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Hey folks,

You should watch this webcast of a cool talk by a neat researcher.  It starts, like, right now.

The Sacramento Bee has gotten more and more panicked about the budget situation, and they started off frantic. Before the election, their recommendation was to vote against every last bond measure. Good ideas may be on the ballot, but the Bee editors kept saying that we have no money. From what I can observe, they are right to be panicked about our budget situation. I talked it over with a friend who follows the legislature closely, and he cannot imagine a realistic solution to our budget problem. The rules put in place by propositions combined with the incentives for the Republican legislators* close out any solutions.

The Bee writes editorial after editorial trying to focus attention on the fact that California can’t put together a budget, blaming institutions, blaming individual actors, pointing out the harm. This week they’re running a series on different powerful lobbies in the budget gridlock; they write a plaintive request in the introduction to the series:

As you read these editorials, we’d urge you to think about your role as a member of an interest group.

That’s right. The budget crisis is so hopelessly snarled at the top that the Sacramento Bee is appealing directly to the diffuse better nature of the broad public to rein in their advocates. That’s how bad it is. The constraints on the budget process are so binding that the next best leverage is for the broad public to read a newspaper editorial and adopt long-term benevolence and shared sacrifice. I’m strongly in favor of that, but the Bee’s own comment section contributes to my doubt on that front.

I do not see a path to resolving the budget crisis within our current system. That leads to the interesting question of which is more likely, a large game re-setting force, like a Constitutional Convention, or living in a failed state. What would it look like, living in a failed state? We’re not that far from finding out. We’ll be insolvent in March, which is not a distant and unknowable future. A few months after that, what do we do? Of course we send home all the lazy and irrelevant stateworkers. After that? Send home all the UC, Cal State and community college students and professors? Release all prisoners? Stop patching levees? Stop fighting fires? This isn’t abstract. Right now those are political suggestions to apply pressure, but when we have no money, there won’t be a choice in the matter for very long.

Personally, I think we should start considering an alliance with Somali pirates. They need failed states to base their operations from, and considering that there will be rich pickings headed up to ports in Washington, I think there may be strategic benefits for both sides in a California-Somali pirate alliance.

*Their districts are so solidly republican that if they vote for a budget that raises taxes, they’ll be challenged in the primary and lose. In addition to their own ideological opposition to raising taxes, there’s the fact that they’ll be ousted if they do. That’s some pretty strong motivation for them.

I was very interested in this post, because I think a lot about intentional retreat.  I think sprawling suburbs should retreat from high gas prices.  I think beach dwellers should retreat from the rising sea.  I think Delta farmers should retreat from likely death by flood.  I think all sorts of retreat is necessary.  I think the important question about retreat is “the easy way or the hard way?”.  The hard way will happen by itself, so it doesn’t really require much of us until the very last minute.  Communist central planner that I am, I’m in favor of the easy way, which means acknowledging the coming problem and intentionally choosing to address shortages.

I’m super curious about what will happen to sprawled out suburbs.  Nearly every day of the week I see a news article about some facet of water use becoming “too expensive”.  Local water delivery is either at the edge of their cheap historic supplies or they are being forced to internalize some environmental cost.  Every story closes with a quote about how this will mean the end of financial viability for the residents.  If aggregated rising costs really do herd people in from large houses on the periphery of cities, what happens to the houses?

I personally think that we should leave the landscape neat and tidy behind us, and salvage what we can from the spectacularly bad decision to put valuable low-entropy resources into house shaped lumps all over the place.   That first article talks about businesses who mine abandoned houses.  I’ve been wanting to take down abandoned houses as a reverse Burning Man project. 

Ever since Chris Clarke pointed out that traveling to a pristine desert and building a city is the most American activity ever, and my other friend said to me that “Burning Man is proof that humans love to work”, I’ve wanted to take a camp of people that would usually go to Burning Man out to some unfinished and languishing development.  I think the Burning Man ethic of self-reliance and work should go into dismantling a house or two, stacking it neatly and leaving.  That would be anti-consumerist America and a radical statement.  I haven’t yet been able to convince my friends that it would be a good way to spend the week before Labor Day.  I can’t think why.

