April 22, 2009 · :

I got mine.

I’ve now read the Public Water Coalition’s position paper a few more times.  It is an odd document.  Seriously, I don’t know anything about how the Public Water Coalition wants to organize or exert influence, although with the membership they claim, they could be very powerful.  All I can find online is a few Boards of Directors deciding whether to align with them based on the 19 page position paper we’ll be talking about.  This position paper is nearly all I can find (no website, no gossip), but the strange thing about it is that the paper’s initial purpose was to provide comment to the Delta Vision process.  It does that fine, but that focus is odd for a group that describes itself as “committed to solving our state’s water problems”.  Since it is 19 pages responding to this and that in the proposed Delta Vision plan, the overall impression is that the water problem all those agencies want to solve is that Phil Isenberg, the Chair of Delta Vision, is getting uppity.

The document has a number of policy recommendations, nearly all of which are “Give us money.”  This isn’t wrong.  Making the water system flexible and reliable enough to serve millions more people with less water will require lots of money and dispersing bond funds to agencies is a decent way to do that.  Still, it is a little offputting.  In 19 pages of discussion and recommendation, they suggest a few things for someone else (DWR) to do and ask for money without any strings attached.  They emphasize their dedication to local control fairly heavily.  Really?  They’re agencies with ratesetting and taxation authority.  They claim to represent 25 million Californians, nearly 3/4ths 2/3rds of the state.  Is there nothing they could get started with while DWR is occupied by the drought?  But action by the Public Water Coalition doesn’t come up, because the document isn’t about “solving our state’s water problems”.  It is about responding to the Delta Vision plan and pushing the Peripheral Canal.

Finally, to an astonishing extent, the positions in this document are about protecting power.  I’ll try to illustrate that when I talk about individual sections, but I’m honestly surprised that they feel that they have to coalesce to lobby for power they’ve always had.  The Delta Vision committee must have been very scary for them.  It is a little odd to talk about power in this context.  They claim to be water agencies representing the bulk of Californians.  If Met (the agency that distributes water to lots of SoCal) is in it, then their constituents include, for example, all of L.A.’s poor people, whom I would normally not class as powerful.  If the Friant Water Authority is in it, their constituents are as close as this state has to stable small farmers, not always a powerful group.  The powerful and the not-powerful in this coalition are larger water agencies on the powerful side, and anyone using water in the Delta and unaffiliated water users on the not-powerful side.  I don’t know how explicitly they thought about this, but my take is that they see looming water scarcity and are reaffirming their claims as against anyone smaller.  This drought is exposing all the flaws in our institutions, so the people who have done well under those institutions are trying to reinforce them in their favor before the permanent drought hits.

I don’t know how stable this coalition is going to be.  The traditional alignment was northern versus southern California, then ag versus urban, then a triangle between ag, urban and enviros.  There’s been talk recently of an east/west split, which looks to me like an ag versus urban + enviros version.  If the Public Water Coalition is the new force it claims to be, the new alignment would be large established water agencies versus anyone small.  That’s interesting.  Well, I’m interested.

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April 17, 2009 · :

Introduction: the Public Water Coalition

I was very intrigued by this story on a new coalition in water politics, the Public Water Coalition.  It is a few months old, and like the article says, I had never heard of it.  It looks to be a loose affiliation of most of the big water districts in the state.  They don’t have staff or a website or anything, so it took me a while to track down their guiding document, a position paper issued in February.  It is among the attachments in this report to a water district board, (pages 11-29), and looks like the comments they submitted to the Delta Vision process back in November.  I found one other statement by them, again to Delta Vision.

Do you remember when this blog was just a baby, and we spent three weeks of its young life going through the Pacific Institute report?  Remember how exciting that was?  Shall we do that again, focus on parsing a position paper that none of y’all would read anyway?  LETS!

My take-away from my first couple readings is:

Every recommendation in the report is a way to protect the power of the already powerful water interests in the state.  If you want to know the water buffalo party line, this is it.  (Given that, I’m impressed with the extent to which they have conceded that environmental management is necessary.  I’m thinking that is Tim Quinn’s influence.)

This position paper heavily favors the upper Sacramento Valley water users, which doesn’t surprise me, because it looks as if they were the organizers for this coalition.

They are throwing the in-Delta farmers TO THE WOLVES.   Advocates for maintaining the Delta in its current state, know that the big dogs have turned on you.

