Category Archives: Uncategorized

Don’t remember why I was googling Del Puerto WD, but something about this satellite view grabbed me. The redundant street view, perhaps.

Hey, Alex Breitler at the Stockton Record?  I really do like your work, and I read your articles extra carefully.  You’re the only mainstream journalist I can think of who covers water* from within the Delta.  One of your stories gave me the lead-in for what I still think is the best post I’ve written here.

But I’m not going to pay for a subscription, so I can’t read your stories any more.  Now I will know less about the in-Delta perspective on meetings.  I won’t be linking to the Record anymore, so you’ll lose at least half a dozen hits.  Maybe you could tell your editors that this move will shut you out of the blog discussion circuit.  And isolate the Delta voice a little more.  Or give Aquafornia permission to quote your articles in full?  Aquafornia might as well, since we can’t click through anyway.  Don’t know.  But the subscription model doesn’t mesh with my blogging approach (read all the news stories until something strikes me) and the small blog niche.

More:

I know that newspapers are looking for a solution and trying out different models; I don’t have anything constructive to suggest.  But if each newspaper unilaterally requires a subscription, I’ll just give up on that as a reading/blogging source.  I don’t care enough to pay for any one of them.  Not for news about a meeting or an update on a political event. 

If all the newspapers switched at once, I’d have to think about it more.  I might choose one, or hope for an aggregator.  (Speaking of which, I’m curious about what the DWR WATER NEWS will do.  If they drop the Stockton Record too, I think in-Delta water reporting will have lost a big amplifier.)  If I can’t go to newspapers?  I don’t know.  Go to the next free source.  Posted public comments?  Other blogs?  Those have a punishing signal to noise ratio, but I’m still not going to pay money for something I once got for free.

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What I first noticed about this press release from the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta is that it is really hard to read.  Seven prepositional phrases in the first sentence?  Why do you hate your readers?  Then I laughed at the loaded phrasing.  Calling the review panel “elite” within one word?  Sure, they are, but that’s a lot of brown-nosing so early on, although I suppose they don’t lay it on thick until the second sentence.  Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, have you given any thought to what you are going to do if this all backfires on you?  What if the NAS review says the Biological Opinion is solid?  That reducing pumping and increasing in-Delta flows is the best way Science  knows to protect the Smelt, although Sacramento should also treat its wastewater to a higher standard?  Then you’ll be in the same situation, but the Biological Opinion will have the backing of the “nation’s most esteemed science body” and the Sacramento region will hate you. This plan might not work out for you.

My next thought was, “Michael Boccadoro?  Who is Michael Boccadoro?”  These days it takes about two seconds to find someone with an unusual name, and look!  Here’s Michael, at the Dolphin Group.  The Dolphin Group?  I love dolphins!  Dolphins and nature!  I bet Michael loves nature.  Oh.  Huh.  Maybe not so much.  Looks like he loves Philip Morris and Altria, lying about smoking bans and creating racist attack ads.  Well, I suppose someone has to be the hired flack for a fake “ad hoc group of water users who depend on conveyance through the Delta for a large portion of their water supplies.”  While we’re poking around the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta page, I wonder who it belongs to.  Whois could probably tell me.  If you look up sustainabledelta.com, you get a Laura Kistner.  She’s kinda shy; she hid her organization behind a proxy.  But a Laura Kistner works for the Dolphin Group, so I’m going to guess it is the same one.  I wonder what it costs to buy the whole package, an “ad hoc group of water users”, a spokesperson and a website for your pretend group.  How nice to have a lobbying firm that will sell the whole thing to you.

(I have to say, the Dolphin Group website cracked me up itself.  The stock photos, man.  So many beautiful white people, dressed in suits and listening attentively.  In fact, there isn’t a single non-white person in any photo.  That’s a little odd. These days we’re supposed to show token beautiful ethnic people (but not too many!) dressed in suits and listening attentively.  Why are the Dolphin Group pictures so damn white?  Because they don’t even think about the issue?  Because that’s what their clients want to see?)

While we’re on the topic of websites, it is the regret of my blogging career that I never grabbed screenshots of the fake Latino Water Coalition website (gotwater.org).  I wish I had; the Wayback Machine doesn’t have much of it.  I meant to do a full deconstruction: militaristic grey and white template, no Spanish anywhere, thin content.  But the site is gone now.  Whois says gotwater.org was registered to Daniel Kahn of the California Water Association.  Hey, lobbying firms that make up fake groups of concerned citizens?  Why is your work so fucking transparent?  Don’t you owe your clients better?  Convincing looking websites?  A spokesperson’s name that takes more than two seconds to google?  Are they not paying you enough for that?)

