[swatcoder]

> The simple solution > The obvious answer

This community seems like its at its best when it expresses humble curiosity and its worst when it shuts the door on learning by oversimplifying deeply complex matters as though nobody else had the sense to look straight at them.

Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests. The levers with which to control price and set incentives the way you suggest don’t exist.

There are real problems looming, but there are no “simple solutions” or “obvious answers” being missed.

Whatever comes will involve great compromise and very few will think it was the right solution. I guess maybe you’re just joining that chorus early.

[LanceH]

We can start by rolling back the modern entrenchments that have only made it worse. I would be absolutely shocked if this were only a 200 year old problem and there wasn't modern legislation basically gifting free water to special interests.

[jfoutz]

I'm by no means an expert or a lawyer or someone you should listen to. But this may hint at the complexity. A lot of water rights come from Spanish land grants ~330 years ago. And those were guaranteed by treaty after the Mexican American war. So, the U.S. can do whatever it wants, but treaties are in this weird space below the constitution but above a simple bill through congress to become law.

Water rights are generally old, old law and weird and complicated and special for each little town.

[AlotOfReading]

Mexican water rights were considered separate from the underlying land rights unless they were explicitly included in the grant. Moreover, Mexican title was required to be registered with the government shortly after annexation. Most of those titles were in turn siezed by various quasi-legal means, which is where cities like Berkeley come from. There are relatively few water rights remaining from Mexican annexation, most of which are held by municipal institutions like LA and only affect relatively small streams. Those of larger areas, like the Sangre de Cristo grant, have been litigated to death in courts over the past couple centuries and most of the entities involved no longer exist.

Water law is a nightmarishly confusing hellscape, but Guadalupe -Hidalgo isn't an important reason why today.

[jfoutz]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Your point about nightmareishly confusing hellscape is what I just what was trying to get across.

[JumpCrisscross]

> treaties are in this weird space below the constitution but above a simple bill through congress to become law

Treaties have the force of federal law [1]. Not more. Not less. California is bound by them. The Congress is not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause

[jfoutz]

Thanks for the clarification! my dim memories of high school civics failed me, and you helped me out.

But I think the main point - water rights are a nightmare - still stands. Endless bickering over what rules apply.

[bombcar]

And the final say rests with the man with the gun, so if necessary the laws will be changed.

Since things haven't reached that level, it's likely the issue isn't super serious (yet).

[JumpCrisscross]

> things haven't reached that level, it's likely the issue isn't super serious (yet)

This isn't some some weird theoretical aside. Congressional power to modify and break treaties was debated by the founders [1].

Treaties are laws, full stop. Congress breaking them has political consequences. But it's not illegal, and it's no different from amending an act a prior Congress passed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause#Repeal_of_treati...

[bombcar]

Yep, and if it got really really bad 3/4ths of the states can modify the Constitution and over-ride just about anything.

So if the southwest states piss off the rest of the country ...

[refurb]

Way to double down on the "not sure why this is so hard to solve, the answer is obvious!".

[googlryas]

What is so complex about eminent domain? Just force the sale of water rights back to the government for a fair price. It will sting a little bit, but sting far less than pretending like only 15% of the water in the western US actually exists.

[gedy]

Politicians are afraid of getting voted out, and frankly many of their constituents prefer to ban this or that symbolic thing in residential usage that scratches their control freak itch.

[pfdietz]

Or, just allow farmers to sell their water to the highest bidder. The Coase theorem to the rescue.

[sacrosancty]

This is what I would expect to happen. Everyone wants the government to "simply" violate property rights and seize it but is there not a way for the market to sort itself out fairly? Are they forbidden from selling their water rights? Or is the water actually worth more to the farmers than the city residents so that the current situation is actually fine?

[lovich]

> Everyone wants the government to "simply" violate property rights...

It's a lot simpler when you don't believe that water is something private individuals have a right to hoard. Imo, water is a natural resource we all have some minimum access to as humans, regardless of if someone wants to buy it up and sell at a higher price later

[sacrosancty]

It's not really natural though, is it? Regulated by the Hoover dam and supplying people living in deserts. Obviosuly people who choose to live in remote arid places don't automatically have the right to be provided with water by everybody else.

[lovich]

> It's not really natural though, is it?

What? I’m not sure how water could not be considered a natural resource. It just exists, it didn’t take a human hand to create.

[jandrewrogers]

This happens in some places already but a major issue is the absence of a distribution network to get water from where it is to where it is needed most. Being able to move the water consumption to where the water is located is one of the major drivers of cattle ranching out west.

[staticautomatic]

Notwithstanding the farm and ranch lobbies, what part of raising prices isn’t a simple solution?

[dendrite9]

The question of who owns the water right is important. The doctrine for water usage is different in the western US and the eastern US. Some of this is due to geography, and some due to the history of settlement. Here are a few useful links that discuss the differences. https://nationalaglawcenter.org/overview/water-law/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/03/an-introduction-to-water-l...

https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/whose-water-is-it-...

[ABeeSea]

So change the laws.

[swatcoder]

I know you’re being earnest and understand the conviction behind what you’re saying, but I can’t help imagining that some of these comments are “false flag” posts by the NRA.

