Category Archives: Uncategorized

I very much liked this story on how large agribusiness came to control the Kern Water Bank.  I’ve not seen it so clearly presented before.

Couple thoughts:

• How I love watching large players turn on each other.  Even if I don’t support either of their interests, I do enjoy watching the sharks fight.

• The story mentions that the controllers of the Kern Water Bank, especially Roll Call International (who is Paramont Farms, who are the Resnicks, who make the pomegranate juice that you shouldn’t buy in stores anymore) are permitted to sell water to LA, rather than farm

The Monterey Agreements permit water contractors to resell the water they receive from the State Water Project. This means they become middlemen making profits on state-supplied water. If they choose to, they can dry up vast areas of productive agriculture and ship the water to municipalities south of the Tehachapi range. A coalition of agriculturalists and environmentalists has brought suit to challenge this.

If they were to sell water to LA rather than farm, would we be hearing from the Latino Water Coalition?  Would there be faux-farmworker marches on a well-head in Kern County?  Would there be estimates of tens of thousands of idled farmworkers?  Of course there would not, since all that turmoil was created by public relations firms funded by Roll Call International.

• I wondered who wrote such a clear and fearless piece.  Aren’t all growers cowed by the Resnicks?  Apparently not retired UCLA professors who farm up near headwaters in Northern California.  People in those fortunate and  secure circumstances can write all the stories about the Resnicks they want.  How nice that agriculture is still big enough to include people with such different backgrounds.

Everyone is all, wah wah wah, Pres. Obama didn’t mention climate change in his address on the BP oil spill.  He talked about feel good stuff, like clean energy technology, but he didn’t talk about pricing carbon, the costs of climate change, or instituting cap and trade.  That bothered me too, but if he wasn’t going to mention climate change, I would have liked to see him give another speech.  He could have told a powerful story about governance.

We’ve been subjected to almost three decades of Norquistian complaints that governments don’t work well, can’t produce anything, and hinder real enterprise.  Those regulators making real people jump through endless hoops to produce stacks of paper, all those pointless plans.  But Pres. Obama could have told a very clear morality tale about what happens when those agencies are co-opted, or overruled.  Sadly, we have too many recent examples, like Cheney’s fish kill in the Klamath.  He could have drawn a straight line from the concept that governance is pointless and an impediment to business to allowing the Minerals Management Service to run amok.   The glamorous part of that story is that regulators were partying, literally sleeping with and doing coke, with the oil companies they were regulating.  That’s dramatic and unethical.  But the part that turned out to be a real problem when the Deepwater Horizon fell apart is that the hadn’t done what bureaucrats are paid to do.  The Minerals Management Service hadn’t demanded rigorous Emergency Plans from the oil companies.  By all accounts, they approved farcical plans with nice covers, and that turned out to be a tragic mistake for everyone who lives in the Gulf.

Water districts pushed back hard when we required Management Plans from them.  They didn’t want to go to the expense of gathering the data they had sort-of kept and that one guy knew real well but didn’t write down.  They certainly didn’t want to tell Reclamation or DWR that data.   A couple submitted good, thorough plans that they intended to use themselves.  A bunch submitted plans that met the bare minimum; they never intended to make that plan into a working document for themselves.  A few submitted intentionally rude plans, with no information and a fuck-you attitude.  They didn’t want to write a plan and were pissed.  A good plan takes effort, perhaps a year of someone’s time and hopefully some public input.  They seem like some dumb hurdle, until something goes wrong.  When the Deepwater Horizon exploded, how much do you think the BP executives wished they had an effective emergency plan, one that told them where all the ships and booms on the east coast were.  In this last drought, districts flocked, a hundred people at a time, to our workshops on drought.  Time after time, we asked them, what does your Shortage Contingency Plan say you will do?  The answer?  They didn’t have a decent Shortage Contingency Plan.  Could we tell them what it should say?

If President Obama was going to back away from a speech about averting world-scaled human catastrophe within the next century, if he was going to back away from an environmentally -themed speech, he could at least have given a progressive speech.  He could have pointed, very directly and step by step, to the consequences of bad governance.  He could have challenged the narrative that government is only a burden.  He could have shown where good governance would have made an incredible difference.  It is hard to see when governance goes right, because deepwater oil rigs are never permitted, and if they are, they have the safeguards they need, and then if something goes wrong, it is contained.

