Robert Glennon on Water Scarcity
2021-11-29 · Guest: Robert Glennon (Professor and author) · 52:29
Legal and economic complexities of water scarcity
Bob Zadek interviews water policy expert Robert Glennon about the legal and economic complexities of water scarcity in the United States. They discuss the history of water rights, the lack of a market pricing mechanism for water as a commodity, and potential solutions ranging from recycling to market-based reallocations.
Topics: Water Rights, Scarcity, Prior Appropriation, Groundwater, Conservation, Market Economics, Public Resource, Agriculture, Greywater
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Robert Glennon: Professor and author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It
Introduction to Water Scarcity [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. This show, this Sunday and always, is of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for sharing an hour of your time this morning.
This morning’s guest is an expert on something—on a noun—that would sound, when I share what it is, rather banal: an expert on water. An expert on water? Well, there’s two molecules, as I remember from high school chemistry, and you put it together and you get water, and you drink it, and it makes plants and humans grow. What is there to say or think about water?
The answer, you will see during this hour, is there is so much to understand, to learn, to debate, and to figure out about water. Everybody is depending upon it. Everyone takes it for granted. I dare say that every single one of you folks out there who are sharing an hour of your time this morning, your total knowledge of water, besides what you have learned in high school chemistry, is hot is on the left and cold is on the right. And that’s kind of it.
But in point of fact, understanding the strange place that water plays in our physical and economic life is and will become crucial. There are unresolved, profound issues concerning many aspects of water. Who owns it? Who gets to use it? And most importantly, how much is it worth? To help us understand all of these profoundly difficult issues, I’m happy to welcome to the show Robert Glennon. He’s one of the nation’s preeminent experts—maybe the preeminent expert—on water policy and on, this is my phrase, the law governing water. He has received not one but two National Science Foundation grants and has appeared often in print and broadcast media. And he has written the book, Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It. I’m happy to welcome Robert to the show this morning. Robert, thank you so much for joining us this morning to talk about water.
Robert Glennon: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Bob. Thanks for inviting me.
The Paradox of Water Supply [01:58]
Bob Zadek: Now, water is in the news almost every day. In fact, in the ten seconds before I went live with you this morning, there was a broadcast tidbit about possible flooding up in the Northwest. When there isn’t news about flooding, there’s news about shortages. So it seems that somewhere we have too much and somewhere we have too little. And often in the news is a discussion, a fear, about water shortage.
Now, it seems to me I recall learning that on Earth today, there is the same quantity of water that there was when the Flintstones were wandering around and when the dinosaurs wandered around. We aren’t losing water. We aren’t gaining water. Well, maybe we’re gaining it in the margins, but generally, the quantity of water is unchanged in the history of Earth. First, is that correct? And if it is correct, what is all this talk about there being a shortage?
Robert Glennon: That’s a great start, Bob. It really is a paradox, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s absolutely correct. We’re drinking the same water as the dinosaurs. We can’t make water, nor can we destroy water. All the water there is, is.
But the problem is that the water is not often where we need it, when we need it, and in the form that we need it. Let me offer a couple of illustrations. First, let’s take Los Angeles. LA has a plant, the Hyperion treatment plant. It produces a volume equal to the seventh largest river in the United States. And until very recently, every drop of that water was dumped in the Pacific Ocean. So all of that means every time someone flushes a toilet in the LA area, that water ends up in the Pacific. And it means it’s not available for reuse until the hydrologic cycle completes another full turn. And that could be decades or generations off. So that’s a major problem.
A similar problem would be to focus on groundwater. So I think of groundwater and the aquifers that store our groundwater as like a milkshake glass. And it took Mother Nature tens of thousands of years to deposit that water in the form of snow or rain and melt, and then it infiltrated or percolated into the aquifers. But since the mid-20th century, we’ve been pumping out groundwater as though it were infinite, when it is not. So if you think about my milkshake glass, that’s a finite quantity. But the law in many states, and especially in California in the Central Valley, allows a limitless number of demands—wells or straws—into the milkshake glass. And over time, of course, the supply goes down. It really is the epitome of the tragedy of the commons. So the answer to the paradox that you start with is that the water just isn’t where we need it, when we need it, in the form that we need it.
