1/ Questions about whether the Cal Water FIx will effectively manage inevitable sea level rise. KCET reports that a now-projected 1.5-2 meter sea level rise by 2100 would bring salt water to the proposed twin tunnel intakes, raising serious questions about the premise of the project. The visitation to the pumps by salt water would only be aggravated by the loss of the pulse of Sacramento River downstream flows to Carquinez Strait induced by rerouting that water south to the San Joaquin Valley.

In fact, by outlining a scenario for extreme climate change-induced saltwater intrusion into the Delta, this study points to the Achilles’ heel of the Cal Water Fix premise. In no way have its advocates or technical experts conclusively described the science behind how diverting potentially a third to a half of the Sacramento River’s volume will aid in the restoration of the Delta’s ecosystem.

2/ A la the Panama Papers, will Westlands’ fiduciary agents will be punished for their possibly criminal practices? Enabled by an Obama Administration payout, Westlands’ corruption is implicitly given the okay to continue, and as it does, it continues laying waste to communities, children, and the environment. Reported by the Sacramento Bee’s Michael Doyle, Rep. Jared Huffman is looking into that deal, while Westlands officials say they’d be happy to �educate the public.� Maybe they could also educate the public about their Securities and Exchange violations, and what their strategy is for avoiding prison.

I like to dream of a day when the smug faces of Westlands’ influence peddlers will one day find themselves facing a courtroom full of the testifying mothers of sick kids whose drinking water was turned into a toxic soup of chemicals and selenium. The Obama Administration, entangled in this mess, would be wise to end them, now. Throwing good money after bad, and all, is never a good idea. End them. Give them their money.

3/ Westlands brings into focus the need for Californians to make choices about values. An aside, not in Maven’s digest, is more Westlands, this time a report from Fresno’s ABC30, by way of On the Public Record.

Yes, I long for the day when those mothers organize a political movement that is ready to apply some basic principles of environmental justice to uproot entitled bullies like �Buddy� from political office (see 0:30-1:10 of the video). Locally, it will take political power to keep Westlands’ selenium in the ground, so get organized, Ms. Jagannath. I’d be happy to help, if I can.

4/ Finally, the libertarians of the Delta, overreacting to news that is entirely unsurprising. Also unsurprising were their lawsuits, once confirmation came that the Metropolitan Water District had bought out the 25-year-old Delta Wetlands Project, a capitalist dream of turning the Delta into a reservoir and habitat mitigation bank transformed into a public utilities’ dream.

By anti-tunnel groups, there are the same tired invocations of Reiser and Chinatown water grabs, and Owens Valley, sure�but this really is not new news. I see the Met’s action here in a fiduciary way; much more as a short-term risk management investment by the most responsible actor in all of the state’s recent water intricacies. The Met may have had its power plays early in the 20th century, but to continuously invoke nearly hundred year-old events is absurd, especially when applied to a conservation-first, demonstrably responsible public agency.

5/ It’s been awhile since I last wrote something here, and I wish to make one last appeal. Please, Obama Administration, please talk to your working poor constituents in places like Cantua Creek (and not just the wealthy, government subsidized, well-funded and -represented)** before making your decisions about where to burnish your legacy in these last days of what has been a remarkably achievement-filled two terms.

**link to EWG Farm Subsidy Database via On the Public Record

Screenshot:

The argument:

Modern California is an extraordinary achievement. To make a semi-arid region habitable and prosperous has required massive geo-engineering - reservoirs, dams, aqueducts, canals, pumping stations, and treatment plants, all dedicated to harvesting, storing, supplying, and transporting water. But now this achievement has produced a wicked tangle of problems.

I’d like to publicly thank John Fleck for his generosity in all of the exchanges the two of us have had over the years.

I can’t help but wonder if articles like this one by technophile Charles Fishman in the NYT, applauded for being “optimistic,” or Wallace Stegner’s barely expressed anxiety about rugged individualism, help kick the more difficult cans down the road. Fishman apparently thinks the solution is to build an even bigger water redistribution infrastructure:

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Wouldn’t do much to alleviate pressure on California (or west of the Rockies) water issues, but whatever. Those who have a less cheery and I would argue more complete view of the hazards of big infrastructure technophilia (even at the scale that it currently exists at) might look at this piece about this widening financial and technical means to exploit California’s regulatory blind spot, and ask how can this be?

Today, Peter Gleick’s oped piece in the Sacramento Bee, written in a Stegnerian style, describes that cities have proven to be run by adults when it comes to long-term water conservation measures. Gleick’s essay makes this point nicely. But what lies underneath his piece is that same half-expressed anxiety about rugged individuals and their political advocates. What are they up to while cities are behaving like adults?

About 80% of the state’s “developed” surface water is used for agriculture. But what is “undeveloped” water? In general, it’s water that flows to the sea for environmental uses, which for rugged individuals and their political advocates is political hay. For them, undeveloped water is about 50% of the state’s total surface water supply going to waste. They want more of it, and it can pretty much only come from one place.

Farmers are compensating for lack of surface water by intensively pumping groundwater. Groundwater pumping that, unlike any other state in the West, is not even measured, let alone regulated. It seems that the affront such regulation would be to the state’s property rights and development interests makes it politically fraught to accelerate. So, optimists laud the state for passing some bills about groundwater. These may lead to actual groundwater monitoring and management policies in perhaps 20 years, when instead of pumping 1000 year-old water out of the ground, as farmers are doing now, they will be pumping out 10,000 year-old water. Assuming, as I’ve written before, there is any more water to pump, that is. Keep in mind that all of this water is not going to get recharged, at this point, for a thousand years.

Who ultimately pays for this irresponsible practice? Until the regulatory system is in place, there is no way to geographically fix the locations of and amount of pumping going on. The implications of this intense pumping - like destruction of public property that is measured right now in at least millions of dollars - cannot be precisely attached to those doing the pumping.

The extent of groundwater pumping going on now and continuing into the foreseeable future is not sustainable, and farmers know it. So where is the next supply of water going to come from? From poor communities relying on wells for their water. From ecosystems, its fish, wetlands, and estuaries.

The newest threat is by aggressive hedge fund “farming” that is pumping groundwater out of the foothills (and from reaching the Valley bottom) to keep their almond orchard investments alive. These faceless global systems of return on investment don’t give a shit about the health of California’s environment. But they do care about taking from it, and will assert their influence to gut state and federal environmental laws in order to do so.

When Peter Gleick’s editor at the Bee decides to headline his piece “GOP presidential wannabees have no clue about the drought,” good for the editor. As I’m sure the editor knows, the GOP is coming for the state’s environment next.

The problem isn’t the lack of a real and transparent water market, as Lester Snow recently argued at Water Deeply. The problem is that the demand for water is bigger than the supply, especially the demands of those who offer salt in trade.

