On the public record

Dr. Lund is more optimistic than I am. My prediction is that in retrospect, this drought will be considered a continuation of the 2006-2009 drought, the full extent of the damage we have done to the climate will start to become evident this year, and the innovation we’ll wish we had started sooner is managed retreat.

Back when I was a pro, I would have written these all up and then posted them in reverse order so that you could read them top to bottom. Well, it was a rough two years in that dungeon and you will have to accept what is left of my ragged, diminished soul.

Governor’s Drought Proclamation, items 6-10.

6. This item strikes me as an opportunistic way to re-purpose old bond capacity. I believe there are some old bond items that were closely written for a use that never panned out, primarily items authorizing bond funds for low-interest loans for ag water conservation. They went out for proposals once or twice and never got any takers, because there were also grants available at the time. Now interest rates are so low that these bond funds still aren’t interesting. I am guessing that this is a way to reach back to those bond funds and use them without having to go back to the legislature to get them authorized for a new purpose.

7. This one is straightforward, no? Junior appropriators, back off. Enforcement interests me more than “notice”, but I don’t know how this is enforced. Flyovers to look at what is green when it shouldn’t be? Satellite pictures? Real wardens, going out to look?

8. Man, what a dilemma for the State Board. Choose between current river water quality, which they love, and future river water quality, which they also love?

9. Chris Clarke is already on this one; I think the enviro line is that Governor Brown has suspended CEQA for actions that mitigate the effects of the emergency. Maybe they brainwashed me in that dungeon, but I’m not convinced this is awful.

My most cynical self says that all the State agencies are going to do about the drought is have a nice website and write up monthly impact reports. And maybe feed people in Mendota. None of those require CEQA. If this waives CEQA for water transfers, it poses the same problems as “expediting” the water transfer process. But I also have heard that CEQA is just a monster problem for water transfers. It can take months to do a CEQA analysis on a proposed transfer and just that delay can render the transfer useless. Further, the buyer has to pay for cost of the analysis on top of the purchase price of the water and the carriage water. The whole transfer has to happen within weeks or months to be useful, and CEQA is a pretty outsized burden on anything but large, ongoing transfers. I get why the Drought Proclamation waived it. (I also acknowledge that Jerry Brown personally dislikes CEQA and may be seizing an opportunity.)

10. This item addresses one of the genuine problems of the drought, and one that doesn’t get much political attention. Small communities (in the Valley, along the coast, up in the foothills) on wells are pretty fucked in a drought like this. It poses real problems, because they are small and widely distributed (and thus expensive to help) and mostly don’t have their own wealth to tap. What do we do? Truck in water? Move them elsewhere? Nothing? What are our societal obligations to people who have chosen to live in situations where their own wealth cannot buffer them against variability? If you are thinking of farm laborer towns, you may be sympathetic. When I am thinking of people who move to beautiful places for a picturesque life remote from infrastructure, and who have perhaps been unwilling to spend in advance for reliability, I am less sympathetic.

My strength is not what it was, dear friends. I must recover before attempting items 11-20.

I assume you have a copy of the proclamation to hand. I’ll go point by point with my first impression.

1. Calling on Californians to reduce their water usage by twenty percent in one year doesn’t seem like enough when reservoirs are so drastically low. But if they do reduce by that much, after this year Twenty by 20XX will be relatively easy. I know some of the behavioral changes backslide when the drought ends, but this drought will be a big boost to that effort.

This drought feels very different than 2007-2009. People mention rain and guiltily enjoying the sun everywhere I go. I’ve heard so many mentions of the dry hills. The dry reservoirs are so blatant. I have come to believe that humans can only deeply identify with problems they can see (literally see –problems without a visible element (groundwater, greenhouse gases) will not be solved.) and this drought may be stark enough to qualify. I’d urge water conservation people to put pictures of empty reservoirs on billboards.

