Triangle city officials are pursuing what amounts to the Barack Obama approach to water supplies: cut consumption rather than increasing the supply.
The one-note samba from the mayors of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill is “Don’t use so much water.” That’s their approach to the water shortage. Their political support for Democratic standard bearer Obama isn’t surprising. They have a lot in common. Here’s his approach to the stretched supplies of oil:
“If we reduce our consumption of oil, that’s what will reduce gas prices. There’s really no other way of doing it,†the presumptive Democratic nominee said in a one-on-one interview with The Post-Crescent during a campaign stop in Kaukauna.
There’s only one difference. With oil, increasing supplies couid actually mean lower prices. But with water, the more we conserve the more our city fathers want to charge us to make up for the lost revenue from the water they’re not selling.
UPDATE: An excellent point by James Lileks today:
We cannot drill our way out of this. We cannot, in other words, deal with shortages by increasing the supply. Presumably because it wouldn’t have an immediate effect? Well, then, there’s no point doing anything about global warming today or tomorrow, is there.
