Monthly Archives: October 2009

I’ve tried three times to write this up nicely. I remembered Hilzoy’s saintly patience. I thought about vinegar and honey. I want to be part of a constructive dialogue on water policy with bright people who listen with respect. But apparently I’m going to be the flamethrowing part of the constructive dialog, because this op-ed brings up all my old frustrations about economists.  That piece shouldn’t be as bad as it is.  The dude seems like he does a ton of bright, interesting research.  I’d love to listen to him discuss his own research.  I’m sure I would learn a lot.   But he does not know what is going on in Californian water today.  The guy make two mistakes that are instant give-aways.

Dr. Carson writes both:

water rationing should never be any part of an intelligent water policy.

and

San Diego needs an increasing block rate structure with more blocks and higher prices for those using the most water.

The only way someone could write both those things is that he or she took a surface level read of newspaper stories and didn’t do more. I know this because every single agency that instituted a rationing program this year did it by instituting an increasing block rate schedule (or threatening fines, which is about the same). That rate structure is what the newspapers called rationing this year.

Los Angeles:
The rationing would be achieved by adopting “shortage-year rates” to encourage conservation by altering the billing method used by the DWP.

Santa Cruz:
But barring a deluge of rain between now and March, the 90,000 people who depend on the district could be forced to cut water use by more than one-third, or pay steep fines.

Folsom:
In Folsom, first-time violators get a warning. A second violation within one month could result in the customer getting their water shut off. A third violation within six months brings fines.

South Bay:
Now water retailers and the county’s 15 cities and towns must translate this vote into specific actions, like watering the lawn only on specific days, or increasing water rates if customers use more than a set amount. The district is asking municipalities to pass ordinances containing these types of measures.

I can understand that if you see the word “rationing”, you think it means rationing like in the former Soviet Union where you can only buy two loaves of bread. But if you know what happens in the real world of California water, you know that never happens. Districts NEVER physically restrict the amount of water someone can buy*. If they go to “rationing”, it works by making the next chunk of water more expensive (by rate structure or by fines). Which is what Dr. Carson recommends!

That’s the first way I know that the economist isn’t knowledgable about what is actually happening in California water this year. The second way is that he says the three magic words:

low-value agriculture growing like alfalfa, cotton and rice in places like the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys

Whenever you see those exact three things, “alfalfa, cotton and rice”, you can stop listening to that person. That person got his or her opinion from Reisner and hasn’t kept up since. If you read Reisner, you know what that person will say. I can tell you straight up that his prediction, that San Diego or MWD will buy water from those sources, WILL NOT HAPPEN soon.

Why? Long time readers here already know.

MWD will not buy water from fallowed cotton because there is almost no cotton left in California. The decline has been going on for several years now.  People who are willing to opine in the paper should already know this.

San Diego will not buy water from fallowed rice because rice is getting good prices these days. It isn’t a low-value crop right now and rice farmers don’t want to sell. Even if rice farmers would sell, neither the state nor the feds have spare capacity to move non-project water across the Delta these days, and buyers aren’t tempted to buy water that might not get delivered.

Alfalfa’s another story, and here Dr. Carson might be right. Last year alfalfa prices were high, because the drought hit pastures so hard that dairies and beef cattle had to buy supplemental feed. This year they thinned their herds, so demand for alfalfa may go down. There are close to a million acres of alfalfa in California; some of that might be retired to sell water to MWD and San Diego.

But I’d be very surprised if the guy who made a blanket statement about “low value crops” did any of that thinking. So far as I can tell, his thinking on water policy stops at the boundaries of economic theory and some old Reisner**. That’s fine. But it isn’t helpful in a debate where informed people already know conventional economic theory and old Reisner.  I’ve seen it before, that economists think that knowing economics deeply makes them qualified to speak on other subjects.  But it turns out that other subjects are complex and surface level knowledge of the subject plus deep knowledge of economics doesn’t offer anything new.  It frustrates the people who are looking for useful suggestions for improving water management in the real world.

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Assembly Republicans, unhappy with the water-reform package authored by the Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, introduced their own water plan that they said would curb the authority over groundwater monitoring contained in the Senate plan.