The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research has released preliminary guidelines for analyzing greenhouse gas emissions in CEQA documents.  I’ll read this for you, but don’t know what useful critique I could offer.

A public review draft of the next California Water Plan is out. 

Aquafornia tells me the American Water Works Association has put out a primer on what water utilities should do to prepare for climate change.  I’ll read this for you too.

I liked this post on environmental concrete quite a bit, not least because it reminded me that the best presentation I saw last year came out of the concrete sub-committee of the AB 32 Scoping Plans. I had no expectations for a report on concrete and greenhouse gas emissions, but it was great! Skip slides 1-15, which talk about the Scoping Plan. Go straight to slide 16 and start to learn about cement and climate change! Plenty of pictures of cement mixers, too.

I gather from that presentation that there are two places you can cut your emissions from cement. You can improve your cement factory or you can change the cement mixtures that get used in the world. The second option was more interesting to the water folks in the room. My rough sense of the conversation was that specifications for cement mixtures are something you get from some 1950’s manual and no one has given them much thought since. But, if it is important to make cement with low emissions, it could be done. Even more, you might want to do some thinking about what you need your cement for. You might want a cement mix that hardens overnight, so you can put a first floor on that foundation the next day. But we don’t need that in the water industry. Some of our dams don’t dry for a hundred years*. Quick drying isn’t necessarily a feature we need.

When I talk about adapting to climate change taking thought, this is the sort of thing I mean. Used to be**, you pulled down the ASCE manual on cement, looked up the cement mixture for your strength requirements and ordered it from the factory. Now we should probably figure out what we want specific cement to do and find a mixture that does that while minimizing emissions. With the new exciting cements, perhaps they can also breathe in CO₂ as well. This is a lot more thought and finesse than we apply now. Doable for sure, but it adds work.

I’m so tempted to say that this is great new work in an exciting new field. But I bet it isn’t. I bet people have been working on cement for decades and I just never knew about it. They’d roll their eyes if I announced that cement is such an exciting new field just because I didn’t know about it, and they’d be right. One of my big regrets is that I never took the class on cement while I was in school. I suppose I could still do that. Enlightenment and bliss are open so long as one draws breath and I’m pretty sure concrete class is on the path to enlightenment.

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Apologies if you’ve seen them before.  I won’t recycle content very often, I promise.

I’ve been going to climate change meetings a lot, and started to notice this one guy as super sharp and knowledgeable and insightful.  Everything he says is relevant and he doesn’t talk just to talk.  I’ve been really impressed with him, and then yesterday he said something I’ve thought too!  En route to another comment, he mentioned that we just spent a century optimizing our infrastructure and farms and cities to our old climate.  (Then he said that the climate will be changing too fast for us to do that for another few centuries, so instead of optimizing like the engineers neeeeeeed to do in their souls, we’re going to have to move to a new approach, designing for flexibility and resiliency instead of maximization.) Then, in the hallway later, he said one of my comments was good, which was all the excuse I need to unload on him.  Way too fast, I said disjointed pieces of all of this:

He’s right about how we optimized to our former climate!  It would be expensive for us to transition to anything different, even a more generous regime.  But we aren’t moving to a more generous regime.  We’re moving from abundance to scarcity.

Abundance (partly because the world was so rich back when we had all that timber and oil and big fish and groundwater and partly because there were so few people) used to be the rule, but I think we moved out of the Age of Abundance into the Age of Information back in the mid-seventies.  That’s when we started writing plans. All those plans, those three-inch thick documents.  Timber Harvest Plans.  Habitat Conservation Plans.  EIRs and EISs.  Water Management Plans.  Grazing Plans.  Biological Opinions.  People thought they were writing those plans for one project or another, but taken together, I think they were the entry fee into the Age of Information.  They were the first pieces of infrastructure in this new era, just like rail lines and assembly lines were for the manufacturing age¹.

We only lived in the Information Era for about thirty years, and we didn’t even get good at it.  We’re still figuring out things like how to use GIS all the time, and collect enough LIDAR data and give citizens easy access to rich information.  We’re only barely starting to understand how to present it.  On the whole, we’re could have used another fifty years to collect information and do things with it². But climate change is now, and climate change forces us into the Age of Management.  From here on out, the unmanaged default is going to suck.