Bob Zadek: So when you say there is a shortage of water, you have to always limit it to a certain geographic area. There’s no universal shortage. It’s a shortage of water being in the wrong place. The people are in one place and the water is in another. So the problem is not the quantity of water, but simply transportation issues. Is that simplistic or a reasonable place to start?
Robert Glennon: I think it’s a little too simplistic because a lot of the water has been fresh water and now it’s salt water. And you know, we can desalinize ocean water, but it’s extremely expensive, energy-intensive, costly. And so the water for all practical purposes isn’t really available until Mother Nature does that for us by evaporating fresh water off the surface of the oceans, carrying it by wind currents over the land, and then depositing it again in the form of rain or snow.
Water Rights and the Law [07:59]
Bob Zadek: Western economic systems—the US being, of course, the prime example, but not the only example—has long ago established a pretty sophisticated, generally understood, widely accepted system of property rights. People own things. And one of the attributes of ownership is if you own something, you can sell it. Why would you sell it? Because you’d rather have somebody else’s money than whatever it is you own. The other person would rather have what you own rather than their money. Thus, a mutually beneficial exchange. And that exchange is not limited just to things you might buy, but of course, it includes mineral rights—gold and oil. And we have in this country a system that there is a way to prove and establish who owns, for example, the oil in the ground. And if somebody owns the oil in the ground, then they will exploit it by taking it out of the ground and they will then sell it to somebody else, who will sell it to somebody else. And the buyer will pay—the buyer who has the best use for that oil will pay the highest price. Thus we have the market price for oil. It all works kind of automatically. No one even sees this happening. It just happens.
Now, question to the audience: Did you ever wonder why oil is owned by people—it’s in the ground—and water is not? Or is it? And if it is owned by somebody, how is water bought and sold the way oil is? And how is the price of water established? Not by supply and demand, we will see. So this whole area, when I first discovered the topic, it struck me as being, “Wow, how is water not owned by anybody? How is the price of water determined?” We all more or less—but you will learn from Robert it’s not true—you think you are buying water because you get a water bill from the water company, and the water bill will—the amount of the bill will change depending upon more or less how much you use. So it seems like you’re buying water from somebody who must own it, lest how could they sell it? But this whole system is not what it appears. And I dare say until this second, nobody has wondered about it. Well, the wondering now begins. So Robert, tell us about—is water free? And if it is free, how does anybody get to sell it? Tell me about the system of buying and selling water, such as it is right now in the country.
Robert Glennon: Sure. Well, let’s start, Bob, with who owns the water. Water in the United States at law is treated very differently than the kinds of mineral resources, gas and oil and whatever, that you were talking about a few minutes ago. In the United States, water is understood as a public resource. And the—in other words, no one owns water in the United States. You can make an argument that that’s not completely true in Texas. There are some arguments and some case law there that suggest that the property owner does have a property interest in the water underneath his or her property. But in virtually all of the rest of the United States, that just isn’t true.
Well, how, you might ask, then, do people get to use water? Well, exactly that. The state grants rights to use water. They’re not ownership rights; they’re use rights. And to do that, the government has to recognize those rights—that there are really water rights to it. This is not a state of nature where we end with Lockean rights that we have innate rights. It’s instead a system of real laws created in real states and other jurisdictions that recognize that water has valuable economic uses but is also a public resource that people depend on, and then the state grants rights to use that resource.
It’s very important, though, if you’re going to talk about property rights, that not only must the government recognize the existence of them, but the government must also create a system to protect or enforce the rights that it’s recognized. Otherwise, they’re really just frankly not much good. And that’s been a problem for the growth of the water market. The government hasn’t adequately defined the basic water rights, nor has it clearly allowed for transfers—sale, lease, or exchange. You know, your set-up piece very nicely, I think, described the process of having a market and a functioning market and who has incentives to buy, who has incentives to sell. But several of those incentives just don’t exist when it comes to water rights.
So if I could just—I mean, the law that probably most of your listeners is familiar with is something called “prior appropriation,” which is the right to surface water in the American West. It started in the Gold Rush days of California in the 1840s and ’50s, but it quickly spread to agricultural communities across the West. It’s complicated, but in essence, it’s really very simple: first come, first served. And the advantage of that was that it incentivized people to make use of what was then seen as an abundant, maybe some would say even limitless, resource: water. If you could put it to a beneficial use, then you had a right to use it, and anyone who came later had to take subject to your prior use.
