States allow too many straws in water supplies

In the United States, we constantly fret about running out of oil. But we should be paying more attention to another limited natural resource: water. A water crisis is threatening many parts of the country, not just the arid West.

In 2008, metro Atlanta (home to nearly 5 million people) came within 90 days of seeing its principal water supply, Lake Lanier, dry up. Lake Superior is too shallow to float fully loaded freighters. The Ipswich River near Boston has gone dry in five of the past eight years. In 2007, Orme, Tenn., ran out of water entirely, forcing it to truck in supplies from Alabama. In Florida, excessive groundwater pumping has dried up scores of lakes.

Nationwide, more than 30 states are fighting their neighbors over water.

The real problem isn't shrinking water levels but population growth. Over the next four decades, the country will add 120 million people, the equivalent of one person every 11 seconds.

Another problem comes in something that sounds relatively benign: renewable energy, at least in some forms, such as biofuels. Refining one gallon of ethanol requires four gallons of water. This is a drop in the bucket compared with how much water it takes to grow enough corn to refine one gallon of ethanol: as much as 2,500 gallons.

We have traditionally engineered our way out of shortages by diverting more from rivers, building dams or drilling groundwater wells. But many rivers, including the Colorado and the Rio Grande, already dry up each year, and levels in aquifers are plummeting. We're running out of technological fixes.

More viable solutions include desalination of ocean water, reuse of municipal waste and aggressive conservation strategies, but none is a cure-all. Desalination is expensive. Reusing water from the sewage system not only has a major "yuck" factor, it's also quite expensive.

We need a new water policy in the United States. Americans don't pay the real cost of the water that we use. In fact, we don't pay for water at all. The check that citizens write to their municipal water department or private water company covers only the cost of service, plus a small profit for the private company.

Last summer, as gas prices inched up over $4 a gallon, Toyota dealers couldn't keep fuel-efficient Priuses in stock. We should apply that pricing lesson if we want to conserve water, using increasing block rates to discourage profligate water use. The government has an obligation to manage water wisely.

Think of our water supply as a giant milkshake, and of each demand for water as a straw in the glass. Most states permit a limitless number of straws. That has to change.

The West is developing a system that should lead the way: the use of market forces to reallocate water. In eastern Oregon, along the Middle Fork of the John Day River, the Oregon Water Trust persuaded ranchers Pat and Hedy Voigt to turn off their irrigation system each year from July 20 until the end of the growing season. The 6.5 million gallons per day that would have been diverted to grow alfalfa now augment river flows and improve the habitat of endangered salmon and steelhead trout. The $700,000 paid to the Voigts allowed them to make substantial on-farm improvements.

Taking their straw out of the glass is one step toward keeping us from getting parched.