Delta National Park - Blog

The semantics of saving

2013-04-29T18:13:43Z

Just to follow up a little more, Jerry Meral made a comment that has attracted lots of attention, and some interesting thoughts from the UCD/PPIC group in a 4/29 tweeted re-post of a piece they had penned almost two years ago.

First, though - here’s what Meral is quoted as saying:

“BDCP is not about, and has never been about, saving the delta. The delta cannot be saved.”

The question of course is what exactly did he mean? The knowledgeable folks at UC Davis’s California Water Blog weighed in, and imply, perhaps, that Meral sort of misspoke. That what he meant to say was that it can’t be restored - not saved - and provide historical context to just how profoundly the Delta has been altered.

The UCD people know, and as I have brought up many times, the rhetoric about “restoring” the Delta that the UCD folks focus on is just that, a messaging tactic of pro-Delta groups.

A statement in the UCD piece:

The hardest part of moving forward is deciding where we want to go. Do we want to continue to have a Delta that has the species and ecological characteristics of a lake in southern Arkansas? Or do we want to restore estuarine ecological functions to support struggling native species?

Fortunately, these are not either/or questions. Indeed, trying to have all parts of the Delta serve all divergent objectives for this region cannot succeed. Some parts of the Delta can be restored to seasonal floodplain habitat, favoring rearing and spawning for native species (especially salmon).

Actually, this does frame the questions more or less as either/or. Either it’s habitat-first, or it’s nothing, because we need to be better stewards of Nature. Natural heritage always is foregrounded.

I don’t think so, but do the UCD people think we could just walk away from the Delta, and it would get along just fine? Walk away, and the place will evolve on more or less on its own, with little taxpayer expense, into a number of local ecosystems? Yolo Bypass, a flood plain for salmon; a (yes!) southern Arkansas lake in the Central Delta’s new waterscape of lagoons and remnant levees; brackish water estuarine habitat at the X2 line? Boutique organic farms amidst the tunnel muck plateaus in what remains of the picturesque North Delta, etc.?

That is my admittedly harsh take on the UCD piece and its re-tweeting. It skillfully and with nuance gets to the heart of Mr. Meral’s position - the space of the Delta will become more a natural than cultural heritage resource. This is both good and politically necessary. Whether they intend it to or not, this position aligns nicely with Meral’s.

It also suggests that in its subregions “[s]uccessful reconciliation in the Delta will leave some areas quite similar to their current condition, while guiding major transformations in other parts of the Delta.” Guided by omission or commission will be the question.

Given the anti-environmental, anti-tax trends that we are seeing in political discourse today, I would be very surprised if a billion dollars of public funding is directed toward serious investments in so-called “natural heritage,” in Delta habitat mitigation and construction, let alone four or more billion.

It doesn’t take money to usher in “major transformations,” after all. Just ask Kevin Knauss, who is I would guess a Fox News watcher, who wrote an interesting comment to a piece in the 4/30 SacBee piece about the Meral controversy.

“Some people don’t want to face the reality that Meral is right, the Delta can’t be saved. It was constructed with no plan other than to make money. A tunnel nor canal will kill the Delta. The people have killed the Delta by over farming and not allocating enough money to maintain the levees. The only thing that will survive in the end are the fish, which is tearing the whole process apart in the first place.”

That’s pretty clear, and accurately reflects the mix of fact and myth that swirl around the Delta and CA water debates.

Then there’s this bit about Meral, from Wyatt Buchanan’s piece in the 4/29 Chronicle (h/t Jerry Cadagan):

“The man who’s shepherding Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build massive water delivery tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is making big waves.
Jerry Meral, deputy secretary at the California Natural Resources Agency, said the tunnel plan - known technically as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP - won’t ultimately help the delta.

“[The] [p]roblem is that the stated objective of the intensely debated plan is to meet the “co-equal” goals of restoring the vast inland estuary while using its water to irrigate California farmland and quench the thirst of millions. Without the restoration goal, the plan would look like an overt water-grab.”

Yes, it would.

With the pragmatic knowledge and objective view of a military engineer or surveyor, the UCD piece points to a future that privileges natural heritage over cultural heritage in the Delta. Some of the most picturesque and settled parts of the Delta will be irreversibly transformed and forever jealously guarded against the ravages of climate change. A new collection of secured “facilities” with all the character of a Bakersfield parking lot, protected by chain link enclosures, guards and sodium halide lighting systems - all to the good of sport fishermen and real estate speculators, big agriculture, and environmental and water lawyers.

slightly edited, 4/30

Occam’s Razor and Delta Geography

2013-04-25T17:22:10Z

Here is the problem of shepherding Delta water policy management strategy, illustrated to describe a messy geography with a simple imperative.

Today’s question is Why, if the Delta cannot be saved, as Jerry Meral apparently pronounced, are we going through this charade about co-equal goals?

Because environmental advocacy’s votes are needed to sustain the BDCP coalition perhaps?

Any discussion about what to do with water in the Delta has extents and limits. Defining these extents and limits is colored by interest and is an exercise in messaging tactics. A good example of this, as economist Jeffrey Michael describes, is the BDCP’s argument for doing limited cost-benefit work. BDCP needs to keep the extents and limits narrow.

Michael’s, of course. is also a narrative of extents and limits, but his would cover more expansive cost-benefit analysis, and certainly include analysis of “fortress levee” alternative.

That idea might develop something like this:
Phase 1/ 2016-25: Build Sherman Island forebay and tunnels to Tracy pumps
Phase 2/ 2016-30: Build primary perimeter setback levees on adjacent islands
Phase 3/ 2025-50: Build secondary perimeter setback levees on next concentric layer lower Delta islands

It is pretty clear that the BDCP doesn’t want to include such an alternative, not because fortressing the Delta would be significantly less costly than the twin-tunnel or NRDC alternatives (which it would), but because the Delta would remain a strategically important political entity. The tunnels would effectively neuter the Delta as a political space, and shift a great deal of power to the southern half of the state. I am surprised that Mr Meral, by saying the Delta was beyond repair, would get out in front of this so amateurishly.

But let’s be clear about a few facts:

Fortressing the Delta would also be every bit as certain to improve the health of the Delta ecosystem as would the tunnel approach to co-equality.

A Fortress Delta would be no more vulnerable to a big earthquake than would a pair of tunnels buried in 150 feet of sand and clay.

Fortress levees would one day save lives in the Delta’s land and water when the inevitable flood comes, but would protect both from rising sea levels.

Fortressing infrastructure would intrinsically create habitat in the very form of its setback levee’s water-side benches, and create at least as many jobs as twin tunnelling.

So why was moving water through the Delta’s surface, once the CAL-FED “preferred alternative,” rejected? Do the reasons have to do with science and environmental outcomes?

Not if you believe that the tunnels are likely to spell doom for migrating fish, as National Marine Fisheries Service and C-Win’s Carolee Krieger contend:

Krieger writes:

In terms of direct fisheries threats, the agency noted that the twin tunnels may work in malign concert with climate change to drive the endangered Sacramento winter-run chinook salmon to extinction. More broadly, states the letter, the diversions enabled by the tunnels could reduce the Sacramento’s flow to the point that salmon and other fish would find migration impossible.

The agency also observed that claims of the project’s environmental benefits are overblown, particularly in regard to the proposed restoration of 65,000 acres of fisheries and wildlife habitat. The fisheries service said such an effort is unlikely to succeed because it will be difficult to acquire all the needed land. Indeed, the letter notes, the Department of Water Resources has not provided any specific feasibility analysis to identify just how this land will be obtained, and at what cost. Rather, Water Resources blithely bases related analyses on the assumption the restoration will be successful; there are no “bounding analyses” examining the effects of the twin tunnels if habitat restoration does not proceed as planned.

So, what would the tunnel option do that no other alternative can? Move water around the Delta with minimized local resistance, minimal political complication and exposure to pollutant contamination. Tunnels can even be sized to one day convey much more water than is now being publicly discussed!

Tunnels avert messy land takings in difficult locations - though we’ll see whether the reality of building tunnels actually takes less land than would have a peripheral canal or fortress leveeing. The land the tunnel needs to take is less valuable, and more controllable, given its ownership, than would have been all of that land parallel and near to I-5.

That is why I called the tunnels the path of least resistance over a year ago.

Earthquakes! Climate Change! Locusts! BDCP’s messaging tactic is to frame the argument about a complex problem in the simplest Shock Doctrine-esque way possible.

Not doing nothing

2013-03-28T17:59:04Z

From today’s article by Paul Burgarino in the Contra Costa Times:

“An immense amount of science has gone into the (plan), but we know there will always be scientific uncertainty,” said Charlton Bonham, director of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “The only thing for certain is that if we do nothing, things will get worse from a conservation point of view.”

This tactic of claiming light speed is actually not moving is a common rhetorical device. “Doing nothing” is not what happens in the Delta. Ask San Joaquin Valley farmers if “nothing” is being done to address conservation. Ask environmental groups who support the Endangered Species Act and CEQA. What any of those groups want is less of the doing nothing that restricts their access to water.

