On the public record

I dunno, man.  I sorta mostly agree with some of what this article talks about.  But I can’t get really worked up about it.  I believe what the author writes; that oil production didn’t see any restrictions on water use in the past drought.  The stuff about how yucky the water is after it gets used in oil production is new to me.  Maybe that’s a problem.  But overall, I think he’s bucking some pretty conventional wisdom with this piece, and for me at least, he isn’t persuasive.  Yes, oil production got all the water it could use during the drought.  By and large, most people agree that industrial processes should get priority for water, because they’re making things.  That may not actually be the case and perhaps this article is the kind of muck-raking that will start changing minds.  But I bet that if you ask laypeople how water should be allocated in the state, they’d say: me first, business second, fishies third, cute farms fourth, non-cute farms last.  You could maybe switch around the cute farms and the fish.  But saying that oil production, or industry in general, got their water in the drought isn’t going to raise a lot of eyebrows.

I have to complain about the attempt to make this sound like a big problem.  The oil industry got 8.4 billion gallons!  Eight point four BILLION!  Except, like, gallons are tiny.  You can even carry a gallon.  What is 8.4 billion gallons in real units?  Oh.  Twenty-five thousand acre-feet?  You wrote an article about 25,000 acre-feet of water in California?  Yes, every bit is precious, but unless you’re telling me a small town halved their consumption and saved 25,000 acre-feet, I’m not that intrigued.  We can all do this in our heads by now.  You’re talking the equivalent of 8,000 irrigated acres.  In the San Joaquin Valley, that’s rounding error.

Now that the State Water Contractors are so concerned with ammonia from Sacramento’s wastewater causing fish declines in the Delta, I keep imagining myself sitting down to chat with some lobbying flack for the State Water Contractors, a group that until now has been all about engineering water solutions to deliver water to agriculture.  I like to think of them leaning earnestly across the table, to tell me things like:

• “Even small amounts of pollutants can greatly disrupt ecosystems. Matter is always conserved, you know. Diluting the problem just makes it all the harder to clean up later.”
• “The food web is crucial to ecosystem stability. Small organisms can have much larger importance than you might think. We don’t mean some minnow, of course, but beautiful little phytoplankton.  It is so shallow to focus only on charismatic mega-fauna.”
• “What you can see in these complex systems are threshold events, where different effects combine to cause an unexpected crash.  The only way to prevent that is to protect natural ecosystem functions and processes.”
• “We should spend what it takes to keep the Delta ecosystem stable. There’s no balancing test for keeping Nature alive.”

I am pleased to welcome the State Water Contractors to the world of Ecology, where everything is complex and inter-related. They are going to just love the concepts of resilience (how much ammonia can one dump into a system before it re-sets to less complex functioning) and appreciating how each small part contributes to a rich larger system. Spend enough time hanging out in Ecology, and they’ll start to love the precautionary principle, because it turns out to be really hard to patch ecosystems back together. If a small and ignoble part of me thinks that their newfound love for phytoplankton is something of an opportunistic attempt at distraction from the much larger effects of lack of water through the Delta, well, I think it could be good for the State Water Contractors to start thinking like biologists and ecologists anyway. 

Now that the State Water Contractors are all about ecology, where might they turn their attention next? I’ve loved their recent emphasis on invasive species. Are they going to get very interested in upstream creek restoration and spawning grounds? They should. How about water quality besides ammonia from Sacramento’s wastewater?  Methyl mercury from gold mining?  It all combines to influence the Delta ecosystem, as well they know. I’m looking forward to more lectures from them about food webs.

Was reading The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough this week, because I love a disaster book like no other. You guys should read this, and then Under a Flaming Sky, by Brown, which is about a giant fire that ate whole towns. Then you should read The Outlaw Sea, by Langewiesche, which has informative parts too, but I read for the ferry sinking in the middle third. Then you’ll never sleep again.

Anyway, The Johnstown Flood was fun. There were the dramatic parts, of course, which were horrific.  I enjoyed an early sighting of some engineer named Brinkerhoff. The part that I think might be relevant for today was a poem that could have broader contemporary use. One theory of the dam collapse was that it was due to screens across the discharge pipes that were intended to keep fish in the reservoir for sport fishing. A man named Isaac Reed wrote a poem about the tragedy:

Many thousand human lives–
Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives,
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,
(Worse than Herod’s awful crime)
Sent to Heaven before their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!
All the horrors that hell could wish,
Such was the price that was paid– for fish!

Farm Water Coalition, Dolphin Group, Westlands, fake Delta front groups. So far you have been concentrating on fake workers’ marches and fake websites, and I see Mike Wade everywhere commenting on any newspaper story that mentions water. Have you considered writing torrid poetry?  You could add a second verse.  “Smelt” practically rhymes with “Hell” already.  Shoot, if I get bored at my meeting today, maybe I’ll write something for you myself.