From now on, we have to manage things.  A lot.   Up and down the scale, we’re going to have to finesse the details.  Individual people have to plan trips, find the shortest route and combine errands.  Cities will have to count the greenhouse gas emissions of new development.  Reservoir operators are going to have to plan water releases to the daily weather.  We aren’t rich any more and we will have to pay fine-grained attention.

Once most are fed and sheltered, the true privilege of being rich is mindlessness, Tom and Daisy’s famous carelessness.  That was how America lived from the fifties to the nineties, but that’s over now.  In the Age of Management, we move into constant planning, deliberating, choosing and implementing.  All the time.  It is better than not doing that (because the alternative is Katrina-like collapses), but it is a burden.  It also makes me wonder if over the next few decades, our limiting ingredient is going to be thought.  Each of us will be paying this thought-debt in our personal lives, as we adjust and scrounge and figure out how to live like this.  But the big problems will take just as much care.  We can solve any of them, when we must, with lots and lots of thought and implementation.  But there are so many coming, at once, and we will have to think very hard about all of them.  Maybe I’m completely off-base and labor will be the problem.  Or physical capital.  But I’m not sure of that.  Sometimes when I go to a lot of meetings and read lots of newspapers and blogs and comments, I get worried.  When I see how little dense thought is out there, how much is cribbed or facile or rationalizing, I wonder if we have enough sheer thought to find the least-painful way into our new world³.

UPDATE:  Reader Todd sent me a copy of Jeremy Grantham’s GMO Quarterly letter, which hits on some of the same themes.  I liked the essay about the Age of Limitation, starting on page 8.  Thanks!

¹ And some computers came along, too, to help us.

² No electronic medical records yet? Although I have seen some useful and interesting stuff recently.  I particularly like having public meetings archived online, with agenda items linked and all of it categorized, so you can search by speaker (even the public comment!).  That is actually handy and user-friendly.  Facebook seems to be particularly relentless about tracking me down.  (No!  Do not send me an invitation!  They’re, like, the CIA.  If the spooks want to know who my friends are, they should have to tap my phone without a warrant, the American way.)

³ Tyler thinks this is reason enough to support population growth, because increased people will bring with them increased thought that we can apply to problems⁴.  I think that having far too many people on the planet create problems that overwhelms the advantages of added thought, especially since most of
them are living in conditions that make abstract concerns low priority.  Better, I say, to get the number of people down and make sure all of them are thinking at top capacity.

⁴ If I have correctly understood him.

So, like, there’s a drought in California.  And, like, there are big bathtub rings around our northern reservoirs.  So, do we need more dams?  There are a couple being studied now.  What are these two new dams¹?  Will they get built?  Do we hate them?  Who supports them and why?  Is more surface storage a necessary investment to support the next thirty million people here?

Everyone on the agriculture side of water use is crying out for more surface storage.  The standard line is that the State Water Project was designed to be much larger, but never got finished, what with that terrible Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the popular vote against the Peripheral Canal.  Then (usually) Republicans and agricultural water users say that we haven’t built any major water infrastructure for decades while the population of California has shot up and isn’t it self-evident that we need new reservoirs?  Besides, climate change!  Ten years ago, even five years ago, that kind of talk would have been dismissed immediately by everyone in the water field.  It was taken as an absolute that “the era of dam-building is over” and that there was no public support for new dams, largely because of Cadillac Desert.  The prospect of new dams is coming back, though, with some interesting twists².

I see the vehement editorials calling for new dams and I grin.  Every single time, I wonder.  Suppose your new dams are built, buddy.  What will you put behind them?  Root beer?  The waters of the state are spoken for.  Ag and cities have claimed what is there, and they aren’t getting all they hope for.  In-stream water uses are both increasing and being hardened by the Endangered Species Act.  Most climate projections for California estimate it will be about 10% drier within decades.   The State Board has applications for the next 4.8 million acre-feet of water that miraculously appears.  The act of pouring concrete for a dam doesn’t call water into being.  What are these dams supposed to impound?

