Add the industrial and cattle together and one can quickly see that it's not humans that are consuming the vast majority of potable water, but companies and industry that are depleting what's available for the rest of us.
companies only make what they can sell. The sell what consumers want. So it is humans. Humans want meat. If they stop wanting meat companies will stop making meat.
There should be three grades of water:
1) Untreated.
2) Salty (desalinated, but not to full freshwater standards), used for toilets, showers and the like.
3) Potable.
What you're doing with the water should have no bearing on the price and the price difference should only reflect the additional cost of going from #1 or #2 to #3.
You also pay a separate charge for delivering water to your place, this is omitted if you're getting it from a well and don't need delivery.
The base rates are standardized across a watershed (in this case, every place served by the Colorado river), the delivery charge is based on the cost to provide it to you. (Thus the cabins on the other side of the mountain here that lost their water in a wildfire--when the trees burned it not only damaged the pipe but caused land slippage that destroyed said pipe--pay a whopping delivery charge, but otherwise the same price per cubic foot we do.)
Most of Central California for instance isn’t in a watershed that connects to the Colorado in any way.
If companies start paying the total costs (water, carbon)—including externalities—of their raw materials, and pass those costs onto consumers, perhaps things will rebalance.
I'm sure this kind of feedback loop happens in a lot of industries. Companies don't just make what people want, they also make people want things. Throw in regulation too, which limits the shape of what can be produced. I think what it boils down to is that when you say people want X, that want is not unshaped by those providing it plus other external factors, so there can be a path to people not wanting it that doesn't just involve their individual decisions.
The only real solution is that we consumers consume less, and probably spend more for the same products, period.
I couldn’t disagree more. We need more regulation and taxation, and the real cost of the externalities added to the end product. The public is subsidizing and paying for private industry to pollute and use resources without accountability. That needs to end. The idea that the problem is solely due to personal consumption by individuals is a greenwashing tactic used by corporations to avoid responsibility for their products. The real solution is to put up barriers to producing these products and make the companies pay for their impact on the planet. This strange, antisocial idea that companies aren’t part of the social contract and don’t have to follow the rules of governments and civilization needs to be called out.
I don’t like the idea of blaming companies anymore than blaming individual consumers. They’re working in the same market
If companies start paying the total costs—including externalities (water, carbon)—of their raw materials, and pass those costs onto consumers, perhaps things will rebalance.
https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2022/06/30/intel-i...
"The average semiconductor fab uses somewhere between 2 million and 4 million gallons of water per day"
> Arizona has [some non-water requirements for Semi fab location]; however, it faces water challenges. Semiconductor fabs require tremendous quantities of highly pure water, using between two and four million gallons daily.[1] The fact that Arizona has become a semiconductor fab given these high water requirements may seem bewildering.
> ... Although these companies use vast amounts of water, they also recycle aggressively
The chip plants being built in the southwest are fed from the Colorado River, and are using scarce water.