They mount a surprising defense of “traditional water rights”.  I’ve heard a good amount of talk about scrapping our existing water rights and starting over, but dismissed it as a fantasy too good to ever come true.  So I’m surprised that the Public Water Coalition feel that they have to defend against that talk.  I can only hope that they perceive a threat to the existing rights system.

 

Anyway, there’s a lot in this position paper.  I’ll be writing about it in coming posts.

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April 15, 2009 · :

Stimulus Package and the Peripheral Canal

The new Secretary of the Interior toured the Delta today and announced some of the Stimulus Package monies that Reclamation will be spending in California.   So far, nothing rules out the possibility that some Stimulus Package money will go towards the Peripheral Canal.

Secretary Salazar says that California will get $400M to spend. The Governor’s Office spells out $260M of that.  I can’t find an accounting for the other $140M; I would believe that they haven’t dedicated it to any specific project yet.  The Recovery Portal tracking project doesn’t help, and all of the language I’ve seen anywhere is vague enough to include a Peripheral Canal.  “Ensure adequate water supplies in Western areas impacted by drought” and “restore the Delta” don’t rule out a Peripheral Canal.

I favor a Peripheral Canal, so this doesn’t bother me.  But if you are a Peripheral Canal opponent, I think you can keep your suspicions alive.

LATER: A knowledgeable reader wrote me to suggest that the other $135M will be water recycling projects, which is a third or so of the $450M Reclamation got to spend on Title XVI water recycling projects and rural water projects in the west.  He pointed out the very handy site detailing how Reclamation will spend its Stimulus Package money.  Thank you, knowledgeable reader!

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April 14, 2009 · :

They may as well dance to the rain gods.

Yes! This quote:

Long story short, the super-simple proposal you’ve developed for ending piracy has probably already been thought of, and probably has a host of problems that you haven’t considered.

This is especially true if the super simple proposal for fixing California water is END WATER SUBSIDIES TO AGRICULTURE. I actually support ending water subsidies for agriculture and instead providing direct subsidies designed to buy the form of agriculture I want. But it is really rare to hear discussions of that. Instead you get blog commentors shouting that water subsidies must end, with no discussion of what that would look like. The problem with an abrupt end to water-based subsidies is that those subsidies are old now. They’ve been going on for fifty or more years, and their existence means that some noticeable piece of the agricultural sector has come to depend on them.

Losing water-based subsidies abruptly would set off the ‘host of problems’ that would matter to real people. Grower’s land would be suddenly worth much less. Some growers would find the costs of water tip the balance, so that farming is no longer possible for them. I keep saying that subsidized water grows field crops that are the basis of cheap meat. I don’t care if cheap meat vanishes, but I think there are a whole bunch of people who think eating meat frequently contributes to their quality of life. Those are attenuated problems, and maybe you aren’t very sympathetic to growers who are all MULTINATIONAL BILLIONAIRE CORPORATIONS anyway. But the first people who are going to hurt, as I’ve been saying all along, are farmworkers.

We’re seeing that now, that when water leaves the ag sector farmworkers hurt first and worst. But, even as farmworkers have all my concern, I have to say that their march this week just kills me. Farmworkers are marching from their dying town to a reservoir as a way to lobby for “state money for dams and canals and the lifting of pumping restrictions at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that were imposed to comply with environmental laws”. They’re deliberately evoking Cesar Chavez. I find that march to be a horrible perversion and wish they weren’t doing it.

I have to assume that to the marchers it feels like a meaningful protest that will draw attention and aid, but I can’t see how it will work. The primary problem is that they are asking for the wrong remedy. Specifically what they want is to lift the ESA restrictions on the pumps that protect salmon and smelt. I don’t really have much claim on Chavez’s legacy, but I have to say that it breaks my heart a little to have farmworkers using his tactics to shift the drought burden to the only entities in our water system that are suffering worse (farmworkers have it bad, but they are not physically ground to pieces by the pumps) and have less voice or capacity to escape the consequences of drought (fish, however, must be in drying rivers and cannot move to another).

That aside, this march doesn’t pressure anyone who can respond. In Chavez’s original marches, farmworkers and boycotts could pressure growers for better wages and working conditions. Those improvements were something that growers could give, or legislators could legally require. But knowingly breaking the ESA as a result of this march? Who could do that? Pres. Obama could call a God Squad, which I hope he doesn’t do. A judge or the state legislature could try, but the resulting litigation would last longer than this growing season. The Department of Fish and Game could reverse all their findings that this pumping regime kills fish that are already nearly extinct, but that would require some pretty surprising new scientific studies. So long as the ESA holds, we can’t do what farmworkers are marching for, which is to send more water to the farms that would employ those farmworkers.