NPR published an article on July 24th about how salt is slowly crippling California’s almond industry.  Where surface sources are scarce, more salt is moved from groundwater pumping to the surface by desperate farmers trying to keep their unsustainable orchards on the west side salt mine alive. Pumping increasingly salty water out of the ground means putting more of it in surface sources and ultimately, in the Delta. This makes the problem of salty water worse for everyone.

It would be nice to be able to monitor/regulate/tax the saltiness of pumped groundwater. Maybe in a couple of decades it will be possible to do that, if by then there’s any decent quality water left in the ground.

The Orange County Register reported on July 25th increasing salinity levels in Delta waterways. The article describes how the lack of water flowing into the Delta reduces its ability to keep salty water from the Bay from entering into it. Keeping the x2 line where it’s supposed to be isn’t easy right now, but I surmise that at least for those who hate wasting water on “three inch bait fish” this is an understandable rationale for why that tenuous and elastic line exists.

Without a long period of huge snowpacks and the simultaneous perfect timing of purging flows that are unlikely in the new climate reality, salt in the Delta - and in the aqueducts - only accumulates, year to year. This will happen without the tunnels, and of course with them the pace of Delta salinity increase would vastly accelerate.

I do not understand why the Delta is targeted as the first geography to be sacrificed. Why aren’t the salt-producing geographies first on the cutting block? The amount of water saved would be huge, and the cost to buy these geographies out no greater than the cost of building the tunnel project.

At the very least!

So, with California experiencing its worst three-year drought in a 120-year history of record-keeping, here is my highly curated timeline of what’s been happening for the past six months of California’s water world:

1/ Late 2014. Governor Brown signs “groundbreaking” groundwater legislation that will not take effect until 2035 - if by then there is any water left to regulate, that is - when he will be 97, and possibly no longer Governor.

2/ April 2015. Gov. Brown more or less abandons the basic principle of co-equal goals as he mulls options now that the BDCP’s theory of “embracing scientific uncertainty” has proven to be untenable in practice. “California Department of Fish and Game Director Chuck Bonham told The Associated Press Wednesday that the project now calls for restoring 30,000 acres for wetland and wildlife habitat - down from 100,000 acres. Bonham said the amount of land targeted for environmental improvements was revised because there was ‘too much complexity’ in the original 50-year plan, given the need to get permits from federal wildlife agencies against a backdrop of uncertain future climate change impacts.” In another scenario that doesn’t start with the neoliberal definition of “complexity,” one could imagine that cuts would be in water supply-derived profit, and not in further damaging an increasingly besieged and dying habitat.

3/ Yesterday. On the bright side, some baby steps… ”[T]he state Senate Appropriations Committee approved legislation Thursday (May 28th) that would make data on water wells available to the public like is done in all other Western states.” Of course, the “California Chamber of Commerce and various farm groups oppose the measure. Opponents contend ‘no beneficial purpose’ will be served for making the information public and that the measure ‘is intended to assist those trolling for lawsuits.’” Just trying to understand this opposition: do they oppose because the CoC and farm groups don’t sue people, and therefore this law’s not fair? What bullshit. Even Texas law requires this.

The geopolitical Almond:

4/ 2015. “With crops averaging over 1.5 billion pounds, double what they were in 2000, California almond growers produce over 80 percent of the world’s almond supply, while barely keeping up with rising world demand. California growers export 70 percent of what they produce to over 95 countries.” Courtesy of the Blue Diamond website

Such a beautiful plant:

5/ Future. The almond’s undeniable health benefits echo across the globe and the airwaves while they wreak havoc locally.  The almond, among the most profitable products of California agriculture, originated in the Middle East as far east as Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. Perhaps it should be grown there at the global scales needed for the Chinese and India markets, instead of in California. This would be super good for the economic and political stability of that part of the world - and California has other and higher uses for the water anyway - not to mention reduce the carbon footprint of getting snacks to market and the buckling of roads and canals in the Central Valley.

More later, but why isn’t anyone making a remake of Von Stroheim’s Greed?

I need to get into this because Mr. Maviglio decided it would be clever to pull “DeltaNationalPark.org, an environmental blog” into his messaging, referencing an old post of mine that was critical of RTD supporter Alex Spanos for his conventionally suburban development off Eight Mile Road north of Stockton.

I stand by that criticism, but Mr. Maviglio is disingenuous in his tactics. He knows that I have my issues with RTD, sure, but he would (or should) also know that I stand with the RTD in opposition to the BDCP, and favor the Western Delta Conveyance alternative to the twin tunnels, as I understand many (but not all) of the RTD’s supporters do.

He would (or should) know that I believe that all Californians should accept something like the same risk when it comes to their water, and not focus most of that risk on one unique and fragile place.

He would (or should) know that I believe that the Delta’s levees (actually they are dikes, not levees, as Emily Green has recently pointed out in an excellent essay on the Delta) should be transferred to Federal and State ownership (not a very popular position to many of the RTD’s more libertarian members). It would then be fortified to meet a future of Climate Change impacts and likely worst-case seismic events, and pay for itself by developing as a hybrid of public recreational spaces and private parcels.

I am not strictly speaking much of an environmentalist, in other words, and he would (or should) know that.

Mr. Maviglio, who is - I infer, sadly - a Democrat, knows how to provide the optics of hypocrisy, but he might want to look in the mirror and examine the coalition that his clients are a part of, too. He certainly must know RTD is a complicated coalition held together with an overarching interest in “shrinking the [BDCP] to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub,” to paraphrase another master of the negative,  Grover Norquist.

No doubt opposition analysis leading to a communications strategy is a big component of the professional services Mr. Maviglio offers his clients. I just have one question for him: Is the RTD being targeted because they are getting a worrisome amount of traction and/or the BDCP is in trouble? Going negative sure seems like the act of a desperate client. Maybe they’d be better off focusing on buying out (or selling their) marginal farmland and fast tracking groundwater regulations.

But it’s not clear that even intelligent arguments by people like Dan Walters and Jeffrey Mount about these impacts seem will change the basic problem of finding a politically executable policy to reconcile entrenched, not to say radical, pro-water supply/pro-environment positions that have been staked out for decades.

From what I can tell, at least for a relatively short now, Climate Change has two major impacts on California water policy vis-a-vis the Delta: the first - rising sea levels - is more easy to visualize. It unfolds slowly and as it does, the sea rises. This will 1/ intensify the threat of Delta flooding via higher water levels, and 2/ if the status quo (no tunnel) remains, force Delta landowners and state/federal taxpayers to reinforce and raise Delta levees, an expensive proposition, and 3/ make saltwater incursion into the Delta that much more difficult (and water/money-consuming) to push back against.