My liberal friends are so thoroughly disheartened by Pres. Obama.  Some feel that his moderation will lead him to maintain the wealth inequities that grew over the Bush years.  Others point to the bailout that supported big banks rather than disassembling them.  There’s no excuse for Pres. Obama’s record on civil rights and privacy.  But.  I’ve been watching the agencies, because I’m a bureaucrat.  What I’ve seen in the agencies is a return to science, a return to regulating pollutants and upholding  labor laws.  Suddenly, the federal agencies are involved in our state processes again, and we’re glad to have them back.  There’s been a void for almost a decade.  Not many people talk about this, but the executive branch of the federal government is coming back to life under Pres. Obama.  Maybe he wants to keep it on the DL.  But as a civil servant, I wish he’d connected the oil spill to the way the agencies have been starved and abused, and told the stories of how agencies can and do make people’s lives better.

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I’ve been slow to weigh-in on Judge Wanger’s most recent decision, because I haven’t read the ruling myself.  As I understand it, Judge Wanger decided that the pumping regime for smelt and salmon was invalid because it was uncertain to restore smelt and salon, and because the agencies hadn’t done an EIS on the human effects of the restricted pumping allowance.  My thoughts:

1.  Sure, whatever.  It is a wet spring and flows are high.  We can probably get away with higher pumping for the time being.  Sadly, as Matt Weiser pointed out, that doesn’t seem to be true for splittail smelt, which are on the verge of being listed themselves.

2.  I was hoping Prof. Doremus would explain the ruling to us, since that is much easier than reading things and understanding them.  My two main questions are:  I thought TVA v. Hill was pretty clear that there is no balancing the human impacts of preserving species.  Is Judge Wanger making shit up creating new law?  Will it stand?  Her quote in this story gets me closer to my other question.  The whole point of NEPA is to force people to take environmental impacts into consideration (although once they’re disclosed, you don’t have to change your plans based on them).  Why should you apply NEPA to actions upholding environmental laws?

Seems to me that tacking NEPA onto the back end of the ESA was Judge Wanger’s attempt to get around the fact that ESA has no balancing mechanism.  He’s been looking for a way to do that for a while, it seems:

When U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger spoke in February at the Madera County Farm Bureau water conference, he explained the restrictions placed on judges by the Endangered Species Act. Once a species is given protection under the act, the government and the courts are obligated to put the needs of that species over the needs of humans.

He was clearly bothered that judges could not balance the competing needs of various parties in ESA cases as they do in other cases. “As a citizen, I ask the rhetorical question: If there isn’t a way to apply balance under the ESA, would it be appropriate to find a way to balance?”

Strange that a judge would understand the requirements of the law that he is enforcing, but look for ways to cancel those, perhaps by tacking a whole different law onto the process.  It is practically activist of him.

3.  Hoooo boy.  Judge Wanger has opened up an entirely new field for competing claims.  He’s going to look back wistfully on the days when all he had to do was figure out the relative causes of fish decline in the Delta.  So easy and straightforward compared to his new vocation: sorting the causes of poverty in the San Joaquin Valley.  I was delighted by this post, and am looking forward to seeing who Judge Wanger selects as his employment and social science technical experts.

4.  I’m curious as well whether Judge Wanger will be giving more definition about which human impacts to consider in writing EIS’s about Biological Opinions.  His focus appears to be on impacts to farmworkers in Westlands Water District.  This would be a curious standard, selecting the injuries to the most vulnerable of the poor to be the standard for balance.  Not the average Californian, who didn’t notice the effects of the pumping restriction?  What about the growers who benefited from pumping restrictions?  Every grower who got a better price for his melons because Westlands planted less had a positive impact.  I suspect that Judge Wanger didn’t think ahead to that, although I’m sure he’ll get to decide the standard for “human impacts” when the EIS is brought straight back to his courtroom.  He probably thought that whomever writes the EIS will make some call about which human impacts to list.

5.  Which brings me to my last thought.  Who the fuck does he think is going to write this EIS that parses out the impacts of different levels of pumping on poor people in Westlands?  I am so curious.  Are NMFS, DWR, the Dept of Fish and Wildlife, NOAA and the Dept of Fish and Game suddenly going to develop extensive sociology expertise?  They are fish scientists!  As a result of his decision, will the major fish agencies have to bring on new staff?  A couple demographers, a historian, an economist and a sociologist or two?  That’s what it would take to provide the “best available science” on human impacts.  Unless you want a bunch of biologists trying to write those up.

