June 9, 2010 · :

Why Carly Fiorina is wrong about CA water – the facts (1 of 3).

The new Republican candidate for Senate, Carly Fiorina, answered Senator Boxer’s call for debates as follows:

“Barbara, I’ll debate you anytime anywhere. As far as I’m concerned, we can debate once a week.”

The Republican, however, made one debate demand, that they schedule one meeting in Mendota in the Central Valley,”where unemployment is skyrocketing because the federal government has decided that families don’t need water.”

Aw man. The very first thing out of her mouth on the very first day? Brace yourself, water people. This is going to be a theme, and we’re going to be hearing this crap all the way through November. If I were a conscientious blogger, I’d do a nice round-up post specifically addressing that meme. Prof. Michael, you are going to be busy for the next few months. You might want to compose a stock answer for journalists that you can send out rapidly.

Here, mainstream journalists that Ms. Fiorina is dragging into the debate over water. Some posts on the persistent Republican memes in the debate last year.

On food scarcity and Communist carrots:

This one arose out of one picture of a food line in Mendota with a can of carrots labeled “from China”. It has no relation to our actual carrot (or food) production. Real reporters, there is accurate data about the acreages of food crops in California; it is in a nicely searchable online database maintained by the USDA. Search here for California data and do not write false stories about the threat to our food security. If Ms. Fiorina tries to make this part of her campaign, point out that she is wrong. If she says it again after that, point out that she is lying about easily verifiable facts.

(If you find yourself swayed because hundreds of thousands of acres sounds like a lot, read this. CA agriculture is so big that hundreds of thousands of acres aren’t very much.)

Thousands of families out of work:

I’m going to point you to Prof. Michael and the extensive debate over the job figures.

Can I just say? All this interest in poverty on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is great. I am so glad our senators and potential senators have decided this is a major focus. But those towns have been feudal fiefdoms for the past hundred years. Read The King of California for a description, or Goldschmidt’s 1944 study comparing towns on the east and west sides of the Valley. Feinstein and Fiorina all of a sudden care about farm laborers on the west side now? The only thing that has changed is that wealthy farming operations and their hired public relations firms have decided to co-opt the image of farm laborers to achieve their political goals of securing water by gutting the ESA.

Mostly I’m bummed because we’re going to have to hear this for months, after hearing it all last year. Did the spring rains bring us no relief ?

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June 8, 2010 · :

Deferred maintenance is the triumph of denial over intentions.

This quote from one of the constant stream of stories on rising water and sewer rates is wonderful.  Boardmember Clark says her district will need to raise rates because:

“Maintenance is the mark of civilization,” she said. “It is not sexy but necessary to keep sewage out of your house, out of your creeks and out of the bay.”

Building great works is fantastic and all, but single celled organisms can do that.  Maintenance, however.  Maintenance shows forethought and consistency and awareness of what we normally take for granted.  A mark of civilization, indeed.

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June 4, 2010 · :

Get Judge Roesch, if you can. That man fears nothing.

I love how audacious C-WIN is, and am glad they’re out there.  They’re taking on the right issues, and often go straight to the heart of them.  These are all from memory, so I don’t know if I have them exactly right, but suing the State Board to define and enforce reasonable and beneficial use, challenging the big project contracts, getting DWR to take environmental documentation seriously  –those are all great.  I would love it if they could wrest the Kern Water Bank back from private ownership.  They’re right; the state should own and operate that reservoir.  I love that they’re raising the real hard questions and I usually hope they’ll win.  I don’t even mind that they’re litigious; bad as courts are for deciding complex multi-party questions, it isn’t like we’ve got a better forum here.

That said, their legal complaints kinda kill me.   I’m not a lawyer and they are, so presumably they know what they’re doing better than I do.  They’ve won a fair number of their CEQA cases, I believe.  But when their grounds for complaint is, like, the Constitution, dude, I start thinking about pro se defendents waving a copy of the Bill of Rights at a judge.  “It says right here…”  They may well be right that some of our big practices aren’t Constitutional.  But they are well ingrained.  Getting a judge to up-end big pieces of our system sounds hard, especially on broad Constitutional principles.  Glad they’re doing the work, but it looks like an uphill battle to me.

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June 3, 2010 · :

Climate change scientists have been trying to warn him since the mid-80s.

