It makes no sense at all to pay $2k an acre-foot for desalinated water in a state where millions of acre-feet are being used to grow alfalfa that sells for less than $400 per acre-foot of water consumed.
This isn't a lack of water problem, it is an poor governance problem.
No, it's a poor pricing problem.
The price of water should be directly related to the cost of delivery and supply. Unfortunately, virtually everywhere, you are merely charged for the cost of delivery. If we tie the price of water to something like rainfall, we'll all be much better off. Inefficient use of water will disappear very quickly.
Check out SSC[1] for an in depth review of water policy in CA.
1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...
This is actually happening in California with Nestle's bottling operation where the oversight of their water use has been very lax.
The uses that matter are agriculture, agriculture, agriculture, industrial (e.g. power plant cooling towers), and far off in the distance outdoor domestic / commercial use (pools and lawns). (Also, if you consider it a 'use' - not draining every river in the state, but rather allowing some of them to continue to be rivers. This is the so-called environmental use.)
When you bring up red herrings about poor people dying of thirst because rich techies are buying bottled water from nefarious companies stealing public water, you are being a patsy of BigAg.
One concern is to stop monopoly water suppliers from overcharging. So prices have to only cover the costs of delivering the water.
>No, it's a poor pricing problem.
And who do you think sets pricing regulations?
Yeah, I'm sure that will have no public health consequences whatsoever.
If the water-shortage is already so bad that it could cause prices like that for individuals, then you've already got a problem that'll cause health issues.
However, that's totally different than granting similar rights and subsidies to acres of cash-crops and chemical-refineries!
I haven't read any farm bills or anything about water data but that's what I would do first if I wanted to understand more.
If you're the one trying to champion "water as a human right", then I think it's only fair to ask you where you would draw the lines. What demarcates personal use and commercial use? How many gallons can someone use for their outdoor "washing" pool before you step in and say that they're abusing the system?
> How much will the price of goods go up as a result?
I don't know, but we have a distributed algorithm for solving it called "capitalism". Like any algorithm, garbage-in makes for garbage-out, and tuning it is a major pain the ass. One of the important inputs is whatever cost on shared-resources (or externalities) imposed by the government.
Having an annual statewide wholesale auction for water rights would decrease the cost to urban end users, not increase them. But some people are so reflexively opposed to market based solutions that they attack them even when the net result is improvement for the very people they claim to care about.
As for desalting the ocean, perhaps building aquifers to retain the run off from rains would be a better solution. They did a great deal of work to send all that water into the ocean, its time they redirected it to where it can stored and used as necessary.
If you're thinking of using the runoff from local rains, consider that California is in a drought. Rainwater isn't going to be all that dependable. There are things called, "Aquifers" - the water table below ground. Rainwater is used to fill this up, and - well: those are also at historical lows because of wells.
Much of the rain that falls is actually evaporated up again, it doesn't run into the ocean.
So, we're still left with a problem of populations that don't have an adequate and cheap water supply. Uh oh.
CA might be in a drought, but it still does get rainfall. Drought != no rain at all, it means less rain than usual.
If you don't get much rain, you have to do everything you can to prevent runoff. There's not much of that in CA and so there are problems. It's partially a drought, and partially bad water management that have caused the problems.