After introducing the legislation, the three Republican Assemblymembers stepped outside to take sledgehammers to the dashboards of their cars. “I don’t ever want to read that fuel gauge again,” said one. “It makes me so angry when the needle gets lower.” A second Republican assemblymember chose not to take a hammer to his fuel gauge, but instead covered up the warning light with black electrician’s tape. He told reporters, “If I can’t see the warning light go on, the tank will never get empty.” The last assemblymember confirmed that his wife and teenagers all used the car, and not one of them wanted to know how much gas remained in the tank. “Maybe one of us puts gas in the car, maybe not. Maybe someone drives the car a lot, maybe not. But we don’t talk about it, and we certainly don’t want some government regulator forcing us to “monitor” how much gas is in the tank”.

I had occasion to watch some area-of-origin advocates last week and came away unimpressed.  Area-of-origin is code for Northern California, and it really means ‘DON’T TAKE OUR WATER’.  It is named for the doctrine that the regions where water originates shouldn’t be harmed by projects moving (excess) water away.  I have some sympathy for that; the Owens Valley lakebed shows what can happen to the area of origin in the absence of any protections.  But the advocates I saw last week are arguing against water conservation for themselves on the basis that they have plenty.  It made me want to reach for some harsh adjectives.

Twenty by Twentytwenty is the Governor’s policy on water conservation that is likely to be turned into legislation sometime soon.  So far as I know, the goal is arbitrary, picked primarily for the sound of it.  Reduce urban per capita water use by 20 percent by the year 2020.  But it isn’t a bad goal, neither trivial nor overambitious, so why not go with a catchy phrase.  The big problem is that not all cities in the state use the same amount of water.  Some have been conserving for years; reducing their per capita water use by 20% would mean changing their lifestyle or cutting something they value (they use, roughly, 110ish gallons per household per day).  Others are still shamefully profligate and drinking quality water runs down their gutters (more like 380 gallons per person per day).  The civil servants tasked with 20 x twenty20 wrote a draft report suggesting that the regions who use more because they are wastrels (my phrasing) should conserve more than regions who have been tightening down on water for decades (mostly southern California and the central coast).

The prospect of Twenty by 20XX becoming law has got people like Placer County Water Agency campaigning against it.  My jaw dropped to hear people say, out loud, in public, that they don’t want to conserve if it only goes to help other people, that they think they should always have the privilege to waste their water.  I am embarrassed for them.  However, if they are already willing to sound like narcissistic five-year-olds in public, they must have already rationalized and accepted the arguments that they have plenty, and that should exempt them from having to do anything for people downstream, who are presumably different and not-them.  I wonder where they stood on the question of the Bay Area and Smog Check II.

Back in the turn of the century, people living in the Bay Area had weaker Smog Check requirements than the rest of the state.  The wind blew fresh off the ocean each night; because their air basin was always clean, they didn’t have to do smog checks as frequently or maintain their cars as much as everywhere else in California.  This was nice for them.  Turns out, though, that their pollutants were blowing eastward and getting pinned against the mountains.  You know, like in Placer County.  Ozones from the Bay Area were weakening pine trees, raising the fire danger in the area-of-origin mountain counties.  The legislature stepped in, holding people in the Bay Area to the same Smog Check standards as the rest of the state, even though people in the Bay Area breathe clean air.

Look, Mountain Counties.  People in San Francisco have to take their cars to get smogged twice as often for your sake.  For the same amount of trouble, you could adjust your fucking sprinklers and switch out your toilets.  For the cost of their additional car maintainance, you could buy a low water using washing machine.  You wouldn’t want to go backward, would you?  To all those smoggy days in the foothills?  The law was an improvement, right?  Twenty x XXtwenty will be too, overall. 

Folks, we are in an system, connected by pipes and law and flows of water, air and energy.  We are too far intertwined to pull up the drawbridges around your region, even if you do have the water rights to fill the moat.  Please, come out and play with the rest of the state.

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John Yoo is still an abomination who brings shame to my alma mater, but today I am very grateful for tenure.  Harris Ranch (big CAFO on the westside of the San Joaquin Valley, the one you see and smell at Coalinga*) has threatened to pull $500K worth of donations to CalPoly for bringing Michael Pollan to speak.  Valley Economy found the complaint letter, and was interested in a secondary complaint:

My second issue is of still greater concern, and has provided me with both displeasure and outright anger towards the university. In a recent (09/14/09) phone conversation Mike Smith had with Rob Rutherford in the Animal Science Department, … Mr. Rutherford then had the audacity to offer Mike an entirely unsolicited opinion that water should have NEVER been provided to farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. As Harris Ranch operates one of the largest farms in this region, Mr. Rutherford implies that Harris Ranch should not be farming! He went on to offer that this acreage should be converted back to the native forages once found there.

