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Good question as there is no lack of water in the world. In fact there is a great excess of fresh water far more than we will ever need. The issue is how we manage water.Too much reliance on VOLUNTARY CUTS in demand for water fails like the tragedy of the commons economic parable. Everyone waits for someone else to suffer the cuts. Nestle and other corporations argue for water privatization that will bring the advantage of market pricing to control supply, but they ignore the reality that water is more like air than oil. At some level is water not a human right?David Zetland7/15/2008 @ 6:00AMThe Water Shortage Mythhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/07/14/california-supply-demand-oped-cx_dz_0715water.htmlCalifornia is perpetually portrayed as suffering from a shortage of water. Case in point: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently declared a statewide drought, telling citizens to prepare for rationing. But the state’s problems are not a result of too little water.



The real problem is that the price of water in California, as in most of America, has virtually nothing to do with supply and demand.California Drought Hurts More Than the Ag Industry[photo is my addition]Although water is distributed by public and private monopolies that could easily charge high prices, municipalities and regulators set prices that are as low as possible. Underpriced water sends the wrong signal to the people using it: It tells them not to worry about how much they use.



Low prices lead to shortages. Water managers respond to them with calls for conservation. But this often fails.Residents in San Diego County, for example, were asked in June 2007 to cut their water use by 20 gallons a day. They used more. When voluntary conservation fails, water agencies impose mandatory rationing, which is unfair and inefficient because people who have historically been water misers are cut back by the same percentage as water hogs.If water was priced to reflect scarcity, a decrease in supply would lead to an increase in price, and people would demand less.Consider another precious liquid: oil. Despite popular perception, there is no shortage of oil; supply does equal demand at the present price. It’s just that supply meets demand at a higher price than it did a few years ago.In a sensible water pricing system, everyone would be guaranteed a base quantity of water at a low price. Those who used more would face a steep price hike.



As it stands, Los Angeles households pay $2.80 for the first 885 gallons they use per day. That’s enough water to fill 18 bathtubs. The next 18 tubs cost $3.40, which is only 20% more. Most L.A. households don’t even see this price increase, since the average household of three uses just 350 gallons–about seven bathtubs–each day. For that water, the household pays only $35 a month. If they use twice the amount, the bill merely doubles.I propose a system where every person gets the first 75 gallons, or 1.5 bathtubs, per day for free but pays $5.60 for each 75 gallons after that. Under my system, the monthly bill for the average household of three would come to $95.



My system is designed to reduce demand rather than cover costs. Revenue paid by guzzlers would cover the costs of those who use only a small amount of water. Any leftover profits could be refunded to consumers or used to enhance the quality or quantity of the water supply.We can solve Aerica’s water “shortage” in the same way that we would solve a shortage in any market. Increase prices until the quantity demanded falls to equal supply. This pricing system would ensure that everyone gets a basic allocation of cheap water while forcing guzzlers to pay a high price.Want to use more water? Pay for it.David Zetland is a visiting fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. He writes about the economics of water on the blog aguanomics.com.Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During DroughtBy Dan BacherGlobal Research, March 26, 2015Theme: Environment, Law and JusticeImage: The Arrowhead Mountain Water Company bottling plant, owned by Swiss conglomerate Nestle, on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Cabazon, Calif. Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP.The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation continues to bottle city water to sell back to the public at a big profit, local activists charge.The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought.The coalition, the crunch nestle alliance, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory.A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down.“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,”according to the coalition.“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,”the coalition said.Activists say that Sacramento officials have refused attempts to obtain details of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members have addressed the Sacramento City Council and requested that Nestle’ either pay a commercial rate under a two tier level, or pay a tax on their profit.Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif. Photo credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/APIn October, the coalition released a “White Paper” highlighting predatory water profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water Bottling Company in various cities, counties, states and countries. Most of those great “deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Additionally, the environmental impact on many of those areas yielded disastrous results.Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said,“This corporate welfare giveaway is an outrage and warrants a major investigation. For more than five months we have requested data on Nestlé water use. City Hall has not complied with our request, or given any indication that it will. Sacramentans deserve to know how their money is being spent and what they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re getting ripped off.”For more information about the crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn (530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) Gmail or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251Nestlé is currently the leading supplier of the world’s bottled water, including such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino, and has been criticized by activists for human rights violations throughout the world. For example, Food and Water Watch and other organizations blasted Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment” in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”“The failure to examine Nestlé’s track record on the human right to water is not surprising given recent statements by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging the human right to water,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She noted that the company famously declared at the 2000 World Water Forum in the Netherlands that water should be defined as a need—not as a human right.“In November 2013, Colombian trade unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated by a paramilitary organization while many of his fellow workers were in the midst of a hunger strike protesting the corporation’s refusal to hear their grievances,” according to the groups.The press conference and protest will take place just days after Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the LA Times on March 12 that California has only one year of water supply left in its reservoirs.“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agribusiness, Southern California water agencies, and oil companies conducting fracking operations. The $67 billion plan won’t create one single drop of new water, but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm land out of production under the guise of “habitat restoration” in order to irrigate drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate mega-growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.The tunnel plan will also hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels will be good for agribusiness, water privateers, oil companies and the 1 percent, but will be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and environment of California and the public trust.The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!In fact, the endangered Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the entire Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct, according to UC Davis fish biologist and author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital Public Radio.“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council.According to Capital Public Radio:“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. “Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California.‘All these biological opinions on Delta smelt that have restricted some of the pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle.But Moyle says pumping water from the Delta to Central and Southern California could still be restricted at certain times because of all the other threatened fish populations.”The Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, reached a new record low population level in 2014, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall midwater trawl survey that was released in January.Department staff found a total of only eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled each month from September through DecemberThe smelt is considered an indicator species because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is endemic to the estuary and spends all of its life in the Delta.The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) to index the fall abundance of pelagic (open water) fish, including Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and American shad, nearly annually since 1967. The index of each species is a number that indicates a relative population abundance.Watch Nestle’s CEO declare water “food that should be privatized, and not a human right”:‪James Grant Matkin Water shortage is a myth because the real problem is the price of water. Pricing of water today is totally irrelevant to supply and demand. This is very strange because water management is a utility, whether public or private it is inherently a monopoly. This means water utilities could easily charge much higher prices than they do today. But they do not. "Underpriced water sends the wrong signal to the people using it: It tells them not to worry about how much they use. Low prices lead to shortages...If water was priced to reflect scarcity, a decrease in supply would lead to an increase in price and people would demand less." See Forbes story by David Zetland, 2008. Therefore, Nestle are not criminals but water utilities are fools. The Utilities must restructure water sales based on competitive consumer demand to ensure the buyers are not "stealing water" during droughts. While water pricing could be like oil and gold and much better because water is renewable resource. With market pricing