Im sorry but it is going to be higher taxes for you all
'The highest earning 1% in the UK pay an estimated 28% of all income tax. '
https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-bur...
The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really twist yourself around here. But this? > Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt. Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was…
The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.
Maybe they are now (I doubt it), but they surely weren't under Thatcher.