I’m talking about government controlled rationing. A committee of geologists and engineers and whatnot determine what could be sustainably drawn from each water source, add it up, and divide it among the population. The market mechanism essentially serves a means to redistribute wealth from the rich who use too much water on their lawns to the poor who often don’t even have lawns as well as force industry to really account and pay for this common resource. Just because a market is involved doesn’t mean that it’s capitalism. I don’t think carbon offsets work like what I suggested at all.
Make sure that all credits aren’t equal and they increase with use. i.e. if I use “1 credit” and it costs $1, 1000 credit’s needs to cost more then $1000. You can play with the math but the idea is that a house hold should be way cheaper per unit of water then trying to grow corn in the desert.
The credits aren’t dollars of water. They’re kilograms of water. Every individual gets an equal allocation (per month or year) at no charge. If you get more than you need then you sell it at market rate, maybe to that corporation trying to grow corn in the desert. Chances are that as a result, their water costs will be infinitely more than a given household. At the end of the day, no more water will have been taken from the reservoirs and aquifers than is sustainable because only so many kilograms of water were rationed.