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Of course, I would just use my power to call someone a goatblower, but is good that real authors are making better use of our freedom to offend.

Dear Mr. Weiser,

I write to inform you that at 9:20 this evening, Tuesday the 30th of March, the sprinklers at the Sacramento Bee (east side island strip) were on during the rain.  I trust you would want to know, and will discuss the matter with the groundskeepers immediately.  These things happen to the best of us; there’s no shame in an honest mistake, although I myself have unplugged my sprinkler controller to prevent exactly this occurrence.  It is early in the year for automatic sprinkler operations, wouldn’t you say?  I wish you the best of luck and hope you get good cooperation in your efforts to correct the Bee’s practices.

As ever, I remain, your humble and obedient servant,

On the Public Record

This op-ed in the Orange County Register was helpful.  I can understand most interest-based positions, like people in the Delta thinking that through-Delta conveyance will be an implicit guarantee for their levees, or homeowners wanting to pretend that aging water mains will last forever or cost nothing to replace.  So if you’re a water contactor or an urban water user, I can take a rough guess at your position on water.  But I have a real hard time understanding water positions based on mainstream conservative/liberal ideologies.   They aren’t usually responding to a detailed water landscape.  They’re responding to imaginary things (Reisner for the liberals; FoxNews for the conservatives), so they say things about water that sound crazy to people who know about water*.   Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m the demon liberal in that op-ed, so it was good to understand his picture of me.  My dear readers, please don’t be shocked when I tell you that it is not a perfect match for my actual beliefs, here in the intersection of Liberal and Water.

This purposeful drying up of the San Joaquin Valley is part of a “green utopian experiment,” House argued. Since 1992, state policy has been pulling more and more water out of agricultural uses and diverting it to environmental protection. “They just keep coming at you.”

Environmentalists couldn’t care less about the smelt, a little bait fish. They will use any species or any excuse to shut down water resources to people and the farms that feed people. Environmentalists love doomsday scenarios, which give them the opportunity to control water (or land) to achieve their real goal of limiting growth and constraining the human use of nature. They want people to be crammed into high-density human islands and the rest of the land preserved under tight government control.

First things first.  Actually, I care about the smelt itself.  I don’t expect to see one, but I don’t have to see a fish to know that it is there, living a busy fish life and adding darting little glints of life to marshy sloughs.  I want the creatures of our world to be thriving on their own terms, because that’s how it was before people started messing with it.  When I hear that species are threatened, I want to know why humans had to go breaking something, and what good we got for the trouble we’ve caused to the beings around us.

Attributing doomsday scenarios to environmentalists is another interesting twist.  Seems like lots of people in water politics have done that recently.  I bring up severe climate change impacts to suggest that we would prefer a planned transition to much less California ag to an unplanned freefall.  I also invoke great big floods and old levees to say that the Delta won’t remain as is for long, and to promote my view that we should not rely on it for drinking water (and that people shouldn’t trust their lives to a Delta levee).  But I’m a mild optimist compared to people who are trying to eke political gain from drought and pumping water restrictions in isolated areas of the San Joaquin Valley.   Those are the people saying things like “dust bowl”, talking about a food crisis, desertification, and dead orchards.  They’re the ones who have to convince voters that a fairly normal agricultural year was so horrific that a Peripheral Canal is necessary.

Mostly, I wanted to object to that last sentence about cramming people into high-density human islands with the rest of the land under tight government control.  Well, of course I want that, but he’s forgetting the working landscapes aspect of California.  As a good hippie, I also want to eat local produce.  Which means I want local farms.  A lot of them, actually.  Since I’m so urban and effete, I’d like to see those farms worked by people who live in adorable towns that I can drive through along the 99.  I’d like to see farms that can keep a stable income for farm families, and support farmworkers in a lifestyle that I would recognize as first world.   Because I’m such a bleeding heart, I’d even pay more for my food if it accomplished those two things.  Seriously, Mr. Conservative-thinker-who-is-describing-an-environmental-despot, I have bigger plans than Urban Arks in the midst of Untouched Habitat.  When we shaded the maps for the Green Utopia, we definitely colored in Hippie Organic Farming, and lots of it.

I had one other big objection to the op-ed, because this just kills me.

Maybe it’s telling that this “era of limits” nonsense is taking hold again as the state prepares for a possible return to the governorship of Jerry Brown, who first put these dubious ideas into practice during his 1975-83 administration.