2. This point cracks me up. I read this as: do your fucking water management plans. Back when 20xtwentytwenty was written, the only enforcement mechanism for the requirement to write ag water management plans was that if your district didn’t do a plan, it wouldn’t be eligible for DWR loans and grants. Not much of a hammer. But I am very sure that any agency approaching the Drought Task Force for assistance will be welcomed with a sweet “What does it say in your Drought Contingency Plan, appendix to your water management plan?”. If the reply is that they don’t have a Drought Contingency Plan yet, I expect they’ll be told to finish that before coming back.

I see there’ll be a publicly posted map of which districts have updated plans. It is eighteen years since I proposed doing that at Reclamation and was told that was too sensitive. I am glad water districts have become less delicate since then.

3. State agencies implementing water conservation in our own facilities? Dude. I’ll believe that when I see it. DGS is invariably cited as the barrier to making green changes at state buildings. Maybe it will be different in the Brown administration, but I haven’t seen Governor Brown show any interest in shaping the state agencies.

4. They have to say this about water transfers. Water transfers are the politically acceptable win-win solution. Willing sellers, willing buyers, no one loses anything, the State “facilitates” but doesn’t dictate. From what I saw in the last drought, inter-regional transfers were nearly negligible, primarily because rice prices were high and because there weren’t available pumping windows that weren’t already being used for project water. This time I think inter-regional transfers will be even more trivial, because I don’t think many will have water to offer. There is real utility in local and regional transfers, so I hope those get “expedited”.

From what I understand, the danger in a rushed transfer process is that there may be secondary damage on the seller’s end. The transferred surface water may be immediately replaced on the seller’s end with groundwater that wouldn’t have otherwise been pumped. If that damages an aquifer or taps nearby connected surface water, that’s a transfer that wouldn’t be approved. “Expedited” transfer evaluations may miss this. My real opinion, though, is that transfers allow people to pretend that there is a pleasing solution, a feelgood thing the State can do. I think the real volumes are tiny and the secondary damages from transfers correspondingly tiny.

5. I don’t know what this item means in real life, so I don’t have impressions to type up.

I liked the Pacific Institute’s report on future water financing from back in November, but I’ll use this quote from the Conclusions as a springboard to one of my standard rants (just because it is something I hear around, and here is a version I can use).

New financing mechanisms and alternative revenue sources need to be explored for water conservation and efficiency, research and development, monitoring and data management, ongoing operation and maintenance, and upgrading failing water systems.

Look, y’all. This is not that complicated. The revenue sources are the wallets of the people of the state. If we aren’t using bonds to transfer the costs to future people, there are two financing mechanisms. There are taxes, where someone with authority takes an amount in a way that isn’t directly linked to a water bill, or there are fees, where someone with authority takes an amount in a way that is directly linked to a water bill. That’s it. That is the whole range of options. We talk about creative financing mechanisms and looking for alternatives, but in the end, if we decide to pay to keep our level of service up to first world standards, someone with authority will dip into the wallets of the people of the state.

I have some patience for discussions of whether taxes or fees will better accomplish policy goals, but I roll my eyes at discussions of “creative financing mechanisms”. Far as I can tell, the phrase is a placeholder for magic outside wealth appearing.

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I loved every word of this Valley Econ post on making tree crop growers self-insure. Nut crop growers put a whole lot of capital into their orchards, then point to their orchards as hostages in drought time. “But we must get water, or our trees will die!” I’ve never understood why the public at large should be the backstop for the bad choice to plant crops with a constant water demand in a variable climate. If there is a state interest in growing nuts and grapes in particular, it hasn’t been explained to me. I understand the grower’s interest in growing a valuable crop, but since the profits from that aren’t returned to the state, I don’t see why the risk should be.

Devin Nunes gave a whole bunch of interviews about his water bill, which means he talked a whole lot of crazytalk and easily refuted lies. But whatever. That’s what he does, and we’ve spent enough time on many of them. This bill isn’t going far, so it isn’t like I’m worried about it or anything. I only have a couple thoughts worth putting up here.

