The notion of there being a “water shortage” calls to mind the old observation that countries with relatively good governments experience drought, while countries with relatively terrible governments experience famine. In effect drought and famine are caused by the same thing, or they are the same thing: a lack of rain. But in one case, society compensates and survives, while in the other case, a lot of people die and things get pretty messy.
To take things a step further, I propose that there is no such thing as a water shortage: there is only bad pricing in the water market. This is to say that, given the amount of potable water that exists in a country in the short term, access to it can either be priced below the market rate, at the market rate or above the market rate. Pricing water below the market rate leads to a situation we know as “shortage” and pricing it above the market rate leads to a situation we know as “surplus.” We know these situations as shortage and surplus, but they are in fact poor pricing.
Israel is very blessed, unlike some crap countries like Mongolia and Kurdistan, to border a couple bodies of water that is not readily potable but could be without much difficulty, given the high technological ability of our society. But desalination has been awfully slow to proceed. This is not water shortage, it is stupidity. If water were not vastly underpriced, desalination would already have happened because everyone would realize that it’s profitable. But because the government forces the water price down, people see desalination as too expensive and it has taken way too long to happen.
At the other extreme of sanity, rabbis want us to harm ourselves in the hope that more potable water will appear. Please count me among the people who will not be praying for more water, but for better pricing on the water we have and the consequent will to make use of the water all around us.
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The Phoenix metro area that I live in has no nearby bodies of water to be desalinated, and yet we don’t have any shortages. Water shortages are only caused by either state mismanagement or low IQ.