But just as it incentivized use, it also incentivized over-use. The rules set no limits to how what the quantities might be that people could use. It encouraged widely exaggerated claims of what actual use was. It included doctrines such as abandonment and forfeiture, which said, you know, if you don’t use all of your rights, you may lose them. So that created the incentive to use the water whether a farmer needed the water or not. And the consequence of this system is really quite horrible for the environment and for other people who now find themselves in need of water. So many of the rivers and creeks and streams in the United States are over-appropriated. Some, even big ones, dry out every year. And by big ones, I mean big ones. I mean the Rio Grande, I mean the Colorado River. Those rivers don’t even reach the ocean anymore. They’ve been dried up by upstream diversions. We already talked about groundwater. So those are kind of the basic rules of how water rights exist in the US.
The Concept of Beneficial Use [15:55]
Bob Zadek: So water rights were created through the political process. Legislatures met and they wrote laws. The chief executive signed them. And therefore, solely through the political process, rights were created. Yesterday, somebody didn’t own water rights; today, the legislature meets and they own water rights—a very, very valuable right. So it starts off being owned by nobody, and then the act of legislature, it’s now owned by somebody. So now we have at least a starting point. Somebody has—
Robert Glennon: Wait, wait. No, Bob. I’d like to have it be a starting point, but I have to interrupt. No, it is not a system now where someone owns the water. They still own a right to use the water, but that right to use the water is still subject to state regulation.
Bob Zadek: So it’s not an unlimited right to do what you want with it. They can use it under certain conditions. Now, what’s interesting is we all have heard the phrase in our daily life: “Stop doing that, you are wasting water.” Everybody has heard the phrase, “Don’t waste water.” And because of infirmities of my personality, I have to jump in, become sarcastic, and say there’s no such thing as wasting water. Because if you have the right to use the water, whatever you choose to do with it, I say smugly, you can do with it. It’s like you can’t waste food. If you buy food, you own it. You can spill it down the drain, you can throw it away. That’s not wasting it; it’s your thing to use or not use.
So is the concept of wasting water, as we morph into the possible shortage, is there such a thing as wasting water? Can one be misusing water? After all, you have, in general, subject to limitations by government, the right to use water. I can turn on my tap, put water into a glass, and pour it right down the drain. And I am not wasting water; I am free to do that. So tell me about how the concept—can one waste water? What does it even mean to waste water? And how does the market—sorry, please.
Robert Glennon: Yeah, that’s a great question and another kind of paradox. Let’s split out domestic users—you know, people who get water delivered by either the municipal water department or a private water company regulated by the PUC to their homes. Let’s split them out from agricultural users. And we do that for good reason. I mean, that’s where the water is. If we’re going to talk about solving water problems, you have to talk about farming because farmers consume more than 70% of every state’s water. So you can’t really get very far down the path of trying to figure out what are we going to do about these shortages without talking about ag use.
So the property interest that you’re talking about—Herbert Hoover in the early 20th century once said that wasting water is not using water. Every drop of water, he insisted, that flowed down a river and out into an ocean was a waste of water. We have since come to realize that a lot of that water can be performing ecological services. It can be sustaining, for example, a salmon fishery. So it’s not necessarily a waste of water.
But the concept of wasting water is deeply embedded in the right to use the water. You know, I’ve emphasized now that you don’t own it, you’ve got a right to it, but it’s subject to state regulation. And one of the most bedrock principles—probably the bedrock principle of prior appropriation—is: yes, you get a right to take the water out of the stream and you get a right to put that water on your field to grow stuff. It must be for a, quote, “beneficial use.” Beneficial use. And if you’re using it in a way that is not beneficial, then you lose the right to that water.
So water, again, is quite different than, you know, the water that you get at your home, the residence. I mean, no one’s going to be, you know, the police looking over your shoulder if you decide to not turn the faucet off when you brush your teeth or just open the faucet and let it run. I mean, that’s within your control. But for the bigger users in the United States, the doctrine of beneficial use remains a powerful incentive.