The question is, the BCDP material benefits accrue most evidently to which side in this recently crafted principle of “good enough” scientific assessment? It is much easier to argue that those benefits accrue much more to Big Water than they do to the three-inch bait fish or the Delta ecosystem’s health.

Marijke van Warmerdam, Weather Forecast, 2000

Why is it that “doing nothing” is what Big Conservation want to call the many things that are now being done?

I certainly agree that the many things being done now are not reversing the degrading health of the Delta’s ecosystem. It may be that that die was cast 150 years ago, when the Delta was profoundly and forever altered via land reclamation. That’s why it is so difficult for me to accept the Eco-libertarian argument of Delta advocates.

But to go from doing those things that aren’t working to building a $20-50 billion dollar infrastructure that the state knows the beneficiaries can’t pay for (and the beneficiaries know this, too) - to a let’s build it, and see if it helps, policy - that is not a very convincing conservation strategy,

it was pretty clear that, as a quote by a Delta advocate in the CCT article reminds us,

“The new plan is still consistent with the National Academy of Science’s 2012 judgment that the [environmental] effect analysis is just a rationale for building tunnels, Barrigan-Parrilla said.”

Many things could be done in the Delta would be more harmful from a conservation point of view than the current version of doing nothing. For example, it is possible that political change could move the X2 line further into the Delta. The fast-forward version of this would simply be abandoning the Delta’s reclaimed polders to the vagaries of shrinking state and federal budgets, burrowing animals, rising sea levels and king floods.

My guess is that both - X2 line incursions and abandonment of costly environmental restoration projects - will happen, but the former will be a minor footnote, and the latter the key and likely outcome of the BDCP process.

I have come to understand it this way:

What would you do if you were a state assembly member in 2020, grappling with tight budgets and the slow realization that the global economy had relocated the middle class to Bangalore? How would you choose between spending $4B on Delta environmental restoration projects, or paying off a massive debt incurred from a $50B pair of tunnels?

Leo and Marianne Verriet’s house, dry and flood season views

This is why I support thinking of the Delta not as the physical and ideological playpen of a risk-averse technocracy, but as the Netherlands. That place has been around for many hundreds of years. Why can’t smart development contribute to a economically self-sustaining, new kind of Delta that everyone seems to want?

The fall of Delta science

2013-03-15T16:06:22Z

Derived from some writing I’m working on:

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a contested territory at the center of California’s water infrastructure, is another subject that science has studied for decades with little tangible effect.

A 2010 National Academies’ commission concluded what was already obvious: The Delta’s ecosystem was in freefall. There was no easy fix. Their findings were quickly forgotten, and other rhetorical approaches began to surface.

“We decided to embrace scientific uncertainty regarding the facility’s operation, water flows, habitat restoration and the response of fish,” said Karla Nemeth, Bay-Delta Conservation Plan program manager for the plan at the California Natural Resources Agency, in July 2012.

Recognizing that science will not provide the answer might be reasonable. It also all but guaranteed unfounded, self-serving utterances like this one:

“If we had intakes in the northern Delta and a way to convey those supplies to the existing aqueducts, as proposed by the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, we could have diverted more supplies without impacting fish species such as Delta smelt,” said Terry Erlewine, general manager of the State Water Contractors (...and in his spare time, professor of biogeochemistry, oceanography, hydrology, geomorphology, resource economics, marine biology, ecology, fluid mechanics, civil engineering, microbiogeochemistry, sociology, environmental science, computer simulation modeling, biological engineering, and hydrogeology…)

Catch what Karla and Terry did there?

As John Fleck observed at his blog, a new rhetorical tack.

Where is the science that proves that Mr Erlewine’s statement is based on anything more than a set of assumptions?

There is none. For the BDCP, science is now uncertain. Self-serving, self-referential logic takes its place.

Major props to John Fleck, who directed me to Daniel Sarewitz and first wrote about the Erlewine take -

Equite, scarcite, liberte

2013-02-21T18:40:53Z

Carolee Krieger has an oped piece in today’s Fresno Bee that sums up the case for not spending tens of millions of dollars on an unproven selenium extraction facility and instead “retiring” westside ag land.

“Not only is this [land fallowing] the best approach; according to the U. S. Geological Survey, it’s the single effective solution. The agency has stated unequivocally that reducing irrigation is the only way to eliminate drainage problems on the westside.”

Soon, the obligatory response from advocates of SJV agriculture will appear, making their by now familiar two major points:

1/ The feds are obliged to “provide drainage services” to the westside’s toxic domain. From the westside’s point of view, this is just the government spending money doing what they said they would do decades ago.

2/ Taking productive farmland out of production will raise the cost of food families put on their dinner tables.

Both of these points may be objectively accurate, but that does not mean that they are morally valid.

Just yesterday, the Westlands Water District advised its constituents that they should plan for receiving 20% of the irrigation water they want. Blaming endangered fish, this advice went out with the caveat that this was how it was, but now how it should be. “This notice is not intended to suggest that a 20 percent allocation is either reasonable or acceptable,” Westlands officials said.

“We will never forget,” or something to that effect. We will unmake environmental protection laws to suit our purposes, said Mark Cowin:

“These ongoing crises will continue to reveal themselves until we fundamentally change the way we manage the delta,” Mark Cowin of the California Department of Water Resources told reporters during a media briefing last week.

Or until we fundamentally change the way we manage toxic farmland, Mark…

The question of course is Who will give up their water so that WWD can have more of it? Show of hands, please? Hmmm ... no one seems anxious to help WWD out. The fish haven’t been heard from. Yes, scarcity is another reason why land retirement makes good sense.

Another is that good form of libertarianism. One WWD farmer read the writing on the wall prospectively (every crisis is an opportunity, after all), and has shown initiative in the face of scarcity, has had his ag pack turn on him. This is unacceptable.

I recently interviewed a representative of this farmer. According to him, the farm was getting only 10% of the water it needed to farm everything. So, after crunching some numbers, he decided to change course, and spent years in the permitting process for a proposed photovoltaic farm development on just 20 acres of his several hundred.

Well, the proposal was effectively scuttled by a lawsuit based on a specious interpretation of the Williamson Act.

Sabotaged by no less an entity than the oligarchs at the Fresno County Farm Bureau.

I’d like to know where WWD’s Birmingham and CFWC’s Mike Wade stand on the idea of farm institutions eating their own.

Broadening the extent of the territory involved, and in that context, I want to ask a question:

Whose responsibility is it to clean up groundwater contaminated by dosing land with immense amounts of animal waste, pesticides and herbicides, all in the name of cheap tomatoes? The industries, called farming, that have done the dosing? The government? No one, since people “choose” to live in impoverished communities?

Would public opinion be more opinionated if the contaminated groundwater was in Marin County, with the prodigious amounts of digital animation at Skywalker Ranch being the offending culprit?

Would public opinion be more opinionated if the offending agricultural element was piles of cow manure at the edge of a pricey subdivision in Laguna?

“Providing drainage services” to the westside is just the tip of the iceberg. Carolee Krieder knows this.

The impacts of large scale industrial polluting masking as pastoral farming are somehow not on the radar screen of the body politic. Why is this persistent myth of a bygone idea of American life permitted such deference in the face of such obvious flaws?

The poor smelt don’t know which way to flow

2013-02-14T16:10:22Z

Matt Weiser’s article in today’s Bee has a quote that only Kafka could love.

From the USFWS, on why pumping restrictions were reduced by 60% - not days after they were put in effect:

“No Delta smelt have been reported as salvaged since February 6, 2013, suggesting this year’s unusual ... event may be over,” the agency wrote in a determination letter posted online.

This is so obviously a result of political pressure and/or policy loophole as to be laughable.

“The Department of Nature has determined that strip mining can resume after millions upon millions of tons of coal voiced not a single objection, and coal industry spokesperson Michelle Wadinsky reminded the Department how cheaply their work in the middle of nowhere makes heating our houses.”

It is painfully obvious that the pressures of administering the use of a scarce resource requires a review of environmental regulations and policies. Environmental managers are put in an embarrassing and untenable position when they release public starements like this.

Political leaders on (what used to be) the left need to force a public debate that allows difference of opinion to either recalibrate or reaffirm existing environmental law. It is shameful that duplicitous statements like this one are allowed to stand in for in-depth review, especially in what we all hope is a mature Democracy.

How to Construct a Permeable Levee

2013-01-17T19:43:09Z

It’s good to see that Robert Pyke’s proposed Sherman Island location for a new diversion intake and tunnel system is continuing to get at least some traction.

Most recently, Jeff Michael at Valley Economy has argued that Dr Pyke’s plan needs to be “seriously studied.”

A few days ago, Alex Breitler had a good piece on the idea in the Stockton Record.

Such a simple and elegant idea - a permeable levee. Claims, such as this one by the tireless pro-ag advocate Mike Wade in the comments section of the Breitler article - that the Western Delta Intake were seriously studied as part of the BDCP process - are misleading.

