« Wagons circle around White House? | Main | something different required »
September 30, 2003
Water politics
This article is about right. The problem with the overuse and over-allocation of water does lie primarily with the farm (especially in the Murray-Darling Basin) and not the cities.
Yet the cities need to address the way they use water. They waste it on the garden and washing down the car in the driveway. However, we do need to shift from a policy of water restrictions in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide to recycling water. That means redesigning our cities to be more sustainable.
I see little impetus for that shift.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 30, 2003 11:44 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/687
Comments
Call me a narrow-minded economist, but I simply cannot see he sense of these inefficent regulations of what you can and cannot do with water. What's wrong with a simple price mechanism? Just link the price of water to the current level of the reservoirs - it could be (say) eight or ten times its usual price at the moment. Of course you'd have to advertise it well ("watering an average household lawn at midday will now cost you $X a month, versus $Y dollars at night"), but after that all the windfall funds can be put towards long term measures to fix the problem.
Posted by: derrida derider at October 3, 2003 07:15 PM