Subjectivity of “Beneficial Use” [21:18]
Bob Zadek: Beneficial use. That concept makes all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Because “beneficial,” obviously, there’s perhaps no more subjective word in the entire language. So “beneficial,” who gets to decide? For example, golf courses built in the desert. Now, watering that golf course—the greens and fairways on the golf course—is beneficial to somebody. And after all, they built the course, they—and now you’re going to—we’re going to start a conversation in a moment, Robert, but I was going to say they bought the water. Who are you, or—and not you personally, we’re not turning the show personal—but who is government to say whether or not watering a golf course, which makes people happy and people are willing to pay whatever it costs to do it, that that is or is not beneficial? And it’s kind of scary for the government to determine the meaning of “beneficial.” So simply, how does the word “beneficial” fit into it?
Robert Glennon: Let me jump in there, Bob. You know, you’re right. It’s a very ambiguous term, and state regulators have been loath to try to limit what existing water users have done. And you can understand their plight. I mean, if you suddenly tell, you know, a third or fourth generation farmer that he or she is wasting water because they’re not, what, irrigating in an efficient fashion, so they lose their water rights? That’s a—that’s a pretty big ax to carry around. So as a result, there really isn’t much—pretty much anything that’s sensible meets the definition of beneficial use.
Now, on your—let’s move on to your golf course illustration, though. Arizona, where I live, has tons of golf courses, as you know. And yet most of them have turned away from using fossil-aged groundwater to using municipal effluent—municipal treated water from the municipal plant. And some of them did that gladly; it allowed them to access to more water. Others did so kicking and screaming all the way. But that was a tremendous advance in Arizona water policy to start to make major use of water from our reclaimed systems to allow golf courses to continue, but to insist that they do so not with drinking-quality water, but with something else.
Bob Zadek: So—but as to the issue of beneficial use, what got me in a minor way kind of worked up—a tiny bit—is that we think, and you’re going to help us understand how wrong we are, I think I am buying water, the water that’s piped into my home. And once it’s in my home, nobody—we may get to showerheads in a moment if we want to have a diversion, coming attractions—but subject to a conversation about showerheads and low-flush toilets, I get to use the water any way that I want. In fact, I can turn on my tap, let it flow right down the drain, and go to bed. And I’m not going to go to prison. So once I buy something, I am free to do with it anything that I wish in my home. And the problem is that water for most people is so inexpensive that it seems like it’s free. Well, once something is free, it’s devalued, and therefore people don’t take care of it and don’t preserve it because after all, it’s free and to most people it seems limitless.
The Pricing of Water [25:41]
Robert Glennon: So let’s take two different steps. So the second—the first one second, which is: even though you’ve got water, you’ve received water that’s now at your house, that does not—that has not eliminated the capacity of government to regulate use. I think you in California are very familiar with a variety of conservation efforts or emergency decrees that tell you, “No more watering your lawn,” or “You can only water it every other day or during these hours.” We in Tucson have lots of restrictions on what kind of plants you can grow. Some of them grew out of allergy problems, you know, olive trees and things like that that people turned out to be allergic to. But or restrictions on the size, say, of a swimming pool. You know, those are all things that governments have done and are doing.
But now to the second point. Yeah, we’re spoiled. You know, we wake up in the morning, we turn on the tap, and out comes as much water as we want for less than we pay for cell phone service or cable television. I think most of us, when we think of water, you know, it’s the hot-cold levers as you started the opening with, we think of it as we do the air: that it’s infinite and inexhaustible. But in fact, water is quite finite and quite exhaustible.
Now, it may come to a surprise to your listeners, but we don’t pay a penny for water. Even though we write a check to the water department or the water company, we only pay for the cost of service. That’s the standard that the utility can charge municipal users for the water that they provide. So it’s the cost of pumping the water, treating the water, delivering the water, cleansing the water—all those kind of items. But there’s nothing for water itself. The water is free.