The farmworkers have a different remedy, but to my regret, they aren’t asking for it. They don’t need water to go to those specific farms to get those specific jobs. They need some jobs, or failing that, they need money to live on and to transition out of a farming-dependent life. That’s something the state could do. They aren’t asking for it, though. I don’t know if it is politically impossible (because how would you take care of the farmworker victims of the drought without attending to the other victims of the recession) or if they haven’t thought of it (because the idea of the state taking care of its citizens has become a joke) or if they are too self-identified with the some bullshit rugged individualism made even worse by a western farming mythos.

I’ll say this, too. I don’t know this to be the case, but I get a yucky feeling that this march was cynically engineered by politically savvy water districts. I hate that feeling. It would mean that sophisticated large water users manipulated the hurt and restless energy of farmworkers and their desperate families and used the legacy of Cesar Chavez as cover to attack the Endangered Species Act. If that happened (and of course I’ll never know) it was a shitty thing to do.   Making this march about dams, canals and running the pumps more won’t get farmworkers the help they need.  All  the desperation and hope they put into the march will be disappointed.  That’s another disappointment they don’t need.

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April 8, 2009 · :

Cities and resilience.

I’m also trying to read up on cities and resilience, which is frustrating me.  This book, The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster sounds like it would be just right.  It would be a totally good book if I were reading it for fun*.  But it isn’t helping, because they keep talking about sudden perturbations, like fire and bombings and earthquakes, which doesn’t help me.  Now I’m thinking that I maybe need to understand how cities withstand siege, but I can’t go chasing down all these tangents.

Droughts!  I need to understand.  What does the drought actually DO?   What does it do on the household and block and annual level?  How does it aggregate to effect a city?  How could that be countered?

 

 

 

 

 

 

*DAMN!  Cities NEVER give up.  Like, ever.  You cannot raze a city so bad that it goes away.  Like, some study showed that between 1100 and 1800, only forty cities stopped existing.   I suppose that makes sense.  I mean, the fact of a city not existing is so powerful that we remember it forever: Atlantis, Babylon, whatever that one was that got volcanoed.  I’ve been wondering if New Orleans and Galveston will be the leading edge of a new era of cities vanishing.  We’ll know in a generation, I guess.

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April 8, 2009 · :

Worried

I’m reading a lot about Australia’s drought these past couple days.  Two things.  First, it looks exactly like an accelerated version of my dystopic version of how California agriculture will respond to climate change.  I’m always relieved at validation, because I thought through that post from first principles, not from copying a drought scenario.

But, one real bad thing is that one of the sidenotes in my old post is pretty prominent in these articles about Australian drought.  Farmers kill themselves a lot.  I guess the identification with their land and way of life is overwhelming.  Maybe people at the Department of Public Health know more about that, but I don’t think many water managers think of responding to that as part of their job.  Also, the first and worst victims of California’s water scarcity are and will be farm workers, but I don’t see mention of suicide in any of the newspaper stories about them.  Why do farmers kill themselves but the more destitute farmworkers not?  (Catholicism?  Different sort of self-identification?  Sampling and reporting error?)   What’s going on here and how does it become part of drought response?

Later: Relevant. And another article mentioning drought and suicide.

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April 7, 2009 · :

Low and high entropy water sources.

From Aquafornia, a commentary on recent bond measures:

As in the past, the current set of bonds are dedicated to numerous objectives, such as habitat, levees and ecosystem projects to include ocean protection, protection against invasive species, and fuel reduction in fire damaged areas. But nowhere is there truly “new water.”

Advertising of these initiatives dupe the general public into believing that the funding will insure safe and ample water but a closer look at the bond allocations clearly reveals that proportionally few funds are indeed being allocated to long term solutions for the drought, whether natural or regulatory.
…
Voters do not want more of the same, misleading water bonds and morphed environmental programs. Bonds must include language and line items that guarantee the completion of new high yielding storage projects.

On Emerson’s recommendation, I read Cobb and Daly’s For the Common Good, which was fucking amazing. Nearly every page had a well constructed argument for some passing objection I’d had to my resource economics classes. Again and again I wished I’d had the book to hand when I knew the answers couldn’t be as simple as my econ professors were telling me. I need to re-read it; For the Common Good was too dense for me to keep most of it. But one concept from that book has been amazingly useful to me. I think about low-entropy and high-entropy goods all the time.

