As we move from one mega issue to the next, the water wizards are lining up to tell you how to price water to penalize water wasters and gluttonous guzzlers. Today I received a notice about a upcoming two-week event sponsored by the Economist debating water as commodity versus that of an inalienable human right.
From The Economist’s
online debate on the subject:
It’ll be a two-week long, Oxford-style online debate on the topic of the global water crisis. As both an industrial input and a prerequisite of life, water has become extremely scarce for roughly a billion people who do not have a constant supply of clean and safe water.
The exact proposition is, “This house believes that water, as a scarce resource, should be priced according to its market value.” Some of the issues the debate will cover include: Would water supplies be better managed if it were treated as a commodity, and priced accordingly? Or is water a basic human right that governments should secure for their citizens?
Arguing for the proposition: Stephen J. Hoffmann, founder and president of WaterTech Capital, a merchant and investment banking firm that specializes in serving the myriad of companies that, in aggregate, comprise the water industry, and co-founder of the Palisades Water Indexes.
Arguing for the opposition: Dr. Vandana Shiva, author of Water Wars and founder of Navdanya, an Indian-based, non-governmental organization founded to protect nature and people’s rights to knowledge, biodiversity, water, and food.
Links to additional posts were also listed, authored primarily by David Zetland:
After reading these posts I had grave concerns that Mr.
Zetland's commodity approach to pricing water would play right into the hands of the investor-owned water companies that I wrote about in
my post of September 5.My response to my neighbor
Huynh was as follows:
"When demand exceeds supply, water managers do not raise prices; instead, they ask customers to use less. When "voluntary" conservation fails (often), managers send water cops out to ticket those who water their lawns on the wrong day, impose mandatory rationing of 20 percent,...
( And,, Ta
da,)
stop issuing building permits, etc
"This quote from one of his guest posts started me thinking David
Zeitman may be a shill for the investor-owned water companies.
We'll have to monitor the "friendships" of the California Public Utilities Commission, which approves San Jose Water Company's rates.
San Jose Water Company has been posting 10- 20% profit on roughly $200 million in annual revenue. That seems pretty generous on a day that the 3 mos. T-Bills are yielding 0.43%.
This is a safe stock to own, with the guarantee that the State will always approve rates high enough to generate profit. But at what rate? Why does the CA
PUC get to decide that?
I always approach this discussion with the credo that WATER IS LIFE. It's not an option like oil.
We can then begin the negotiations about how to price it.
The farmers in California are the most organized and always have managed to get it for cheap.
City folks don't need much, unless they're growing food. Then they should
get irrigation water at the same rate as the commercial farmers.
Mr.
Zeitman does not adequately cover the subject of the value of irrigation water needed for raising food and fiber. But then, farmers don't get water from investor-owned water utilities. They know how to make sure water is always their
right and that it comes to them nearly as cheap as the rain from the clouds.
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