Bob Zadek: And when you say water is free, but it’s the only—it seems to me from what you have said, then when the property rights starts from the government, the grant—it starts somewhere. So somebody has the rights, a license or whatever the right legal label is, the right to use water, to take water out of the source, whether it’s the aquifer or the stream, take water out of the stream and to do something with it—a beneficial use. But that—it’s like the government saying, “We own all the oil in the ground.” And by the way, in some countries, the government does own all the mineral rights. People just don’t own the minerals; the government does by fiat. So it’s as if the government—imagine if the government had said, “We own all the oil, and you can pay us an extraction fee, us the government, but the oil you extract is free to use. All you pay us is a fee to extract it.” And nobody owns the oil; it just flows around to anybody who can extract it. It would be an utterly absurd system, and it would—what would happen? It would result in over-use. So the absence of any pricing mechanism—this is a segue, of course—the absence of any system where people can own water—as much as we can attribute ownership, because water moves around, it’s all fungible, of course—but we have no system in this country and never did to establish a market price for water. That’s what is missing, and Robert, that’s what you have written about often and persuasively: is without a system to price the product, it’s tragedy of commons, of course. It has all the appearances of being free. Therefore, why take care to not waste a commodity that is basically free and appears to be limitless? So isn’t the missing piece the absence of a pricing mechanism? And how would one go about—because you have written about this—how would one go about establishing a pricing mechanism for water so that now there would be bidding and the water would go to the one who could put it to the highest and best use, and then the system of preservation, of not wasting it, would be automatic because nobody wastes something they bought?
Robert Glennon: Well, they don’t waste it if they paid enough for it.
Bob Zadek: That’s right. Thank you.
Robert Glennon: Yeah. So what I’ve argued for—I mean, many communities in the United States, because water was so plentiful when they set up their cost-of-service rate structures, they’ve used either flat rates or unbelievably even decreasing block rates. So the more a user used, the less the user paid for the final block. Well, we need to completely reverse that. We need increasing block rates. They should be seasonally adjusted because water use in the summer for lush landscapes and swimming pools is entirely discretionary. We shouldn’t ban, I think, my humble opinion, we shouldn’t ban lush landscapes or swimming pools, but for people to have those in the desert, they should pay for them, and they should dearly pay for them.
At the same time, you know, many—it’s really apparent, Bob, over the last several years that millions of our fellow Americans can’t even afford the low rates that their municipal water departments are charging them now. And so I advocate for a human right to water to protect people of modest means to make sure that they have that amount. I do so for a couple of reasons. One is it just makes sense. I mean, in the richest country in the history of the world, people should not go for lack of drinking water. But I also do so because I sometimes get pushback and someone says, “Well, you’re not recognizing a human right to water. You’re letting corporations buy and sell water rights. That’s evil personified.” But if we take the human right to water off the table, then I hope we can have a kind of adult conversation about how to price the other 99% of the water that we use. And that, I think, is important.
Now, when you turn away from the municipal sector to the agricultural sector, there, I mean, it’s just—it takes incredible amounts of water to grow anything. You know, there’s been a lot of attention lately, I’m sure your listeners have seen it, that it takes a gallon of water to grow an almond. And you think about all the almonds on one tree and all of that. Well, it takes 168 gallons of water to grow a watermelon. Basically, nothing you grow doesn’t take a lot of water. Everything takes a lot of water. So we need to figure out how to get the group that uses the most water—farmers—to use so in a way that absolutely maximizes the benefit they get to each drop of water. And so what that’s—what that’s meant, and it is happening as we speak this morning, is that we’re moving into an era of water reallocation. Those original prior appropriation rights or rights to pump groundwater, they’re being supplanted by market-based systems. And what you’re seeing increasingly is the ability of people, willing farmers, to sell water to willing buyers. Now, that creates its own sorts of problems, but that’s the direction that I see us going.
Agriculture and the Market [34:31]
Bob Zadek: It seems—I have two thoughts. You have written about, and I have actually—you could see my desk, I have it highlighted, the various quotes from pieces you have written—you have expressed the concern that in a pure market-based system, farmers would be priced out of the market. They would be outbid by urban communities, by city dwellers who desperately need the water, obviously, for their lives, and they would pay anything. Farmers, you fear, have a cap on how much they can afford to pay before their crops become uneconomic. So you have expressed worry about farmers being priced out of the market.
And I had a little underlining there in highlighter because I don’t understand that point. And let me just raise my question, if I may. A farmer can’t be priced out of the market because a farmer would simply pass through the cost of the almond or—you’ve written about alfalfa, we may get to talk about alfalfa if we have time—but the farmer would simply, if the farmer is paying market rate, i.e., a much higher price for water, then the almonds would cost much more, and those who purchase almonds would simply either go without almonds, buy them from somebody else where the water is cheaper, or not buy them. What—so I say farmers can’t be priced out of the market. At worst, a farmer would discover for the first time, an almond grower in California, that growing almonds in California may be a bad economic idea and a misuse of resources. What’s wrong with the market telling a farmer, “You’re in the wrong business, go somewhere else”?
