ECONOMICS COMES FOR THE LOW-FLOW SHOWER.

Dear reader, what you think the immediate consequences are might be wrong.  "One approach to the teaching of economics is to encourage students to look beyond the immediate consequences of actions to their follow-on effects, which, to a less careful viewer, might be unanticipated, or, in the worst case, unintended."

If you want to encourage water conservation, price it.  Limiting the shower flow isn't going to do the job.

March 10 will mark precisely one year since the Great Shower Debate ended.

Or at least it ended for me when the Guardian published an article with the immortal headline “High shower pressure can help people save water, study suggests.”

Intrepid researchers at the University of Surrey had placed sensors in 290 showers around campus, recording data for 39 weeks from 86,421 individual shower sessions. “Water consumption,” the study found, sensationally, “was reduced by up to 56% with high water pressure.”

The researchers, seeming puzzled by the results, recommended more study. But they also offered a theory along these lines: When a showerhead delivers a good, fizzing spray, people pop in and briskly get their business done, unlike when faced with a drizzle that prompts them to wonder if the Head & Shoulders will ever be adequately washed off their head and shoulders.

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to figure that out, although that anecdote, or a related one, frequently turns up in introductory classes, or perhaps in courses involving regulated industries.  But because that crass Orange Man brought it up, all the Smart People had to preen.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden spent years snapping towels at each other over showerhead policy. It was Barack Obama who got the presidential skirmishing going in 2013 by decreeing, in response to the emergence of showerheads with multiple nozzles, that 2.5 gallons per minute was the maximum rate overall. Trump made it 2.5 gpm for each nozzle; Biden in 2021 restored Obama’s cumulative rate; on his first day back in office last month, Trump promised a new showerhead gpm regime.

Trump, as is so often the case regarding almost anything, has an obnoxious way of elbowing into the conversation. In a June campaign speech, he offered a soliloquy touching on faucets, rainwater, washing machines, hand-washing, his “beautiful, luxuriant hair” and showerhead flow restrictors. “I lather up and then you turn on this crazy shower and the thing — ‘drip, drip,’ and you say, ‘I’m going to be here for 45 minutes. What the — ?’” he said, giving new meaning to the term stream of consciousness but also inadvertently getting at what that British study had found.

Democrats, as is so often the case regarding Trump, were not content to leave bad enough alone. The Biden campaign got caught editing his showerhead musings to make him seem even more deranged than, well, Biden. After the Democrats’ skulduggery was revealed, I knew that this was the moment when I could later claim that this was the moment when I knew Trump was going to win.

Trump actually won the election when he got to East Palestine before any of the Jarrett regency showed up.  Who knows, had the vice president gotten there first, stood the first responders to McDonald's, and reminisced about her time at the fry station, might subsequent fact-checking of her story have been as water down the drain?

Lost in columnist Mark Lasswell's cracking wise about shower flow is a sobering tale of what goes wrong when policy makers refuse to price water properly.

Meanwhile, nobody is throttling the cataracts of water needed to cool servers at the gargantuan data centers firing up our artificial intelligence future. In 2023, according to the Financial Times, data centers in Northern Virginia alone used nearly 2 billion gallons of water. University of California at Riverside researchers estimate that, in 2027, thirsty AI will slurp up between 1.1 trillion and 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally. Don’t blame China’s DeepSeek; its energy demands are much lower than competitors’, and it uses no water at all to answer questions about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs or a democratic Taiwan.

Even more water-profligate than America’s homegrown AI is the country’s shockingly sievelike public plumbing. In 2021 alone, Texas lost an estimated 132 billion gallons to leaks and breaks. The Environmental Protection Agency, usually a paragon of bad-news precision, throws up its hands and says the number of gallons lost nationwide each year is in the “trillions.”

The whole point of creating a water utility ought to be to price the product (and water that has been filtered, chlorinated, possibly fluoridated, with the supply to consumers kept separate from the sewer returns is a product) in such a way as to cover the costs of keeping the mains in a state of good repair.  At least, that's what I understand the water and sewer use charges on the Cold Spring Shops water bill to do.

That frustration on the part of the Environmental Protection Agency might be a call to rustle up some DOGEs.  Each drop of water lost in a leak or a break is a potential revenue loss to the water utility, and keeping the mains free of leaks is prudent.