Honestly, I think Judge Wanger opened up a whole can of worms, and I doubt he thought through what that would mean to have to analyze and litigate “human impacts” to the extent that species impacts are examined in Biological Opinions.   But those worms are also bucking broncos, and he hopped on.  They’re gonna carry this process down the slippery slope into a whole new swampland of trouble.  He’s on the roller-coaster of unintended consequences now, when all he was really trying to do was avoid the well-established law of the Endangered Species Act saying “no balancing”.  Well, that swarm of angry bees will come back to bite him when the exciting new goldfield of “human impacts” becomes new territory to explore in his courtroom.  Hope he enjoys his new expertise.

LATER:  minor edits for wording.

From Ms. Fiorina’s water issues page:

As chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer has the power to help turn the situation around. Yet, despite her willingness to help the people of New Mexico when they faced a similar situation in 2003, Barbara Boxer has repeatedly refused to take the pragmatic steps necessary to get water flowing again. She voted against a water amendment that would have temporarily allowed water to flow to California’s farmland and homes, and she continues to prioritize a small fish ahead of the livelihoods of California’s farmers and farm workers.

I have no doubt that talk like that gives Republicans in the San Joaquin Valley hard-ons, but notice that Ms. Fiorina only talks about what Sen. Boxer hasn’t done.  Notice that Ms. Fiorina isn’t talking about what she will do if she is elected.  That is because she can’t.  To “turn the pumps back on” (an inaccurate phrase), Ms. Fiorina would have to get a modification of the Endangered Species Act past the Senate, the House, and Pres. Obama.   Despite what Republicans want to hear, that isn’t going to happen.  House Representatives from the Valley have been trying to do that for years, with zero success.  They’ve made themselves into jokes trying to get that done.  Just three months ago, Diane Feinstein found out what fury she can stir up by trying to short circuit parts of the Endangered Species Act.

Further, Ms. Fiorina is running for a state office and there’s much more to the state than Westlands.  The only reason she thinks a California senator can deliver more water to “the farms” is that she has no idea what she’s talking about.  She’s ignorant of everything water but Republican polling that shows big results from mentioning “farm water”.  So she doesn’t know that if she starts pulling levers and blundering about, she’ll inevitably piss off vocal Delta interests, or farmers in the Sac Valley, or heaven forbid, Metropolitan Water District and ACWA.

If she’s elected, she’ll be a Senator.  She won’t be God, so she can’t make it rain more.  She can’t turn back climate change or restore a wet hydrology.  She can try to throw a bomb at the Endangered Species Act, but she’ll find out that Californians love it after all.  She’d also find out that when they aren’t hiding behind farmworkers, the growers in Westlands are thought of as unsympathetic agribusiness corporations, a la Reisner.  All she could do is go along with the painfully slow processes that Reclamation is developing, and support all the different Delta restoration processes.

I’d love to hear some genuine water policies from Ms. Fiorina.  But she doesn’t have them, because this is a tangled field and the knots are drawn tight.  If she does offer something substantive, we’ll talk about it here.  I don’t suppose I want to go look at Ms. Whitman’s water page, do I?  These three posts will probably cover it equally well.

Here are the two pieces of Ms. Fiorina’s water policy that I could find. In her debate challenge to Sen. Boxer:

The Republican, however, made one debate demand, that they schedule one meeting in Mendota in the Central Valley, “where unemployment is skyrocketing because the federal government has decided that families don’t need water.”

Her water issues page on her campaign website:

“Bringing relief to the thousands of California farmers and farm workers who are out of work and also to the many other family-owned, agriculture businesses in the Central Valley due to the water crisis is one of my highest priorities.” – Carly Fiorina

Nearly 40,000 of our fellow Californians are out of work in the Central Valley because of our state’s urgent water crisis, and job losses will only increase unless the U.S. Senate acts now to turn the pumps back on. While the Central Valley is disproportionally impacted by this water shortage, our water crisis is having a serious impact across the state and threatens the water supply to tens of millions of Southern Californians.

As chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer has the power to help turn the situation around. Yet, despite her willingness to help the people of New Mexico when they faced a similar situation in 2003, Barbara Boxer has repeatedly refused to take the pragmatic steps necessary to get water flowing again. She voted against a water amendment that would have temporarily allowed water to flow to California’s farmland and homes, and she continues to prioritize a small fish ahead of the livelihoods of California’s farmers and farm workers.

