Residents in parched Colorado county fight water speculation

“Speculation in and of itself is not a bad thing, either,” said Steven Greenhut, a water expert with R Street Institute, a public policy research organization. “I mean, it’s just a normal market process. There’s a new water market that’s been created where people can buy and sell a futures.”

Having a market to trade water as a commodity means pricing can provide signals about what is happening on the ground, Greenhut said.

“Anti-speculation laws actually discourage water banking and other collaborative approaches to saving water,” Greenhut said.