There is already a great way to do this: prices! The market isn't perfect, but with commodities it really does seem to function. We don't need artificial usage limits, we just need to charge for water on the open market. Reserve whatever is needed for residential use and sustainability and auction the rest. Or allow it to be sold freely.
Right now many pleases have a tragedy of the commons situation. If you don't use up as much water as possible, and dig deeper wells to use it up faster than your neighbors, then you can end up with no water and out of business. If you could secure specific water rights you could plan your business. Farms _would_ go out of business with crops that are too water-intensive relative to the price, but that is actually a desirable property of the system. Those crops will raise in price until the demand lowers and the cost of higher water is sustained. Lower water-utilizing crops will replace the previous higher intensity usage.
Yeah, making water sources private property might not turn out well.
But if the water sources are publicly managed and water consumption is priced progressively (and sustainably) at the source, I don't see what the problem is of letting markets do the rest.
Although water pollution should be addressed as well, but this is required regardless of the scenario.
> There is already a great way to do this: prices! The market isn't perfect, but with commodities it really does seem to function.
That's absolutely insane.
Don't worry poor people, you won't be able to drink water because Amazon is being lazy with pumping tap water to cool it's data centers, but it's okay because markets have deemed you irrelevant!
It's not insane. Open markets work for every other type of commodity, and there is little reason to think it won't work for water usage as well.
Also data centers don't use water for cooling. They primarily use air cooling, and last time i checked air conditioning doesn't require a constant supply of water.
> Not all datacenters use water for cooling, but of those that do, a large facility might use anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day
Your home AC, sure. However... pretty much every facility with a physical plant (hospitals, universities, data centers, skyscrapers, factories etc.) uses cooling towers to dump heat from their internal systems into the environment.
Nearly all cooling towers require a constant water supply. Some water is recycled, but it is not anywhere near a closed loop system.
GP literally said start by reserving water for residential and sustainability use and only sell the rest on the market (i.e. the portion currently used for commercial activity such as power and agriculture). If you demand extreme pedantry, you can expand the reserved quantity to whatever arbitrary domestic carveout usage you desire as profit-seeking, commercial water depletion is >80% of water usage, so any non-commercial carveout is largely irrelevant to depletion.
Perhaps that's an end-around for water rights issues. You can't "just" take the water rights from long established players. But it might be easier to simply apply a water tax, a base rate multiplied by how much water the product required to create, divided by the abundance of water in the region.
Right now many pleases have a tragedy of the commons situation. If you don't use up as much water as possible, and dig deeper wells to use it up faster than your neighbors, then you can end up with no water and out of business. If you could secure specific water rights you could plan your business. Farms _would_ go out of business with crops that are too water-intensive relative to the price, but that is actually a desirable property of the system. Those crops will raise in price until the demand lowers and the cost of higher water is sustained. Lower water-utilizing crops will replace the previous higher intensity usage.
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