That’s what we’re working with until we get more detailed policy pages. I look forward to those, because like many Republican talking heads, Ms. Fiorina has apparently decided that the only thing that is important in California water is what happens in Westlands Water District. No policy statements about any other water issues for any other Californians. You live in a city that is facing rate hikes because of deferred maintenance, drought and population pressures? So far, she hasn’t said what she’d do. Delta residents, are you mad about the state of the Sacramento River and scared about a Peripheral Canal? You already know that she only perceives the problems of Westlands. Salmon fisherman, do you want to know her program to revitalize fish stocks? She hasn’t said. People dependent on the Colorado and interested in the Salton Sea, she hasn’t shown any interest in your issues either, but there I’m sympathetic because man alive is that stuff boring I haven’t focused on that system either.

She said “…the federal government has decided that families don’t need water”.

By that does she mean, the unanimous vote of the U.S. Congress to pass the ESA three decades ago? Does she mean the single federal judge in Fresno who is upholding the ESA? Judge Wanger didn’t decide that “families don’t need water.” He decided that pumping was illegally taking endangered fish, and slowed the pumps down when fish are near the pumps. I don’t have to add this for this audience, but I will. No one went without drinking water because of this decision. No families had their living water turned off. Some farms (many of which are huge corporations) didn’t get enough water to irrigate their entire tens of thousands of acres. This is not quite the same as families not getting water, which actually looks like this. (I’m sure the Latino Water Coalition will address the issue of nitrates in drinking water any minute now, and senators who are newly fascinated by poverty in the San Joaquin Valley will get right to work on the problem.)

On her issues page, Ms. Fiorina goes on to attack Sen. Boxer’s handling of the pumping restrictions, in rhetoric that will be familiar to the Republican base in the Valley, but explain very little to anyone who isn’t a water junkie. She never says the words “Endangered Species Act”, even though that (and climate change-induced water scarcity) are the heart of the issue. Her current issues language makes it seem as if Sen. Boxer is acting on whim, because her issues page doesn’t mention the reasons for conflict.

There’s no sophistication in Ms. Fiorina’s water issues page, and no content besides a very Republican focus on a very small piece of California’s water situation, where large corporations have exploited the image of farmworkers to try to secure a supply of irrigation water. That isn’t too surprising. Ms. Fiorina came from a tech background and hasn’t learned about water issues*. I can’t blame her for that, but then it surprises me that her very first words were about debating in Mendota, because of the poor farmworkers. I know that has been a rallying cry for Valley Republicans and very motivating for that base. But she’s got nothing underneath that talking point, nothing at all. She’s bluffing in an extremely complicated field that a subset of Californians are very knowledgeable and opinionated about. Seems like a bad strategy for her to bring it up front and center.

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The new Republican candidate for Senate, Carly Fiorina, answered Senator Boxer’s call for debates as follows:

“Barbara, I’ll debate you anytime anywhere. As far as I’m concerned, we can debate once a week.”

The Republican, however, made one debate demand, that they schedule one meeting in Mendota in the Central Valley,”where unemployment is skyrocketing because the federal government has decided that families don’t need water.”

Aw man. The very first thing out of her mouth on the very first day? Brace yourself, water people. This is going to be a theme, and we’re going to be hearing this crap all the way through November. If I were a conscientious blogger, I’d do a nice round-up post specifically addressing that meme. Prof. Michael, you are going to be busy for the next few months. You might want to compose a stock answer for journalists that you can send out rapidly.

Here, mainstream journalists that Ms. Fiorina is dragging into the debate over water. Some posts on the persistent Republican memes in the debate last year.

On food scarcity and Communist carrots:

This one arose out of one picture of a food line in Mendota with a can of carrots labeled “from China”. It has no relation to our actual carrot (or food) production. Real reporters, there is accurate data about the acreages of food crops in California; it is in a nicely searchable online database maintained by the USDA. Search here for California data and do not write false stories about the threat to our food security. If Ms. Fiorina tries to make this part of her campaign, point out that she is wrong. If she says it again after that, point out that she is lying about easily verifiable facts.

(If you find yourself swayed because hundreds of thousands of acres sounds like a lot, read this. CA agriculture is so big that hundreds of thousands of acres aren’t very much.)

Thousands of families out of work:

I’m going to point you to Prof. Michael and the extensive debate over the job figures.

Can I just say? All this interest in poverty on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is great. I am so glad our senators and potential senators have decided this is a major focus. But those towns have been feudal fiefdoms for the past hundred years. Read The King of California for a description, or Goldschmidt’s 1944 study comparing towns on the east and west sides of the Valley. Feinstein and Fiorina all of a sudden care about farm laborers on the west side now? The only thing that has changed is that wealthy farming operations and their hired public relations firms have decided to co-opt the image of farm laborers to achieve their political goals of securing water by gutting the ESA.

