On coming water scarcity everyone seems to be predicting.
An excerpt.
The Quest for More Water
Why Markets are Inevitable
By Robert Glennon
Some readers might wonder why I, a liberal Democrat, spent this past summer as a fellow at a free-market think tank. The answer is that I believe that water marketing is essential if we are to prevent further damage to the environment from development. Where I probably depart from some of my PERC associates is that I believe government must play a critical role in overseeing markets to protect the environment and third parties.
We in the United States are heading toward a water scar-city crisis: We can’t make new water; all the water there is, is. In July, the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, froze new development due to a lack of water. The city expects literally to run out of water this month.
Such a dramatic action may become commonplace in future years. In a recent survey, 36 states reported that they expect to suffer water shortages in the next ten years, yet demand for new sup-plies is increasing dramatically, mostly due to the increase in population. We now number 300 million and will exceed 400 million by the middle of the century. Fights over water are no longer confined to the American West, as disputes involving the Great Lakes, the Delaware River, the Potomac River, the Roanoke River, and the Ipswich River suggest.
With such a disconnect between supply and demand, what are our options? The conventional answer is to build a dam, divert a river, or drill a well. Each of these options has significant environmental and financial consequences. We have already dammed most rivers in the United States, some repeatedly. Few good dam sites remain. Even proposing a dam stimulates serious opposition and controversy. As for our rivers, we have decimated many of them, diverting so much water that they have literally run dry. I’m not merely talking about small creeks. Large rivers like the Colorado and Rio Grande no longer reach the ocean. Securing new supplies by diverting additional waters from rivers will come with a high environmental cost attached.