Strangely enough, because of climate change, there may be one chunk of water that those dams could usefully capture.  The climate change models predict that we will get less water overall, and they predict that more of the water we do get will fall as rain instead of snow.  This turns out to be really important.  In the era that is ending, the snowpack held water from winter until June and July, releasing it slowly as snowmelt.  Once you knew how big and wet the snowpack was, you knew how much water you had to make last until November and roughly when it would show up at your reservoir.   Rainstorms are going to be a different story.  Rain falls and runs off in the space of days, a big slug of water arriving at the reservoir at once.  Our reservoirs aren’t big enough to catch that water all at once.  Right now they empty all spring while new snowmelt arrives to top them off; that flow-through creates a lot of capacity.  The other problem is that when you get snowstorms, you can add up the snow and know how much water you’ll have to handle later.  When you get a rainstorm in March, you don’t know whether you’ll get another one in April.  You must empty your dam, so it can catch the next storm before it turns into a flood.  That water, the water that you have to empty out so your dam can hold and control later spring rains, is the water that new surface storage could catch.  Without the snowpack to hold it for us for months, we don’t have space to capture that.  It would run out to sea, and if we’re lucky it won’t take out a city on the way.

The alert reader already noticed that this is not new water.  This is the same water that used to be slow snowmelt, moving through the tops of our reservoirs each spring.  California is looking at building two new dams ($3-$4B each) to try to keep some of what we have now.  Makes one’s eyebrows raise, doesn’t it?  Climate change is expensive.  It also makes one wonder who is going to pay for that?  Agriculture tops the voices calling for new dams, but I don’t know if they realize that it won’t get them anything more than they have, if that.  On the other hand, if I were in a sector that everyone agreed would be the first to give up water, I’d probably call for new storage too.  They aren’t offering up money, in any case.

Well, say the dam-haters.  Maybe we still don’t want two new dams anyway.  Maybe we’ll conserve lots and stop growing rice and alfalfa in the desert!!! agriculture will contract considerably and we’ll just make do on two-thirds of the water we have now, even as the population grows to sixty million people in 2050.  Water markets will solve all this!

Maybe.  Considering the reflexive antipathy to dams sowed by Cadillac Desert, that may be how this works out.  But the other interesting perspective is that both of those dams will almost certainly be operated primarily to fulfill environmental demands.  Because salmon runs and the delta smelt are so precarious, the Endangered Species Act is driving water priorities.  Until salmon or smelt go extinct or recover, they dominate where water goes and when.  When water managers talk about Sites Reservoir (the one proposed for the Sacramento Valley), they don’t talk about new water for cities.  They talk about the location.  They get all dreamy-eyed about the flexibility it could provide to manage fish requirements in the Delta.  It takes three days from water to get from Shasta to the Delta, but it would only take one day from Sites.  Doesn’t sound like much, but it can mean cold water and better tuned salinity control in the Delta.  Anything that helps fish means that you can keep the big pumps to L.A. running, and water managers really want that.  No one says this explicitly, because it sounds too much like extortion, but most water behind Temperance Flats will likely go to the San Joaquin River restoration project.  Having that dam would give water managers another dial to turn as they try to keep cold water in that poor river until October.  Maybe those dams don’t happen and that water comes straight out of ag.  But maybe those dams don’t happen and environmental laws yield instead.

So, do we hate these dams?  Should enviros fight them forever?  Well, we don’t love them for the old-school reason.  They won’t produce new water.  The big cities in the south have realized this; they aren’t offering to pay or even lobbying for new dams.  Both dams would destroy a beautiful valley.  They’ll be expensive.  On the other hand, they’ll have downstream environmental benefits in ways that old dams never provided.  We have more of a need to catch floods, because that’s what we’re going to get in the new hydrology.  They may give us a way to keep more of the ag we have now, if that is the goal.

Honestly, I can’t decide whether I’m personally opposed to these new dams.  I know for sure that the arguments don’t line up in the old ways, cities and ag clamoring for more against the enviros.  With climate change unsettling everything we’ve optimized, we’re likely to be grateful for anything that increases operational flexibility.  I’m more intrigued by the idea that there are actually way more valuable water infrastructure projects that you would never predict!!! Since you were sweet enough to read all the way to the end, I promise I’ll tell you what they are someday.

