Monday, November 3, 2014

What Water Companies Are Doing In California Is So Completely Messed Up

Seems like both a market failure and and a government failure to me.  What do you think?



What Water Companies Are Doing In California Is So Completely Messed Up

4 comments:

  1. Yeah, I would have liked some information on why the bottled water is coming from these areas. If water there is scarce, then it should cost more, and these bottled water plants should be changing locations or reducing output. I suspect the reason is that the governments just have a flat price for water so the laws of supply and demand don't work here.

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  2. With so many locations of the water companies, it seems like there just has to be some sort of advantage for them. I'm not too certain on laws regulating bottled water companies, but perhaps this could be an issue of private property. If so, maybe the government should limit the amount of water being extracted at a given source. However, this begs the highly political question if a company owns the land, should the government be able to regulate the resources on it.

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  3. I agree that the shortness of the article begs many different questions. First it shows that the companies have water plants there but it does not provide any information on if they reduced output from these locations or not. Further the majority of the locations for the companies are all located in California. As displayed by the first graph the companies may not have other plants to increase output from. While I understand that California is in a drought, I think the lack of information provided makes it hard to criticize the companies at first glance.

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  4. In agreeing with everyone else, there needs to be more information provided alongside the two figures. With the article being quite brief, I feel it's difficult to jump to any conclusions. For all I know, these water companies could be preserving water that would have otherwise been gone due to the drought. It's also a possibility that these water companies just happen to be located in drought regions coincidentally in like a "correlation doesn't imply causation" scenario. All in all, it's difficult to make a confident assertion without more knowledge about the situation. This article could have limited the information presented to sway our opinions on the mater.

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