1. For a bill this drastic, I can’t believe how petty and smallminded it is. I mean, if you’re going to write a federal bill that supercedes state water rights law for the first time, nullifies two previous well-established Congressional laws, breaks open settled litigation, and invites all hell to break loose, why would you waste your time on serving such a small set of masters? He does all this just for the monetary interests of powerful West Side ag. That’s so banal. Believe you me, the day I get to completely supercede state water rights law, nullify a couple Congressional laws, re-open settled litigation and invite all hell to break loose, it’ll be for some giant-ass principle, or to make history, or something supercool. Not so that rich people in the San Joaquin Valley can stay rich.

2. Bird’s gotta fly; stallion’s gotta run; Nunes has to say crazy insulting shit. That’s fine. He is who he is. Mostly I can let it slide or laugh at it. But occasionally, he still catches me offguard with something. This bit? Pissed me off.

Rep. Devin Nunes, author of H.R. 1873,  jumped on board, too.

“The communities on the west side of San Joaquin County, I guess perhaps they don’t matter to the minority (Democrats),” he said. “Because evidently, by opposing this bill, you’re basically guaranteeing that the city of Tracy and those water districts where those jobs are created are going to be cut off from their water this year.”

Alex Breitler did a nice bit of fact checking, and showed that it wasn’t accurate about the city of Tracy. But I’m infuriated by Nunes’s statement that the minority communities on the west side of San Joaquin County don’t matter to Democrats. Let us be real clear about what Nunes’s interest in getting water to the west side means. It does not mean getting clean and safe drinking water into farmworker communities in the Valley as so many of those towns desperately need. No. Nunes means that he wants to get agricultural water supplies to the largest farms in California, farms comprising tens of thousands of acres, so that as a byproduct of their raising crops, they can offer menial farm labor to the permanently impoverished communities on the west side. Perhaps that is better than not offering menial farm labor to the permanently impoverished communities on the west side, but it is trickle-down concern at best.

Real concern about “water” for poor communities in the Valley would be about getting those communities affordable clean drinking water. And hey, look who is working on that! Fran Pavley and a bunch of enviros. Hey, another enviro. A Democrat from Fresno. A Democratic governor.

I mostly watch the water politicking and laugh. I mostly watch Devin Nunes and laugh even harder. But the thing that made me the angriest in all the drought propaganda was West Side agriculture suddenly pretending to care about the only sympathetic group of people in their counties, and hiding behind the plight of communities that they have exploited for generations. Fuck that, and fuck Nunes’s insulting bullshit about who “cares” about farmworker communities in the Valley. If Nunes wants to show he cares, he could get some towns in his own damn district some clean, safe drinking water.

You know that I’m not actually going to read those, right? I base my comments instead on the news summary, because that’s the kind of in-depth reporting you’ve come to expect here. What I read makes me simultaneously more cynical and more optimistic. It also tells me what the new direction for the Peripheral Canal must be, if it is going to exist.

You guys know that I’m in favor of the Peripheral Canal, because I don’t think there’s hope for the Delta to be both a functioning ecosystem and an important drinking water conveyance system. I want those functions separated. So I trot around to the blogs and say things like, ‘but it doesn’t have to be a “water grab.” It could be for reliability without being for pumping more water. Reliability for urban drinking water for 25 million people is really fucking valuable.’ Then opponents laugh at me and say, ‘of course it isn’t for reliability. Of course it is for pumping additional water.’. After today, I have to admit, yep. They’re right. The Preferred Alternative is the big tunnel, and it proposes to export more water than Delta has been able to support since its fisheries collapsed. The Peripheral Canal in these documents is, in fact, a bid to get more new water south of the Delta.

