> We don't do this for gasoline

No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.

> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.

No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.

Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.

Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.

When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.

Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.

The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.

And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.

A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.

The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water.

And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water.

(Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is.

It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)

> and those are regularly treated as sacred

They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.

> Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes.

Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.