A Russian scholar wrote an intemperate article saying that America is deliberately causing climate change as an act of war.  I suppose that if your wheat harvest for the year were wiped out by drought and your capital city were choked in smoke, you might well think you’d been attacked.  I wish we were purposefully causing climate change, for any reason.  Then we could stop doing it.  The fact that climate change is the unseen by-product of the convenience of our lives makes it far harder to stop contributing to the problem.

If climate change is an American weapon, it is a poorly aimed one.  For some reason, we’re pointing this weapon at phytoplankton, who were probably disrespectful that one time.  We’ve slashed it across iceshelves and glaciers, who were no doubt talking about us behind our backs.  Our weapon boosts floods in countries we then help and hots up fires in countries that feed the world.  Sometimes this weapon just dries out countries that feed the world. As weapons go, it is an indiscriminate one.  Sure would be nice to turn it off.

I read the stories on the Russian peat fires, the ones that have been choking Moscow, and I’m just astonished.  I can’t believe a society could so thoroughly misunderstand their soils, especially their peat soils.  Did they never consider what would happen over years of mis-using them?  Didn’t they have scientists to tell them how draining peat soils for decades would combine with the effects of climate change, causing ahistoric calamities?  Where were their leaders to point out in advance the size of the risk they were taking on, and urging them to take precautions before the conflagration hit?  How were their villagers willing to live right on the edge of the potential disaster, willfully blind to the high possibility of instantaneous life-threatening change?  Those poor people, realizing that now that their system has collapsed, they’ll have to fight the on-going effects for years and dedicate substantial water resources to the problem.  How horrible for them.  Thank god things like that only happen in backwards poorly-governed oligarchys and kleptocracies.

I love the North County Times’ water reporting.  Couldn’t tell you whether the rest of the paper is any good, but I find their water reporting to be informative and thorough, with a good eye for detail.  This op-ed in the North County Times, however, lacks their usual nuance.  It is written by a Ms. Batra, who imagines her local water authorities to be an authoritarian bunch.  I am at a loss, however, to understand exactly how their fiendish plots will work.

On the surface, Ms. Batra objects to a recent reversal of district rate policy.  She writes that the people of Encinitas were promised a lower water rate if they conserved; on getting good conservation returns, four of five (city?) councilmembers cancelled the lower rates.  (I don’t know if this is the actual story, if there were a promise to reduce rates, what the vote was, what actually happened.)   I strongly suspect the city had the same problem many districts had in the past drought.  They had a poorly designed rate structure, one that spread the costs of their capital and operating costs over the amount of water they sold.  When they sold less water, they suddenly found they couldn’t pay their fixed costs.  The PUC is trying to introduce a decoupled rate structure into water service.  The costs of district infrastructure and O&M are bundled into a fixed rate, while the costs of delivering water are a separate variable price.  This way, districts will always recoup their infrastructure and O&M costs.  Most districts aren’t on this model yet, though, and the phenomenon that Ms. Batra observes (that you conserve and then your rates go up) really pisses people off.  Telling them that they would be paying far more if they hadn’t conserved, because then they’d be paying for more water, and some of it would be even more expensive water that the district had to go buy from some one never seems to soothe anyone.  Ms. Batra has illustrated one of the common policy problems of water conservation, but it is resolvable and not emotionally intractable, like some of our other water policy problems.  That’s not really what is bugging Ms. Batra, however.

The way I read Ms. Batra, she seems preoccupied with governments abusing authority.  She uses some pretty loaded language, for starters, all about bossing people around and authority.

…the state introduced mandatory water conservation measures… …we have been nagged to death about conserving water… …rules that dictated…

She goes on to state her thesis, which is where I started laughing.

It’s pretty obvious that City Council members will cherry-pick and follow only those rules that expand government and their own power.

This is funnier for water districts, and only barely more plausible for city council members, but WHAT POWER?  How does changing a rate structure consolidate a board member’s or a council member’s power?  Even if you change the rate structure so it charges more, how does that lead to personal power for a council member or institutional power for a district or city?  On the boring legal side, a special district or a city  has listed powers from their enabling legislation.  They can tax parcels.  They can grant water service.  They can get easements for maintenance.  They have some genuine and useful powers.  But they aren’t feudal lords.  They can’t get any powers that are any fun or make their institution be more than a water district. It isn’t like a district can get so strong it can invade a neighbor, and, um, force water deliveries on their new serfs.