integrity water owners like British Columbia could indeed enjoy a bonanza by pricing according to demand rather than giving water away to the Nestles of the corporate world. California also could benefit from water exports from BC where 99% of water ends up in the ocean. If BC priced their water resource properly accounting for environmental sustainability exporting to California would make sense. California is a desert never intended by nature to serve the water demands of a population larger than Canada.http://www.globalresearch.ca/nestle-continues-stealing-worlds-water-during-drought/5438880Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be PrivatizedJanuary 14, 2017 Winter Watch Around the Web, Business, International News 0Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. PHOTO: via ACCMagazine13 January 2016ACC MAGAZINE — Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.The company notorious for sending out hordes of ‘internet warriors’ to defend the company and its actions online in comments and message boards (perhaps we’ll find some below) even takes a firm stance behind Monsanto’s GMOs and their ‘proven safety’. In fact, the former Nestle CEO actually says that his idea of water privatization is very similar to Monsanto’s GMOs. In a video interview, Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe states that there has never been ‘one illness’ ever caused from the consumption of GMOs.The way in which this sociopath clearly has zero regard for the human race outside of his own wealth and the development of Nestle, who has been caught funding attacks against GMO labeling, can be witnessed when watching and listening to his talk on the issue. This is a company that actually goes into struggling rural areas and extracts the groundwater for their bottled water products, completely destroying the water supply of the area without any compensation. In fact, they actually make rural areas in the United States foot the bill. […]The Cost of Water: Why It Keeps Going UpNovember 20, 2015The cost of water keeps going up as most facility managers know. In fact, in many cases, the cost of water is going up very significantly, with even higher costs anticipated in the future. For instance, in Chicago, the cost of water went up an average of 25 percent in 2012, and plans are now being discussed to double rates in 2015.So why is the cost of water escalating so fast? After all, historically it has been one of our least expensive natural resources in the United States. However, water has typically been underpriced for decades. Utility companies are now trying to adjust charges so that they better reflect the actual costs to collect, store, and deliver water to consumers.But there are other reasons as well. According to engineers Willa Kuh and Fred Betz with Affiliated Engineers, the following are seven other reasons why the cost of water is going up in the United States:Old infrastructure. According to Kuh and Betz, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports we will need about $350 billion to improve water infrastructure by 2026. Other estimates indicate that by 2050 as much as $1 billion may be needed. As a result, charges are going up now to address these infrastructure updates.Loss of Federal funds. For decades, the Federal government paid the lion’s share of the costs to collect and deliver water. It is now turning these costs over to the states.Accounting changes. In order to avoid raising taxes, communities are shifting the costs of supplying and maintaining water systems from property taxes to utility bills.Demographics. The areas of the country that are now growing the fastest are the same ones facing the greatest water challenges. This includes the Sun Belt states and many Western states.Reduced access to clean water. The number of rivers, streams, lakes, and other water sources that can be accessed has been reduced in the past few years due to pollution and related issues.Climate change. While engineers do not call it climate change, they do indicate there has been “a reduction in snowmelt supply to water resources [which] frustrates demand for water to support human health, food, and energy needs.”Supply and demand. Basic economics is playing a role. As supplies dwindle, costs go up. This applies to water as well.This leaves facility managers with two choices:1. Pay ever-increasing costs for water and try to pass these costs on to building tenants.2. Find effective ways to conserve water such as low flow and no flow restroom fixtures.For both the short- and long-term, the only real option managers have to adjust to the rising cost of water is to find ways to reduce water consumption. Waterless urinals are one way to accomplish this.The Cost of Water: Why It Keeps Going UpPOLITICSWater war in California: Two agencies fight over Colorado River drought plan with a crucial deadline loomingPUBLISHED FRI, MAR 15 2019 • 2:03 PM EDTJeff Daniels@JEFFDANIELSCAKEY POINTSCalifornia remains a holdout on a drought emergency plan for the Colorado River that is due next Tuesday by seven river states.Holding up the plan has been a fight between two powerful water agencies in Southern California.The plan is designed to produce voluntary cuts that would keep the river and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels.The Colorado River typically accounts for about 25 percent of the water needs of Southern California, but during periods of severe drought it can be a much larger share.HOOVER DAM, AZ - MARCH 30: A ‘bathtub ring’ surrounds Lake Mead near Hoover Dam, which impounds the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border, on March 30, 2016. The white ring shows the effects of a drought which has caused the level of the lake to drop to an historic low. The ring is white because of the minerals which were deposited on the previously submerged surfaces. