The Toronto Star writes up an argument for paying the real price of water. The idea is that water pollution is an externality to the economic pricing of goods and services. If we raise the price of using water to better reflect the cost of using it, the theory is that the quality (and quantity?) of water will improve.
The story is adapted from the soon to be published book, “Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America” by Chris Wood. I’ve not read the book yet so I can’t comment on it but when a journalist writes stuff like this, “… the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET)” I get mildly annoyed. Evapotranspiration is one of the advanced topics of thermodynamics and part of an engineering hydrology course. It isn’t insidious in any way but fundamental to the hydrologic cycle. Without evapotranspiration, we’re screwed. So when a journalist describes fundamental science phenomena using language that inflames the reader’s unease, it isn’t serving anyone’s interest. There is a key word in there and that is amplification. Evapotranspiration is one of those things that is pretty tricky to measure accurately. It can also vary significantly within short distances and depends on a great many variables. So extrapolating from single measurements is very inexact. What we do know is that evapotranspirtation is proportional to degree days (to non corn growers out there, a degree day is a measure of heat for growing crops. Hmm wikipedia has a more general and better description than that). So as warmer temperatures are anticipated so too could evapotranspiration. However, as I said this is a not a simple process and we don’t know exactly how this will change.
Guess I’ll have to read the book to see where the argument goes.