Robert Glennon: Well, I think the farmers do that all the time. I mean, across this country, farmers are in the business of boom or bust. And, you know, farmers in this country are operating in the context of an international market for all kinds of crops. We’ve been focusing on the American West. The US is the largest exporter of water on Earth, but that water is not water itself; it’s crops. It’s water that’s embedded in crops. And the one that I’ve written most about is alfalfa because we’ve been growing alfalfa and then putting it in container ships and shipping it off to China right in the middle of a drought in California. And my message there was not that we should prevent farmers from selling water to China in the form of alfalfa. It’s that the legal rules in California are so cumbersome that they don’t allow the farmers to refrain from using their water and instead bartering it or selling it, leasing it, transferring it to others who have a higher-value use for it. I want to open up the market, not close the market.
Bob Zadek: Tell us what that would—because that’s, of course, a market-based solution. It’s the one that provides the most economic freedom and allows sensible economic decisions to be made. So tell us what that market might look like. If people—and it might be individuals as well—conceivably, homeowners could be provided with economic incentives not to use water, which is just another way of a homeowner selling their rights to water. They would use less and make money. So to further encourage reducing consumption and allowing the market to influence behavior much better than by mandate. So tell us what that system might look like, because it warms our libertarian hearts to find market-based solutions because that means the solution is freely negotiated exchanges between consenting adults.
Robert Glennon: Yeah. Well, and that’s what I’m urging for: a system that relies on those incentives. But remember, water remains a public resource. And the problem with the unregulated water market that you’re talking about is that it may fail to internalize the costs of the transfer. So a farmer, for example, who sells out does well for herself. But that sale may negatively impact the farm community and the environment. Farm workers lose their jobs, the seed and pesticide suppliers lose a customer, farm implement dealers like John Deere lose a customer—the whole array of businesses and individuals in the farm community suffer as the farm sector constricts. Local governments suffer a loss of tax revenues. Land that’s fallow creates problems of weeds and blowing dust that carry seeds with it to adjacent farms. So I think we need to have a process that looks at large-scale transfers to protect the integrity of the viability of rural communities. I mean, there’s no way to talk about this, in my humble opinion, without recognizing that we need farmers to be even better farmers and more efficient farmers than they have been. And they are some of the best and most productive farmers in the history of the globe. But as the planet moves from seven-plus billion to nine-plus billion in three decades of population, we’re going to have to figure out how to get water to these rural areas. And what we don’t want—what we really don’t want, Bob—is just a “buy up and dry up.” And that has happened in places like Southeast Colorado. And the agricultural community has a long memory, and they saw what happened there. Enough interest from Denver came in to buy up water rights, and pretty soon there was just nothing left to support the infrastructure, and the whole system collapsed of its own weight. So we need to be very mindful of what we’re doing because we want, at the end of the day, to have really productive farmers who can feed us. I mean, we’re spoiled. We have some of the cheapest food on Earth as well as the cheapest water on Earth.
Bob Zadek: Well, we have the cheap food because we have cheap water, because water is used and the users don’t pay the market price because there is little or no market. So we have cheap—you always could have cheap food if you just gave away the land and let farmers grow on land they were given. So the cheapness of the food is artificial. It’s really not cheap; it’s being subsidized by wasteful practices.
Water Recycling and Greywater [42:24]
Bob Zadek: And also you had mentioned earlier in the show, and I flagged it because I want to come back and discuss it for a few moments, because you have written about it quite recently, which is the LA experiment. LA does a lot of things wrong as a municipality, of course. One of the things that it appears to have gotten right is the huge recycling, water recycling plant in the LA area, which is very forward-thinking and small-p progressive. It’s an idea almost anybody could embrace. So because it’s representative of what governments could be doing, tell us a bit more about it. And including the concept of recycling, because recycling water, since there’s always the same amount of water on Earth as you have pointed out, what does that even mean if water is always here? So tell us what is so good about that, because that sets a bit of a standard, sort of a shining city on the hill—a wet city, but a city. And tell us about that and why you’re so supportive of what’s being done.