But it is the other impact of Climate Change - the harder to visualize, quicker, spikier, wetter - and drier - and warmer rain and snow dynamic that California’s water infrastructure is not well suited to control - that I want to focus on. First of all, Spiky Weather is already here - whereas rising sea levels are not, at least not impactfully so - and people are starting to be directly effected. So other people - smart, well-informed people - including the aforementioned Sacramento Bee writer Dan Walters and the Public Policy Institute of California’s (PPIC) Jeffrey Mount, have started writing more explicitly about the implications. Their thoughts appear to respectively be glass-half-empty, glass-half-full viewpoints of the spikier weather problem. But I wonder if in fact when seen together they are really a good cop/bad cop performance, unintended, perhaps, but nevertheless, just that.

Walters argues that the increasingly frequent pulses of rain and melted snowpack reduce the effectiveness of the state’s dams and reservoirs. The state can no longer assume that every year, deep snow packs high in the Sierras will gradually accumulate and then gradually melt, the meltwater collected behind dams. Spiky Weather isn’t playing along, and Walters argues that this necessitates the creation of ways to capture that water at lower elevations than the reservoirs sit. Walters mentions new low-elevation dams and reservoirs, but it is easy to see how his reasoning could underpin the case for the peripheral tunnels. It is not clear to me how Walters’ is not a variant on the “wasted water” argument that has been around since someone said that if any water from the Colorado River makes it to the Gulf of California, then it is being wasted. Just today, Sen. Feinstein, Rep. Nunes, et al once again made this argument.

Jeffrey Mount’s position about Spiky Weather helps to clarify what I mean by this. Mount (who, and I could be wrong, is a twin tunnels proponent himself) makes the argument that Spiky Weather is not entirely a negative for the state’s water system. The big pulses of water two or three times during the Spiky Weather rainy season have the useful effect of pushing the Delta’s salty water - especially saline during the current, extreme drought - out to the Bay. This “naturally-occurring” benefit of Climate Change means that water managers do not have to release water stored behind state’s dams in order to manage ecosystem health or migrating species’ needs. Instead, water stored behind dams can be released at optimal times, when it can be most efficiently delivered to its users, by which he presumably means human users. Mount’s position is implicitly status quo with respect to environmental laws and how this affects the uses of water. His position depends on their continuing enforcement.

A caveat is in order here. It needs to be noted that it is not terribly difficult to shift Mount’s argument to Walters’ - from using Spiky Weather pulses of valuable water to purge salinity from the Delta to bypassing it altogether in order to supply big AG in the San Joaquin Valley. Only time will tell whether the laws Mount’s scenario depends upon will hold, or whether they will die of a thousand cuts by the advocates of Walters’ argument. A few cuts have already been delivered. The Obama Administration’s decision to waste water in a different way by subsidizing farming in toxic landscapes like Westlands comes to mind and does not bode well at all. (Neither does the President’s recent agreement to supply rural, super-sunlight-rich India with American nuclear technology, but I digress.) The other increasing source of cuts is found in pleas like the one of Feinstein, Nunes, et al, which call for the loosening of environmental restrictions and increase in water exported from the Delta, being made now because of this ferocious drought.

Unicorn Petting Zoo, Staten Island, 2025

Walters and Mount may be among the first to directly address the Spiky Weather problem, but have they also simply articulated new arguments for positions that are in reality quite complementary? They aren’t really opposed points of view, and it’s not hard to see how what they are saying will one day be seamlessly integrated into an updated version of PPIC’s managed retreat project. But morphing from the “wildlife-friendly agriculture,” “sandhill crane habitats,” “experimental islands” and “unicorn petting zoos” of the Delta’s managed retreat future that PPIC has illustrated in its work will be the real project. In the real project, the Delta is a landscape of tunnel access points and spoils mounds, salt water sloughs and brackish lagoons, security-guarded chain link-surrounded territories of risk-averse machines and infrastructures, Spiky Weather pulses and their gradual destruction of the fragile Delta settlement geography, enclaves for wealthy bird hunters, entire islands of riparian beauty and privilege for the 1%.

In this future, there will be little to no public access on an ever-diminishing landscape, and the Delta’s waterways will primarily serve a demographic of ecosystem scientists conducting research related to commitments that have long since been abandoned, sport fishermen chasing the new, salt-tolerant fish inhabiting the Delta, party boats, and party animals. What a shame to lose such a beautiful place. What a shame that it doesn’t have advocates in influential places arguing to make it more public, not more like an industrial waterfront.

Yes, that review was produced over six months ago, but it is worth restating the concerns that were identified by the DISB. Given their extent, it is clear why Federal agencies are so cool to the BDCP, and why we will continue to see Congressional coalitions making secretive (and soon, not so secretive) efforts to circumvent environmental law.

Digression moment: It is noteworthy that DISB member Jay Lund wrote recently that a new environmentalism is needed for California water. “New environmentalism is about diverse interests working together to create more promising environmental solutions,” Lund somewhat generically writes.

But isn’t that what the BDCP was, and in his capacity as a DISB Reviewer, is Lund simply following the letter of the laws he thinks need to change? The devil’s in the details I guess. And there are a lot of details, as Lund et al articulated. In principle, I agree with him, not necessarily with the implicit belief in more science, because ultimately a hybrid of science and design will break through the logjam, as I’ve written about, and worked on in the context of the Delta for many years. Here’s a low—res overall map of the geography of my efforts:

140616_DNP_Map_blog.png

Back to the BDCP review: Can it be read as an index of where this new environmentalism must focus if it is to develop the mechanisms for doing what Lund is asking for? The DISP acted like a panel of scientists bound up in the contradictions of their disciplinary limits. They demanded more measurability, empirical tests, details of methods, despite the impossibility of arriving at a correct answer. What they seemed to be saying was that more certainty was possible, despite the explicit embrace of scientific uncertainty by the authors of the BCCP.

They seem to be saying that it is the responsibility of the Bay-Delta Conservation Planners to demonstrate that their assessments of the project’s impacts and mitigation efforts are realistic (or properly qualified if unknowable in advance - as they should have) - and that more explicit contingencies be put in place in the inevitable occurrence of failed environmental restoration objectives.

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The following points are taken from a presentation of DISB’s review, made available by Maven:

Summary of Major Concerns:
Effectiveness of conservation actions, especially habitat restoration
“Many of the impact assessments hinge on overly optimistic expectations about the feasibility, effectiveness, or timing of the proposed conservation actions, especially habitat restoration.”

Treatment of uncertainty and use of modeling
“The project is encumbered by uncertainties that are considered inconsistently and incompletely; modeling has not been used effectively….”

Effects of climate change and sea level rise on BDCP implementation and outcomes
“The potential effects of climate change and sea-level rise on the implementation and outcomes of BDCP actions are not adequately evaluated.”