Anyway, I have two more thoughts on the NAS review.

First, no one should forget that this was Dick Cheney’s tactic from the Klamath.  I was afraid it would set a precedent, and using it for more situations is exactly the sort of normalization I feared.  Sen. Feinstein, I don’t care what your rationalizations are.  When you do what Dick Cheney does, you aren’t acting like a Democrat.  Only the reputation of the National Academy of Sciences is protecting you now, but you risk bringing them down with you if their decision counters a Biological Opinion that already passed through two reviews.  You would think the National Academy of Sciences would refuse to be used in such a blatantly partisan way; you’d think they’d want to protect their reputation better.

Second, I know at least one person on the NAS panel is reading this, and now I’m talking directly to him.  What you are doing damages the Endangered Species Act.  You can say anything you want about Science in your head, but you are taking part in a process that weakens the ESA.  There is a legal way to challenge a Biological Opinion. That is to take it to court, where a judge decides if it is “arbitrary and capricious.”  That is the established place and level of review of a Biological Opinion, and this one has met that.  These two politically motivated NAS reviews are starting to create a new standard for biological opinions, in which they have provide the best science in the world to the satisfaction of the National Academy of Sciences.  That is never what the law has been.

Maybe you, panel member, don’t like the ESA as configured, or want to undermine the law for some reason.  In which case, this is all fine for you.  But if you believe in the Endangered Species Act and want to uphold it, you now know that you are acting in a way that hurts it.  You, personally, are actively part of breaking the ESA.  You should feel dissonance; you should reconcile your actions and your beliefs about the ESA.  If you avoid this question, you will be a smaller person.

Just listened to the High Country News interview with Matt Jenkins*.  No surprises until about minute 12, when the interviewer asked Jenkins if any agency at any level is addressing the issue of population.  Jenkins said no, which isn’t quite right.  The 2009 California Water Plan, written by DWR, is broaching the matter in the most discreet and non-suggestive way possible, and denying that they mean anything at all by it if you ask them directly.  It is all extremely coy.  But, when they project future demand, they model demand for three scenarios (pgs 14-15).  The three scenarios have different land use patterns (from dense to sprawling) and three populations (from 45 million to 70 million people, up from 38 million now).  The models show that demand is lower in the denser, lower population future.  (Climate change increases demand in all three scenarios.  The 2013 Update should have supply numbers to pair with those demand numbers.)

Now, DWR does not mean to suggest anything by that.  They would never.  It is not the jurisdiction of the water department to make such personal and touchy policy recommendations.  That would be wrong!  The legislature should do that!  Or maybe no one should! It should happen however fate intends!  However, DWR cannot help but notice that demand would be lower if there are fewer people in 2050.  They would be more than happy to show you how they modeled that.  Modeling is within their expertise; touchy population issues are definitely not.  They draw no conclusions whatsoever.  None.

So it isn’t quite right to say that no CA water agencies are addressing the population issue.  The state water plan is broaching it in the most oblique and circumspect way possible.  You know, it is easy to overlook the water plan.  It is big, and hasn’t come out in four years, and there’s a lot of political code in there.  But it is the plan for what the state should do with water for the next forty years, and it addresses a whole lot of what is going on.

***

This is a fantastic opinion piece on how municipal water districts overstate their water supply so that they can permit more development.  It is relatively new that districts have to show supply for large developments (>500 houses) at all.  But they do, and are apparently using imaginary water for some of it.  I’m not really in favor of arrangements that permit more sub-divisions, but I have also thought that is is fundamentally irresponsible that cities might not have water for their people.  That’s one of the reasons I think people should have individual rights in water.  If you move to a new city, your 30 gallons of water a day comes with you.  (That’s a small drinking and bathing allotment, much less than people use now.  More than that is optional, quality of life type-stuff, and cities can scrounge for it as they can.)  We’ve got enough plumbing to achieve that.  Since cities are told by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment that they must build housing to accommodate more people, essential water for those people should come with them.

Also, I hear rumors that the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research is maybe making (suggesting?) cities have a water chapter in their General Plan.  But I just told you everything I know on that.

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I’m so entertained by the thought of a crazy Russian ex-pat coming back and deciding to follow CA water policy that Levine’s essays get  the benefit of the doubt from me.  I figure that maybe he knows oligarchs and fiefdoms and cartels when he sees them.  I also like that his rants stretch the boundaries of the water conversation way out to the left, making me look measured and reasoned by comparison.  Best of all, he’s writing long pieces that say more and different things than re-heated Reisner.  So I’m glad he’s on the scene.  But.  I have four objections to his piece on myths of the recent drought, two of them serious.

