Pratt Rogers

Didn't expect this to spur as much conversation as it did. Supplemental thoughts: 1. Property rights. It's bad for our knee-jerk reaction to someone owning something scarce is "let's just take it from them." The farmers and ranchers who own water rights are valid owners, and if we want to use their water rights, we can buy them out. 2. Increasing supply > zero-sum fighting. The best long-term answer to scarcity of an important resource will usually be to make/find more of the resource, not to pick winners and losers. 3. Boldness. The more important the resource, the more imaginative and bold we should be to figure out how to increase supply. 4. Water is worth the effort. Water is extremely important, and we should be extremely imaginative and bold about making it abundant. 5. Energy revolution. We are in the middle of an incredible energy revolution. Solar and battery infrastructure is expanding by leaps and bounds, and the Trump admin has done an incredible job of removing the shackles on the nuclear industry. We have the ability to achieve energy abundance, and energy abundance gets us to water abundance. 6. Near-term allocation. We still have to solve supply now. And that's probably most directly accomplished by buying people out or incentivizing lower-water-demand crops 7. Scarcity sucks. The water situation in the West illustrates the unpleasantness of zero-sum situations. Scarcity turns interdependent groups (farmers, governments, industry, cities, etc.) against each other. Abundance will delete the conflict.