The concept that we’re in an era of limits is nonsense to this guy?  You know, I fault the old-school engineers for over-reliance on concrete, but actual engineers and scientists don’t ignore data the way ideologues do.  I’m sure that I wouldn’t agree with everything someone from the State Water Contractors is promoting.  But if we sat down and looked at overdraft in the west Valley, they wouldn’t pretend to me that subsidence isn’t a problem.  They wouldn’t say there is no limit to what you can pull out of an aquifer, that the ground isn’t falling.  They wouldn’t say that the falling ground isn’t cracking the Delta-Mendota Canal.  They are real sure about the costs of changing run-off patterns and losing snowpack. 

Which is why ideologues aren’t real interesting to people in the field.  People who’ve learned a whole lot and put a lot of time into protecting their interests in this complicated system can’t believe an ideologue that contradicts their experience.  Even the strokes from hearing someone confirm your biases don’t feel that good when the same person talks crazytalk in the next sentence.  It is hard enough to talk to laypeople about Water.  Talking to laypeople who are trying to cram the whole topic into some other arbitrary framing is that much more dissonant. 

Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking about subsidence and the damage it does to infrastructure, like the Delta-Mendota Canal and Highway 5. You know what would be handy? A law saying that if the ground level drops some amount (like, say ten feet) due to subsidence, all groundwater pumping in that aquifer should be immediately stopped until the ground surface level above that aquifer comes back up.

Then I got to wondering who pays for the costs of infrastructure repair due to subsidence for overpumping. I bet the State Water Contractors pay for repairs to the Delta-Mendota Canal, so that strikes me as their own private business. But if I were CalTrans, I’d want someone to pay me back for the cost of repairs to Highway 5 and its overpasses. I think the people pumping groundwater so fast that they’re lowering the roadbeds would be good people to pay for the damages they cause to the roads of the state. Can’t see why the larger public should have to pay for that.

LAO’s gw report is out. Didn’t say anything shocking.

There’s a fairly well established way to distribute a small amount of a desired good, right? Cap annual gw withdrawals at annual sustainable yield (minus necessary re-charge) and let in-basin water users trade for pieces of that quantity?

Haven’t seen discussion of cap-and-trade systems for groundwater anywhere, but it does seem like the locally controlled option that people say they want.

Newspaper comment sections are a vile cesspool, we all know that.  So I’ll freely admit I’m showing the worst case scenario.  But look at this, from the Bee, whose comment section makes me despair of my neighbors:

That a certain amount of self-interest will skew the findings of this panel of “experts” is predictible – and inevitable.

Similarly, the power and prestige – say nothing of budgetary concerns – of the government agencies who fund such studies is heavily dependent upon the corrupt panels of “experts” conducting such studies lending legitimacy to the funding agency’s agenda.

***
Just because a bunch of grant money hungry second-rate scientists say something is true and terrible, we shouldn’t believe them without solid and peer-reviewed proof. These bozos who have never done a day’s work in their lives are just like politicians: liars, cheats, thieves, and self-interested men and women. Be very cautious and skeptical of what they proclaim as truth. Look behind the curtain to ascertain who is speaking and what agenda they are promoting for personal interests. The more they shout “Armageddon”, the more restraint you must exercise.

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The biological opinions are the scientific equivilent of political slush fund. As usual, follow the money trail. The panel agrees the unmanageable is an appropriate alternative, but more research is needed. Hmmm… This is code for I do not have my next research grant, but this seems like an opportunity.

It would be informative to know the composition of the panel and their areas of expertise. It would also be informative to know how many of the scientists have received grant money and/or paid or unpaid consulting contracts, etc.

This is what I predicted. The NAS review didn’t change anything about the political landscape here. The only new element in the conversation is libel directed against the Delta National Research Committee. That wasn’t in the air before Sen. Feinstein brought them into this. She was relying on their extremely good reputation, and now she’s dinged it, just a little bit. She’s willing to trade pieces of their reputation for a process that weakens the ESA (although it strengthens the reputation of FWS scientists, who had their Biological Opinion right) and hasn’t changed the infighting here. If I were the National Academy of Science, I’d be pissed at being her pawn.

Mr. Mark’s question is perfect; interesting topic and I can speculate wildly. Thanks. He asks:

Okay, here’s a philosophical one I suppose. Just asking for pure speculation on your part, wild extrapolation into the future. I believe that in the current — and likely future — political climate in California, the chances of any of various things that I would term “completely ridiculous” coming to pass, e.g. raising the level of Shasta Dam and flooding the Upper Sac for miles up towards Dunsmuir, or the construction of the proposed Auburn Dam, are extremely unlikely; at least I want to believe that this is so.