Linkages between species, landscapes, and the proposed action
“Insufficient attention is given to linkages and interactions among species, landscapes, and the proposed actions themselves.”

Effects on SF Bay, effects of levee failures, effects of increased water availability
“The analysis largely neglect the influences of downstream effects on San Francisco Bay, levee failures, and environmental effects of increased water availability for agriculture and its environmental impacts in the San Joaquin Valley and downstream.”

Implementation of adaptive management
“Details of how adaptive management will be implemented are left to a future management team without explicit prior consideration of (a) situations wherer adaptive management may be inappropriate or impossible to use, (b) contingency plans in case things do not work as planned, or (c) specific thresholds for action.”

Lack of risk assessment and decision support tools
“Available tools of risk assessment and decision support have not been used to assess the individual and combined risks associated with BDCP actions.”

Presentation of the document itself
“The presentation, despite clear writing and an abundance of information and analyses, makes it difficulty to compare alternatives and evaluate critical underlying assumptions.”

“Many of the negative impacts of the project are expected to be mitigated by habitat restoration, some 150,000 acres….”

“Many of the impact assessments hinge on overly optimistic expectations about the feasibility, effectiveness, or timing of the proposed conservation actions especially habitat restoration.”

“In particular, the Panel observed that the critical uncertainties associated with presumed beneficial effects of tidal wetland restoration were not recognized in the Chapter 5 summary.”

The DISB recommended several improvements in the scientific framework of the BDCP:

Initiate pilot restorations actions as soon as possible.
“Pilot restorations actions (and other projects to address critical uncertainties) should be initiated as soon as possible, within a scientific framework that will allow BDCP and others to test, refine, and improve the effectiveness of restoration.

“Some students that are already underway can be incorporated into BDCP once (or if) it is permitted… other studies being planned could benefit by addressing needs identified in the Draft BDCP or DEIR/DEIS.

“Current and planned habitat restoration projects in the Delta should be aligned as much as possible with the priorities indentified in BDCP and the Delta Plan.

“Contingency plans….What if things do not go as planned? The history of ecological restoration shows that restoration shows that restoration projects rarely have exactly the intended consequences in the expected time frame….There will inevitably be situations….where there is a large-scale failure of restored habitat to function as anticipated. What happens then?”

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Yes, what does happen then, embracers of scientific uncertainty, and demanders of more science?

It’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the only people who will truly benefit from the fifteen or twenty years that will now be spent trying and failing to execute SB 1168, AB 1739, and SB 1319 are water lawyers.

This is a fundamentally flawed process for two reasons:

1/ Metering. Why try to adjudicate as wicked a problem as groundwater allocation without first building the measuring infrastructure that is needed to adjudicate it?

Describing the process of measuring existing or potential groundwater use, here’s what the Honorable Ronald B. Robie, whose knowledge is undeniable, had to say. From Maven:

“Finally, in order to complete an adjudication, the court has to determine the individual water rights of every pumper in the basin, he said. ‘This is the major task of the adjudication and the one that is most complicated, because everybody has an adverse interest to everybody else. Since we don’t generally require pumpers to document their use, these claims are often based on acres farmed, and then the duty of water. People want to know, did you really farm during those years or not, what were you farming, so lack of ready information is the most important reason to me why these proceedings are so lengthy - because you have to spend so much time finding out what’s going on before you can make the final difficult decisions.’”

“Since we don’t require pumpers to document their use…” I love Robie’s use of passive voice there. He might’ve gone on to say “since pumpers know that data about how much water they use would reduce their options for litigation…” To not meter groundwater use is a failure of this legislation - and of course of political leadership - but worse, it is weak and complicit, full of bad faith acts and actors.

2/ Stakeholders not at the table. How can any process of adjudication take place in this small a bubble, without the public environmental interest being considered a key stakeholder?

Asked whether there were any key issues associated but not directly implicated with groundwater law that should draw legislator’s attention, here’s Robie again, from Maven:

“‘Yes,’ says Justice Robie. [long pause ... laughter] ‘The reason I say that is this is a common law proceeding, and common law doesn’t provide for protection of ecosystems. In other words, when you have a groundwater adjudication, protection of ecosystems or environmental factors of that type are not currently covered in what you normally raise in an adjudication ...subsidence and things like that, they haven’t dealt with ...but you get to that frequently in practical matter through CEQA where mitigation is required, but an adjudication of course is not subject to CEQA, so I think you pointed to something that could be added to it. In an adjudication, you only have the right holders present. There’s no place for intervention by public interest groups or anybody else that I’m aware of.’”

A basin going dry or subsidence, sure. But not environmental impacts. Get your head around that quote. Public and private stakeholders will now spend hundreds of millions, perhaps into the billions, of dollars adjudicating water rights allocations without as fundamental a stakeholder as environmental use being considered.

Peracchi begins with a few statements about why Westlands is no less improbable or unsustainable than “growing crops in a saline estuary” or “vast farms on the desert lands of Coachella and Imperial Valleys” or “building a great city on the arid plain where Los Angeles now stands.”

Not that this establishes a particularly high bar for why Westlands - as opposed to other territories - should survive, but in principle, despite the hubris, I agree!

I’d also concede that Peracchi’s correct when he cries foul about some of the tired, old cliches Westlands’ bashers trot out - about excess water use, for example. I get tired of them, too.

Westlands gets that they are an agri-culture of water that must deal with scarcity, like every other interest and entitlement. Farming requires extremely rational thinking. And if it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, then you’d better use that water very efficiently.

Thanks to Michael Campana (@WaterWired), I became aware of Peracchi’s get-out-in-front-of/straight-talk-about advertisement in the same Twitter perusal session that led me to this three-year-old piece by Jeffrey Mount (with a h/t to @alexbreitler):

We agree about the above, but a further parsing of Peracchi’s advertisement led to me to ask the following “fact vs. factoid” questions…

What is a corporation? Is it “corporate” farming when you have - to paraphrase Peracchi - 2,250 landowners farming an average farm size of 710 acres, all or most of whom buy into a very expensive and very effective legal and public relations apparatus? Would you, family farmer, call that “family farming?” Many corporations are family businesses, too - like the Walton family. So, my definition is that when farming aggregates to 1.6 million acres, or 2,484 square miles of land, it might not be corporate, but whatever it is, that’s a lot of power for 2,250 families.

I haven’t done the math, but how many gallons of water do these 2,250 families use to make a living? How many, compared to a tomato farmer in Spain? A single family of farmers, mind you - since that is the metric here.

What is a waste of water? Peracchi references the creation of the CVPIA, and the “new regulatory restrictions that redirected more than a third of the water that cities and farms used to receive from the federal project, dedicating it instead to serve a wide range of new environmental uses.”

Of course. The “wasting water” argument. We’ll have to agree to disagree about whether it is a waste to maintain ecosystems on life support or to send publicly subsidized water to a factory of toxic materials and almonds.

