[humanrebar]

I'm confused why the price per gallon for water isn't skyrocketing in California.

If the state is artificially keeping the price low, of course people aren't going to change their habits and business models. And the end game is running out of water instead of innovating to keep your water bill down.

[rconti]

Well, for one, water prices are not really set by a free market. Residential water providers are monopolies regulated by the local governments. They're not allowed to jack up their rates as it would hurt the poor. In San Juan Capistrano, the plaintiffs recently won a suit against tiered pricing on the argument that the water cannot be sold at a cost greater than the cost of providing it.

Agricultural interests with senior water rights have a legal right to a much greater amount of water at much lower cost. Those with riparian rights (upstream) have the right to take as much water as they can use.

There are hundreds of reasons why it's not as simple as "turn this knob to raise price".

[hydrogen18]

That is interesting. I live in Austin, TX and my water bill is all kinds of complicated. A good portion of the dollar amount is actually sewer. We're encouraged to game the system by using as little water as possible during the cold months. Then in the warm months the excess is marked as 'agriculture' and thus we don't pay sewer on it.

The city also doesn't read my meter monthly, but yearly. It just estimates it from month to month. So about once a year I get a huge, insane bill for about 3 times my monthly bill. OTOH they only bill me for the water when they do that so technically I'm getting sewer for 'free' during the year.

[dchichkov]

/sarcasm: I wonder why there aren't air access riparian rights (upstream) or senior air rights. It seems logical if there are such rights for water, there should be similar rights for air.

[hydrogen18]

In actuality, it is one of enforcement. It is relatively easy to track and identify water usage. You can disguise a well only for so long. If the US federal government had the means to regulate air usage by so many cubic feet per year, they would.

For some industries this already exists in the form of the regulation of emissions. If you're capping an industries carbon output into atmosphere what you are really capping is the mass of oxygen they can consume from the atmosphere. If you do the thermodynamic analysis of it, you're basically putting a cap on the amount of energy that a business can acquire from using the atmosphere. Most industries run 24/7, so it is really easy to calculate how much oxygen they'll use each year and how much carbon they'll emit into the atmosphere.

It isn't so easy for individuals and smaller businesses. For example, I own a generator that uses oxygen from the atmosphere to get electrical energy. However, I only use it for a tiny fraction of each year.

[k-mcgrady]

Just a guess but if you're talking about tap water costs raising those would hit the poorest the worst. Secondly if they raise them high enough it becomes better financially to purchase bottled water (which I assume wouldn't rise in price as much as the companies producing that are global businesses and a spike in demand in one area shouldn't affect the overall pricing too much) - again not a problem for those that can afford it.

[DanBlake]

Water costs less than a half cent per gallon. Water could double, triple or quadruple in price and still be 'affordable' for the poor to drink. It certainly would not cause them to drink bottled water, which is like 10,000x more expensive- But, Shorter showers and no more watered lawns? Absolutely. But if all it takes to survive for a family of four to have clean drinking water is 5 cents, i think you might be claiming it impacts the poor a little bit too far.

[ianferrel]

Bottled water costs orders of magnitude more than tap water, so there's little danger that raising water rates will provide much incentive to switch to tap water.

I live in Santa Barbara. The first 3000 gallons of tap water I use each month cost 0.5 cents per gallon. Even the most expensive rate for my water is only 2 cents per gallon. Bottled water, even in bulk, tends to cost $0.50 or more a gallon.

And of course agricultural users pay an order of magnitude less than I do.

[dxbydt]

>I'm confused why the price per gallon for water isn't skyrocketing in California.

It doesn't quite work like that. For eg. Fresno pays one-third of what San Francisco pays, even though both of them are in California.

http://imgur.com/ywkmDzT

There was a very long article in yesterday's Seattle Times on this very topic -

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-se...

[nomass]

> artificially keeping the price low

But isn't that the case with ALL finite/natural resources? In this case it's might be the state, in the case of oil it might be other actor(s), in case of rare minerals the causes are again different.

Could our world even work without these discount prices? Probabely not. Thats why this is all so terrifying. There is no data about how much oil or silicon or aluminium or uranium we have. We dig this things out and throw them on the marked and then act as if those prices reflect the value of this things.

I don’t see a solution for this

[marcusgarvey]

The problem with setting one price for water is that very rich people will always be willing to shell out what's needed while poor people who lack the means will suffer. Some kind of dynamic pricing based on a wealth/income/property value proxy might solve this.

[untangle]

Much of the water consumed is not even metered. And not just that taken from wells.

[fweespeech]

> If the state is artificially keeping the price low

Hint: The State doesn't have control over the price. Its mostly be extracted via privately owned water rights.

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2014/09/18/ca-laws-restr...

> “With the stroke of his pen, the Governor changed over 100 years of water laws – without the people’s input. This is not the democracy Californians deserve.” – State Senator Jim Nielsen

> In the midst of drought and heightened overdrafting problems, California passed legislation allowing the state to control and regulate the use of groundwater on privately-owned land. Citizens, previously free to use whatever water was underneath their own land, are now preparing to challenge this governmental undermining of their property rights in court.

Private property owners were engaging in unsustainable behavior for their economic benefit is basically why this is a problem. Proper planning and not burning through reserves to grow almonds/alfalfa/etc for export would have prevented the issue from getting this bad.

[dchichkov]

Normally I would support libertarian attitude, but in that case it seems like a pretty reasonable Governor was elected by people, precisely because these people wanted these particular strokes of the pen, instating reasonable control over access to common resource. Democracy at work.

Attitude "...If I’m an overlying landowner, I have the right to pump as much water as I can..." leads only to the tragedy of the commons and ensuing disaster...

[fweespeech]

I wasn't supporting the libertarian view. ;)

I'm just explaining why this came about. This is very much a tragedy of the commons where one sector of the economy was able to profit from this privilege and socialize the costs now that it is a problem for them.