“Various plans to achieve the goals of the BDCP have been submitted and each has been fully vetted. Some elements of these plans have been incorporated into the BDCP current proposal because the researchers have determined that value exists.”

As far as I can tell, and I could be wrong, the idea of a permeable levee and a Sherman Island forebay were neither “seriously studied” nor “fully vetted” by BDCP.

Back in late August, I wrote a bloggier but similar argument to Dr Michael’s. Notwithstanding the engineering legitimacy and economic and environmental merits of his proposal, I was especially grateful to Dr Pyke for providing a new idea to visualize.

I was particularly taken with his completely counter intuitive idea for a “permeable levee.” Curious, I spoke with Dr Pyke a couple of weeks ago. We exchanged sketches and a few mails, and his useful and critical input helped me develop a diagram that illustrates the sequence of how such a levee might be built.

Caveat One: This is my imagination let loose on time, based on Dr Pyke’s proposal, and is not the product of careful engineering thinking:

Caveat Two: Step number seven, the habitat estates, is not part of his plan, it is part of mine. The economies intrinsic to Dr Pyke’s proposal (shorter tunnels, especially) suggest it might be 30-40% less expensive to construct than the BDCP’s North Delta intake solution. But I am still skeptical. Does the state have the appetite for funding a less expensive, 15- or 20 billion infrastructure project? Hence me, continuing to hammer on the idea of Delta-specific property development.

Wanting to do some vetting myself, I asked Dr Pyke about a couple of potential Achilles’ heels that might undermine viability of the proposal:

Loss of elevation difference between the intake and the pumps means pumping costs that the North Delta intake wouldn’t have. Dr Pyke disputes this, say that the few feet of elevation difference will be negated by friction losses. Both the north Delta and Sherman Island intakes would require lots of pumping, and lots of electricity costs.

Rising sea levels means greater salinity levels at Sherman Island means lower quality water for export. Dr Pyke disputes estimates of sea level rise at a meter or more over the next century. And perhaps rhetorically he suggests that if the X2 line is to be maintained, then the quality of water at a Sherman Island intake should be able to be maintained. In theory, yes - but we’ll see, when push come to shove.

Another potential question mark that I’ve only recently considered is whether, over time, a permeable levee would silt up, rendering it useless as an enormous fish screen and intake facility. A giant fish screen made of miles of coarse sand and gravel levee isn’t exactly going to be easy to floss. Would welcome any thoughts on this potential deal-breaker.

Finally, a concern outlined in the Breitler article by a representative of the MET, hydrostatic pressure of a big reservoir leading to seepage on adjacent islands, is likely to cause some concern among local landowners, just as it has in the long harangue over the Delta Wetlands Project. A key difference is that the DWP proposed dam-like reservoir-polders, in which the level of water stored would be higher than the adjacent rivers.

Still, seepage is an issue. I would argue that it will become less divisive once the inevitable fortress levee improvement of the nearby Lower Delta islands is implemented.

Pyke’s idea sure seems win-win. To the degree that the permeable levee infrastructure, located at Sherman Island intake and tunnel facility, allows for a 9,000 cfs export capacity, Dr Pyke’s proposal seems to negotiate local and southern export interests extremely well.

Cheaper, better for the Delta ecosystem and farmers, more politically inclusive. Can someone please tell me:

Why wouldn’t the state look at this more closely?

*edited Friday, January 18th

An argument against going backward

2012-09-09T17:54:21Z

I haven’t had much to say about Restore the Delta (RTD) for quite a while, and more specifically, about its two biggest, or at least two of its biggest, funders, the Alex Spanos and Dino Cortopassi families. That’s about to change, since it is clear that the politics of their work on behalf of RTD presses my buttons, in a way that is scalable to national politics.

I don’t disagree with the point that there are powerful interests aligned with the momentum to ensure the southern half of the state’s water supply gets delivered through the Delta. RTD and others remind us of that frequently. But what are the interests of the Spanos and Cortopassi families? Is it consistent to support environmental protection locally while supporting its national dismantling?

A recently recovered email, sent by a knowledgeable source, reminded me of why the agendas of both families need to be carefully examined. Because like most of the argument that comes from the Right these days, it is very difficult to find any complex, follow-through, “what if we got our way” thinking in the rhetoric and actions of those who offer up their money in the service of the libertarian end of the political spectrum.

To the degree that there are principles in that position to be gleaned, they seem to be about restoring America’s past, going backwards to some imagined, mythical state of being, when all was right and good.

And despite its environmental arguments, it seems to me that Restore the Delta advocates going backwards, too. At both the national and Delta scales, this is neither possible nor desirable.

Simplifying the world to an unsustainable but easily described set of principles is politically effective but ultimately dangerous. It is also fraught with hypocrisy, multiply contradictory interests and agendas, and unarticulated or vaguely described policies for implementation. Which leads me back to the Spanos and Cortopassi families.

The Spanos’s, for example, seem to have been a major contributor to Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor. I would be curious to know whether they regret writing that check after Schwarzenegger started promoting finding a method of exporting more Delta water.

I am going to go out on a limb here and speculate that they don’t, since the family name is also associated with a major fundraiser for Gov Romney’s presidential campaign. So it is difficult to conclude that the family’s aspirations make them a friend of a progressive, pro-endangered species, climate-change-is-real, activist (I say proudly) environmental agenda.

Especially if we take Romney’s party’s Republican platform at its word.

And if that doesn’t make you wonder what the Spanos’s (and RTD’s) real agenda is, Cortopassi’s attempted libertarian balancing act won’t help you figure it out without a fair amount of analysis. For starters, Cortopassi seems to be one of the million-dollar contributors to the Koch brothers’ attempt to rewrite the democratic process.

How would he feel if impediments to exporting Delta water that currently protect endangered Delta fish were dismantled by the differently activist beneficiaries of the Kochs’ largesse, assuming the stratagem is successful and his mouthpieces are given a working majority in national government? Not that I am holding my breath, but I would be happy to discover that his version of libertarian principles stops at the brink when it comes to greater good policy-making.

In order to explain this microcosmic Delta example about the libertarian politics of the Right, let’s consider the RTD mission. If one reads their statement, what RTD uses as their go-to principle of “restore” is to make improvements to Delta water quality the primary objective of California water policy. All of their other objectives, including Delta community health, habitat health, farming health, etc., flow from this basic idea of what restoring water quality would produce.

For RTD, at least the way I read their agenda, the only acceptable method for improving water quality is to reduce exports and increase the amount of water that flows through the Delta unimpaired to San Francisco Bay.

This of course appeals to the coalition of interests who are affiliated with RTD. But it also marginalizes their ability to build a coalition, since they are not really interested in an idea of environmental improvement or building a sustainable future that extends beyond their own boundaries and the boundaries of their naturally occurring downstream neighbors.

The reason I feel like I can say this isn’t because the threat to the Delta’s habitat or the ocean fisheries isn’t real, because it is, but instead because of the conflict of interest clearly present in the agendas of funding sources like the Spanos and Cortopassi families.

Let me say that I do not have the precise answer to what the constituent elements of a complex, sustainable water policy future are. And I agree with some aspects of RTD’s arguments, especially when it comes to the retirement of the toxic agricultural West Side. So before anyone decides that I am anti-Delta, please take a look at this, this, and and this.

I have not heard anyone from RTD accept that significant modifications to in-Delta water delivery infrastructure are clearly part of the equation. I would be interested to know what RTD’s position on Robert Pyke’s proposal is, for example.

This political MO strikes me as being consistent with the position and (what I hope are) the limitations of the Right in American politics today. Others may disagree, but it seems to me that Restore the Delta practices a very much bubble-like “I’ve got mine” position on the environment, even one that is consistent with the Republican have-it-both-ways (but not really) platform statement that:

Experience has shown that, in caring for the land and water, private ownership has been our best guarantee of conscientious stewardship, while the worst instances of environmental degradation have occurred under government control. By the same token, the most economically advanced countries - those that respect and protect private property rights - also have the strongest environmental protections, because their economic progress makes possible the conservation of natural resources.

Well, the second sentence makes sense, really good sense, in fact. Just not very clear how it follows from the first one, given that privately produced environmental degradation led to environmental laws in the first place. I suspect that they are more interested in promoting the first principle, and will take apart the second one if given the chance. The two contradict each other, is the point.

Yes, the Spanos family’s RTD contributions, coupled with their suburban developments at the edge of the Delta, press my buttons. It does so because the Spanos development company is actively engaged in developing suburban spaces in the Delta that one would think RTD would like to see quashed. Unless of course using in-Delta water for new communities built on the suburban model of Orange County is in their view consistent with a mission that is really more about private property rights than it is about water quality.

It isn’t even that I am opposed to development in the Delta. Far from it. Call me naive, but what I am arguing for is a new kind of mixed-use development pattern that is fundamentally informed by the Delta’s particular geographic features. I elaborated on how this might be done in the midst of the fair amount of flack (some of which I definitely deserved), received the last time I examined the relationship between Spanos, Cortopassi and Restore the Delta.