What defines “community?” In his advertisement, Peracchi also appeals to us to recognize the “communities that have grown there as a result” of the creation of Westlands. Like Punjab, India’s vicious circle of ever-increasing use and contamination of its groundwater water supply, there is perhaps no more environmentally unsustainable landscape of small communities anywhere in the U.S. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe Facebook’s advertising algorithm.

What is a waste of money? Finally, there’s Westlands’ ace in the hole: the absolutely intractable issue of who is responsible to “provide drainage services” to their salt-laced lands. I’ve already written about this Big Problem, so I won’t revisit the details of Westlands’ “we-are-the-victim-of-Government-inaction” argument.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s just say Westlands’ advocates are right, that their 2,250 family farms are the victims here. So what’s next? Shall continued hundreds of millions of dollars be spent by them and others in perpetuity on legal battles and local infrastructures to mediate and remediate what is obviously an insoluble situation?

Westlands gets water, Westlands irrigates land, Westlands produces a toxic drainage soup that cannot enter the Delta. “Don’t look at us,” Westlands claims. Not our problem. Their’s or someone else’s, it is most definitely a problem, one that has no technical solution.

It seems to me that this is pretty simple math that the owners of Westlands property, smart people, probably get.

If you look at a time scale of 50 years, which is the time scale that should be looked at here, the only rational solution is for the Feds to buy out Westlands “family farms.” Give them their money. They win - move onto the fourth inning.

Boxall’s piece clarifies the point I want to make about the dilemma California has created on how to manage its groundwater. I’d been thinking about a comment offered by the always thoughtful John Fleck, in response to my last post. Here’s John’s comment:

Wicked problems are always more difficult than tame ones, even when the tame ones (putting a man on the moon) are really really hard. In a tame problem, we can all agree on the objective, and a measure of success or failure. Did we get the people to the moon? Did we get them back safely? Groundwater management is classically wicked. What, exactly, is it that we’re trying to accomplish? How will we measure success?

My reply (yes, I was being rhetorical):

John Fleck, I do entirely agree with you about the difficulty of this problem and its difference from putting men on moon or building a dam, etc. Nevertheless, I still want leaders/lawyers/courts to deal with this particular wicked problem with greater urgency since the current practice (and its extensions 26 years into the future) is both obviously unsustainable and will increasingly hurt the poor and be paid for by the larger public. In your reporting you have noted what’s happened to Porterville’s water supply, for example.

Anyway, what should be accomplished? At minimum, is it to much to ask that the new regulatory framework include two things: to have completed a statewide program to “install meters” and to “read meters” in one year on everyone - Delta landowners included?

—————————————- so

Why can’t the metering element of this particular wicked problem be tackled, head on, right now? If Governor Brown can put his weight behind a 25-50 billion tunnel scheme, why can’t he do the same for $1B in metering/monitoring infrastructure? Think jobs, Governor. And if he can’t and they can’t, then isn’t it reasonable to conclude that this so-called wicked problem is simply the result of the skillful work of intelligent, well-connected and -paid but ultimately wicked bad actors?

I am unwilling to accept the idea that a problem like groundwater management is anything more than a microcosm of a wicked problem. Common sense says that to install and read/monitor water meters on every water user in the state is too simple a task to rise to that level. It is a matter of political will.

The reaction to the passage this summer of “landmark” groundwater legislation by the California Assembly is overly optimistic, and to burnish my point, I’d point the reader to the Pacific Institute’s September 2014 paper on the recent history of California water metering:

“The California legislature has recognized the importance of metering and has passed several bills requiring meters in California. In 1991, the legislature passed SB 229, requiring meters on new connections after 1992. The legislation, however, did not require utilities to actually read the meters or to use that data to bill customers by volume. In 2003, AB 514 required Central Valley Project water users to be fully metered by 2013 and start charging metered users volumetrically by 2010. Then in 2004, AB 2572 (Kehoe) closed the loophole in SB 229 by requiring urban water utilities to meter all municipal and industrial users by 2025 and charge metered customers based on the actual volume of water delivered.”

“Did not require utilities to actually read the meters”? Hey, California - sometimes you reap what you sow.

The Pacific Institute’s paper notes that the 1991 legislation covers only urban water users, who consume about 25% of the state’s water. You can figure out who consumes the rest.

It took legislation passed in 1991 22 years to actually be implemented, not including municipal or industrial users, for whom that time span, according to the Pacific Institute’s work, will not have teeth until 2025, or 34 years.

National Geographic on the recent groundwater legislation:

“But the new laws give local agencies five to seven years to develop those groundwater plans, and until 2040 to implement them.”

Apparently, it is about four times more challenging to come up with and implement a policy regarding groundwater pumping than it is to get a man on the moon. In California, 26 years sounds about right, but of course, there may be no groundwater left to manage by then. If there is, let’s hope the plans for doing so include the requirement that meters are read and users pay.

Here’s some of Matt Weiser’s recent work on the subject.

In this sense, the newly signed legislation anticipates its own future. A future of haranguing, lawsuits, and political hyperbole. This future is well-understood by people like U.C. Davis’s Richard Frank. “By the time this process cranks up in five, 10 or 20 years, the damage may long have been done,” Frank is quoted as saying in Weiser’s article.

By the time the legislation actually kicks in - if it ever does, that is - there may not be any fresh groundwater left to regulate. And that’s just within the timeline of the law, without the lawsuits. And since those are inevitable, why not put some deadline pressure on everyone - property owners, the courts, environmental advocates, politicians - to get it sorted out?

On a no less important point, Frank notes that the new laws shield even more from public scrutiny basic information about groundwater use - information that is essential for groundwater monitoring. Further, that (now, even more private) data would have been critical to developing legally defensible, quantifiable laws for groundwater management and pumping, basin recharge, correlations to subsidence and infrastructure damage, seismic activity, etc. This giveaway of basic data is entirely unacceptable, and needs to be amended.

So yes, I am profoundly underwhelmed by this bit of political theatre, manipulative optics and “I’m shocked” propaganda. Prove to me in 10 years that this has proceeded toward accomplishing anything other than providing political cover for the governor, the agricultural lobby, and the pro-BDCP constituency, and I’ll do a mea culpa at the lowest point of the one-time bed of Tulare Lake - which will likely be several yards lower than it is today.

When it doesn’t rain, it sues.

The complaint claims that Westlands’ water is being stolen upstream, and that this was very easy for their people to discover. That if this was so easy to discover, then something or someone, perhaps the Delta Watermaster management bureaucracy, wasn’t doing its job. Perhaps the entire system of water rights and management is broken and should be torn up and rewritten. Farmworkers are suffering because of this, after all…

I was surprised that an argument wasn’t made that Westlands’ position at the bottom of the access-to-water food chain was hurting America. Or that Westlands was being denied its god-given right to subsidized almonds exporting and bad business models. Is planting trees in a virtual desert and expecting others to supply them with water smart, practically?