My Dad once told me that the only thing anyone ever manages is risk. You see that here, in this story about uncertainty and Westlands. The lede:

Like many Central Valley farmers, Todd Allen says it’s the unpredictability of his water supply that causes the most damage.

You know, Mr. Allen doesn’t have to be uncertain about his water supply. He could look at historic supplies and see that Westlands has always gotten at least ten percent of contract allotments. He could plant to match that ten percent and never worry again. (Actually, he can’t, because climate change will introduce even more variability than we’ve seen this decade. But, for the next couple decades, he can probably be sure of at least ten percent.) But what Mr. Allen wants is something different. He wants enough water to plant most of his acreage, and he wants certainty. He wants to offload that risk; in real life, without legal protection, the fish would feel the brunt of that variability. Bummer that Mr. Allen has to live his life during the transition period for climate change. He (and the rest of us) will feel the effects of increased variability first hand.

Allen is a mid-sized producer of lower-value crops on land whose productivity is further impacted by drainage problems. With transferred water known to cost up to $500 an acre-foot and a new well more than $500,000, he took the realistic option and reduced his production to 40 acres of wheat.

Soon Westlands’ attorneys were calling to add his story to court briefings challenging the bio-ops. Wanger pointed out Allen’s example in his May 27 ruling on flow restrictions protecting salmon, saying such human impacts — along with pollutants entering the waterway, along with other possible stressors — were missing from the agencies’ documents.

It is kindof bullshit to come in as junior contractors, explicitly accepting a risk regime, then later complain that you can’t manage the variability. That was what they bargained for when they started. They got used to more supplies under a governing regime that was willing to shunt that variability to the Delta, but a few years of regular supplies, even decades of them, shouldn’t become the new standard of acceptable risk for them. High risk activities suck, but the appropriate response is to recognize what you’re working with and not allow yourself to depend on them. That type of farming operation should only ever have been bonus, bonus production when the water is high. Mr. Allen is looking at the right response, although he probably doesn’t like it.

Allen said he was building a promising future, having upgraded irrigation equipment and purchased new land in the past few years. He wasn’t expecting such an impact from something beyond his control.

“I was really starting to turn the corner, and all of a sudden … I feel like I’m being punished and I’ve done nothing wrong,” Allen said. “Now I’m thinking about getting another career going in case this falls apart.”

Yes. He needs something stable to support his family, which being the junior contractor wasn’t ever and especially will not be from here on out. It is a shame that he didn’t understand the risk regime he entered, and gambled on more reliability than was ever there. It is even more of a shame that he feels victimized. I hope he understands that he’s in the vise of big forces, and doesn’t direct that at any particular person (like a judge, say).  What he did wrong was believe that what he observed around him was guaranteed by something (if nothing more than his lived experience).  It is a human mistake to make, but the same big forces will inexorably exact the full cost of that error.

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May 5, 2010 · :

Other stuff on the internet.

I loved this slideshow of agriculture around the world, which I looked at long and hard (not least because it loads painfully slowly). I tried to guess the crop and country before I read the caption. I could tell the dairyman was in a first world country because of all the capital in the shot (the nice clean buildings and fences), but wasn’t sure where until I looked at the hills in the background. Oh, home. Absolutely, without question.

Picture 4 blew my mind. Those furrows/beds were machine dug, right? It reminded me of my irrigation professor’s statement that nothing would be more useful to African agriculture then laser leveling.

Looks a fair amount like coastal Central California. Americans should wear more color. Start ’em early.

The picture of the lettuce harvesters reminded me of my perennial internet debates. Sen. McCain once infuriated people by saying that Americans wouldn’t pick lettuce for $50/hour. I don’t agree with Sen. McCain on just about anything, so I should be warned. But I agreed with him here. After spending a summer in fields doing irrigation system evaluations and seeing how hard the laborers worked, I believe that anyone with any alternative (a minimum wage job stocking shelves indoors, for example) wouldn’t do farm labor. I also believe that people who didn’t do manual labor growing up couldn’t pick at a speed that growers would pay for. That picture of lettuce pickers reinforced my take on this stupid, pointless question that I should learn to ignore.