Low entropy goods, either stocks or flows, contain tons of energy and are well ordered. Think of old growth timber stands that yield wide boards. Or high quality oil wells, close to surface and under pressure. Or fisheries of abundant huge fish that swam close together. Or of pure snowmelt flowing into narrow-mouthed canyons above a waterfall, so you can get some hydropower too. All the old rich sources, so easy to gather, so low-entropy. Those are low-entropy goods.

You can tell when people haven’t accepted that the world has changed, because they are still wishing for low-entropy sources. Those are gone. If they were stocks, they’re used up. Big trees, big fish, artesian water, artesian oil, all gone. If they were flows, they’re tapped already. Ms. Sutton calls for Sites Reservoir, but the concept of building dams is played out because all the good options are already in use. She mentions Sites, but it is more interesting that there is no other dam on the table. Besides Sites, I couldn’t name another proposed dam project in the state. (The San Joaquin River Restoration project was the end of Temperance Flats.)

The next water available to the state is from high entropy sources, widely distributed dribs and drabs, or mixed with something, or requiring lots of energy to extract. That’s what urban water conservation is, at essence, going around and collecting all the small streams that run from leaky taps, or small ponds that we put in our old toilets. Water recycling is putting energy back in, to separate water from human waste. Digging thousand foot wells is another form of collecting a low entropy source. So is, it turns out, protecting habitat at the top of watersheds, so that restored forest meadows boost infiltration and your springs feed your rivers for longer into the summer. And pollution prevention programs, so that if you collect your stormwater, it takes less energy to clean it again. Most of the strategies that people will use to scrounge more water in the future are some variant on working with high entropy sources.

That’s what the new bond measures are doing. Ms. Sutton objects that they are a hodge-podge, but that isn’t because it is all feel-good stuff for urban voters. The stuff in recent bonds (tons of conservation money, some habitat protection, some urban re-use stuff) is getting at the next sources on the low-to-high entropy spectrum. I sympathize with Ms. Sutton’s desire, because who doesn’t want the return of easy pickings, but that era is done. Water managers are now measuring high entropy sources against each other and starting in on the next most valuable ones*.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*You can tell Sites is a medium entropy source because it was left for dead last. It is an off-stream storage project in the Sac Valley; the idea is that it would hold flood flows off the Sacramento. So, look. It is collecting intermittent flows, distributed in time and unpredictable. It is far and requires a pipeline to put water in and out of it. It’d take Sacramento River water nearer to the bottom than the top, full of flood flow sediment. A medium entropy source like this has to be compared to other medium entropy sources like water recycling, and Sites isn’t necessarily the next best choice.

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April 7, 2009 · :

What does the drought cost?

I got to wondering whether the drought will necessarily cost us money.  The numbers for ag are clear:

Richard Howitt, professor of resource economics at UC Davis, last week offered sobering numbers to the state Board of Food and Agriculture.

Using computer economic models and DWR water data, Howitt estimates 40,000 jobs will be lost, along with $1.15 billion in income.

But this is just the first splash of trouble, because Howitt’s estimate applies only to areas of the Central Valley south of the Delta, and only in the farm sector.

They get quoted all the time, but I can tell you for sure that the reason they get cited so much is that his study is quite literally the only study we have. People want to quantify the effects of the drought, so they give the only numerical data we have. That’s understandable, although people confuse “the only thing we know” with “the whole story”.

However, this drought has also been a huge spur for urban conservation. If the premise behind conservation is true, that measures like fixing leaks and lawn removal and fixture replacement are pure efficiency gains, then presumably most of the urban drought measures will have some payback rate. Districts could have gotten those returns at any point, but it took a drought and someone else’s money to get them moving. I’m also seeing stuff like this, where the drought has brought enough pressure to get institutional realignments. I don’t know anything about that one in particular, but presumably the participants think there are gains from it. If so, and if the infrastructure and behavior changes stick around after the drought, racheting down inefficiencies in urban use could plausibly have a positive payback within a few years.

I don’t know that to be the case, and I don’t know how it will compare to ag losses. But it that is the kind of contrarianism that drives traffic to blogs and gets an econ grad student big press. So I’m hoping that some econ grad student takes it up. I’m sure Howitt’s study is fine for what it is, but I’d like to see more of the picture.

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April 3, 2009 · :

What drought means to most Californian urban users.