So that makes me cynical. Here’s what makes me not-cynical. We totally knew all this was true in the Schwarzenegger administration. The game was rigged then, like we knew. It is, however, the only game going on this scale. The Brown administration has been forced to play it, as has everyone. What else can they do, start from scratch? The new administration swears they are all transparent now, and the process is all open to new voices and stuff. After today, at least, it is way more transparent. It is a transparent bid for more water through giant tunnels. They have finally declared themselves. Now we can see whether the “open” part is also true. I don’t know what goes on in high level executive stuff. But I have somewhat more hope that the Brown administration would consider different Peripheral Canal options than they were handed from the last administration.

Which leads me to my other thought on the new information on the Peripheral Canal. The documents today released cost estimates, and Dr. Michael broke that down into $/af for us, which is what I need.

That comes out to between $3600 and $730 per acre foot of new supply – not counting operations costs – just to get the new water to the Tracy pumps.  Add a few hundred dollars more for operating costs and pumping to Los Angeles.

Y’all, this is not ag water. There are almost no crops that can return a profit on $1000/af water. Avocados. Strawberries. Maybe weed, before it is legalized and everyone can grow it. Paying for this water would bankrupt the West Side. They are beginning to realize this, which is why they are looking for other ways to secure their water supply. (If I were on the East Side of the SJV, I would start getting nervous, because they are some relentless motherfuckers.) This is, however, still cheaper than de-sal. This may yet be worth it to urban SoCal, especially a SoCal that sees water levels in Lake Mead falling and is in litigation over allocating water to dust control in the Owens Valley. In a catastrophic failure of the Delta levees, it would totally be worth it.

I am still a proponent of a PC, so I am glad to have this all out in the public. People can push back against taking more water from an unstable Delta ecosystem. We can figure out who wants this water at this price. We can figure out if there are cheaper Peripheral Canal options that still protect SoCal’s water reliability. This is all progress, which has me back to being mildly optimistic again.

I want to put down some thoughts on drought before a drought is declared, before anything I say will necessarily be a response to drought politicking. I’d also like these thoughts to be more general, not the same stuff we had so much fun with last time (40,000 jobs! Thousands of acres of almond trees bulldozed! Bait fish!). These aren’t in order of importance.

• If this year is as dry as it looks to be, the obvious question is whether we are in year 5 of a long drought (with a sporadic wet year).  Won’t find that out for a long time.
• Drought is a very strange emergency, since it comes on so slow, without an origin event.  Emergency managers get flummoxed by it.
• So far, the drought hasn’t been a severe one.  It was certainly not severe enough to provoke responses beyond “preserve the status quo!”.   It was forgotten in one wet season.  It was not so severe that the State thinks it needs to do anything to prepare for/avoid a repetition of the last drought.
• It is very hard to know what to DO about a drought, especially for a State that considers itself broke and wants to decentralize power.
• There are things a rich state could do about drought.  A rich state that prioritizes ag could simply give farmers or ranchers money instead of water for a year, so that they still exist as farmers when the drought goes away.  Money is a decent substitute for water, if what you’re after is agricultural resiliency.  Money could be used to subsidize Lifeline rates, so that urban water and energy users don’t feel drought-related cost increases as much.  You could use money to buffer a drought, if you had the foresight to sock it away in advance (during the wet years, as it were).
• There are things a strong state could do about drought.  A strong state could demand effective Drought Plans from every district in the state, plans that actually spell out who gets water during droughts and who gets cut back first.  A strong state could combat demand hardening, by saying that 800,000 acres of almonds and 540,000 acres of vines is (more than) enough already.  I understand the argument that trees have to get water at the expense of row crops because trees are a decades-long investment.  I don’t understand why growers can unilaterally decide to grow a crop that will commit a chunk of water for the life of their trees given that water rights do have cutback provisos for drought.  A strong state could make the Model Landscape Ordinance retrospective, not just applying to new urban landscapes.  A strong state could do a lot more to make policy decisions about drought, but I haven’t seen any willingness to go that far.
• The alternative to making State decisions about how to use water during drought is to use a mostly unspoken “let The Market sort it out” default.  Well, if a grower planted almonds where there isn’t water for them, the trees will die and he’ll go broke and in the aggregate of these failures, the problem will sort itself out.  That is a way to do things, but it is a pretty brutal one.  If it is too brutal for public opinion, the State will be forced to step in and save individuals anyway.
• It is hard for me to see how droughts hurt cities, so long as cities get enough water for direct personal use.  Higher energy costs as hydro-electric power gets scarcer.  Damage to landscapes.  But then, what?  If people don’t get to wash their cars, they’ll still have cars that do all the things that cars did.  Higher water rates take money out of local circulation, although that money doesn’t leave the state economy.   My thinking on this isn’t clear.
• The usual drought response is “Drought?! My God! Pour water on it!” Find water from somewhere and put it on that drought! If the Brown administration does this too, I’ll be disappointed. I’d rather people were looking at what is substitutible for water, and what societal structures are overextended during drought.
• The folks hit hardest by drought were not the political noisemakers last time.  Ranchers feel droughts first, as their pastures falter and they have to buy alfalfa feed.  (Which should also tell you that alfalfa growers make out like bandits during droughts and you shouldn’t believe that ag is a monolith that feels drought pain evenly.)  Sadly, ranchers that lose their herds during droughts also commit suicide disproportionately.  Any serious drought response should include mental health counseling for ranchers and farmers.

