On the public record

I am actually quite worried about Captain Knapp’s third point about Valley Fever. I would love to see his data on that, and would relay it to the Dept of Health Services if they don’t already have it. (For those of you who aren’t local, Valley Fever is an airborne fungus that makes people real sick. In seventh grade, it killed my best friend’s father. I came home from trip, asked my best friend how she was, and her father had died of Valley Fever within a couple days of getting it from a dusty attic. Oh.)

I also thought of a few critiques of the first story in the series, which was about the effects of pumping restrictions on the “human environment” of the west side. You guys want to see those?

KMPH, the Fox News Affiliate for Fresno, is running a story on how the pumping restrictions and regional water scarcity on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are threatening the military readiness of the nation. I am skeptical, but the story lists three things that apparently threaten “half of the navy’s total offensive combat strike power”*.  According to the air station base commander, Captain Knapp, the lack of water on the west side:

1.  Increases the number of bird strikes.  Somehow, cultivating the 12,000 acres of surrounding farmland used to decrease the local bird population (and it is worth pausing over what that says about their farming practices).

2.  Increases local dust and debris, which Captain Knapp’s airplane engines are apparently sensitive to.

3.  Increases incidence of Valley Fever among people living on the base.

Now, I am no military expert**, so I will not venture a guess at the dangers increased bird strikes and dust on a California naval air station pose to the air strike capacity of the United States Navy.  It seems to me that they’d have encountered these conditions before, but what do I know?  I am, however, a California bureaucracy expert and a water expert.  So I have a few thoughts.

First, what is Lemoore Air Station doing entirely dependent on the water allocations of an agricultural water district?  Lemoore has about 5,000 people on base, which means I bet they have more than 3,000 water connections, which means Lemoore Air Station should be writing an Urban Water Management Plan.  Then, in the event that they suddenly have less water, they could go to the required Shortage Contingency Plan and implement their plan for dealing with these foreseeable problems.  I bet Lemoore fell through the cracks, because it is a federal installation in the middle of an ag water district, but the state requires other comparable-sized cities to plan for these events.

Second, I don’t think a small city should be dependent on an ag water district’s water supply; there are different minimum health and safety standards for each, for example.  But given that it is, that actually makes the lines of communication simple and direct.  If the lack of 12,000 farmed acres around Lemoore is a national security issue, the base commander can go straight to the Westlands Board of Directors.  They’re right there and they meet every month.  But the word “Lemoore” doesn’t appear in any of the last twelve Board meeting agendas.  Apparently the danger to naval air strike capacity is bad enough for base commander Captain Knapp to tell a newspaper reporter about, but not bad enough for him to go to his water supplier and ask for a specific allotment for a buffer against bird strikes and dust.

Maybe Navy Captain Knapp is shy and doesn’t want to disturb the Westlands Board of Directors with a national security matter.  In that case, he has other options.  He can’t go to DWR for an emergency transfer from the Drought Water Bank, because he’d need an Urban Water Management Plan with a complete Shortage Contingency Plan in it.  But considering that the half the navy’s air strike capacity is endangered by bird strikes and dust at Lemoore, perhaps he could make a case to another federal water agency, like Reclamation.  His 12,000 acres of cultivated buffer would require about 36,000 acrefeet of water to grow a crop and preserve the nation’s military readiness.  Reclamation had ten times that amount in carryover storage in San Luis.  They were holding that against a dry 2010, but if a direct link between 36,000 acrefeet of water at Lemoore Naval Air Station and a pressing national security crisis had been proven to them, I find it hard to believe that Reclamation couldn’t have given Lemoore water that was already south of the Delta.  Captain Knapp complains that Reclamation wasn’t responsive, and perhaps that’s true.  But perhaps they weren’t responsive to a general plea for more water in the region, instead of a specific request for a fixed amount of water to alleviate a well-demonstrated threat to the military readiness of the country.  I’m only speculating.

Which leads me to two more points.  First, how far do you want to take this link between water and national security?  Does it go any farther than giving interviews to Fox News reporters who are trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act?  I ask because I’m worried about your long runways.  Look at them out there on the west side, where overpumping has caused about seven feet of subsidence in the past few years.  Are they cracking?  Do cracked runways in California put half the air strike capacity of the United States navy at risk?  Seems like it is at least as worrisome as additional bird strikes.  That might be a good reason to call for groundwater regulation (or a halt to overdrafting altogether) in California.