So as for Mr Spanos’s (and the Republican platform’s) having your cake and eating it too straddle, I await an explanation for how “restoring the Delta” can be squared with support from entities that have subdivided parts of the Delta. Perhaps RTD’s spokepersons can explain how building many hundreds of units of market rate suburban development in the Delta’s secondary zone is consistent with their mission? How do they feel about the still not dead River Islands project proposed for Stewart Tract?

And as for Mr Cortopassi’s cake problem, how does RTD rationalize his litigation supporting increased Delta dredging that seems to spring from concern about the threat of Delta flooding? This is a real concern, yes, but wouldn’t such a change in policy directly threaten water quality in the Delta and by extension the fragile fish species that rely on someone (EPA, CEQA, some body that probably is within the Government) maintaining that quality?

This is the problem with pretty much any group that advocates restoration as a principle in the face of the inevitability of change. Leaving aside the basic question of “to what period in time would this restoration roll the clock back to?” question (for which I also await a reasonable answer), the microcosmic Delta shows us that we live in far too complex a world to advocate going backwards.

Unfortunately, RTD’s mission statement and some of its biggest financial backers perfectly illustrate the messiness of the real problem.

Contacting me

2012-09-05T22:41:58Z

Just today, I was horrified to discover that dozens of messages sent to me by clicking on the “contact” link at DNP over the past two years have gone unanswered.

These have been from diverse people representing diverse interests, from communities, water districts, environmental groups, bloggers with expertise, and others. Some of you have figured out a work around, others are probably chagrined. My apologies to the latter, and I think the former will speak to my real intentions.

The whole point of doing this was to build a community of knowledge exchange, with local, technical, design-based, political, and other interested actors involved in the back and forth, Many super interesting bits of knowledge have been proffered that have not been properly acknowledged.

I was happy to see so many new people trying to contact me, and at the same time as I wrote above, horrified that I probably have left the impression that I don’t care to exchange ideas. That is exactly the opposite of my intentions.

This snafu was due to a DNP website architecture setting I didn’t know existed and haven’t figured out how to change. So your queries have been accumulating in a void.

I will endeavor to respond the inquiries starting with the most recently made, and will work backward in time from there.

In the meantime until I’ve fixed this, please contact me at jwbass@shaw.ca

Megaphoning Robert Pyke

2012-08-30T17:09:47Z

Thanks to Robert Pyke for his recent and significantly titled Open Letter to Delta interests, which has compelled me to more closely examine a possible western Delta circumnavigational conveyance alternative.

The proposal would make profound transformations to Sherman Island*, the big island that acts like a plug at the western confluence of the Delta and an area already compromised for farming due to negotiations over the salt water boundary known as the “x2 line”.

Despite this, and the inevitable criticism of the area’s vulnerability to the Big One, there are a number of reasons why Pyke’s idea needs to be carefully studied:

1/ Mitigation of E/W Delta flows problem without the aggressive usurpation of North Delta water before it courses through its fertile, productive and (relatively) geologically stable agricultural landscape.

2/ Comparatively less expensive than either alternative making a North Delta intake facility its starting point. My back of the envelope calcs make it half as expensive as the currently preferred option.

3/ Very similar to the north Delta intake option, ensures extraction of high, if not quite so high, quality Sacramento River water for use to the west and south.

4/ Greatly reduced “approach velocities,”, which is I think an engineer’s way of saying “wouldn’t suck so many fish in.” (Not sure what “sweeping velocities” are - though I could probably Google it.)

Pyke’s proposal also acknowledges that significant South Delta recirculation of freshwater brought to the Tracy pumps must, one way of another, deal with the ecosystem and irrigation problems of the South Delta differently than the East Delta. This is independent of the east or west conveyance question, but needs to be commended.

San Joaquin River water returning to the Delta salt-laden and toxic to South Delta fish and farming alike (and spreading through the Delta as it flows toward the Bay) is a serious contributor to the Delta’s ecosystem woes. Pyke’s proposal addresses this. In itself this is a refreshing, realistic acknowledgement of the complexity and highly-artificial future of Delta water management that is mostly explained away (or ignored due to its my-eyes-are-glazing-over-now inside baseball detail) by advocates of the North Delta intake option.

A fifth compelling reason why I like Pyke’s idea is that it gives me a whole new set of ideas and infrastructural tools, machines and spaces to visualize.

Which I will be doing in the coming months. In the meantime, it is my hope that Pyke’s idea gets serious attention from those who have much bigger megaphones than me.

*To my friend Chris Gulick: Just a heads-up so that when you catch drift of it, you are forewarned to immediately sit down - I will be working on Sherman Island’s potential future as a “pervious levee” island landscape replete with marinas, fish screen facilities, levee housing, camps and hotels, settlement basin reservoirs, etc.

Five questions about the proposed intake/tunnel facility

2012-08-22T19:19:01Z

Writing a response to Emily Green’s piece in the High Country News unearthed one or two questions that I’d not really gotten into before. And since I asked Green to elaborate, I thought I should, too.

This piece raises questions about some of the performative characteristics being attributed to the new North Delta intake facility. The intake facility would capture 9,000cfs (with the capacity to be expanded to 15,000cfs) of Sacramento River water just below Sacramento, before it enters the tangle of sloughs and intersecting rivers of the Delta. Water taken in would then feed a pair of tunnels, those coincidentally having a capacity of 15,000cfs, but conveying the more limited 9,000cfs collected by the intake. The 15,000cfs capacity, we are told, is about reducing friction and conveyance energy costs. Love that one.

I’d like to consider for a bit what seem to be the basic premises that led the Governor to put his support behind the big North Delta intake facility option, and the presumed tunnels attached to it. I’ve organized this around a five simple statements of the rationale followed by my assessment of the truthiness of each statement.

1/ Of the two major (tunnels or canal) intake-fed conveyance alternatives, the tunnels would displace the least private property, minimizing time- and money-consuming land takings legal processes.

Truthiness: High. It would be relatively easy to calculate the amount of displaced land caused by canal, tunnel and fortress Delta options, and to extrapolate the time and money involved in litigation and buy out expenses for each of them.

Seems pretty unlikely that despite the enormous size of the access points, settling lagoons, etc. that are part of the tunnel, either the canal or fortress options could be constructed with a smaller footprint. (The caveat here is that this my argument, not the Governor’s. But I maintain that this is a major reason for the tunnel option being the preferred one.)

2/ Similar to the canal option, the North Delta intakes would eliminate the north-south Delta flows caused by the big Tracy pumping facilities that have decimated migrating fish that are drawn toward the pumps and away from Suisun Marsh and San Francisco Bay. This is touted as a major environmental benefit of the intake facility/tunnel/canal improvements.

Truthiness: First half of statement - High; second half - Sure, but that’s not really the point. No dispute here lots of migrating, often-endangered fish have been killed at the pumps. Mike Wade and others assure us that the new intake facilities will have new state-of-the-art fish screens. But apparently nobody asks why these aren’t being built at the existing pumps, saving lots of fish while we all take the next 15 or 20 years building tunnels.

Assuredly, the pull of the new 9,000cfs intake facility will be enormous, by some measures up to half the flow of the Sacramento. The intakes will no doubt tempt all manner of fish seeking the Marsh and Bay to dive headlong into the maw if it were not for this new miracle of fish screen technology Mr. Wade speaks of. Why aren’t we making these improvements at Tracy now?

3/ Extending the logic of #2 above, the Delta intakes would provide water managers with more flexibility than a through-Delta option as they try to provide reliable water supplies to downstream water contractors, independent of environmental demands made on that same water.

Truthiness: High. At the present time there is a real conflict between late-winter, early-spring water demands: San Joaquin Valley agriculture want and migrating, endangered fish need Delta water at the same time. This problem would be mitigated.

But it is also entirely plausible that new studies c. 2030 conclude that the Delta’s ecosystem remains on a crash course, too little too late. A new stressor, like the rise of a salt-tolerant invasive predator who loves the Delta’s new brackish environment, or the ongoing collapse of the Central Valley’s urban economies and its ability to upgrade its ammonia-laden wastewater treatment infrastructure, or another scenario, emerges.

But it is unclear how the complex interactions of a variety of Delta stressors (yes, water interests - I am not forgetting that some are caused by in-Delta and edge-of-Delta polluters) will be reanimated by the Delta’s new, post-intake facility hydrology. Since it is not and cannot be known, this is where political “trust” comes into play.

Let’s also not forget that a large percentage of Sacramento River water, the highest quality fresh water moving through the Delta, will no longer flow through the Delta in whatever way it does. So, if the idea is to allow the Delta to become a significantly more brackish (water-side) ecosystem, then truthiness is Very High. Delta landowners who rely on a reliable supply of fresh water may wish to be compensated for their trouble though.