On the other hand, and this is my question, do you personally believe there is any remote chance that, say, in the next 30 years, the political/social climate in California might be such that one of any number of what I would term “ridiculously great things for the environment” might actually come to pass? To take a specific example, do believe that the water which is currently stolen from the Trinity watershed and sent over into the Sac Valley will ever be allowed to flow down its natural course to the Pacific? Is there any chance that something this obvious could become a priority for the body politic in California? What would it take for this to become reality? There are many other examples, of course, but this one has been on my mind lately, for some reason or another.

I don’t know, man. Last year salmon returned to the Seine, and just this week, the San Joaquin River re-joined the Pacific for the first time in 50 years.  Those are pretty outrageous things, yet both happened.  So it is possible.

I agree with your guesses about what is likely in the short term.  I don’t expect CA to build any big storage, primarily because it is expensive for very little yield.  The only big project that I see as possible is a Peripheral Canal (perhaps the small one the Planning and Conservation League is saying should be studied), and that’s because I simply cannot imagine Southern California letting their water supplies depend on weak Delta levees indefinitely.  For the next five to ten years, being broke will be a good line of defense against big marginal water projects (and all remaining dam sites are marginal.  If they were good, there’d be dams on them already.)

But what about prospects for the long run?  In favor of outrageously good things for the environment:

New governor next year might remind the state that we’re Democrats, and proud to be environmentalists.  He could set a new tone, and I’m encouraged that Jerry Brown’s been pretty active on forcing cities to incorporate greenhouse gas mitigation into their general plans.  The agencies might be a whole lot different under a Democratic governor.  Schwarzenegger hasn’t been as bad as he might have been, more erratic than consistently destructive, but if you remember, wild-eyed crazy enviroguy Jonas Minton was a deputy director in DWR during the last Democratic administration.  So there’s precedent for the agencies to be a whole lot different.  Eight years of an environmentalist governor could start a lot of trends in motion.

If you want to know what drastic project might happen in thirty years, the time to start looking at rumors and crazytalk is now.  I’ve come to believe that big shifts take twenty years from being crazytalk to institutionalized.  Pipedream grad student seminars are a good place to look; when those poor saps are broken upper managers, they can put their ideas in place. 

I think generational succession will boost the state’s environmentalist thinking.  I’ll be glad to see the single purpose engineers retire out of the field.  I mean, I love the square old guys, but they were never flexible thinkers, you know.  They want to optimize One Thing, and overbuild while they’re at it.  I think the Kids These Days have more capacity to hold multiple goals in their heads and more willingness to try different strategies.

Neutral, but possibly influential:

We’re in a turbulent period and I cannot predict the alliances any more.  If anything, I’m expecting to see more “every man for himself”, and less of agriculture or urban coalitions acting as a block.  This may mean that you aren’t going to see “ag” determine policy for much longer, since they’ll be squabbling amongst themselves.

Against the possibility of extravagently wonderful environmental restorations:

We’re about to be poor.  Much poorer.  We were optimized to the old climate and living off mined wealth.  With both those ending, a whole bunch of things are going to get more expensive in tandem (gas prices, water prices, sewage prices, firefighting costs, food costs, moving goods, cooling costs in summer, moving seaside infrastructure), although probably not communications, electronics and health costs.  But people will see more of their income go to daily non-discretionary goods.  They will feel (and be) poorer, and then I think there will be a big fork in the road.  The thing that will matter is how scared they feel.

If they correctly perceive themselves as getting poorer, and our mega-policies don’t change, they will be rightly scared.  They’ll be scared of getting sick or injured.  They’ll be scared of losing their houses.  They’ll feel trapped and vulnerable and nothing will yield, not their water bill, not their gas bill, not their mortgage.  That kind of scared makes people mean, selfish and shortsighted.  They’re not going to care about making some river they can’t afford to visit look pretty.

But if our society re-installs its social net, our society could get poorer and people will yet know they will not die of untreated dentistry, that they can take their babies into the doctor, that they can send their kids to a university, they can get out of their cars and take light rail.  Being poorer is likely to mean living in smaller places and eating less meat, but it doesn’t have to mean falling out of the middle class.  If we can get on that path, then people can have the expansiveness of spirit to be stewards.  In that spirit, who knows what they’ll decide.  Maybe they’ll want to know that northern rivers run to the sea undisturbed by us.

I’ll take questions, if anyone has them. Although who knows if the thoughts they prompt will address the question. SWP and CVP territory only, please. I don’t know any other systems well enough to opine.

Stories saying that internalizing negative environmental externalities imposes direct costs on the users do not get my sympathy.