Maven excerpts the following:

“Westlands believes that the Delta Watermaster and the current water rights enforcement have failed to achieve any meaningful compliance with the legislative mandate to collect information through statements of diversion and use from water users in the Delta,” the letter states. “The statements of diversion and use supplied in the letter submitted by DWR and Reclamation under exhibit 1 represent a sample of what is - at best - questionable assertions, and what - at worst - amounts to a flagrant disregard for the law.”

Ooooh. The law….

Then there’s this:

”...southern Delta riparian right holders have no right, in any year, to natural flow from the Sacramento River because the Sacramento’s natural flow does not reach those diverters, and therefore they are restricted to the natural flow in the San Joaquin River.”

Westlands is of course the same group that will fight litigation-tooth and lawsuit-nail any proposed regulation of ground water pumping. Using powerful pumps to extract a resource from hundreds of feet below a property is, according to that logic, a natural source of water. A god-given property right, and all that. Subsidence and the destruction of publicly funded infrastructure that results, that’s a problem for somebody else.

Let’s first stipulate that none of this debate, litigation, NIMBY-ism, etc. is about what is or isn’t natural. The Delta is a reclaimed landscape, and no pristine wilderness.

So, how to define this idea of “natural?” According to Westlands, what is less natural is a South Delta farmer opening a valve in a pipe so that an adjacent river’s or slough’s water can flow, via gravity, onto a field. I know that there are lots and lots of laws that define when this is and isn’t legal, but which do you think sounds like a more “natural” way to source water? South Delta farmers should limit their water supply to the selenium-laced effluent that Westlands themselves provide?

I get the argument, but that doesn’t make Westlands amoral lack of accountability and hypocrisy any less hard to stomach. Because, along with helping to supply fractured aqueducts or road surfaces to their own region, and almonds and pistachios to China and Canada, Westlands is a major supplier of toxic water to the Delta and not a huge contributor to the “food security” of the state or the nation. I guess that’s not their responsibility.

As we near the end of this round of the California water struggle, every constituency is weighing what they are going to give up and what they are going to get.

Some people don’t support the plan because they don’t get much from it—except some “assurance” that if the water’s available then they will get theirs. Problem is, they already get that—without spending $50 billion dollars.

Others don’t support it because it takes something away, that thing being what they consider their Jerusalem, their traditional homeland, despite the history of transformation, exploitation, and destruction that this irrevocably altered place was, is and always will be.

Others support it, but want others to pay for it—because that’s the way it’s always been—and others too support it, tepidly, because they have managed their affairs very well by self-imposing prudent conservation policies and fashioning good tools.

As I watch news of the ever-shrinking BDCP water bond, and the rise of (finally!) Sen. Wolk’s modest and measured water bond, I have hope that the Shock Doctrine rhetoric of Earthquakes! and Rising Sea Levels! and Drought! can finally be replaced by incremental, long-term, rational planning.

What is needed is a phased plan to armour the Delta’s levees, beginning with the westward ones, and moving upstream north, east, and south from there. Parallel to this, public discussion about managing a civil society when a decades-long drought happens.

No, Fortress Delta may not address the conflict between endangered fish migrations and pumping, but spending $50B on an experiment to see if an under-Delta solution would—now that would have been really stupid.

Since it will require levees approximately two metres higher and 30-60 metres wider, Delta residents will not like Fortress Delta’s effects on their properties and communities. This big new, engineered levee infrastructure will be transformative and intrusive.

Towns already sitting astride the existing levees, like Isleton and Walnut Grove, Locke and Courtland, will need to be moved, if someone wants to pay for that, and if not, half-destroyed. Beautiful land-side cottonwood groves will be ripped up, as will many lovely Victorian houses of the early Delta era. The picturesque Delta will have to be rebuilt.

And I guess we’ll have to accept the fact that our produce will be less perfect, though hopefully more flavourful, because it will come from somewhere where almonds cannot be grown instead of tomatoes, because that’s what the market dictates gets grown in CA (but not Rhode Island, or Nebraska) if there’s not enough water. Obviously.

And of course, the unfortunately evolved Delta Smelt goes extinct, as do the Salmon and Splittail.

Nobody gets what they want. And that’s how it will be, whether $50B or $5B is spent.

Just to be clear, I certainly didn’t get what I wanted, either—which was to get a thoughtful discussion going and be a bridge across conflicting interests. Silly me.

Professor Lund’s great to read, in large part because he doesn’t feel the need to overly self-edit. This of course gets under the skin of people who are both more knowledgable and better writers than I am.

For example:
“‘Virtual water’ and related ‘water footprint’ calculations are cute and popular. We can have lots of fun with the idea of a virtual this and that. (Virtual manure can be imagined coming and going from California and flowing globally.)”

A while ago, Professor Lund felt that I overinterpreted his “funding the Delta like a public sewer” essay. But like when I write “Sewer analogy > Heuristic fail,” if I were to choose to title an essay of mine linking “sewer” with “Delta” I would know that I was looking to pick a fight. And I would expect Lund would, too.

So Professor Lund is either being coy or naive about how words work when they are put together, or he just wants to pick a fight with a group of people (Delta people, bloggers or opinions of bloggers he considers illegitimate, etc.), period.

In Lund’s defense (I guess) is that I honestly sometimes can’t tell which it is.

Mike Wade agrees with Professor Lund about all of the kvetching kvetchers. Feeling like he’s in a safe space, Wade incautiously but accurately pulls out the “we live in a global economy” argument. It certainly can’t hurt Mike and the CFWC when Lund and his colleagues at the PPIC seem to understate just how expensive it will be to get them the water they need to feed the global economy designer pomegranate drinks, pistachios and wine, too.

Peter Gleick doesn’t agree with Lund about the kvetching. He thinks that if it is fair for one group to argue that water supply and environmental policy should be measured via “food security” and out of the other side of that same group’s mouth chasten the naive with talk of the global economy (see Wade, Mike), then it is reasonable to ask whether it is really food security or power politics that is at stake for that group.

On a recent plane trip, I was sitting next to a logistics VP for a major media equipment outfitter. He was a very young guy, and got his new job after noticing that like 95% of the servers used in the TV and radio industry were manufactured in one place. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your ability to foresee how catastrophe becomes dollars, that place was a vast IT park sitting on a floodplain in Thailand. That was where this guy’s company sourced their servers, too - just like all of their competitors.

This concerned him, and so he watched weather reports for the region, and saw a major storm coming that would surely inundate the IT Park. Days and hours before the storm hit, he explained the emerging situation to his boss, and was instructed to buy every available server manufactured in North America ASAP. His company flourished in the supply chain chaos that ensued, and he was promoted.