That brings me to my last point, which is that you work for me, Captain Knapp.  I am one of your many employers, and I don’t like your giving interviews to biased news stations that are trying to undermine the laws of the land.  I think that you shouldn’t be using the gravitas of your military service to try to influence court decisions through the news.  I think that is bullshit, and you should be reprimanded for conspicuously inserting yourself into civilian politics.  Now, half of your employers might think different.  But half of your employers probably think like me.  Since you’re sure to anger half your employers, you should stay out of politicking about water and stick to your military duties, which I am sure you serve well and admirably.

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Of course, I would just use my power to call someone a goatblower, but is good that real authors are making better use of our freedom to offend.

Dear Mr. Weiser,

I write to inform you that at 9:20 this evening, Tuesday the 30th of March, the sprinklers at the Sacramento Bee (east side island strip) were on during the rain.  I trust you would want to know, and will discuss the matter with the groundskeepers immediately.  These things happen to the best of us; there’s no shame in an honest mistake, although I myself have unplugged my sprinkler controller to prevent exactly this occurrence.  It is early in the year for automatic sprinkler operations, wouldn’t you say?  I wish you the best of luck and hope you get good cooperation in your efforts to correct the Bee’s practices.

As ever, I remain, your humble and obedient servant,

On the Public Record

This op-ed in the Orange County Register was helpful.  I can understand most interest-based positions, like people in the Delta thinking that through-Delta conveyance will be an implicit guarantee for their levees, or homeowners wanting to pretend that aging water mains will last forever or cost nothing to replace.  So if you’re a water contactor or an urban water user, I can take a rough guess at your position on water.  But I have a real hard time understanding water positions based on mainstream conservative/liberal ideologies.   They aren’t usually responding to a detailed water landscape.  They’re responding to imaginary things (Reisner for the liberals; FoxNews for the conservatives), so they say things about water that sound crazy to people who know about water*.   Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m the demon liberal in that op-ed, so it was good to understand his picture of me.  My dear readers, please don’t be shocked when I tell you that it is not a perfect match for my actual beliefs, here in the intersection of Liberal and Water.

This purposeful drying up of the San Joaquin Valley is part of a “green utopian experiment,” House argued. Since 1992, state policy has been pulling more and more water out of agricultural uses and diverting it to environmental protection. “They just keep coming at you.”

Environmentalists couldn’t care less about the smelt, a little bait fish. They will use any species or any excuse to shut down water resources to people and the farms that feed people. Environmentalists love doomsday scenarios, which give them the opportunity to control water (or land) to achieve their real goal of limiting growth and constraining the human use of nature. They want people to be crammed into high-density human islands and the rest of the land preserved under tight government control.

First things first.  Actually, I care about the smelt itself.  I don’t expect to see one, but I don’t have to see a fish to know that it is there, living a busy fish life and adding darting little glints of life to marshy sloughs.  I want the creatures of our world to be thriving on their own terms, because that’s how it was before people started messing with it.  When I hear that species are threatened, I want to know why humans had to go breaking something, and what good we got for the trouble we’ve caused to the beings around us.

Attributing doomsday scenarios to environmentalists is another interesting twist.  Seems like lots of people in water politics have done that recently.  I bring up severe climate change impacts to suggest that we would prefer a planned transition to much less California ag to an unplanned freefall.  I also invoke great big floods and old levees to say that the Delta won’t remain as is for long, and to promote my view that we should not rely on it for drinking water (and that people shouldn’t trust their lives to a Delta levee).  But I’m a mild optimist compared to people who are trying to eke political gain from drought and pumping water restrictions in isolated areas of the San Joaquin Valley.   Those are the people saying things like “dust bowl”, talking about a food crisis, desertification, and dead orchards.  They’re the ones who have to convince voters that a fairly normal agricultural year was so horrific that a Peripheral Canal is necessary.

Mostly, I wanted to object to that last sentence about cramming people into high-density human islands with the rest of the land under tight government control.  Well, of course I want that, but he’s forgetting the working landscapes aspect of California.  As a good hippie, I also want to eat local produce.  Which means I want local farms.  A lot of them, actually.  Since I’m so urban and effete, I’d like to see those farms worked by people who live in adorable towns that I can drive through along the 99.  I’d like to see farms that can keep a stable income for farm families, and support farmworkers in a lifestyle that I would recognize as first world.   Because I’m such a bleeding heart, I’d even pay more for my food if it accomplished those two things.  Seriously, Mr. Conservative-thinker-who-is-describing-an-environmental-despot, I have bigger plans than Urban Arks in the midst of Untouched Habitat.  When we shaded the maps for the Green Utopia, we definitely colored in Hippie Organic Farming, and lots of it.

I had one other big objection to the op-ed, because this just kills me.