Mostly I’m bummed because we’re going to have to hear this for months, after hearing it all last year. Did the spring rains bring us no relief ?

I love how audacious C-WIN is, and am glad they’re out there.  They’re taking on the right issues, and often go straight to the heart of them.  These are all from memory, so I don’t know if I have them exactly right, but suing the State Board to define and enforce reasonable and beneficial use, challenging the big project contracts, getting DWR to take environmental documentation seriously  –those are all great.  I would love it if they could wrest the Kern Water Bank back from private ownership.  They’re right; the state should own and operate that reservoir.  I love that they’re raising the real hard questions and I usually hope they’ll win.  I don’t even mind that they’re litigious; bad as courts are for deciding complex multi-party questions, it isn’t like we’ve got a better forum here.

That said, their legal complaints kinda kill me.   I’m not a lawyer and they are, so presumably they know what they’re doing better than I do.  They’ve won a fair number of their CEQA cases, I believe.  But when their grounds for complaint is, like, the Constitution, dude, I start thinking about pro se defendents waving a copy of the Bill of Rights at a judge.  “It says right here…”  They may well be right that some of our big practices aren’t Constitutional.  But they are well ingrained.  Getting a judge to up-end big pieces of our system sounds hard, especially on broad Constitutional principles.  Glad they’re doing the work, but it looks like an uphill battle to me.

My Dad once told me that the only thing anyone ever manages is risk. You see that here, in this story about uncertainty and Westlands. The lede:

Like many Central Valley farmers, Todd Allen says it’s the unpredictability of his water supply that causes the most damage.

You know, Mr. Allen doesn’t have to be uncertain about his water supply. He could look at historic supplies and see that Westlands has always gotten at least ten percent of contract allotments. He could plant to match that ten percent and never worry again. (Actually, he can’t, because climate change will introduce even more variability than we’ve seen this decade. But, for the next couple decades, he can probably be sure of at least ten percent.) But what Mr. Allen wants is something different. He wants enough water to plant most of his acreage, and he wants certainty. He wants to offload that risk; in real life, without legal protection, the fish would feel the brunt of that variability. Bummer that Mr. Allen has to live his life during the transition period for climate change. He (and the rest of us) will feel the effects of increased variability first hand.

Allen is a mid-sized producer of lower-value crops on land whose productivity is further impacted by drainage problems. With transferred water known to cost up to $500 an acre-foot and a new well more than $500,000, he took the realistic option and reduced his production to 40 acres of wheat.

Soon Westlands’ attorneys were calling to add his story to court briefings challenging the bio-ops. Wanger pointed out Allen’s example in his May 27 ruling on flow restrictions protecting salmon, saying such human impacts — along with pollutants entering the waterway, along with other possible stressors — were missing from the agencies’ documents.

It is kindof bullshit to come in as junior contractors, explicitly accepting a risk regime, then later complain that you can’t manage the variability. That was what they bargained for when they started. They got used to more supplies under a governing regime that was willing to shunt that variability to the Delta, but a few years of regular supplies, even decades of them, shouldn’t become the new standard of acceptable risk for them. High risk activities suck, but the appropriate response is to recognize what you’re working with and not allow yourself to depend on them. That type of farming operation should only ever have been bonus, bonus production when the water is high. Mr. Allen is looking at the right response, although he probably doesn’t like it.

Allen said he was building a promising future, having upgraded irrigation equipment and purchased new land in the past few years. He wasn’t expecting such an impact from something beyond his control.

“I was really starting to turn the corner, and all of a sudden … I feel like I’m being punished and I’ve done nothing wrong,” Allen said. “Now I’m thinking about getting another career going in case this falls apart.”

Yes. He needs something stable to support his family, which being the junior contractor wasn’t ever and especially will not be from here on out. It is a shame that he didn’t understand the risk regime he entered, and gambled on more reliability than was ever there. It is even more of a shame that he feels victimized. I hope he understands that he’s in the vise of big forces, and doesn’t direct that at any particular person (like a judge, say).  What he did wrong was believe that what he observed around him was guaranteed by something (if nothing more than his lived experience).  It is a human mistake to make, but the same big forces will inexorably exact the full cost of that error.

Man, all the news stories are dull these days. Is this what blogging in a normal water year is going to be like?

I am working on several posts on water and markets. One day you’ll come by and see eight posts at once. If you have questions on water and markets, now is a good time to ask them.