4/ Also extending the logic of #2, the Delta intakes would therefore simulate a more natural flow regimen in the Delta by eliminating the induced flow of fresh water from the Sacramento across the eastern (via the Delta Cross Channel) and southern (via the Tracy pumps) Delta.

Truthiness: Moderate. If “natural” means “Delta flows no longer affected by the pull of water project pumps that draw most of the power generated by Shasta Dam,” then the Delta will immediately become nearly pristine, practically a wilderness. Of course, natural lost all meaning here once the first reclamation began in the mid-1800’s, and that is on the Delta’s current landowners as much as it is on Big Ag and Los Angeles.

The word natural has little if any meaning in the Delta. By their active management or neglect, this place is in the hands of human beings.

5/ “A new facility would be acceptable only if it were designed and operated to benefit the Delta ecosystem.”

Truthiness: How will this be assessed, given that the science and the engineering are happening simultaneously? That is an expensive full-scale model you all claim to be making. See above four points.

The question really is what do Californians value? A fragile Delta ecosystem nursed indefinitely with the best health care state and federal taxpayers can buy, until they say they can’t afford it anymore? A Delta that is mined for all of its increasingly scarce and valuable water and tracked by a semi-conscious kind of human guilt allowed to reconfigure itself over time into whatever ecosystem it becomes? Both?

Given the ambitious performative expectations/capacities being projected on to the proposed North Delta intake facility, it appears that the Governor is really down with the Big Experiment option in which he sides with developing a more reliable, if not greater (that won’t be known ‘til long past the current Governor’s term), supply of water for the southern half of the state, and the massive shift of wealth that engenders.

I guess if you want to get shit done you gotta let the chips fly. Politically-neutered science may help around the edges of not making any major errors. Kesterson was, in hindsight, predictable, as are the eventual problems that the ongoing accumulation of selenium-laden soils and sloughs will bring.

But over the last two decades of well-funded state-of-the-art research, science has not demonstrated it is capable of providing any politically useful conclusiveness to the issue of balancing environmental and economic objectives for the Delta.

I believe the above comments need a response from those who have and will continue to make ambitious claims about the beneficial impacts of this intake facility. Or who ask for trust while more inconclusive study takes place.

Scope + Environment + Economy = Sustainability

2012-08-21T16:04:05Z

Emily Green has written a thoughtful, carefully supportive piece about the environmental rationale for the tunnel plan. I am moved to comment, but due to my respect for the author, reserve the right to amend my comments.

The case, and it does feel like a case, made in the Green article is a better-written version of one familiar to those who have followed recent California water announcements. It is useful and persuasive that the article takes the time to lay out a recent (c.1950-2010) history about the environmental implications of massive pumping out of the Delta.

Green’s line of discussion is similar to what is in my opinion the more persuasive of the arguments (another being about growth and the California myth of abundance) made by Gov. Brown in recent months: Diverting export water from the Sacramento River as soon as it enters the Delta will eliminate or limit the confusion of migrating fish who, inconveniently for farming, seasonally head “downstream” to the Tracy pumps, where they are decimated, instead of out to sea, where they are fruitful and prepare to multiply.

Intuitively at least, this premise seems to make sense, and is certainly politically effective. Green writes, “whether Brown has converted environmentalists or merely disarmed them remains unclear.” That is an interesting thought, as is this one, when Green writes that environmental advocates “better understand the cost of inaction,” but doesn’t explain what that cost might be. One could ask Why, but let’s stick to What are environmental advocates being singled out as needing to understand?

So this is where I have some criticism of Green’s piece. Perhaps due to limits to the length of the piece, Green does not get into questions of the scope of the water geography to be implicated. I think she missed an opportunity to describe some of the issues she thinks environmental advocates need to understand, which to dig in heels on and which to kick down the road. I would have carefully reflected on her thoughts in this matter.

I have no way of knowing whether it is the following issues or others to which Green refers, and she knows as well as anyone that these are not easily resolved matters:

Groundwater pumping regulation. As Green’s own excellent research and writing on the Cadiz groundwater pumping project portend, the unregulated pumping of groundwater in California is an environmental disaster in waiting.

It may be a different disaster in the Mojave than it would be in the San Joaquin Valley, but where will farmers there go, except back to the Delta, looking for more relatively cheap water for their farms and urban trading partners once the supply of cheap groundwater has been sucked dry?

Tunnel capacity upgrades. Should there be any, and if so, what assurances are there that the Sacramento River pumping facility will not be developed from 9,000 to 15,000 cubic feet per second capacity once the state arrives at the inevitable moment when the SJV and downstate urban water contractors start clamoring for more water?

What assurances are there to support the occasional statement that no additional water supply, only supply reliability, will be assured as part of the tunnel project? If environmental advocates are asked to understand that they may not get everything they want in a short time frame, shouldn’t contractors like Westlands, who threaten to pull out, be held to the same standard?

Commodified water. Water is an increasingly expensive commodity that will be traded to great profit by (I will go out on a limb and presume) increasing numbers of SJV landowners. We know that the relatively sparsely populated agricultural regions of California use 75% of developed water in the state. The other 25% of developed water serves something like 25 million people in the cities and suburbs.

So, back to scope: Are the state’s political leaders willing to discuss whether there any real policy limits to the ability of development interests in Southern California and the Bay Area (let’s not forget them, Northern Californians!) to buy increasing amounts of water from ostensibly agricultural land owners to feed their alchemical water turning to gold strategies in Antelope and Silicon Valley?

Infrastructure’s $25 to 50 billion price tag. Who will pay for the tunnels? Will it be proportional to the amount used, or to the number of users? David Zetland has some interesting things to say about this.

So does John Fleck, though John’s comments reflect a more optimistic viewpoint than David’s.

Environmental mitigation. Other than the purely intuitive sense that building a pair of 33 foot diameter tunnels under the Delta will help minimize turning smelt and salmon into grist, what assurances are there that any other environmental mitigation will occur there?

Because, as Mike Wade likes to point out, it is a public benefit, “the public” will be asked to come up with the billions of dollars needed for Delta environmental mitigation. But since this will ultimately be a question on a ballot, who’s to say that the public will say yes, and what in today’s political and economic environment gives anyone reason to think they will say yes? As Mike also likes to say, pronouncements about how much, but for some reason not about who pays, at this point in time are entirely speculation on the part of the author.

Perhaps it is a bit reptilian-brained on my part, but the economic argument of the truly scary unpredictability surrounding rising sea levels, rather than an environmental argument that is neither proven nor unlikely to ever be paid for, is much more palatable to me. Maybe it is even this future to which Green is alluding.

I am increasingly skeptical that long litigated environmental arguments can win public support once that support translates to billions of dollars. But if an environmental commitment is to be made into public policy, then it better be hammered out now, before the debate gets shifted to quenching some new thirst or thwarting new environmental and economic threats. That is, in my opinion, what advocates for the environment better understand.

Shaking the jar

2012-08-14T16:06:01Z

I had to read this a couple of times with irony meter at full sensitivity to make sure I wasn’t missing it:

Rep. Devin Nunes says that 76 percent of the water flowing into the delta is flushed out to the ocean. That must be contributing to rising ocean levels that keep environmentalists awake at night, with saltwater eventually inundating the delta and much of California.

This appears in an early paragraph of a piece written for the Modesto Bee by John Michelena. According to the Bee, “Michelena is a Patterson-area farmer who served as a visiting editor at The Bee in 2009.”

Was this ironic? Only further reading would provide the necessary clues. So I read on and found this:

Water prices have already increased 10- to 20-fold from environmental laws passed by Congress and President George H.W. Bush.

That great environmentalist, George H.W. Bush, surely among the most anti-establishment presidents ever. Can we assume that some form of anarcho-capitalist government that voided all environmental law post-hydraulic mining, a la that dreamed of by visionaries Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan (irony intended), would suit Mr Michelena just fine?

and this:

The liberals and environmentalists will never stray no matter what overtures he [Obama] makes to farmers. He may know that powerful interests against farmers getting water will prevail, with pipelines or without pipelines.

Mr Michelena is trying to help us to forget who built the Central Valley - cigar-chompin’ railroad magnates given big chunks of free land by that most powerful of interests, the federal government, to develop themselves and sell to politically beleaguered big farmers (irony intended) who gave us big agriculture - not the taxpayer subsidized pumps and dams and aqueducts that those beleaguered farmers discovered they needed, if they were to wring maximum value out of their property. Poor victimized big ag - it has no powerful interests in its corner!

Read Frank Norris’s The Octopus, please.

and finally, this:

Should the tunnels actually materialize, they must yield a fair return on investment for farmers. The fish screens and other pumping improvements were also paid for by water users, but they were somehow never good enough. I am not convinced that regulatory abuse and legal fraud will not continue with this water plan.

Yes, of course farmers should assess whether there is a fair return for their investment, but really, you want to make that claim? One can only infer from the above that water users pay for everything they receive, and no one else contributes, except to pile on all manner of regulatory and legal hardship.