First:

He cites last year’s precip (94% of average) as evidence that we’re not really in a drought.  But precip isn’t the right measure; what matters is run-off.  Turns out that precip isn’t becoming run-off that we can catch and store like it used to.  We’re not completely sure what is happening to it.  Some is probably evaporating off the snow during hotter Springs.  The dry ground from the previous two years of drought is sucking it in, maybe.  But last year’s 94% of annual precip was only 65% of annual run-off, and it wasn’t enough to re-fill our low reservoirs.  Focusing on Westlands, as some national media has done, exaggerates the effects of the drought for sure.  But the drought is real.

Second:

Levine asks why California officials would pretend we’re in a drought if we aren’t:

[W}hy would California officials exaggerate — if not outright lie — about the drought? Well, the issue here is less about the drought itself and more about what a drought — real or not — can help achieve. If there is one thing 2009 revealed about California’s “action hero” governor, it’s that he is eagerly willing to serve as the front man for the sleaziest, most crooked business cartel in the state: a de facto water oligarchy made up of billionaire corporate farmers who run vast stretches of the state like their own personal fiefdoms, exploiting migrant workers for slave labor and soaking the taxpayers for billions of dollars in subsidies every year. And like all good businessmen, they aren’t letting a good mini-crisis go to waste. Their objective is to whip up fears of a drought-related calamity to push through a “solution” they’ve been having wet dreams about for the past five decades: a multi-billion-dollar aqueduct the width of the Panama Canal that would give them near total control of more than half of California’s water supplies.

That’s what the state’s “historic” $11-billion bond measure that will appear on the November 2010 ballot is all about. A columnist at the Stockton Record said it best: It “really amounts to an old-fashioned California water grab based on the failure to face nature’s limits.”

I absolutely believe that some politicians and some big water officials are using the drought to push a Peripheral Canal, and simultaneously, know that even a monstrously huge new Peripheral Canal IS NOT A WATER GRAB.  That’s the thing.  What water would it be grabbing?  The Sac and San Joaquin are, like, four times oversubscribed.  New water stored in the non-existent Sites Reservoir?  Grabbing water currently going to in-Delta uses, when the G-Men disappear all the Delta farmers? That water has people waiting in line for it too, and don’t think they wouldn’t sue to protect that priority and use if any water came free in the Delta.

There’s no possibility of a huge corporate water grab for Westlands.  There’s no chunk of water they could be grabbing.  That’s not what the Peripheral Canal is about.  Whether Westlands knows it or not, the Peripheral Canal is a rearguard action; they’re fighting to keep some of what they’ve got now as they retreat from a new, increasingly dry climate.   Moreover, there’s no chance Westlands can hold that water against the other power that needs it: Los Angeles.  If Westlands is lucky, they’ll get paid a freaking fortune when LA takes it.  If they’re stubborn and hold out, I’d expect to see an initiative or legislation that takes that water.  This is why MWD, who supplies the southern cities, is willing to pay to construct the Peripheral Canal.  They absolutely need the water that comes from the north, they need secure conveyance, and they know that cities of 20 million people will get their water if they’re the only ones who do.

Third:

Levine’s section on urban water conservation makes no sense at all.

Schwarzenegger’s mandate that urban water use be cut by 20 percent has earned the governor a lot of green cred, but few people realize that his plan for water conservation is actually a forced wealth transfer scheme in a environmentalist disguise. …

[N]o matter how much water city dwellers save, it’ll be sucked up by wealthy corporate farmers who are always on the lookout for more taxpayer-subsidized wet wealth. And with water trading for a minimum at ten times what they pay for it on the open market, every gallon a city dweller conserves will will end up as cash in the personal bank account of some wealthy corporate farmers. It’s all part of the master plan because, even as the governor talks up urban conservation, he tries his darnedest to get them more water.

This is completely backwards.  Water NEVER goes backwards from urban to ag.  That makes no sense; urban water prices are far too high for growers to make a profit using urban water as a farm input.  Water freed by urban water conservation goes to other city dwellers in the same district.  Even that isn’t enough, so urban buys from ag.  But every gallon conserved in a city is a gallon that they don’t have to buy from a farmer.  The conserved gallons are the ones that do not end up as cash in a corporate farming bank account.  Schwarzenegger’s 20 by 2020 is the exact part that is NOT a wealth transfer to ag.

Fourth:

I couldn’t help but notice that your section on the myth of food shortage looked mighty familiar, what with putting fallowed farmland in context and discussing whether almonds are vital crops.  Seems to me that a fancy online magazine like Alternet could afford to buy hyperlinks in bulk, and spend one or two connecting  readers with your sources.  That’d be a nice thing to do.  The section on unemployment in Mendota owes a fair amount to the work done by Valley Econ, so perhaps you could throw a link that way, too.