It is hard to know whether Representative Devin Nunes writes his blog himself.  The posts are all in the first person singular, and one should assume that someone claiming to write a blog is the real author.  On the other hand, don’t elected people have staff for stuff like this?  And he writes pretty good for an ag business major with a masters in agriculture.  I sat in a lot of classes with ag majors and I didn’t come away thinking of them as writers.  I wonder because I found his recent post deeply strange, and wanted to talk about what  it reveals of the author.

First, the title:
Unnatural Greenies: The Two Faces of Radical Environmentalism

“Radical environmentalism” is an attempt at a new catchphrase, right?  I’ve seen it around more in the past six months.  I’m not sure what it is supposed to convey.  Some combination of the Earth Liberation Front and Center for Biological Diversity, only in body paint?  Is it in implied contrast to mainstream environmentalism, which the speaker can mostly accept, so long as it sticks to anti-litter campaigns and de-oiling birds?  Supposed to imply that the speaker is reasonable and could treat with reasonable environmentalists, but not these radical ones?  The opener, “Unnatural greenies”, only reinforces that, although I suspect it is more supposed to be clever.  Like, greenies are supposed to be “natural”, but these aren’t, get it?  Heh heh.

The first paragraph shows an apocalyptic view of the conflict.  If the radical environmentalists get their way, the SJV will be transformed into desert.  The whole thing.  Nothing but dunes, from Sierra to Coast Range.  Well, far as I know, I’m making the most radical predictions on the water blogs, and my prediction is that we’ll lose 3 million acres of ag in the next several decades, out of 10 million acres of ag in the state (from reduced runoff from climate change).  Further, I think ag could stabilize with a robust east side industry, which is Nunes’ own district.  (Besides, if I got my own radical way, (parts of) the SJV would return to grasslands and seasonal marsh, not desert.)  But, the author of that blog post thinks that he is battling against desertification of the whole San Joaquin Valley.

Then comes my favorite paragraph:

To this end, environmental radicals, operating in the name of Gaia, Mother Earth, the wiccan religion and a host of other cult-like organizations, have litigated, legislated and extorted away the water needed for San Joaquin Valley communities.

This is who Rep. Nunes thinks makes up the environmental community?  What? I have to make a list.

• First, I’m pretty unhappy with the imputation of false gods.  Now, I don’t think it is an insult to say that someone worships something besides an Abrahamic god, but my understanding is that from within narrow-minded sections of Abrahamic faiths, accusing people of serving other gods is a serious business. Thou shalt worship no other, and all that.  The author is throwing around serious charges, and I don’t know if it is worse if he means it or is spewing the garble in his head.
• The gods listed are Gaia, Mother Earth and hilariously, wicca.  This list, all female, sounds to me like a very, very short step away from calling environmentalists “uppity women.”  It also makes me wonder what powerful woman could be haunting the author.
• Doesn’t this sound like small-minded rural folks talking about the scary (unnatural) people in the big cities?  Does the author look on LA and SF and see cult-captured freaks?  Is that why he doesn’t see urban environmentalists as reasoning opposition?  They’re crazy even aside from wanting to turn the Valley into deserts!
• The only pagan anything I’ve heard about in ages is the Winnemem Wintu prayer at the Salmonid conference.  Don’t know if that’s what set off Rep. Nunes, but if it wasn’t that prayer, that means he thinks of enviros as deeply Other all the time.  Suspicious, chick, urban Others.  Radical.  Unnatural.

The third paragraph is interesting; it confirms my earlier take on Westlands’ maneuvering.

Yet despite their ability to command the agenda of our government through powerful alliances in Congress, none of the endangered fish have shown signs of recovery.

From within the House of Representatives, Rep. Nunes (or his staffer and blog writer) believes enviros command the agenda of our government and are powerfully allied in Congress.  This is a Congressperson writing this; he must feel stymied. No wonder Westlands is doing inexplicable thrashing about.  D.C. is not going to overturn the Endangered Species Act for a couple hundred thousand acres of farmland in California.

The rest of Rep. Nune’s post spins off into ornate and oddly emotional gotcha arguments, easily refuted by editorials like this one.  But I’m left with one last question.  To whom is Rep. Nunes addressing this post?  Who is the audience for such a peculiar view of “radical environmentalists”?  Are there still peasants out there, willing to hear accusations that the enemy is, literally, witches?  This can’t be a persuasion piece, because it isn’t reaching out to the opposition.  If it is trying to reach neutral masses, the first two paragraphs won’t be like the enviros they know, and the end of it sounds like walking in on an old fight, where the arguments have gotten too complicated to follow.  So it has to be a piece for his allies, to confirm biases and give talking points.  But he is misleading his own allies.  If this is who Rep. Nunes thinks is after San Joaquin Valley water, he has missed about 95% of the complexity of the conflict.  He got the other 5% wrong.