Maybe it’s telling that this “era of limits” nonsense is taking hold again as the state prepares for a possible return to the governorship of Jerry Brown, who first put these dubious ideas into practice during his 1975-83 administration.

The concept that we’re in an era of limits is nonsense to this guy?  You know, I fault the old-school engineers for over-reliance on concrete, but actual engineers and scientists don’t ignore data the way ideologues do.  I’m sure that I wouldn’t agree with everything someone from the State Water Contractors is promoting.  But if we sat down and looked at overdraft in the west Valley, they wouldn’t pretend to me that subsidence isn’t a problem.  They wouldn’t say there is no limit to what you can pull out of an aquifer, that the ground isn’t falling.  They wouldn’t say that the falling ground isn’t cracking the Delta-Mendota Canal.  They are real sure about the costs of changing run-off patterns and losing snowpack. 

Which is why ideologues aren’t real interesting to people in the field.  People who’ve learned a whole lot and put a lot of time into protecting their interests in this complicated system can’t believe an ideologue that contradicts their experience.  Even the strokes from hearing someone confirm your biases don’t feel that good when the same person talks crazytalk in the next sentence.  It is hard enough to talk to laypeople about Water.  Talking to laypeople who are trying to cram the whole topic into some other arbitrary framing is that much more dissonant. 

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I’ve been thinking about subsidence and the damage it does to infrastructure, like the Delta-Mendota Canal and Highway 5. You know what would be handy? A law saying that if the ground level drops some amount (like, say ten feet) due to subsidence, all groundwater pumping in that aquifer should be immediately stopped until the ground surface level above that aquifer comes back up.

Then I got to wondering who pays for the costs of infrastructure repair due to subsidence for overpumping. I bet the State Water Contractors pay for repairs to the Delta-Mendota Canal, so that strikes me as their own private business. But if I were CalTrans, I’d want someone to pay me back for the cost of repairs to Highway 5 and its overpasses. I think the people pumping groundwater so fast that they’re lowering the roadbeds would be good people to pay for the damages they cause to the roads of the state. Can’t see why the larger public should have to pay for that.

LAO’s gw report is out. Didn’t say anything shocking.

There’s a fairly well established way to distribute a small amount of a desired good, right? Cap annual gw withdrawals at annual sustainable yield (minus necessary re-charge) and let in-basin water users trade for pieces of that quantity?

Haven’t seen discussion of cap-and-trade systems for groundwater anywhere, but it does seem like the locally controlled option that people say they want.

Newspaper comment sections are a vile cesspool, we all know that.  So I’ll freely admit I’m showing the worst case scenario.  But look at this, from the Bee, whose comment section makes me despair of my neighbors:

That a certain amount of self-interest will skew the findings of this panel of “experts” is predictible – and inevitable.

Similarly, the power and prestige – say nothing of budgetary concerns – of the government agencies who fund such studies is heavily dependent upon the corrupt panels of “experts” conducting such studies lending legitimacy to the funding agency’s agenda.

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Just because a bunch of grant money hungry second-rate scientists say something is true and terrible, we shouldn’t believe them without solid and peer-reviewed proof. These bozos who have never done a day’s work in their lives are just like politicians: liars, cheats, thieves, and self-interested men and women. Be very cautious and skeptical of what they proclaim as truth. Look behind the curtain to ascertain who is speaking and what agenda they are promoting for personal interests. The more they shout “Armageddon”, the more restraint you must exercise.

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The biological opinions are the scientific equivilent of political slush fund. As usual, follow the money trail. The panel agrees the unmanageable is an appropriate alternative, but more research is needed. Hmmm… This is code for I do not have my next research grant, but this seems like an opportunity.

It would be informative to know the composition of the panel and their areas of expertise. It would also be informative to know how many of the scientists have received grant money and/or paid or unpaid consulting contracts, etc.

This is what I predicted. The NAS review didn’t change anything about the political landscape here. The only new element in the conversation is libel directed against the Delta National Research Committee. That wasn’t in the air before Sen. Feinstein brought them into this. She was relying on their extremely good reputation, and now she’s dinged it, just a little bit. She’s willing to trade pieces of their reputation for a process that weakens the ESA (although it strengthens the reputation of FWS scientists, who had their Biological Opinion right) and hasn’t changed the infighting here. If I were the National Academy of Science, I’d be pissed at being her pawn.

Mr. Mark’s question is perfect; interesting topic and I can speculate wildly. Thanks. He asks:

Okay, here’s a philosophical one I suppose. Just asking for pure speculation on your part, wild extrapolation into the future. I believe that in the current — and likely future — political climate in California, the chances of any of various things that I would term “completely ridiculous” coming to pass, e.g. raising the level of Shasta Dam and flooding the Upper Sac for miles up towards Dunsmuir, or the construction of the proposed Auburn Dam, are extremely unlikely; at least I want to believe that this is so.