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)Robert Alexander | Archive Photos | Getty ImagesLOS ANGELES — California remains a holdout on a drought emergency plan for the Colorado River that is due next Tuesday by all seven river states. Holding up the plan has been a fight between two powerful water agencies in Southern California.The drought contingency plan is designed to produce voluntary cuts that would keep the river and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. If the plan doesn’t get finalized, the federal government could step in and force mandatory cutbacks instead of voluntary ones for a river that serves 40 million people and some 5 million acres of farmland.Drought in the past decade has stressed the Colorado River to the limits and contributed to Lake Mead reaching perilously low levels. Lake Mead, located by Hoover Dam and a vital water source for California, Nevada and Arizona, had dismal levels last year that raised alarm.“We have a supply crisis that has been developing due to drought on the Colorado River,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a water wholesaler serving 19 million in six counties, including Los Angeles and San Diego.The need for water led Metropolitan last year to approve funding to help pay some of the costs for a delta water-delivery tunnel project in Northern California that would bring more water to Southern California. But Gov. Gavin Newsom last month said he would scale back the $10 billion plan championed by his predecessor.Newsom appoints members to an agency’s board that represents the state in discussions and negotiations on river issues: the Colorado River Board of California.Earlier this month, Imperial Irrigation District, a water district in California’s southeastern Imperial County with senior rights to the Colorado River, announced a plan with water cutbacks. But it required that the federal government pay $200 million for restoring the dwindling Salton Sea, California’s largest lake.“Our job here is to protect the people and the environment of the Imperial Valley,” said Robert Schettler, a spokesman for the Imperial district. He said the Salton Sea has become a health and environmental concern due to dust exposed by the receding lake.However, the Imperial County agency’s demand for federal funds as part of its plan didn’t go over well with Metropolitan. The Los Angeles-based agency contends Imperial’s condition for money would be unlikely to be met before the federal deadline.“We gave [Imperial Irrigation District] time and space to continue to work on their Salton Sea issue, but at some point we felt we needed to move on,” said Kightlinger.The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation asked governors or their representatives of the river states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to turn in the emergency drought plan for the Colorado River no later than March 19. Approvals from a handful of water agencies in California and Congress are what’s left for the plan to become fully implemented.The Colorado River typically accounts for about 25 percent of the water needs of Southern California, but during periods of severe drought the river can represent more than 50 percent of the region’s water supply. The Las Vegas area gets nearly 90 percent of its water needs from the river system, and Arizona roughly 40 percent.On Tuesday, Metropolitan’s board of directors agreed to bear most of the state’s water cutbacks as a way to prevent Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. The agency could contribute as much as 700,000 acre-feet of water, or the equivalent of enough water for 2.1 million households for a year.California is only required to make contributions if Lake Mead’s elevation drops to 1,045 feet above sea level, or 44 feet below its current level of 1,089 feet.Lake Mead, which supplies water to cities and agriculture areas, has a more than 50 percent chance of reaching dangerously low elevations in the next few years, according to Metropolitan. If that happens, it said “severe delivery cuts could be triggered, hydropower generation would be threatened and Metropolitan could be prevented from accessing conserved water it has stored in the lake.”“The key part for California is that once a shortage is declared, they still have some access to taking water out of Lake Mead,” said Michael Cohen, senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that studies water issues.Added Cohen, “If Metropolitan didn’t sign on to the agreement, when a shortage is declared (which could happen next year), Metropolitan could not access that water. So by signing on, they still have the ability to withdraw water that they’ve stored previously.”TRENDING NOWGoogle announces Stadia streaming game platform in effort to upend the $140 billion game marketThere’s a business growing within Amazon that could one day be worth more than retail or cloudAOC’s approval rating falls after Amazon deal collapse, while Trump hammers Dems over ‘socialism’Prosecutors offer deal to drop prostitution solicitation case against Patriots owner Kraft: WSJStocks whipsaw on conflicting trade deal reports, Dow now 100 points higherWater war in California: Agencies fight over drought emergency plan with crucial deadline loomingEnormous Aquifer Discovered Under Greenland Ice SheetAnthony Watts / December 23, 2013An ice core segment extracted from the aquifer by Koenig’s team, with trapped water collecting at the lower left of the core.Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic BruckerFrom NASA, I had to laugh at this statement:The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).That’s assuming it can get out sometime in the distant future. Greenland’s topography under the ice is bowl shaped.===================================Buried underneath compacted snow and ice in Greenland lies a large liquid water reservoir that has now been mapped by researchers using data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne campaign.A team of glaciologists serendipitously found the aquifer while drilling in southeast Greenland in 2011 to study snow accumulation. Two of their ice cores were dripping water when the scientists lifted them to the surface, despite air temperatures of minus 4 F (minus 20 C). The researchers later used NASA’s Operation Icebridge radar data to confine the limits of the water reservoir, which spreads over 27,000 square miles (69,930 square km) – an area larger than the state of West Virginia. The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).“When I heard about the aquifer, I had almost the same reaction as when we discovered Lake Vostok [in Antarctica]: it blew my mind that something like that is possible,” said Michael Studinger, project scientist for Operation IceBridge, a NASA airborne campaign studying changes in ice at the poles. “It turned my view of the Greenland ice sheet upside down – I don’t think anyone had expected that this layer of liquid water could survive the cold winter temperatures without being refrozen.”Southeast Greenland is a region of high snow accumulation. Researchers now believe that the thick snow cover insulates the aquifer from cold winter surface temperatures, allowing it to remain liquid throughout the year. The aquifer is fed by meltwater that percolates from the surface during the summer.The new research is being presented in two papers: one led by University of Utah’s Rick Forster that was published on Dec. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience and one led by NASA’s Lora Koenig that has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The findings will significantly advance the understanding of how melt water flows through the ice sheet and contributes to sea level rise.When a team led by Forster accidentally drilled into water in 2011, they weren’t able to continue studying the aquifer because their tools were not suited to work in an aquatic environment. Afterward, Forster’s team determined the extent of the aquifer by studying radar data from Operation IceBridge together with ground-based radar data. The top of the water layer clearly showed in the radar data as a return signal brighter than the ice layers.Koenig, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., co-led another expedition to southeast Greenland with Forster in April 2013 specifically designed to study the physical characteristics of the newly discovered water reservoir. Koenig’s team extracted two cores of firn (aged snow) that were saturated with water. They used a water-resistant thermoelectric drill to study the density of the ice and lowered strings packed with temperature sensors down the holes, and found that the temperature of the aquifer hovers around 32 F (zero C), warmer than they had expected it to be.Koenig and her team measured the top of the aquifer at around 39 feet (12 meters) under the surface. This was the depth at which the boreholes filled with water after extracting the ice cores. They then determined the amount of water in the water-saturated firn cores by comparing them to dry cores extracted nearby. The researchers determined the depth at which the pores in the firn close, trapping the water inside the bubbles – at this point, there is a change in the density of the ice that the scientists can measure. This depth is about 121 feet (37 meters) and corresponds to the bottom of the aquifer. Once Koenig’s team had the density, depth and spatial extent of the aquifer, they were able to come up with an estimated water volume of about 154 billion tons (140 metric gigatons). If this water was to suddenly discharge to the ocean, this would correspond to 0.016 inches (0.4 mm) of sea level rise.Researchers think that the perennial aquifer is a heat reservoir for the ice sheet in two ways: melt water carries heat when it percolates from the surface down the ice to reach the aquifer. And if the trapped water were to refreeze, it would release latent heat. Altogether, this makes the ice in the vicinity of the aquifer warmer, and warmer ice flows faster toward the sea.“Our next big task is to understand how this aquifer is filling and how it’s discharging,” said Koenig. “The aquifer could offset some sea level rise if it’s storing water for long periods of time. For example after the 2012 extreme surface melt across Greenland, it appears that the aquifer filled a little bit. The question now is how does that water leave the aquifer on its way to the ocean and whether it will leave this year or a hundred years from now.”Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Teamhttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/23/enormous-aquifer-discovered-under-greenland-ice-sheet/Will investors develop, like new oil fields, these amazing aquifer’s under the ice or not. Unlikely without a better market based return?