[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.