The people I’m generalizing about in this post are residential water users who grew up in a modern urban water system, with a district providing them with flawless water reliability.  I know that’s not the case for most of the world, but I want to make a point about my peers.)

Drought, for most urban users in California, is not about water. Furthermore, residential users in California do not care how much water they use.  People in California are not emotionally attached to using a certain number of gallons per day; no one wakes up and ponders, ‘do I want to use 135 or 145 gpd today?  I need a little pick-me-up.  145 it is!’.  People can be trained, through their water bill, to start thinking of gallons per day, but no one feels better just for using any amount of water.  Rather, residential users want a number of aesthetic experiences for which they need some water.  My guess is that they appreciate, from most utils to least utils, a shower with water pressure*, drinking water, washing dishes with the water running, growing some houseplants, having a green landscape, washing driveways.  They also use water in ways that they derive no satisfaction from.  Carrying human waste away, leaking from faucets, overwatering plants, washing clothes in it.   The results of those things are nice, neutral or annoying, but if the nice things could be achieved with something besides water, it would make no difference to people.

Because most urban Californians will never experience an interruption of water service, nor rations small enough to threaten their bodily uses of water, what drought really means to most people is that they have to pay attention.   What they really want is a few daily experiences (that don’t have to take much actual wet water) and that they don’t have to think about it.  In a society as rich as ours, a drought starts the moment casual users have to think about it.  The marker of the start of a drought is completely independent of snowpack or precip.  For most people, a drought starts when they get a bill insert or see something about it in the news. At that point, the privilege of living in such a wealthy society that you don’t have to fix your broken sprinkler is gone**.  That is what drought will mean to most people.

Water managers focus on meteorology and absolute amounts of water, but the way to alleviate the experience of drought for most Californians is to reassure them that they can keep the water experiences they value and to make giving up the other ones trivially easy.

This is not a particularly focused prescription, and it is the real effect of most of the conservation measures that cities and districts are employing.  (Put a nozzle on your hose when you wash your car, don’t serve water unless it is requested.)  It also suggests that scaring people about drought is itself the drought for most people, but I don’t mean to argue that they shouldn’t be aware of it***.  My point here is that what is important to people is their subjective experience.  That is as true for their uses of water as it is for their perception of drought.  We have to manage water, but it might be more important to manage the casual user’s experience of drought****.

Continue reading →

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March 27, 2009 · :

This was s’posed to be a blog about climate change.

I’ve been trying not to analogize between the banking crises and the California drought, not because the comparisons aren’t there, but because analogies are the devil. So this is totally not an analogy. Instead, I am pointing out some truths that both crises reveal. We already talked about how losing trust makes it extremely difficult to solve policy problems.

Here, Ezra quotes a guy who wrote of regulating banks:

And if a highly interconnected, highly complex but small financial institution fails, the system as a whole would be fine.

This isn’t limited to banks. This is a generic recipe for resilience and it is the direction our water system should go in as well.

Resilience is a Big Deal in adapting to climate change. The notion is that with increased and more severe weather events, there are going to be more disasters. So we should arrange our built environment to be resilient, to suffer less during a storm and to bounce back faster afterwards. The way to do that is with “highly interconnected, highly complex but small … institution[s]”.

I wrote this for something for work. It totally got bounced*, but it goes to show you that I’m not just making this up now.

One way to avoid having extreme events become catastrophes is by building widely distributed and mildly redundant systems. A flood that destroys a large regional wastewater treatment plant is harder to recover from than one that takes out one of several smaller plants; other facilities can assume some of the load or people will be less dislocated by a search for working facilities. The cost of replacing a single major piece of infrastructure will be a higher burden on the region than that of patching a distributed system. Because the ferocity of weather perturbations cannot be predicted now, armoring a single crucial facility can’t be assured of success and will be very expensive. Smaller distributed systems mean that after an extreme event, pieces of the region will still work.

As of yesterday, I’m starting to turn my attention to managing the recovery from perturbation. If any of you know of any good work on how modern built environments respond when crises end, I’d be super interested. It can’t be as simple as “they all instantly go back to acting normal”. How do they reactivate themselves?

 Later:  I’m doing the obvious, googling “Drought Recovery”.  I loved both of these presentations.  Also, with my public library card, I can request books from college libraries throughout the west.  They come to me!  Civilization is remarkable.

 

 

 

 

 

*I estimate I get about 15% of my thoughts through one layer of management review. I have no idea if any make it past that. That’s OK, though. I have a lot of thoughts.

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