This little anecdote helps to explain why Mike Wade’s argument about food security is backwards. It also explains why the inclusion of virtual water in any drought debate is relevant, and why a significantly reduced agricultural territory south of the Delta is the only practical solution to both virtual and real California water supply.

I think it is safe to say that - at least for the supporters of the twin tunnels project at the heart of the BDCP - it did not help to let loose a group of evidently independent and knowledgeable scientists on the mixture of science, suasion and policy-making that permeate the BDCP effects documents.

Here are a few excerpts (though boldface captions are by me) from Chris’s reporting, but I would strongly recommend reading the entirety at her website. Here’s that link again. And supporting her invaluable work by making a donation, too!

The BDCP Playbook, Part II

Employ a favorite bait-and-switch magic trick, Adaptive Management
“The panel recognizes that the success of BDCP hinges on a commitment to effective adaptive management, he said.  ‘Although it doesn’t fall under our purview in this review, adaptive management and really linking the effects analysis with the adaptive management was lacking with virtually no mention of it within Chapter 5,’ said Dr. Parker.”

Make sure that poor indexing appears to be a manifestation of the challenges of a complex planning exercise trying to find common ground among multiple, conflicting agendas, and not a political tactic
“‘‘We just need better linking throughout—better cross-referencing and better indexing throughout because without it, we are left with this sense of “trust us.”’  Without the level of detail, we’re really hunting.’”

Do not value weight the affected in the uncertainty. Don’t come clean about what’s really at stake here, the value of an endangered fish that strictly speaking is probably as stupid as Devin Nunes says it is
“‘Unless you weight the attributes, you can’t determine the overall uncertainty,’ said John Skalski, a panel member.  ‘An attribute that has high importance, even one of them, that has high uncertainty, makes the whole program uncertain.  On the other hand, you might have a lot of attributes that are very insignificant with a lot of uncertainty but it has no effect on the overall assessment.  Uncertainties don’t average; sometimes they multiply, but it depends on your model, so unless we know the weight of the attributes and how certain you are of those individual components, we can’t put the pieces together.’”

Employ rose colored glasses science
“The panel felt that there was a lack of consideration of a variety of scenarios, including moderate or worst case scenarios, with predominantly optimistic scenarios in modeling, said Dr. Parker.”

Employ rose colored glasses science wherever possible
“Restoration of tidal wetlands is highly uncertain or a very long process, and yet restoration is assumed to be 100% perfect for meeting goals, said Dr. Parker.”

Limit the “Study Area” despite the fact that Nature doesn’t do limits
“The panel overall feels that the effects of changes to the conservation measures should include San Francisco Bay, said Dr. Parker. ‘Reality is that there is connectivity, and the BDCP will likely have impacts downstream, particularly the loss of suspended sediments, and that impact to salt marsh in the face of sea level rise. ‘At this time we feel like it should be included.’”

Embrace uncertainty, embrace arbitrary and undefined measurables
“Greg Ruggerone said that per a table from the beginning of chapter 5 that for covered fish species, only 11 or 28% of the biological objectives could be evaluated in your opinion, 38% of them were partially evaluated, but 33% were not evaluated at all. ‘This is unfortunate, because the biological objectives are where the project wants to go.  You want to be able to achieve those objectives and yet we don’t have the information in the basin to evaluate at this point in time whether or not those objectives might be achieved, so therefore this raises uncertainty in the overall effectiveness of the plan and highlights the need for monitoring and adaptive management as the project continues.’”

Downplay how much uncertainty is being embraced
“There is a mismatch of potential benefit from conservation action and how they are assessing it, said Dr. Parker, noting that this is a broad comment that addresses the communication of uncertainty.  ‘Overall the broad consensus was that the level of detail within Chapter 5, the summary sections, that level of uncertainty is often downplayed, so there is this sense that prediction is there’s going to be a net benefit but without adequately capturing the level of uncertainty around that prediction,’ he said.”

Thought he had a problem with stupid fish? Watch Devin Nunes head explode when he tries to understand why we manage turbidity
“Science panel member Nancy Monsen offered some further clarification. ‘As you are adaptively managing the north Delta operations, that turbidity is one of those things that you adaptively manage for,’ she said. ‘You recognize that there is 8 to 9% sediment that we’d like to keep in the Sacramento, if possible, and if there’s something you can do with pump operations—if you see a pulse of sediment that possibly goes down, maybe you back off the pumping for that period of time while the sediment goes down. That’s just an example of how you could adaptively manage sediment in the system.’”

Avoid this study at all costs
[Science panel member Greg Ruggerone, referring to a paper by Phil Roni et al, said that if one applied that groups’ conclusions to the Delta, then] “‘100% of the habitat would need to be restored to be 95% certain of achieving a 25% increase in smolt production for either species.’ Ultimately, they concluded that “our study demonstrates considerable restoration is needed to produce measurable changes in fish abundance on a watershed scale.” So this just raises the question that we’re asked a lot in the Columbia River Basin by policy makers ... and we ask the question here, with the BDCP, is the amount of restoration that’s being proposed, is it enough to achieve the biological objectives set forth in recovery?’”

Like climate change deniers, let’s make it some other science’s problem to prove that we are wrong
“‘I have a question on our treatment or lack of treatment in Chapter 5 of adaptive management since that permeates so many of the conclusions, especially when there’s a high degree of uncertainty,’ said David Zippin with ICF International. ‘And I would encourage the panel to provide specific suggestions on how we might do that.  In previous drafts of the document, I think we probably overdid it, and now we’ve sort of swung the other way, omitted it completely, so there has to be a happy medium somewhere in the middle. ... We opted to be conservative and rely on adaptive management very little in chapter 5, but perhaps there’s a way we could acknowledge it that’s defensible.’”

Adaptive management means do some research. It does not mean describing how to intervene in a wide range of scenarios
“‘A rigorous adaptive management plan would have a conceptual model that poses those decision points that are linked to triggers and thresholds,’ said science panel member Charles “Si” Simonstad.  ‘One thing that was a little confusing to me was in the monitoring and research component, the tables had compliance monitoring, effectiveness monitoring and research, and most of the uncertainties were allocated to research.  In fact, it should be sort of explicitly incorporated as a major element of adaptive management to try to resolve those with monitoring and incorporate those into alternative approaches if they pass those trigger points.  So in some respects, there’s a potential need for a table, a conceptual model or some other diagram that suggests for the major uncertainties, how would you approach that with a rigorous adaptive management program.  What would be the candidate triggers, what would be the candidate thresholds, what would be the candidate alternatives that you would have to move to under that condition?’”