I am not sure that in Mr Michelena’s world view it isn’t “regulatory abuse” when there’s talk of regulating pumping of the groundwater farms “receive.” But since the pumping continues without restraint or regard to its sustainability and is not subject to regulation in California, not yet anyway, perhaps he can withstand the assault.

So should I come to the conclusion that the first quote (about environmentalists unable to sleep because of what they have wrought) is ironic, or merely ignorant? Let’s crunch the numbers on all of that wasted Delta water’s contribution to rising sea level.

Here is the total volume of water in the ocean: 310 million cubic miles.

According to my 1995 copy of the Delta Atlas the average annual outflow from the Delta: 21,020 Thousand Acre Feet (one foot of water covering one acre).

640 acres make a square mile.

640 x 5280 = 3,379,200 acre-feet make a cubic mile of volume.

21,020 x 1000 = 21,020,000 acre-feet, or

21,020,000 / 3,379,200 = 6.22 cubic miles of water are allowed to run through the Delta to the ocean.

6.22 / 310,000,000 = a Delta contribution of .00000002% total volume of the oceans (with perhaps an extra zero). This is the amount of water that should be growing pomegranates, and not contributing to the rise in sea levels.

And keeping environmentalists awake at night.

Just to be clear, I think my irony meter is sensitive enough to detect partisan, conservative irony, so my guess is that yes, Mr Michelena was trying to be ironic, if inconsistently so. I thought about editing the piece so that it would be more consistently ironic - you know, Obama being able to trust his liberal friends, because they have unfailingly had his back while he tries to govern from the center, and all - but that would have been a lot of work.

So, remaining irony-unadjusted, the latter quotes still trouble, less that Mr Michelena believes them to be true as much as the Modesto Bee does.

Or doesn’t - and simply likes to shake the jar, Frank Hoenikker-style.

By publishing Michelena’s not-funny-or-serious-enough piece the editorial board of the Modesto Bee only enables a public debate that might be louder, but is also more historically revisionist, politically divisive, and factually baseless.

On Exactitude in Science, or “let’s think about things differently”

2012-08-02T20:01:35Z

Last week, KQED’s Forum had a program titled “Peripheral Tunnel Plan Unveiled.”

I had been wanting to ask Karla Nemeth to explain what she meant by “embracing scientific uncertainty,” and this would be my chance, since she was one of the panelists that morning.

Having heard her answer, I am not convinced that she laid out a particularly new decision-making process. To recap her basic points (elaborated below in my transcription) about what will or needs to change:

Agencies work at cross-purposes? We are with you so far…

Scientific foundation and scientific road map for how the system is tested? Well, that hasn’t been tried before, at least not if by scientific “foundations” and “road maps” you mean building a full-scale “replica” of the system. Jorge Luis Borges would be proud of the ambition.

Separate water supplies from the estuary? Did I somehow miss the science that has determined that eliminating half of the Sacramento’s flows before it makes its way wherever in the Delta will improve the health of the estuary?

But you be the judge. Here is the transcript of our part of the forum, with brief responses from two other panelists. Commentary follows.

Transcript of July 26 KQED Forum: Peripheral Tunnel Plan Unveiled
Dave Iverson (host), Barbara Barrigan-Parilla (Restore the Delta) Paul Rogers (Mercury News), Jason Peltier (Westlands Water District), Karla Nemeth (BDCP),

KQED: John is next, calling from Vancouver, British Columbia, this morning.

Bass: Good morning, thanks for having me. This question is for Karla, and I guess by extension, generally. The other day, you were quoted as saying that the [BDCP] process is going to move along based on a shift in philosophy which calls for embracing scientific uncertainty. Now, I think that’s a good idea, but I wonder, given yesterday’s announcement, whether in fact that’s going to happen, and also, what does that mean in practice? Does it mean simply kicking the can down the road, or what? Thank you.

Nemeth: Sure, yeah, that’s an important point that I think we need to put a closer lens on. One of the fundamental challenges about the Delta as an ecosystem is how do we know what actions that we put forward in particular combinations - that’s flows, that’s habitat restoration to generate food sources, that’s ways to deal with predator species, invasive species - how do we know that the combination of activities is going to produce the intended results?

And I think, we all acknowledge among the state and federal agencies that what we need to have in place, in any kind of plan, is a very strong science-based adaptive management program that can deal with these, deal with the ecosystem more holistically. Currently the way that we do that, actually - it’s fractured within different agencies - different agencies deal with different species. And sometimes they deal with them at cross purposes.

So the plan that we are putting forward, would with these 200 plus biological goals and objectives essentially provide both a scientific foundation and a scientific road map for how do we test the effectiveness of the actions that we’re taking, how do we adaptively manage, how do we take in new science and have it guide our resource management decision-making?

So one of the things that we are focused on is, particularly as it relates to operation of any new facility, is embarking on an intensive joint science program over the next decade to test out several key scientific uncertainties, that effect flows and the overall volumes of water moving through the system both for environmental purposes and for human uses.

KQED: But doesn’t that, Karla Nemeth, leave still leave somewhat in the position of we are going to build and we are going to figure out the science later?

Nemeth: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Over the course of the last several years, the National Academies, Public Policy Institute of California, many other scientific bodies have all pointed in the direction of we need to separate water supplies from the estuary and conduct a suite of measures that includes re-operating the system to deal with flows for fisheries, that includes the habitat restoration, that includes ways to address some of the ecological stressors. That is the scientific path forward.

I think the challenge is going to be, and this is where I think we very much need to - we need to think about things differently - we need all of our stakeholders to be open to the possibility of participating in an ongoing implementation process, where we have a lot more public access to science. That’s incredibly important for folks living in the Delta, it’s incredibly important for environmental groups, it’s important for water users.

KQED: Right, but this gets us right back to the question of trust, does it not Barbara Barrigan-Parilla? I mean, that you don’t really count on the fact that there will be that ongoing dialogue as science evolves.

Barrigan-Parilla (paraphrased): Several months ago, the BDCP process just about collapsed because its own assessment established that the science up to this point to support the project was that recovery of fish species very likely would not happen. This policy put forth where you’re going to build a project and take fifteen years to figure out the science and how to operate it really puts plumbing before policy.

KQED: Yeah, Paul Rogers, weigh in. We’ve heard this phrase a lot in the last twenty-four hours, plumbing before policy…

Rogers (paraphrased): Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions, there’s no question about that. How much water will be run through the project, and at what time of year? We know water agencies will build water $14B infrastructure, but then who pays the $10B to operate it and for habitat construction? No cost-benefit analysis yet done, doing so was defeated in legislature by same interests who support BDCP project. This is far from a done deal. Environmental groups will sue no matter what on the environmental documents saying that they are not accurate. Finally, farmers and water agencies might pull out if they aren’t guaranteed the level of water that they want to get from this.

————-
This exchange was near the end of the program, but I did want to give Jason Peltier a chance to represent. When asked “what’s at stake?” he said “[w]hat’s at stake is the future of our state, in alot of senses. Whether we can make a decision of this magnitude is the challenge to the people we elected and the people they’ve appointed, and whether they can get their focus on their statutory responsibilities.”

I love Peltier’s clever synthesis of rhetoric and legal threat (where are my drainage services, dammit?). He also had this to say: “The ‘plumbing before policy’ notion is a bumper sticker because we do have [the so-called “co-equal goals”] policy in California.” This, from the folks who helped bring to public discourse the edifying “congress created dustbowl” string of signs down I-5. Quintessential Westlands. NIce job, Jason.

In the end, Ms Nemeth’s (non)response basically tells me that one of two things are likely going to happen.

1/ The mountain of presumably sound science that has been accumulating during the past twenty years of CAL-FED and BDCP processes will be, Men In Black memory wipe-style, instantly forgotten. A newer, better slimmed down science, or more likely, a better way to change the subject to earthquakes, rising sea levels, and ten dollar Chilean tomatoes, will somehow miraculously appear in the next several months that is sufficiently persuasive as to allow the Governor to kick the project down the road a while longer.

2/ People will begin to figure out how, as Nemeth put it, “to think about things differently - we need all of our stakeholders to be open to the possibility of participating in an ongoing implementation process, where we have a lot more public access to science.” This will put all the linked issues and possible scenarios on the table, including

a/ regulating groundwater consumption in the SJV. This consumption, which is so painfully, obviously unsustainable, will ultimately put more pressure again on the Delta as a source of water, making this 6,000CFS in the tunnels wasted capacity, “outmoded,” with “the future of the state” again at stake unless exports are increased again.

b/ buying out very big chunks of west side agricultural land, reducing its unsustainable expense of “providing drainage services” to its toxic soils.

I hope it’s the second, because it would actually indicate a real improvement in the knowledge and awareness of the state’s water issues among the body politic. The BDCP’s managers better realize that if they can change the rules, those playing the game may demand that the dimensions of the playing field be adjusted.

The Governor’s Nixon in China opportunity

2012-07-31T20:00:37Z

Can California’s water lobby just admit that for the purposes of the BDCP, science will be politics’ handmaiden?