If you have other conceptual understandings of drought, please put them in the comments.  But please don’t repeat political talking points.  We’ve all heard those.

This is preposterous.   “Water leadership up for grabs as deception fells Gleick.” There are several things wrong with that statement, which I will list for you.

1. Deception isn’t going to “fell” Dr. Gleick.  The dude has a track record of decades.  Pearl-clutchers are going to clutch their pearls for another week, and within a month or two, Dr. Gleick is going to get invited to conferences again for the same reasons he always was.  He knows the data, makes his point(s) clearly and is a good speaker.

2. This level of “deception” shouldn’t fell Dr. Gleick even if it could.   This was a situation in which there were two morally impure effective outcomes, and a morally pure ineffective outcome. 

a. Morally impure effective outcome #1.  Gleick does nothing; the Heartland Institute continues to deny climate change, damaging what we recognize as a comfortable world.  Billions of people in the Third World suffer more than they otherwise would.
b. Morally impure effective outcome #2.  Gleick uses subterfuge.  Heartland Institute is discredited, maybe can do less damage from here on out.
c. Morally pure, ineffective outcome.  Gleick tries to get more out of the Heartland Institute in an above-the-board fashion.  Nothing happens, except that the Heartland Institute now has the knowledge to hide the fact that they’re bought and sold denialists.

Of those options, Dr. Gleick chose the one that causes the least damage, which is the right thing to do.  The folks who whine on and on about being perfectly morally pure aren’t acknowledging that there are moral costs on the other side of the balance.  Sometimes all you can do is choose the least bad option.

3. “Water leadership” doesn’t depend on Dr. Gleick’s presence.  Outside the field, people are super impressed with him.  If I had to choose only one message to get out to laypeople, it would be Dr. Gleick’s, because it sets an enviro standard.  But inside the field, he is one good thinker among a half dozen, and he’s lost a fair amount of credibility with people who simply cannot agree with the Pacific Institute’s claims that there is substantial wet water to be gained from agricultural water conservation.  Lots of people agree there are very good reasons to manage ag water very closely, and many of them think that getting big yields of transferrable water is not one of those reasons.  I don’t think Dr. Gleick should be discredited over the Heartland emails anyway, but if he were, it wouldn’t create a leadership void in the field.

