This isn't about polluting water, it's about injecting waste water into deep reservoirs from which it will not return to the surface in the meaningfully near future.
I understood iLoch's comment to be about "losing" the water ('I was shocked to learn water used in fracking is permanently "gone"'), and I was explaining why one-time loss of water is unimportant, because the oceans are limitless and our fresh water supply is a rate that is sourced by the ocean. It doesn't matter if the water is polluted, injected deep underground, or fired into space. If you want, you can replace "sullying" with "burying".
I suggest you read up on North American hydrology. Fresh water is being depleted at a rate significantly greater than it is being replenished. It's also a stretch to call wastewater injection a "one-time loss of water" when we can expect to be doing it for 30-50 years.
While that is true, thats a purly poitical problem. If their were a prober market solution that priced according to sound resource managment priniples it would not be a problem.
The price of water woild still be very low and it would not impact standards of living in any siginificant way.
Their are tons of easy ways to save water, pertocularly in farming but that will not happen.
Its a classical tragety of the commens. They had to solve the same problem when tjey were moving west, frontier society had very soffisticated systems of water managment.
You misunderstand. It seems clear that iLoch views this as a fundamentally different use of water than, say, watering your lawn, since he emphasizes the gone-ness but doesn't mention the magnitude of the usage. The point is that this use of water is no different than any other one-time use of fresh water. (We'll be farming for 30-50 years too, thereby depleting the ground water.)
Assuming the wastewater injected into the ground is ocean water (I don't know if it is), it has zero effect on either the fresh water supply or its replenishment rate.