All the pictures are fantastic, but the last one that stuck with me was of the Afghani herders driving their goats. Such beautiful goats! Then, right there, graffiti-ed onto the rock, an American surveying station in ugly orange paint. What did the Americans start there? Can they finish it? Did the Afghani’s want the reminder? What did the locals write in response (coincidence that the response is in green, color of Islam)? In that picture, they’re going along their daily business, not bothering anyone, with the beautiful goats and ugly reminders of imperialism.

***
Another amazing photo series on the food families around the world eat in a week.

Gene Logsdon has been writing about driving animals, and what a big part of life it used to be.

***
An interesting take on the Resnicks, from before the drought politicized them in water circles. I stumbled on this by accident as I was looking for beekeeping information, and was surprised to see them in other conflicts. Hard to believe there’s life outside Water, but sometimes it pierces my blinders.

***
Couple interesting pieces in the SF Chron today. A hay farmer holds out against turning a Delta island to a wetland. My take-away is that we shouldn’t have made contracts to maintain levees in perpetuity for free. Like water rights, it was too much to offer.

Also, an interesting read about a Californian cotton grower who doesn’t want his cotton subsidies. He’d rather compete on quality. Next Farm Bill reauthorization is in 2013? First year of Pres. Obama’s second and final term? Interesting thought.

***

Alex Breitler pointed us to a new site, put up by South San Joaquin and Oakdale irrigation districts to argue against a Biological Opinion for preserving steelhead on the Stanislaus River.

I like the site. It looks like the authentic work of the people who posted it, not smarmy bullshit by paid-for PR firms. You can tell. This is good, because now I can get a feel for what SSJID and OID actually think. I’m glad they put it out for public analysis.

That said, their argument is wrong on two fronts. First, they say that the Biological Opinion is flawed because it will drain New Melones reservoir 13 times over the next eighty years. But keeping the reservoir full isn’t the goal of the Biological Opinion; just because the reservoir empties doesn’t mean that the Biological Opinion won’t achieve what it is trying to do, which is give the best chance to steelhead. I’d be real interested in seeing that report. I’ve seen similar DWR reports, of state reservoirs going dry about 20 times in the next century. I wonder whether the New Melones/Stanislaus modeling included climate change, which will make the problem much worse (less water, plus you have to release more cold water to cool off warmer rivers). Anyways, the report’s results sound roughly right to me, and point to much more active reservoir operations in the future than we’re used to.

The real problem with their argument is in the last two bullet points. They’re essentially saying that once the reservoir is empty, the river will run dry and it will be terrible for steelhead. That, they claim, is the flaw of the Biological Opinion: “The implementation of the BO could kill the very fish it attempts to save…”. This is true. Once there’s no water left to send down the river, there’s no water left. But holding that water behind the reservoir will also dry up the river, making it terrible for steelhead. Every year the rules laid out in the Biological Opinion draw the reservoir down to almost nothing is another season that the Biological Opinion did exactly what it was written to do, keep water in the river and save the steelhead. I can’t tell from the write-up on their site, but that looks like it might be 22 years in the next 80 years. (Or maybe the 13 years of complete drawdown come out of those 22 years; I can’t tell.)

So far as I can see from the write-up on their site, the problem isn’t that the Biological Opinion is flawed. The problem is that it is likely the right thing to do for steelhead, and that will direct water into the Stanislaus and away from SSJID and OID’s growers. Also, it looks like there isn’t enough (cold) water in the system even if it all went to steelhead. I do love seeing growers and districts take such an active interest in invasive species, stewards of the land that they are.

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April 28, 2010 · :

That day is not yet.

Man, all the news stories are dull these days. Is this what blogging in a normal water year is going to be like?

I am working on several posts on water and markets. One day you’ll come by and see eight posts at once. If you have questions on water and markets, now is a good time to ask them.

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April 21, 2010 · :

A shadowy cabal, let me tell you.

This is an interesting article on businesses facing the realities of climate change, because they’re feeling early effects.

This makes capitalism a curiously bracing mechanism for cutting through ideological haze and manufactured doubt. Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who’s facing “climate exposure”—as it’s now called by money managers—cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion. Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations—aluminum manufacturers, real-estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick—and you’ll find straightforward statements about the grim reality of climate change that wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Greenpeace.