——————————————————————-

So, there you go, David Zippen - Mr. Simonstad’s agreed to help you with your work, and his suggestion is a good one. Along with Mr Skalski’s recommendation that you give value weighting to things costs, benefits, affected, I hope we see what adaptive management looks like, what it costs, who and what suffers, etc., fleshed out across the range of possible scenarios as part of the final BDCP documents.

Still I remain concerned that what we are seeing here, beneath all of the rhetoric about food security, is a massive and strategically ordered shift in wealth toward the AgriFracking landscape of the Monterrey Shale region—more or less the southern half of the state. And the Governor is no small player in this.

The essentials, in a diptych:

So, onto the trollish future history of California Water

At the most chaotic opportune juncture in Iraq’s civil war California’s drought, a new law push is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP AgriFracking to claim the country’s vast oil reserves usurp California’s precious water supply.

Immediately following September 11 the Zero Allocation announcement, the Bush Brown Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” “War on the Environment” to Halliburton and Blackwater San Joaquin Valley Congressmen.

After a tsunami wipes out levee breach floods the coasts of Southeast Asia a subsided island in the South Delta, the pristine beaches water resources are auctioned off to tourist resorts shifted to the junior water rights-holding AgriFracking bloc.

New Orleans’s Delta residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina besieged by bellowing right-wing Congressmen, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools watch as endangered species, waterways, levees, and agricultural economy will never be reopened irretrievably degrade.

Original Shock Doctrine text sampled from Naomi Klein’s website: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

No doubt it does focus attention. And in Lund’s essay, attention leads us to innovation - as opposed to, say, conflict. He begins by describing a very specific history of California water innovation. No dynamiting of Owens Lake pipes from 1924-1976 in that history.

In this era of scarcity the interests of the haves and have-nots will intensify, the resilience of the myth of American innovation is going to be tested like never before.

What California needs is to develop a Jugaad culture of innovation: be Frugal, be Flexible, and be Inclusive. This is the way that this era will not be a zero-sum game of water supply and reliability, something that the tunnels ensure.

Innovation is about the market - the power to take, to conserve when taking is physically impossible, and to mitigate when politically unavoidable - are the innovations of the haves.

The Delta may have physical limits, but is intrinsic and not slave to an extensive geography that it exists within. Who can decisively claim that the Delta is any less sustainable than say the Tulare Basin or Malibu?

Water market transfers and Valley groundwater regulation are “difficult” issues as Lund concludes at the end of his piece, but these are not the “really difficult” issues. These are what the haves are probably willing to give away.

A really difficult issue, or decision, would be to calibrate environmental and economic policy with social justice policy.

For example, a really difficult decision would be to pay off Westlands’ landowners, taking its entire toxic territory, a major contributor to the Delta’s ecosystem problems, out of production. Wouldn’t this make water supply and environmental sense for everyone but Westlands landowners?

Big Ag constantly cites unemployment rates in the poor towns of the Central Valley as a reason to open the spigot. But why isn’t ensuring that these same towns get high quality water paid for by the agribusinesses that polluted their water supplies in the first place? Why should these agribusinesses get any assurance of water supply reliability before then?

Another idea that it would be nice to hear from those with authoritative voices is about what food security actually is. On the Public Record raised this question recently: How does the production of wine and pistachios, almonds, etc. contribute to our food security? We hear a lot about wasted water, but what about wasted food?

To which I would add another: Should suburban development continue to be supported by water transfers, or should water transfers to new development, like the growing of pistachios and wine grapes, be relegated to secondary status for water?

Development be focused on frugal models that support the densification of existing cities and towns, making them much more transportation, energy and water efficient. Why the Antelope Valley is allowed to develop makes no sense.

The reality is this: The costs for food and fuel, disaster infrastructure and relief are increasing, all signs of unwanted adjustments to the effects of scarcity and climate change. The question is will this myth of innovation be informed by the parallel and dangerous myth of abundance, or by the reality of scarcity and climate change.

From a staunch advocate of Delta interests I received the following question in response to my last post:

John, I agree with quite a bit of your analysis and ideas. But, for those of us whose families have been farming in the Delta for over 100 years, the concept of a “National Park” poses the question: Where do the Delta farmer and his private property rights fit into the “park” picture?  I cannot conceive of a system whereby the government determines what should be farmed (for then farmers are merely serfs), so how does the ability to farm making planting decisions based upon market conditions remain possible?

Thanks for the chance to ask the question.  Rogene Reynolds, South Delta.

Rogene, in answer to your question about private property rights - a principle that cuts both ways depending on whether your concerns are about property or, say, rights to the groundwater underneath it - I have many times described the hybrid nature of ownership, property, access and development that I am proposing within the Delta National Park idea - so I won’t get into doing so again. You have more than enough information about my proposal to draw your own conclusions.

I hope you are able to recognize that my sentiments - critical though they may sometimes be - are with the Delta’s communities and its unique landscape history, and that you are able resist the conclusion that what I am proposing would make you - and Delta landowners generally - “serfs.”

Because the alternative to a more complexly programmed Delta is clear, and included in a good summary of a number of inevitabilities about California water policy entanglements that have been put together by UCD/PPIC experts Jay Lund and Ellen Hanak. In their view the Delta will become a simpler place, except for the expanded opportunities for recreation that can occur in a future Delta brackish inland sea.

In Lund’s and Hanak’s scenario, agriculture in the Delta will certainly diminish, much more than it would in a Delta National Park. For a description of the contraction scenario, refer to Point One of their thoughtful ten-point list at the above-linked UCD Water Blog.

My appeal is to think in a way that removes the Delta’s future from being a zero-sum game. This appeal does necessarily presume that the Delta will indeed change, develop, become more complex in its land uses. I believe my view to be a hybrid of all views, and not an entrenched view of any party, whether those of Restore the Delta, the California Farmworkers Coalition, the Public Policy Research Institute of California, or others.

The interests of pro-private property in the Delta regularly claim that they can manage just fine without government help, but this assertion does not reflect existing substantive government subsidies of Delta infrastructure. At the same time, in-Delta interests accurately view the tunnels as the existential threat to their way of life that it certainly is.

The UCD/PPIC experts claim that government subsidies of Delta levee infrastructure cannot prop it up forever and that this inevitably means that the Lower (westernmost) Delta levees will collapse due to a lack of any other viable form of economic support for infrastructure maintenance. This view is reductive, and doesn’t seem to be willing to consider a set of options for the Delta’s future and California’s water supply as inter-dependent. Of course, such an alternative would be profound in its impact on State governance. And on Delta mindsets.

So, two questions for in-Delta interests and risk-averse experts alike:

1/ Would Vermeer have existed in the Netherlands if it were a brackish inland sea?

2/ Is this your best proposal for how the Delta and California can benefit from using this opportunity of drought, climate change, and environmental regulation to create a conciliatory model of water policy governance?