“There is a classic paradox in economics: Water is cheap, but diamonds are expensive, though one is essential for life and the other is not.”
But what happens when water becomes scarce? In the cover story for the new issue of National Review, “Running Dry in the American West,” Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., surveys the effects that a record drought will have on America west of the Mississippi.
“There are more water rights on paper,” Regan writes, “than there is actual water to go around, and everyone is lawyered up with arguments for why cuts should fall on others instead of themselves.”
The problem is a combination of drought, bad luck, NIMBYism, and, yes, governmental regulation that prevents water from being distributed efficiently through market mechanisms.
As usual, however, Americans are learning to shoulder a sclerotic government aside and get on with it by attempting to “adapt to scarcity without sacrificing economic growth.”
The biggest opportunity to continue this progress is in the agricultural sector, which uses more than 80 percent of the water consumed in the West. Farmers also have found ways to increase yields and earnings in the face of shrinking water supplies, sometimes by switching to less water-intensive crops or installing more-efficient irrigation systems.
Technology combined with a freer markets, adaptive farmers, and deregulation may prove to be the way out of this. But recycling treated wastewater, building desalination plants, and advanced farming and irrigation methods are all great — until government gets in the way:
“In May . . . the California Coastal Commission” — a state agency — “rejected a large-scale desalination project in Orange County that would have supplied residents with 50 million gallons of drinking water a day.”
Read the whole thing here.
What else is in the new July 11, 2022, issue of NR?
In “Lessons from the January 6 Hearings,” Dan McLaughlin catalogues what just we’ve learned — despite the committee’s flaws.
In “Scorched Earth in Arizona,” John McCormack takes a look at the broiling Republican Senate primary in the Grand Canyon State, which pits attorney general Mark Brnovich against wealthy businessmen Jim Lamon and Blake Masters, the latter of whom is backed by Peter Thiel.
Andrew Follett examines how much damage woke ideology is having on scientific rigor in “Too-Political Science.”
Rick Brookhiser sings coffee’s praises in “The Elixir of Life.”
And Ross Douthat wonders why Pixar’s new flick Lightyear has landed with such a thud in “To Mediocrity and Beyond.”
Finally, don’t miss the excerpt of Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis’s just-published book, Tearing Us Apart: “Making Abortion Illegal and Unthinkable.”
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We invite you to check out the new magazine out here.