There was more.  I loved the bonus myth.  I could go into other points here and there.  I enjoyed the tone, honestly.  I hope Mr. Levine writes more about CA water.  I hope the next piece is more accurate.

The next morning: Some minor editing for clarity.

There is another permanent water transfer out of Dudley Ridge Water District.  From what I’ve seen reported, the sales are:

14,000 af of permanent water rights, from Sandridge Partners, to Mojave Water Agency, for $73M.

880 acres of land, including 1,700 af of water rights, from Jackson family, to Irvine Ranch, for $14.3M.

Two data points!  I can conclude things!

MWA transfer:

(14,000 af in the water right)/($73M) = $5,200 per acrefoot of right.  (This isn’t per acre-foot, remember.  This is for the right, which will have intermittent yields in perpetuity.)

Irvine Ranch transfer:

(1,700 af in the water right)/($14.3M) = $8,400 per acrefoot of water right.

Except that Irvine Ranch also bought the land.  Since the two transfers are from one SWP contract with Dudley Ridge, they’re equally reliable.  The conveyance costs are similar.  So I am going to say that the difference in price comes from the value of the land.

($5,200 per acre for just the water right)/($8,400 per acre for the water right and the land) = 0.62 .

I’m thinking that the water right accounts for 62% of the value of agricultural land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.  I heard some Australian guy say land prices drop 80% when the water is sold away from the land.  So those numbers are in the same ball park.

That ten percent decrease in annual runoff from climate change I see in the water models?  That’s a lot of money capitalized into land values.  You’d think people who owned big swaths of farmland would be leading the fight to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and prevent some of global warming.

I don’t even have a TV, because I am unbearably self-satisfied.  So I didn’t watch the 60 Minutes segment and can’t compare it to other TV programs.  For all I know, it is as good as any TV.  That said, I read the transcript and had some thoughts.

1.  They spent an hour on this?  Man, TV is slow.  I read that in five or six minutes and even for five or six minutes, I thought it was light on content.  This internet business is nice.  I’ve gotten used to much denser content.

2.  Chance of Rain is completely right.  The Twain quote is overused and a mark of weak thought.  I’m putting it in the category with the Reisner-derived cliche “cotton, alfalfa and rice” as an early signal that the person isn’t going to offer anything new.

3.  I’ve been meaning to complain about the “water war” framing for a while now.  This one:

People have died over water. You know, movies have been made about the wars of water in California,” Gov. Schwarzenegger told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl.

“Chinatown,” Stahl remarked.

“Exactly,” Schwarzenegger replied. “So water has been one of those issues.”

It’s one of those issues that is pitting Californians against each other for every last drop.

Seriously, we are not in a water war.  I can tell you this because if it were a war, I’d be on the front lines.  I am a water bureaucrat, baby, deep in the trenches of the decades-long water war.  In real life, this means I work in a very ordinary cube in ordinary clothing.  No one ever takes any shots at me.   (Sometimes, someone suggests that I re-phrase something before we release it to the public.)  No one took any shots at anyone during the protracted negotiations for the new water legislation.  So far as I know, Judge Wanger walks to his car un-escorted and unafraid, which means that we are really and truly not in a water war. 

Instead, we’re in an extended, complicated, multi-party conflict over resource use that will be resolved through incremental progress in courts, administrative plans, white papers and legislation (or maybe earthquake-caused collapse of Delta levees).  I am sorry if that doesn’t give our Action Governor a boner, but that is not a war.  The conflict is not exciting.

4.  I’m surprised at how little the TV host says.  She echoes and prompts, and offers no synthesis.  I guess that’s not her job.

5.  Political implications, eh.  They’re down the conventional faultlines, so you already know them.  I guess I wish they’d told more interesting parts of the stories.  How ARE people reacting to high new water bills?  Have they changed behavior and which water uses did they sacrifice?  Are growers monolithic, or are there some who are glad to have some of their competition sidelined?  How are bank officers deciding to offer credit next year?

The trailer for the Sixty Minutes show reminded me of something else.  We’ve seen an awful lot of Westlands Water District recently, in surprising places.  The grower shown in the trailer, Stuart Woolf, farms in Westlands and is a former director of the district.  I assume Sarah Woolf, spokesperson for WWD is a relative.  (NTTAWWT. )  It isn’t clear to me why the Sixty Minutes producers chose Westlands to show California ag when the vast majority of Cal ag did fine this year.  Or, if you want to show drought ag victims, why not stumped avocados in San Diego?  But, you know, Westlands got itself on the news again.