After saying all this, which I could summarize by saying that I’ve got the same respect for Dr. Gleick that I always did, I cannot resist needling him some.  He’s disapproved of my pseudonymity for years, but perhaps this has given him a new appreciation for separating your work from your identity.  The reason I have the same respect for him that I always have is that he does damn good work.  He does everything I want to see:  collects and shows data, shows his derivations, shows how he arrives at conclusions.  I have every reason to think that the next report they put out will be exactly the same, since he’s been doing that for thirty years now.  When I read that report, I’ll do what I always do, which is to look at all those, and either agree or be able to point to where we diverge.  It won’t matter to me that it now comes from Big Fat Liar Gleick or that it used to come from Sainted Holy Gleick.  Fuck that noise.  None of it should change how I read his reports.  If it did before, that was always laziness and taking the shortcut of going by reputation. Which is a big part of why I blog under a pseudonym.   I could be an extraordinarily debonair type with a wall full of illustrious degrees.  More likely, I am a debauched lout who blogs from a bar covered in the remnants of my most recent meal.  But you don’t know.  You will have to read my work to evaluate it.  Which is what I want you to do.  And how I hope you’ll evaluate Dr. Gleick’s stuff from now on.  And how you always should have.

I often have a hard time understanding Devin Nunes, which is fine, since I am not his intended audience. Normally, I would use “narrow political interest” to explain politicians, but ever since Devin Nunes threw a fit and scolded (IIRC) Paramount Farms and the State Water Contractors for selling out to the radical environmentalists, I haven’t been sure who he considers his base. I have to consider the likelihood that Nunes is more motivated by spiting environmentalists than by representing Republicans/agribusiness in the Valley. If that is the case, his latest bill doesn’t represent what “his supporters like Stewart Resnick of Paramount Farms, and the 40 families or so who run the Westlands Water District” want, no matter what Ms. Barrigan-Parrilla says. Nunes might just be a rabid loose cannon looking for strokes from rightwing talk radio. But he might also have proposed a water bill that gives us insight into what big Valley ag wants. I’m not confident of that, because rabid loose cannon is such a plausible alternative, but for a few more paragraphs, let’s stipulate that his bill represents what big Valley ag wants. If that is the case, it is really fucking interesting that the bill “also nullifies the need to construct of a canal to bypass the Bay-Delta, savings $12 billion.”

Big ag in the Valley doesn’t want a Peripheral Canal anymore?! I see two interpretations. First, they realize they can’t farm with water expensive enough to pay back the costs of building a Peripheral Canal. They won’t get enough new water to spread those costs over, and the reliability aspect of a new Peripheral Canal isn’t worth the money to them. (Maybe they’ve come to this conclusion based on early access to whatever BDCP has produced, I don’t know.) AND, they’re willing to accept a different form of reliability.

My interpretation is that big ag in the Valley is willing to accept a re-write of water rights law giving them priority in lieu of a canal. They don’t need expensive new cement if they can get the feds and the courts to make sure they get the first portion of our variable supply. Maybe they’re willing to trust that because Westlands has been diligent about staffing the district with very politically connected folks from the Bush Administration and because their GM is an extremely litigious lawyer.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the widespread “plumbing is destiny” belief in the Delta and Northern California. Canal opponents in the Delta and NoCal simply do not believe that a Peripheral Canal won’t be used to “take more water”. If the big canal is built, it will get filled, and no governance structures (Delta flow requirements, a Delta Plan, state laws, agreements, DWR’s solemn promise) will stop LA and Big Ag from using every cfs of canal capacity at the Delta’s expense. I personally don’t share this view, but I understand that it is compelling.

I’m just guessing, and like I say, Nunes is too erratic to be a good predictor of much. But I’m intrigued by this possibility that big Valley ag isn’t interested in a Peripheral Canal anymore (even if they’re still looking for substitutes, like shameless governance structures that favor them). If they drop out, the purposes of a Peripheral Canal (insure a reliable urban supply to the South, separate water conveyance from Delta habitat requirements) become much purer and we can decide how we value those.