Completely overhauling property rights for half of a continent doesn’t come without major resistance. We’re still recovering from the last that that was done.

It’s just not as simple a problem as we’d all like it to be, and it’s not because this senator is in that rancher’s pocket.

[Dylan16807]

All you really need is a tax, and considering how much else can be taxed trying to complain about a water tax for bulk use just seems whiny.

[jandrewrogers]

Changing the law ignores the problem. This involves vast amounts of titled property with centuries of history. People respond very poorly to wholesale deprivation of property rights such that the political ramifications cannot be ignored, and the US Constitution puts strict limits on the nature of such deprivations.

This is essentially in the same class of situation as the government deciding to nationalize everyone's private home to solve some Important Problem. There isn't a realistic version of the world where that is a politically viable solution and the costs would be intractably high.

[dendrite9]

And do what about the geography?

Changing the laws is not something that just happens and solves everything. If we're fixing legal doctrines from westward expansion of the US there is a lot to fix. I'd propose taking back the patchworks of land gifted to the railroads, or at least forcibly consolidate them into contiguous blocks.

Maybe those water rights should be given to the tribes who used to live in the watersheds. Let them set the prices.

[zeroonetwothree]

As we saw in Kelo, the government can easily take away private property for basically any reason.

[stickfigure]

> Water rights carry a legacy of centuries of personal and political history and thousands of competing interests.

So did slavery, and we managed to get rid of that.

Doing the right thing is really not that complicated, it just requires political will.

[remarkEon]

>So did slavery, and we managed to get rid of that.

... with a civil war.

Doing the right thing is often quite complicated, and comes with severe costs and injury to some party somewhere.

[COGlory]

600,000 immediate American casualties (not to mention the slaves) is not a great example here, of something being "simple"

[formerkrogemp]

COVID killed over a million. The culpability for that isn't simple either.

[COGlory]

What does that have to do with this topic?

[swatcoder]

That may not be the example you want to use for something accomplished completely or without complication.

[kortilla]

Water rights are at odds with what society needs now. There is nothing complex here. Make everyone pay equally for water and the problem goes away.

The people that complain that it’s way more complex than that are the ones that don’t want to pay for water.

[swatcoder]

Should someone be able to dig a well in their own land? Draw surface water from a river, stream, or creek that passes through it? Grow crops in their own flood plains, estuaries, marshes, ponds, and lakes?

The water we’re talking about doesn’t come through a pipe with a meter, and the people who have access to water have practical influence over the use, routing, safety, and quality of that water even if you try to assert legal control over them.

[Dylan16807]

> Should someone be able to dig a well in their own land?

If that connects to a shared aquifer which can easily be depleted, then not without regulation.

> Draw surface water from a river, stream, or creek that passes through it?

I wouldn't expect to be allowed to reduce the flow of one of those, comparing how much enters and how much exits my land.

> Grow crops in their own flood plains, estuaries, marshes, ponds, and lakes?

That seems fine, probably.

[rootw0rm]

Where I grew up (near Camp Pendleton), we couldn't dig a well on our property. Nobody in the area owned the water rights on their land.

[formerkrogemp]

You and what 1,200 ft deep well? The aquifers are so depleted the land is sinking. It's just gone, and the rain isn't replenishing it fast enough. The water we're talking about is already more deep and less frequent.

[dghlsakjg]

In a quite literal sense, how?

Much of the water being discussed is in rivers and streams, which is taken as it passes through the land that uses it. It is only useful if it is in that exact waterway. There is no such thing as a market rate for water in a dry river.

If you turn it into an open market there are all sorts of weird complications. E.g. ranch A is upstream of Ranch B. Under a market system ranch A can use all of the water in the stream and just pay for it. Ranch B now doesn’t get that option since there is no more water in the stream. Rancher B can buy more water, but what good is buying water in a river that doesn’t go through your land.

So then you get to a rights based system. Rancher B has been watering his fields for 100 years, and rancher A comes along and says he wants to water his fields too. That’s fine, he just has to lay claim to whatever rancher B isn’t using.

The rights system would work fine except that nature won’t cooperate. We divided up rights for 100 units of water fair and square, so what do we do when we discover that we can only get 90 units of water.

Do you all take a 10% cut? Does the newest guy take the full cut (how it works now)?

You say it’s not complex, but millions of lives and industries worth trillions all rely on it. The current solution is a known flawed treaty that is almost 100 years old based on legal concepts that are far older. If it was so simple it would have been solved back then.

[sacrosancty]

Lots of problems look like they'd be solved with heavy-handed authoritarianism, but there are costs to that both for individuals getting screwed over and the long term trust in the government to honor its agreements, reducing its strength in making future agreements. Plenty of 3rd world governments have happily seized property rights all over the place and it's not really a recipe for success.

Why not go a step further and just "solve" water shortages around the world by "forcing" some neighboring country that has too much water to sell it to you at the same price as to themselves? They weren't using it anyway, so that's fair, right?

[BurningFrog]

The complexity is to find a way to do that politically. Lots of powerful interests benefitting from the current system.

If you or I were Emperor, it would be easy. But the current US system is different.