Robert Glennon: Yeah. Well, that’s the Hyperion treatment plant that I mentioned earlier that produces a volume of water equal to the seventh largest river in the United States. That’s the plant you referred to again. And, you know, until very recently, every city in the country did what LA does, which is to dump the water into the Pacific Ocean. On the East Coast, Boston does that, New York does that, because the water that was treated seemed to have no value. I mean, heck, we call it wastewater, right? It’s a wastewater treatment plant. Well, it turns out that it isn’t. And over the last ten or twenty years, we’re seeing power plants rely on water from reclaimed water from treatment plants. We’re seeing farmers rely on it; it’s a perfectly adequate supply for farmers to use. So you’re seeing some exchanges: farmers give up their rights to drinking-quality water in exchange for reclaimed water. The mining community has been using it. Data centers, you know, the Google and Amazon Web Services and Facebook and all these data centers, they’re starting to use reclaimed water. And that takes some pressure off of our other resources if businesses of all sorts can begin to reuse water.
And we’re doing it in our homes. The brand new building in San Francisco, the Salesforce building, is using reclaimed water in its toilets. You know, why would you use drinking-quality water to flush away human waste? You want to waste a stupid use of water, I think that’s about the biggest that ever gets. So there are some very encouraging things that we are doing. And that makes me—it makes me optimistic. We face daunting challenges, but some combination of conservation—conservation remains the low-hanging fruit. Let me just toss out to your listeners the possibility that they would save water if they, one, stop using their food disposal. That food disposal, if you use it two minutes a day, by the end of the month may consume as much as 150 gallons of water just to get rid of food scraps. So throw the food scraps in the garbage or put them in your compost bin. Or your listeners could turn off the light. A single 60-watt incandescent bulb that burns for 12 hours a day will consume by the end of the year as much as 6,300 gallons of water. So turn off a light, or even better, install an LED light, which uses one-sixth of the energy and one-sixth of the water. So desal, reuse, some conservation, price signals with sensible rates, and water transfers—that’s a menu of options that can really get the job done. And now what we need, what we really need, is the political will and the moral courage to act.
Bob Zadek: In the subject of recycling water, and because you’re in Arizona, I have to share with our listeners in a few minutes we have left a story that I first reported on my show in 2010, and I went and hunted for it and found it for this morning’s show. The place is Chandler, Arizona. And in Chandler, Arizona, in the courthouse, if you were to go into the men’s room, you will see a sign on the wall of the men’s room that says, “Urinals and toilets are served with greywater. Do not drink.” So Chandler, Arizona is worried about people in the men’s room drinking the water from the urinal. The history is they used recycled or greywater for the urinals, a process which Robert, of course, endorses. But in Arizona, a local or it might have been a federal law required that if ever you use greywater, it has to be colored so that people know it’s greywater and don’t drink. Chandler, Arizona didn’t want to color their water, so they got an exception, but only if they put up a sign. But I tell that little anecdote because I love it and because it shows how Arizona is, at least it was in 2010, in the forefront. Now Robert, thank you for giving me an excuse—
Robert Glennon: Let me tell you another Chandler, Arizona story. And we have about a minute left, Robert, but go ahead. Okay, that’s all it’ll take, Bob. Chandler, Arizona is also home to a large Intel chip facility. And they wanted to build a new facility, but they didn’t have enough water rights. So they did a $50 million deal with Chandler to have a new high-tech treatment facility. Right across the street from the Chandler plant were fields of alfalfa. But the legal rules wouldn’t let—made it virtually impossible for Intel to buy the water from those alfalfa growers. That’s madness. We need to change that.
Bob Zadek: Oh my goodness. Well, Robert, we are—you have given us all inspiration. By the way, you mentioned incandescent light bulbs. They don’t exist anymore. I have a stash of 162 incandescent light bulbs that I bought before they made it a capital offense to use incandescent lights. But you showed your age by referring to incandescent light bulbs. Nobody in the audience even knows what that is.
Robert Glennon: Don’t you like money, Bob? Don’t you like money? Why are you possibly using incandescent bulbs? You never stop paying for them.
Bob Zadek: Because I like it. This is Bob Zadek saying thanks so much for Robert Glennon for his conversation with us this morning on the use and misuse and waste, if possible, of water. If you’ve enjoyed our show, please let Robert or I know. Please indicate on whatever your podcast deliverer is how much you enjoyed or didn’t enjoy the show and rate us or give us your comments accordingly. Thank you so much, Robert, for an hour of discussion on the use and misuse of water. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. Please enjoy the rest of your weekend.