I also didn’t get this piece at all.  Like, from top to bottom.  I don’t understand why engineering firms think they should be doing journalism.  But given that they are, why write a piece on the smelt litigation that talks about nothing but Westlands from the Westlands perspective?  There are a ton of engineering aspects to the smelt litigation.  You could talk about fish screens, keeping smelt out of the Peripheral Canal, the bubble curtain, the engineer expert witnesses who testify in Wanger’s court.  There are any number of ways to sell engineering products in an article on smelt and CA water.  So why this incredibly one-sided piece for Westlands?

The strangest, and this one genuinely baffles me, was in the clunky and nearly illegible presentation on California Water Myths, by the Public Policy Institute of California.  The entire myth on subsidized ag was a blowjob for Westlands.  Why?  Westlands wasn’t in the paper report.  If you’re talking about subsidized water for CA ag, you should be (mostly) talking about the federal Central Valley Project, over on the east side.  It was out of nowhere, and I don’t understand the editing process that included it.

Sixty Minutes is about to tell you that the terrible drought cost California 130,000 almond trees!  ONE HUNDRED and THIRTY THOUSAND almond trees!  HOLY SHIT!

Half the country’s fruits and nuts come from this area, and so the impact is imminent.

What if you people who aren’t personal friends with an almond grower NEVER TASTE AN ALMOND AGAIN!!  Is there any hope for New Yorkers who like almond granola?

(130,000 almond trees)*(1 acre/105 almond trees) = 1238 ACRES OF TREES!!!!

(1,238 almond acres)/(710,000 acres of almond trees in CA) = 0.0017

That’s almost 0.2% change in the California almond acreage!!!

Even with this devastating loss, the Californian almond harvest this year was 1.6 billion pounds shelled (up from 1.3 billion pounds shelled last year) accounting for 85% of the world’s almond production.  C’mon, Sixty Minutes.  I know tractors ripping out trees look awesome, but so does the annual Almond Almanac.  A few seconds of searching would have given you some perspective on this.  It would have told you how big the imminent impact is going to be.  And that even with the drought, there were more almonds harvested this year than ever before.

UPDATE:  You know what cracks me up?  1,200 acres of almonds isn’t even big on Woolf’s own farm.  Woolf Farming Company evidently farms about 20,000 acres.  So they ripped out almonds on 6% of their acreage (the rest is evidently in other crops).  I mean really.

Come on, dudes. No one cares about cubic kilometers.  How is anyone supposed to understand that?  Thank goodness for unit converters.

OOOH!  24 million acre-feet have been sucked out of the ground in the San Joaquin Valley in the past six years without replenishment!  Hey, that’s interesting.  Let’s think about that a little.  I’m going to make some very rough approximations.

At six million irrigated acres in the SJV, that would be four feet of water per acre in six years (if every grower were pumping gw). Forty-eight inches in six years means each acre is using about 8 inches of gw/year. 

My usual rule of thumb is three-and-a-half feet of water to grow a crop, so 42 inches of water/year. 

What this information tells me, very roughly, is that every year growers in the SJV are using overdrafting groundwater to get about 20% of the water they need to finish their crop*.  This is, of course, wrong; some growers use only surface water, some use only groundwater, some mix it up in different proportions.  But now I have a rough approximation.  When the groundwater in the SJV gets too deep to be worth pumping (or energy gets more expensive), I expect to see something slightly less than 20% of the irrigated acres drop out of production.   I am standing by my gut feeling of California ag settling at about 6 million irrigated acres by 2050, down from 9 million today.

Let’s compare 24 million-acrefeet of depleted groundwater to something else.  Here is DWR’s graphic of annual water supplies and uses. (On page 6. A two-sided bar chart. I’ll try to put it here later.)

First thought. Hmmm. The state of California uses about 80 million acrefeet of surface water every year, for everything. That’s all the rivers being rivers, cities drinking, crops being irrigated. An additional (roughly) four million acre-feet of gw getting sucked out of the SJV aquifers per year sounds plausible. Second thought. That column on the very far right is a calculated closure term. It says how much more we know we’re using than supplies, and that water comes from somewhere. Reservoirs being drawndown or groundwater. The numbers there go from about 5 million acre-feet a year to 12 million acrefeet a year. Four million acrefeet of overdraft in the SJV fits right into that. (The last time we had more supplies than use was 1998). Contra Dr. Gleick here, the new Water Plan seems to report overdraft at about the same scale as the JPL results.

So, a rough estimate and a different presentation say the JPL results are on the right scale. I didn’t doubt JPL, except for their poor choice of units, but it is nice to see these all agreeing.

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