Just look at the reactions to Gov. Brown’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment last week. He is proclaimed to be in the construction unions’ back pocket, or perhaps of those few wealthy Westlands landowners who also vote Democrat(ic), to want to raise everyone’s taxes, too liberal, or conservative, communist or a pro-developer, anti-environmentalist Trojan Horse.

Chameleon-like (or not, depending on your perspective) in his transitional golden governing years, the Governor is a politician. He has decided that it is his defining legacy to bring California kicking and screaming into the Era of Remediative Machines. Machines that clean up the messes we’ve already made, assuming we don’t keep making the same mistakes, that is.

It is the Governor’s Nixon in China opportunity, and he isn’t going to miss it. But if he so uncritically bases his vision on the rhetoric of the worn-out Myth of Abundance, he might, tragically, make the same mistake his father’s generation made.

Since doing nothing is not an option, Brown’s decision to force this issue is generically a good thing. But it remains to be seen if he is capable of coming though this without caving to the Faustian choice he faces. People with more historical knowledge than me, including Jay Lund and Phil Isenburg have given nuanced, qualified accounts that lay out some of the historical, legal and political context surrounding Brown’s decision. They are wise people and should be read.

A more-or-less progressive but pragmatic politician, Gov. Brown understands the basic facts of power in the U.S. He has decided (once again) to try and use his political capital to guide people through the difficult edu-political transition from first-generation progressive principles to the new reality of scarcity and hard choices about who (or what) is sacrificed along the way.

Californians should be paying attention to what gets sacrificed. Getting most of the play are ecosystems and endangered fish and the Delta whose advocates are tireless and media-savvy. But these interests often marginalize very poor, often migrant populations, like those living in the Tulare Basin. These populations are victims of living within the ever-toxifying Californian agricultural factory - a factory that will only increase its toxic output if it has its way with water export policy.

And the “get shit done” way of conveying his serious intent doesn’t produce an upwelling of confidence in me that he intends on being serious. “Mission Accomplished,” “Git ‘er done,” and all of that macho junk talk debases debate and begs demagoguery.

I am reminded of what Marshall McLuhan had to say in “I’m Tough,” a chapter in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951):

The real toughness today has shifted from the personal Darwinian melodrama to the abstractions of logistics, Cybernetics and consumer research.

Think Howard Roark v. Steve Jobs.

That was written sixty years ago. Today, this formulation only more greatly defines the market-driven processes of modern politics, coalition-building, and policy framing. Reality is defined by the science of polling and data analysis echoed by media.

Which brings me to Steven Glazer, advisor to the Governor, and a lobbyist/consultant (I am not sure what he does, except what one might call “facilitate” development).

Glazer, Mayor of Orinda, California (pop. 17,932; mean household income $209,432) has had a hand in facilitating quite a few contentious land development projects in recent years.

He is listed by something called the Private Landowner Network as a statewide “service provider.”

A May 2010 NYT article wrote this about his consulting work (sub req):

Mr. Glazer has developed a niche representing real estate developers proposing controversial projects. He helped win approval of a luxury Novato housing project known as Black Point over the objections of the Sierra Club and worked to defeat a ballot challenge to a Lowe’s home improvement store in Cotati.

In 2007, Mr. Glazer represented Rob Arkley, the Eureka developer who was trying to build a project that would include a Home Depot along the Humboldt Bay waterfront. Mr. Arkley is a Republican who has since contributed $25,000 to Meg Whitman, the leading Republican candidate running to oppose Mr. Brown this fall.

Larry Glass, a Eureka councilman who tangled with Mr. Arkley, described Mr. Glazer as a “gun for hire.” But in his work for Mr. Brown, Mr. Glazer seems driven more by passion than profit. He returned to work for Mr. Brown after a quarter-century, he said, because the candidate is still a “progressive and visionary thinker” with an ear for practical politics.

The journalist makes a false distinction here - freely walks right into the trap. There is little discernible separation between Mr Glazer’s development advocacy and the principles that guide his work with Governor Brown, at least as it pertains to water.

Pretty clearly, Mr Glazer’s other job includes the facilitation of contentious development, something that, if the Governor’s vision for water succeeds, will only proliferate as the water supply to the south state is given regulatory assurance of being there when needed.

When the value of water surpasses the value of agricultural production, what is to keep a Westlands (or any other) agricultural landowner sitting on a valuable water contract, ensured because of a pair of tunnels bypassing all of the messy environmental litigation, from selling their water to the highest bidder in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara or Silicon Valley? Traditional farming values? There is no such thing in a part of the SJV conjured out of rapaciousness of property investment intersecting with a future of water scarcity.

It remains to be seen what the Governor does as the state moves toward deciding if such a questionable transfer of wealth is inevitable or taken out of the equation altogether by prudent, conservative remediative thinking.

*revised paragraph five to reflect more fully Jay Lund’s blog citation.

The BDCP and the path of least resistance II

2012-07-28T16:03:49Z

By publicly preferring the tunnel bypass option the Governor has chosen the path of least political resistance. I have argued for the past several years here and here and most recently, here that this was a likely development, and that it would be motivated by politics.

The decision is definitely bad news for the health of the Delta as an estuary, and is perhaps bad news for endangered fish, too - species whose fates, for better or worse, were propped up by the clumsy but effective teeth of the ESA, but whose fates now are tied to an assumption about what the primary cause of their endangerment is.

One cannot help but wonder whether the key environmental impact decisions will be put off until after the tunnels get built. I guess I am having a difficult time squaring the idea of “embracing scientific uncertainty” with the Governor’s assurances that the best science will be used as the foundation of any decisions regarding water supply and demand, and building canals, tunnels, more unsustainable but highly profitable Palmdale subdivisions or Silicon Valley think tanks.

The tunnel option avoids most of the nasty, expensive and time consuming land takings processes that inevitably would have been necessary if a land-based peripheral canal were developed. Such land takings processes would have been red meat to the Delta community (see what happened when surveyors tried to do some exploratory soil sampling a year or two ago) but an underground infrastructure that has little to no property right impact will eventually weaken Delta community resistance..

The tunnel (or any isolated conveyance) argument will continue to be based on an assumption - that just by eliminating the pull of the pumps endangered fish will benefit. But this argument is not a conclusion of the science, nor does it address the larger, non-specific-species questions about the health of the estuary that are undoubtedly related to the amounts of fresh water being pulled from it. But it is an argument that will appease the more distracted environmental concerns.

As a type of infrastructure, the tunnels are the equivalent of a monoculture. They would have none of the potential added benefit that the other isolated conveyance option would have - being able to inject high-quality fresh water into the river and sloughs it intersects with as it makes its way to the pumps.

It is possible to understand why the Governor would come out in favor of the tunnel option. It is definitely his best option if he wants to get shit done as quickly as possible. But apart from political expediency, it is probably the worst, most singularly titled toward big money interests south of the Delta, option, option on the table.

*apologies for the typos in earlier draft.

**starfish courtesy of Grant Bay, northwestern Vancouver Island, July 29, 2012.

Having cake, eating it too

2012-07-25T21:55:08Z

As expected, the Governor and Secretary of the Interior made a big announcement today. It was reacted to by many groups of all types - Westlands, Restore the Delta, ACWA, the Met, the Pacific Conservation League, to name a few - but what was the new news these groups were reacting to?

Yes, the Governor “wants to get shit done,” as he put it. But what does that mean in practice? What does it mean to “prefer” a specific proposal? And how does expressing that preference, given all of the caveats, kick the can down the road any great length?

Was this simply a reaffirmation of State-Federal water/environment problem-solving “we are in this together” solidarity presented as new news? Well, it’s not new(s).

He asserts that despite the decision to embrace scientific uncertainly, science will (according to the press release) still be the guiding ethos. That was the case before the uncertainty embracing started, wasn’t it?

From the press release:
The revised approach, which is grounded in science, is designed to help restore fish populations, protect water quality, and improve the reliability of water supplies for all water users who receive deliveries from state and federal projects.

That’s the “revised” approach? As far as I can tell, upholding the “co-equal goals” principle, and all of the wickedness of that formulation persist as extremely complicated political problems.

He didn’t come out swinging for a “massive pair of tunnels,” or eliminating the “no conveyance” and/or peripheral canal (or tunnels) options, or the “suck the Sacramento dry,” maxed-out 15,000 csf Delta doomsday scenario. As far as I can tell, all options remain on the table, if you take the statement at its word.

Perhaps Westlands’ Tom Birmingham said it most cooly and plausibly when he said that it is useful that at least now there is a stationary target that can be number-crunched, helping water contractors in particular determine whether continuing to invest in the BDCP process is a reasonable financial decision.

Because apart from that, what did the Governor provide to his constituents today except an expressed preference for building a 9,000 cfs intake facility on the Sacramento River that, it must be presumed absent clear specification, would feed either a canal or tunnel?