¹The new dams being proposed are named Sites Reservoir and Temperance Flats.  Both are off-stream, which means that instead of dams placed across a river and turning the river into a lake, they put a dam in the neck of a valley near a river and sometimes divert water to turn it into a lake.  Sites Reservoir is on the west side of the Sacramento Valley a couple hours north of Sacramento; it would be connected to the Sacramento River .  Temperance Flats is in the Sierras, a little bit south of Yosemite; the waters that would fill it would otherwise drain to the San Joaquin River.

² It cracked me up that the money for funding the dam studies was listed under the “Conjunctive Use” portion of the water bond.  This, my friends, is not Straight Talk we can believe in.  The term conjunctive use usually means planned switching between your surface water and your groundwater.  So if you have a big water year, you would try to fill your groundwater aquifers, in anticipation of pulling gw out in a dry year.  That’s all conjunctive use means, and everyone approves of conjunctive use, because who doesn’t want to bank supplies and use the best supply for the occasion.  So stashing the prospect of new dams under Conjunctive Use, while not a lie, because conjunctive use does involve switching between stored water sources, is definitely a stretching a innocuous term past all previous uses.

The next few posts were written to be read from the top down.  Hope you like them.

The junkies among you can read a more technical description of field and basin efficiency here, or see a sketch of a description in this slide show (which only makes sense if you already know the topic).

The reason I don’t like to talk about field and basin efficiency is that ag advocates are known to do a sorta bullshit sleight of hand, saying that their “efficiency” is some amazingly high number (anything higher than 90%) and so they don’t need to listen to any more of this talk about new irrigation practices. If they are talking basin efficiencies, that means that for some large boundary, perhaps their water district or a watershed, the amount of water they collectively apply is only barely more than collective crop demand, and presto! Everyone in that area is a very good irrigator. Except they don’t really say “basin efficiency”. They say “efficiency” or “district-wide efficiency”, and hope that you will be suckered into thinking that they mean the average of every single grower’s field efficiency.

Field efficiency comes from matching irrigation water to crop demand on a single field or small farm. This is the realm that individual farmers can influence, with the type of techniques that the Pacific Institute talks about (irrigation scheduling, crop shifting). If every single grower had an field efficiency in the 90s and you averaged them to get some average field efficiency in the 90s, that would indeed mean that you are talking to very skilled irrigators who don’t need any advice from you. But having a basin efficiency in the 90s doesn’t mean everyone is doing a good job applying a precise amount of water. It just means that water gets used again and again within the big boundary area.

I kinda resent giving the idea of basin efficiency much credence, because some advocates use it in a sneaky way to imply that all their irrigators are doing a good job. I also don’t like that some advocates use the idea of basin efficiency to say that there is no good reason to improve their practices on the smaller field scale. This isn’t true, as both the irrigation professors and the Pacific Institute report point out. What high basin efficiency can look like in practice is that growers overapply water at the top of the basin and other growers use it again, as tailwater with pesticides or fertilizers or salts in it. Or it sinks into the ground and other growers pump it out. Or it returns to the river, salty and warm, and gets diverted again. You could still have high basinwide efficiencies, but you pay costs in water quality or pump energy or crop yield. Taking more water than you need (because it will return soon enough or so that it can percolate into groundwater) hurts the rivers it was diverted from; fish would like to live in that clean cold water until the very last second before it gets used. So yeah. There are real problems with using high basin efficiencies to give yourself a free pass.

On the other hand, there is no denying that it exists. A lot of diverted water gets used several times. It is a cheap way to move water, or at least a way to move water that externalizes some of the costs. Further, people have been living in this connected system for two generations now. I have to think they have roughly optimized their positions and come to rely upon them. Getting someone else’s water after it ran off the field may not be a good way for the system to work, but at this point, I’m inclined to think it is the best bet for that second grower. They’ve had forty years to debate sinking a well or digging a pipe directly to the river. If they thought those were better for them than taking tailwater, I think they’d have done it. Disrupting that system (like, if you had the grower at the top really cinch down on irrigation efficiency) will probably put downstream growers in a worse position. To the extent that it means that they’re internalizing their environmental costs, I’m fine with it. But as much as they perceive it to damage their interests, they’ll fight that.