Full respect to Prof. Rutherford. Lest there be any doubt remain about the implication, I will say outright:

Harris Ranch should not be farming on the West Side.
No one should be farming on the West Side.
I don’t know whether it should go back to native forage or be turned into solar power farms, but the West Side shouldn’t be irrigated, which means it shouldn’t farmed.

Even more! Under climate change, I don’t think the junior rights holders on the West Side will get water more than 6 years in 10. If that. If they continue farming, they should stop whining about the other four years (which may happen back-to-back for more than four years.) They should accept that there will be less water in CA, that new dams would catch floods but not yield new supplies and besides will be dedicated to urban uses first, and figure out whether they want to scrape through under those circumstances. If they do, do it and stop whining. If they don’t, figure out how they can extort a good severance from the state, the feds, or someone who will buy their crappy water rights.

Anyway, Prof. Rutherford is awesome. I hope he doesn’t suffer any fallout from this. Also, I am encouraged that the locals around CalPoly SLO, one of the three remaining ag colleges in the state, seem to be Pollan supporters in a meaningless online newspaper survey. Opinions are shifting!

*Coalinga is not a Spanish word, like you might guess after a second’s thought. Coalinga was Coaling Station A. I don’t know whether there were other coaling stations and if they were re-named.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s threat to veto the entire class of bills from this year unless he gets the water bill he wants is incredibly petty.  I hope the legislature calls his bluff, and if he does veto every bill the legislature produced this year, I hope they impeach him.  Further, the things Schwarzenegger is holding out for (two new dams, Sites and Temperance Flats) aren’t the crucial next step for California.  He could get the crucial next step (deep conservation measures and an entity with the authority to move ahead with a Peripheral Canal) from the bills the Dems have offered him.  But he’s insisting on two fairly trivial new dams, presumably because those represent a personal victory for him*. 

The insistence on getting this done this year is also silly.  Phil Isenberg says to do it now, and I generally give a lot of credence to his opinions.  But I think the machinery for what the big water bills would do is already churning.  The state is moving ahead on a big water conservation push (20% by 2020).  Right now that’s not mandatory and legislatively mandating it would be helpful.  But it is gathering steam and could be a stand-alone legislative effort next year.  Putting in place an entity to govern the Delta would also be great, but it will take a couple years to do it and frankly, whether that starts this, next or two years from now won’t make that much difference.  The first thing that entity will do is an EIR for the Peripheral Canal and a habitat plan for the Delta, and people are already working on that.  Don’t think that the specs, surveys, design and permits for a Peripheral Canal aren’t already under development.  They are, and if an entity isn’t created to manage that this year, the work that Canal proponents are doing now will be that much further along when some Delta governing entity comes into existence. 

Yeah, what’s at stake here is the governor’s reputation, which I care nothing for, and two dams that I’m ambivalent to slightly negative about.  The work that I think is crucial is underway.  Don’t cave, legislature!  Send the governor the water bills YOU want. 

*** 

I do want to make a friendly amendment to this summary from Calitics:

We’ve mentioned the water issue for a long time, but there is no way to overemphasize one critical point: No matter how many projects you build, you do not get any additional water.

OK, that’s not true.  There are crazy projects that could get more water.  Those aren’t on the table, but, you know, bringing in water from the Great Lakes would actually be new water to CA.  There aren’t cost-efficient legal projects that would yield (noticeable amounts) of new water.  However, the state looks to be getting much less water under climate change, arriving in floods from rainy spring storms.  It is possible that new dams could catch some of that.  This isn’t new water, but it could mean that new dams would help us keep more of what we’ve got now than we could without them.  That increment is pretty important to whichever junior right holder is in line to use it.  New dams have a direct link to someone’s existing interests.  As for “substantial new amounts of water to grow on”?  No one serious is talking about that.  The serious discussion is about minimizing losses.

* Also, I imagine because if we delay on those two dams, the next time they’re considered, we’ll know even more about the new hydrology, which might well show that they’ll never be full.  The new hydrology might also show that we need them more than ever to catch the precip that used to be snow but will now be rain.  Nevertheless, I think new dams become less likely with time, not more likely.  Especially if a Peripheral Canal gets built in the meantime and the system doesn’t seem to be quite so broken.