Little-known facts and worse

2012-07-24T16:02:48Z

My nominee for charter membership into the Euphemism Hall of Fame goes to Karla Nemeth, who crafted the following quote:

“We decided to embrace scientific uncertainty regarding the facility’s operation, water flows, habitat restoration and the response of fish,” said Karla Nemeth, (BDCP) program manager for the plan at the California Natural Resources Agency.

Love that quote on so many levels. It is to my way of thinking a reasonable thing to do. It’s funny and at the same time honest. It’s more than a little bit tongue in cheek. And it’s politically aggressive, bare-knuckled even.

But that it is honest is what I appreciate the most about Ms. Nemeth’s take on Gov. Brown’s impending peripheral tunnel announcement. And it’s a slippery slope, too, to a place where embracing scientific uncertainty manifests as all sorts of conflated claims of benefit that extracting 9,000 CFS of water at a single point will bring to the (Delta) environment and California economy.

“If we don’t do anything, it’s clear the delta is going to continue to collapse,’’ said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. “That’s bad for the environment and bad for the economy. If we don’t take advantage of this, I don’t know when we’ll have another chance.”

What set of measurements brought him to this conclusion? Yes, I can see that one might want to make the case that directing a more reliable, regulatory-assured quantity of water south will be good for business. That’s a pretty straightforward, perhaps certain, assumption, hard to argue with.

But don’t conflate how an immense, point-loaded, sucking of fresh water out of the north Delta will be both good for the state economy and the Delta’s environment.

Perhaps, to be consistent with the “embrace regulatory uncertainty” principle, Mr Cowin could have said:

“If we don’t do anything, it’s clear the delta is going to continue to collapse. But since we don’t have any way of being certain how to fix it, we are going to go ahead and ensure that this collapse has the least economic effect possible. Hopefully our understanding of the environmental science and engineering will catch up as we go along here.”

Finally, a plea to journalists who will be covering the flood of euphemism, conflation, elision, and outright lie as we enter this new era of debate:

Please fact-check and don’t just passively quote falsehoods.

For example, Beau Goldie shouldn’t be implicitly qualified to be an expert:

“Some of those levees are 150 years old,’’ said Beau Goldie, CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which supports the project. “If there is an earthquake we are likely to have failure of those levees, which could disrupt our water supply from six months to a couple of years.”

Just as there are no 150-year-old bridges over Guadalupe Slough, there are no 150-year-old levees in the Delta. 150-year-old Delta levees were maybe three feet high, Mr Goldie. Journalists, please don’t let water contractor misinformation talking points go unchallenged.

Mr Goldie must also know that the San Andreas and Hayward faults straddle his district, somewhat ominously if you look at a map. He also must know that much of this straddled land is built on sediment and/or liquefaction-prone fill. I wonder what the insurers make the odds for which region will be impacted first by a big earthquake - the Santa Clara Valley of the Delta? The area sitting on the two largest faults on the West Coast, or the area 30 miles from the nearest of the two?

Maybe the answer to the state’s thirst is to halt, even reverse, development in places like the Santa Clara Valley. I know - regressive, anti-California myth blasphemy, right?

Embrace scientific uncertainty - embrace the myth.

“Regulatory assurance” makes the case for through-Delta alternative!

2012-07-07T16:44:30Z

At his blog, University of the Pacific economist Jeff Michael has just asked a really good question that the pro-conveyance Crown really needs to answer.

As is his wont, Michael crunches numbers. Most recently, his crunching on cost/benefit analysis of the various canal and tunnel alternatives has shifted to crunching on how “regulatory assurance” now factors into determining costs and benefits.

You can visit his blog and scroll through his posts to learn how the economics of the Big Infrastructure scenarios only pencil out through a “we are all in this together” argument that is actually a massive subsidy of Big Ag and Big Property.

Every politician in Sacramento knows they haven’t figured out how to sell the idea of getting taxpayers to vote for a taxpayer-paid $4 billion in Delta environmental remediation costs and shouldering much of the $13 (today’s low ball guesstimate) billion canal/tunnel costs necessitating the remediation - or at least not having come up with a better argument than because that’s the cost of doing business.

Quoting Michael:
In the BDCP most, if not all, of the environmental gains that could result in regulatory assurances for the overall projects are due to the habitat investments, not the tunnels which have uncertain environmental effects. The BDCP envisions $4 billion in habitat investments paid for by federal and state taxpayers.

I have always been fascinated with how environmental laws are manipulated, how they impact property rights, reflect our better angels and flusher times, etc.. Now, I am interested in this idea of regulatory assurance as the state-of-the-art in manipulation of these laws. But watch out, it might backfire….

As I read Michael’s explanation of Dr Sunding’s argument for factoring in regulatory assurance as an economic benefit, $4 billion dollars worth of publicly paid-for environmental remediation yields $11 billion dollar benefit to water contractors.

Again, quoting Michael:
In return for the habitat investment that advances recovery of the species as a whole, the HCP provides incidental take permits and some degree of “No Surprises” assurance that there will be no further regulatory or financial burdens for the regulated entities under the ESA. In the proposed BDCP, regulated entities are paying for water supply infrastructure and the public is paying for the habitat. Why would that be more deserving of regulatory assurance, than an HCP without the tunnels where the exporters themselves are paying for a comparable investment in habitat?

This is a truly excellent point. Michael concisely frames how the regulatory assurance argument deals with the objective conundrums of environmental law. Forget scientific conclusions - we have a legal framework to deal with uncertainty, and it’s called “regulatory assurance.”

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on environmental analysis, neither canals nor tunnels can be scientifically proven to yield positive environmental impacts. And that’s how regulatory uncertainty came to be created, or so it seems.

But the real brilliance of Michael’s post is what he asks at the end. To paraphrase:

Why, if canals and tunnels cannot be scientifically proven to yield positive environmental impacts, are we contemplating spending money on anything more than really big but way less expensive through-Delta conveyance (aka Big Levees) and in-Delta habitat restoration projects?

In previous posts I have speculated on how bypassing the Delta with a canal or tunnel could improve the plight of confused migrating fish. I have even speculated that a peripheral canal (but not a tunnel) could, if properly designed, inject high quality fresh water into intersecting rivers and sloughs as it makes its way around the eastern and southeastern edges of the Delta. But this is speculation based on common sense and not on science or legal precedent.

Yes, I understand that supply certainly is the other, arguably more important, half of the equation. So, canals and tunnels because of the inevitably rising sea? That’s why all of the Delta levees need to be Big, and Delta landowners need to give up the land to build these big setback levees, not to mention the habitat integrated into them. Because of the risk of earthquakes? Somehow magically tunnels and canals are invulnerable to them?

I doubt that taxpayers are willing to invest at least $20 billion, or three times as much as in a Fortress Delta, in a tunnel/canal that is no less vulnerable to an earthquake.

Barely a doodle

2012-06-21T05:01:17Z

Thought I would take a moment to raise a couple of questions about the political implications of trying to sell a peripheral canal/tunnel in the wake of the University of the Pacific’s recently completed cost/benefit analysis.

1/ Now that there is a plausible cost-benefit analysis out there, how does the pro-conveyance crowd continue to claim that it is premature, too much of a moving target, etc., to do such an analysis? Doesn’t doing so just scream fear of numbers?

2/ Will Governor Brown be able to go back to the myth of abundance argument now that the C/B cat is out of the bag? That was his go-to argument fairly recently, but this isn’t the hopeful California of his father anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.

From the Jan 22 SacBee, David Siders wrote

Though the governor’s positions are in line with a Democratic Party that is trying to distinguish itself as “the party of bright ideas,” Hoffenblum said, “I don’t know whether the electorate’s ready for that yet.”

Brown said Californians, despite their negative feelings about government, are “loyal to their community” and have “deep feelings about our state.”

He said, “It will be up to me to draw the picture of what California could look like, and what the alternatives are.”

Mark Petracca, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, said Friday that Brown “must be extraordinarily frustrated.”

Sorry, governor, but short of coming together after an invasion by Canada and Mexico, California is no more a “community” than the United States is. Appeals to the “community” are so pre-internet, so pre the virtual communities that are founded on ethical and ideological principals, and not mere geographical proximity. So, if that’s what you mean by “painting a picture,” then it’s barely a doodle.

I know it is easy to be critical, and I actually have a great deal of sympathy and respect for most of what the Governor is trying to accomplish. He may even be a leader capable of solving the state’s water conundrum. Certainly he’s the first one to come along for a long time who might be able to. But until he sheds the mid-century modernist panacea of Big Infrastructure, the governor will remain his father’s son. Let big canals and tunnels go back to playing in the sandbox with the Tonka Trucks.

Forget California’s endless summer and the myth of abundance memes. Embrace scarcity, of doing more with less. Embrace big, complex setback levees, encrusted with all sorts of ESA-useful remediating habitat, and at least as secure from threats of floods, earthquakes and other acts of god as are the non-distributed canal or tunnel options you and those whispering in your ear are trying to sell. The UofP cost-benefit analysis should tell you that the state isn’t buying.