Just had a chance to dive in on this topic...
I generally find tools like these vastly over-simplified for use by those who really don’t want to spend the time understanding all the complexities of the calculations. However, what the tool shows is that our water usage does not begin and end with our home water usage, and this fits with all I have read everywhere else. If you view it through that lens, I think it is a good tool. If you view it through the lens of “will it tell me my water usage to +/- 1000 gallons per year”, then it is not the right tool. However, most people have no idea the impact of their everyday decisions, and this tool helps them.
It’s easy to say “water is cheap and we don’t need to worry about it”, but oil and gasoline were once abundant and cheap and we didn’t worry about those either. Few would consider them cheap today. Simple conservation can be a cost-effective tool to minimize future costs. Case in point – NY City in the 1970s used to use something like 1.3 billion gallons of water a day, and 30+ years later the water usage is ~1 billion gallons a day while the population has grown. Clearly, there was a lot of waste of water. Aside from a rather humorous Seinfeld episode where nobody could seem to wash the shampoo out of their hair for a week, there are no seeming ill effects to this conservation, and great economic benefits.
Unfortunately, our human history, worldwide and regardless of economic system, has overall been a “waste first, worry about it later” philosophy. In communist/socialist societies, this was due to corruption, graft, state planning, or just plain stupidity. In a more “efficient” capitalist society, it is due to the economic discounting of future costs many years out compared to the current (low) cost in the present (based on abundance). Classical economics always assumes that future costs will be somehow manageable, supply disruptions can be mitigated or an alternative product will be available, and they’ve mostly been right for hundreds of years. However, as our planet approaches a mind-boggling 10 billion people, and as these people strive to attain living standards similar to our own, it is impossible for me to imagine in my lifetime that these assumed future and manageable costs for wasteful decisions made today will be as low and manageable as we assume. And then what? There are no do-overs with the planet. I’d rather play it safe if I only get one chance.
I generally find tools like these vastly over-simplified for use by those who really don’t want to spend the time understanding all the complexities of the calculations. However, what the tool shows is that our water usage does not begin and end with our home water usage, and this fits with all I have read everywhere else. If you view it through that lens, I think it is a good tool. If you view it through the lens of “will it tell me my water usage to +/- 1000 gallons per year”, then it is not the right tool. However, most people have no idea the impact of their everyday decisions, and this tool helps them.
It’s easy to say “water is cheap and we don’t need to worry about it”, but oil and gasoline were once abundant and cheap and we didn’t worry about those either. Few would consider them cheap today. Simple conservation can be a cost-effective tool to minimize future costs. Case in point – NY City in the 1970s used to use something like 1.3 billion gallons of water a day, and 30+ years later the water usage is ~1 billion gallons a day while the population has grown. Clearly, there was a lot of waste of water. Aside from a rather humorous Seinfeld episode where nobody could seem to wash the shampoo out of their hair for a week, there are no seeming ill effects to this conservation, and great economic benefits.
Unfortunately, our human history, worldwide and regardless of economic system, has overall been a “waste first, worry about it later” philosophy. In communist/socialist societies, this was due to corruption, graft, state planning, or just plain stupidity. In a more “efficient” capitalist society, it is due to the economic discounting of future costs many years out compared to the current (low) cost in the present (based on abundance). Classical economics always assumes that future costs will be somehow manageable, supply disruptions can be mitigated or an alternative product will be available, and they’ve mostly been right for hundreds of years. However, as our planet approaches a mind-boggling 10 billion people, and as these people strive to attain living standards similar to our own, it is impossible for me to imagine in my lifetime that these assumed future and manageable costs for wasteful decisions made today will be as low and manageable as we assume. And then what? There are no do-overs with the planet. I’d rather play it safe if I only get one chance.