I can tell you who isn’t interested in debating the reality of climate change and faked data. Upper managers at my state agency are not at all interested in an argument over whether climate change is real. They don’t have time for that. They’ll argue over how bad it might get, or whether we can get moving on mitigation fast enough. They’re as happy as anyone to work on strategies for shifting the burdens to someone else. But they’re acutely aware that climate conditions have already shifted. They know that the plumbing we have now won’t work half so well if we lose the snowpack. They can’t pretend that we might not lose the snowpack, because angry water districts are going to show up with pitchforks if we promise water we can’t deliver. (They also might show up with pitchforks if we admit that we can’t deliver water.)

You know how denialists say climate change is all a faked-up conspiracy? I’ve never really understood what the conspiracy is for. Like, who gains? I’ve heard different answers. Thousands of university researchers are carefully faking data, in tandem, for grant money that will keep them employed. (But they’d get grants doing other science if they weren’t studying climate change.) Environmentalists made up climate change because they want to enforce their tiny-car and cloth bag-bringing ways on red-blooded Americans. (I suppose, I guess.) I’ve heard that The State is making up climate change to support a land and water grab for billionaire farmers. (But, we don’t actually get to have that land and water. The land will be undersea or retired, and any re-allocated water will be spread finely over the next ten billion people to live in our cities. It isn’t like we bureaucrats get awarded cute little cabins with pure cold springs, mores the pity.) I guess the story below points to beneficiaries for the conspiracy. Starting in the early Eighties, university scientists started making up climate change so that thirty years later, the Bureau of Reclamation would buy un-needed new turbines from turbine companies in North Carolina. That was far-sighted of them. They’re probably related to the turbine company owners. It’s the only explanation.

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April 21, 2010 · :

Couple examples.

You know how I talk about climate change making everything more expensive? I usually attribute that to actually having less stuff (run-off, hydropower, precip). But there’s also the fact that we’re optimized to the current climate. Changing that will be expensive. Those costs permeate everything.

Yesterday there was a story about installing new turbines at Hoover Dam, so they can continue to generate power when lake levels are low from drought. That’s a small, unexpected cost of $3.4M, that will help us keep the power generation we have now, not increase generation or improve our quality of life. Today there’s a story about changing ocean currents scouring more sand than they used to, so dredged materials aren’t enough to re-fill a local beach. It’d cost the local city $700,000 to replace that sand, but they don’t have it, so this year they only replenished half the beach. In this case, our quality of life is going down, by half a pretty beach’s worth. Not the end of the world, but we’re going to take these hits and feel these small costs in hundreds of ways. Increases in water and utility rates are just the blatant examples of the ways we’re getting poorer.

I saw an early presentation of this paper on how climate change will shift sands on SoCal beaches a couple years ago. It’s pretty neat.

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April 16, 2010 · :

In our lifetimes.

I’ve heard these numbers on food waste before, and don’t have any gut feel for whether they’re about right. (Via.) I’ll say what I always say, which is that the pounds of food waste could be huge (millions and millions), and still be a small percentage of the overall foodstream. But I don’t know. Maybe it is noticeable percentage of the foodstream.

If a noticeable percent of the foodstream is wasted, I think that using that making better use of that food has good potential to use less water in ag. Honestly, I think it holds more easy gains than straight up engineering solutions to irrigation techniques. There are still improvements to make on the engineering side of things, but contra the Pacific Institute, I don’t think they free up a ton of water. The three avenues I see for using much less water in ag without fallowing are: decreasing food waste, improving soil tilth, and bio-engineering crops.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that the farmer quoted in the food waste story said that farmers account for a five percent food loss in the fields. Last year, the year of the Communist carrots and the scares about loss of food production from drought, California carrot acreage was down 3%. This year, because of late rains, California carrot acreage is down 11%. But no one is going to go shrieking about rains causing us to import carrots from China. The food threat from the last three years of drought is completely unfounded, less than the annual write-off from harvesting waste (before food gets wasted at every other level of transaction).

Then, because I can’t help hammering home my usual theme, I have to point out that doing stuff like reducing food waste and improving soil tilth is exactly the type of intense management for small gains over widely spread territory that no one wants to do. We’ve exhausted the big, low-entropy sources of water, so if we want more, we have to get it in small bits from ungleaned fields everywhere. We are still rich enough that it is there for the taking. But we’re getting poor enough that we’re starting to be interested in taking what we never thought worth it before. This is what a transition to relative scarcity looks like.

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April 14, 2010 · :

There will be a quiz.

It has been heavy on the policy side around here, so I wanted to get back to some science.

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