That’s why I don’t get Ms. Batra’s argument.  According to her, because of this rate increase, locals will pay $10 more per month, and… then what?  The locals will become relatively more impoverished, and from their diminished socioeconomic class, look with awe upon the city council members, who then get to cut in line at the movies and get the best tables in restaurants?  The increased coffers of the city (which I think will go straight back to pipe maintenance, but lets say it doesn’t) will do… what?  With the ill-gotten hoard from that rate increase, city councilmembers will be able to eminent domain anybody they want and build their castles on the best land?   If the argument is that the council members in this case act out of base power-mongering, I think the case falls apart when you get to motivation.   I know you think it is all hookers and blow for glamorous water district board members, but sadly, even craven greedy rate increases don’t score board members anything a hedonist would want.  All that heady power barely gets them a parking spot and answers to their questions in staff reports.  I don’t understand the mechanism that Ms. Batra suggests, that shafting the public with a rate increase gives them personally or their agency more power.  And I don’t understand the result, that they have more power to do some unexplained but nefarious something.  What could it be?

I’ve edited this slightly for grammar.

Candidate for governor Jerry Brown released two more campaign plans, on education and the environment.  He is still not talking about water.  Can’t blame him.  The field is turbulent and polarized right now; declaring himself on anything related to the Delta (and everything is related to the Delta) can only make people mad.  Personally, I would love for him to come out with some strong statement.  Folks in the agencies are reading tea leaves and entrails, wondering whether our on-going projects will be up-ended in January.

Bureaucrat that I am, I loved one thing  in particular about his plan for the environment.  Under Protect California’s Coastline and Ocean Resources (Item 3, page 5), he wrote:

…Complete and implement California’s Climate Adaptation Plan aimed at protecting against sea level rise, salt water intrusion, and increased erosion.

I am nearly overcome.  He is aware of an existing planning document!  He wants to implement it!  He will draw on already existing work, rather than have his administration start from scratch!  He knows enough about the state agencies to refer to some of their work and thinks it is good enough to keep it going!  This is amazing talk from a politician, this knowledgeable citing-of-plans.  How fortuitous that we also draw on that adaptation plan!  It suggests that multiple state agencies may actually be seeing momentum from coordinating their planning and working from a common information base.   How extraordinary.

 I wonder if Meg Whitman could name any of the major plans in any of the agencies.  Climate Change Adaptation?  California Transportation Plan?  California Water Plan?  FloodSAFE?  The California Fire Plan?  I mean, she probably could, because you just put a major issue in the middle of the words California and Plan.  But it seems as if Jerry Brown has (at least) a rough idea what is in them (which is the best I could do for transportation and fire and stuff).  Which is surprisingly encouraging for low-level agency staff.

It’d be awesome to get this back.

We never had this to start with.  I am not blogger enough (nor bodybuilder) to explain this.  The playgrounds are worth a look too.

The State Board’s report detailing the flows that would be required to maintain native fish populations in the Delta make the choice very clear.  We cannot manage water the way we do now and have resilient native fish populations in the Delta.  We’ve known this, but now it is all official in a report.  Mr. Fitzgerald wrote:

Only now none can deceive. They can’t pretend fulfilling excessive water contracts – promising to deliver more water than exists – and restoring the Delta both are feasible goals. They can’t say we’ll all get better together.

California knows now that it is making a choice.  The mechanisms for making choices in Sacramento and the state are nearly hopelessly snarled and broken, and from what I’ve seen, we are particularly bad at choices with identifiable losers.  So we’ll tackle pieces of this choice in lots of venues, and if the solution doesn’t appear to be win-win, the forum will dissolve for another three years until it gets re-instated to create and select from a menu of non-existent win-win choices.  But I’m getting off track.   I really wanted to say something different.

There are thousands of water professionals, and maybe tens of very influential politicians, executives, technocrats and judges who will try to sort this out.  They claim to want to follow science, and that’s great.  But they are following science to implement a policy choice of the 39 million Californians in the state.  We project all the time about what those 39 million Californians want.  They want cheap food!  They looove salmon!  The Endangered Species Act shows that they love nature!  Their lawns show that they don’t care about nature!  They want convenience and blissful ignorance!  We guess, project and argue about what the people of the state want us to do with our water.  (They always agree with the speaker.)  What kills me is that “what the people of the state want to do with our waters” is knowable.

There are survey research companies that could detail, with good reliability and precision, the preferences of the 39 million people who would find this blog utterly boring*.  We could commission a large random sample, give them a board game and 80 pieces of water and have them allocate the 80MAF of water that fall on the state most years.  We could have them allocate in drought and surplus.  We could actually know, within a confidence interval, what the people of the state want us to do.  Maybe they don’t give a shit about a minnow.  Maybe they’d throw farming out the window.  But we could know.   We could know this within a few months and a few tens of thousands of dollars.  Perhaps the aggregate opinion of the people of the state should only be advisory, just as the Delta flows requirement report is advisory.  But as we get into the reality of this choice, change our lifestyles or let the natural environment collapse, we could know what the people of the state want to do.

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