On the other hand, and this is my question, do you personally believe there is any remote chance that, say, in the next 30 years, the political/social climate in California might be such that one of any number of what I would term “ridiculously great things for the environment” might actually come to pass? To take a specific example, do believe that the water which is currently stolen from the Trinity watershed and sent over into the Sac Valley will ever be allowed to flow down its natural course to the Pacific? Is there any chance that something this obvious could become a priority for the body politic in California? What would it take for this to become reality? There are many other examples, of course, but this one has been on my mind lately, for some reason or another.

I don’t know, man. Last year salmon returned to the Seine, and just this week, the San Joaquin River re-joined the Pacific for the first time in 50 years.  Those are pretty outrageous things, yet both happened.  So it is possible.

I agree with your guesses about what is likely in the short term.  I don’t expect CA to build any big storage, primarily because it is expensive for very little yield.  The only big project that I see as possible is a Peripheral Canal (perhaps the small one the Planning and Conservation League is saying should be studied), and that’s because I simply cannot imagine Southern California letting their water supplies depend on weak Delta levees indefinitely.  For the next five to ten years, being broke will be a good line of defense against big marginal water projects (and all remaining dam sites are marginal.  If they were good, there’d be dams on them already.)

But what about prospects for the long run?  In favor of outrageously good things for the environment:

New governor next year might remind the state that we’re Democrats, and proud to be environmentalists.  He could set a new tone, and I’m encouraged that Jerry Brown’s been pretty active on forcing cities to incorporate greenhouse gas mitigation into their general plans.  The agencies might be a whole lot different under a Democratic governor.  Schwarzenegger hasn’t been as bad as he might have been, more erratic than consistently destructive, but if you remember, wild-eyed crazy enviroguy Jonas Minton was a deputy director in DWR during the last Democratic administration.  So there’s precedent for the agencies to be a whole lot different.  Eight years of an environmentalist governor could start a lot of trends in motion.

If you want to know what drastic project might happen in thirty years, the time to start looking at rumors and crazytalk is now.  I’ve come to believe that big shifts take twenty years from being crazytalk to institutionalized.  Pipedream grad student seminars are a good place to look; when those poor saps are broken upper managers, they can put their ideas in place. 

I think generational succession will boost the state’s environmentalist thinking.  I’ll be glad to see the single purpose engineers retire out of the field.  I mean, I love the square old guys, but they were never flexible thinkers, you know.  They want to optimize One Thing, and overbuild while they’re at it.  I think the Kids These Days have more capacity to hold multiple goals in their heads and more willingness to try different strategies.

Neutral, but possibly influential:

We’re in a turbulent period and I cannot predict the alliances any more.  If anything, I’m expecting to see more “every man for himself”, and less of agriculture or urban coalitions acting as a block.  This may mean that you aren’t going to see “ag” determine policy for much longer, since they’ll be squabbling amongst themselves.

Against the possibility of extravagently wonderful environmental restorations:

We’re about to be poor.  Much poorer.  We were optimized to the old climate and living off mined wealth.  With both those ending, a whole bunch of things are going to get more expensive in tandem (gas prices, water prices, sewage prices, firefighting costs, food costs, moving goods, cooling costs in summer, moving seaside infrastructure), although probably not communications, electronics and health costs.  But people will see more of their income go to daily non-discretionary goods.  They will feel (and be) poorer, and then I think there will be a big fork in the road.  The thing that will matter is how scared they feel.

If they correctly perceive themselves as getting poorer, and our mega-policies don’t change, they will be rightly scared.  They’ll be scared of getting sick or injured.  They’ll be scared of losing their houses.  They’ll feel trapped and vulnerable and nothing will yield, not their water bill, not their gas bill, not their mortgage.  That kind of scared makes people mean, selfish and shortsighted.  They’re not going to care about making some river they can’t afford to visit look pretty.

But if our society re-installs its social net, our society could get poorer and people will yet know they will not die of untreated dentistry, that they can take their babies into the doctor, that they can send their kids to a university, they can get out of their cars and take light rail.  Being poorer is likely to mean living in smaller places and eating less meat, but it doesn’t have to mean falling out of the middle class.  If we can get on that path, then people can have the expansiveness of spirit to be stewards.  In that spirit, who knows what they’ll decide.  Maybe they’ll want to know that northern rivers run to the sea undisturbed by us.