Water Wars have begun

We all knew that California was due to have another round of water wars. They appear every time there is a drought and disappear when we get a good rain. Nothing is resolved, only postponed. Now, as our climate changes to a warmer reality where we can no longer store so much water in the Sierra snowpack all of the water users will demand their fair share and everyone will suffer because of it.

Restore the Delta has fired a salvo across the bow of the water power structure of California with an ad-buy in the San Francisco Chronicle and Sacrament Bee that asks us all to "Stop the Delta Water Grab." I am sure that this will garner fairly strong reactions, especially as people begin to understand the implications of RTD's call for a system based on (bio)regional water self-sufficiency.

You can learn the story behind the ads from RTD's web site here.

Over the next two weeks, I will publish a series of posts that discusses the Delta based on a set of 12 interconnected recommendations published by the Delta Vision Foundation. They were commissioned by Governor Schwarzenegger to analyze California's water problems and propose a solution. The recommendations that they published were designed to be a complete package; all of the pieces need to be in place for it to be effective.

Needless to say, politicians and lobbyist are picking and choosing which ones they want and using these reports as their justification. This is typical Sacramento politics where people are only voting statistics.

Avoiding water wars.

One of the blogs that I closely follow is Climate Progress, principle author Joseph Romm. It is particularly relevant since Romm is a physicist specializing in climate and also is associated with John Podesta's Center for American Progress, a close Obama ally. While I may disagree with him on the policy implications, I trust Joe to get his facts right.

I am also a fan of good crime fiction and he caught my interest with a post headed "Murder, she wrote." That post wrote of a climate researcher / blogger named Johnnie Rook, a man who is dying and wants to be assured that the world he lives behind will be one in which his grandchildren can live. Poignantly Rook continues to provide good input on climate even as he knows his end from cancer will be relatively soon, his current treatment is only pallative.

Still, for all his story makes us care what happens, and for all the work Rook has done to warn us of what is going to happen with the climate, he steps into deep mud when he tries to be prescriptive about how to avoid the water wars and the feces wars.

Click Read more! for an analysis.


Rook does a very good job in describing the scope of the problem with particular attention to the way that it has been positioned by vested interests. The choice of the Klamath River potato / salmon war was a wise one, because it illustrates the way that unintended consequences accompany political tinkering. Choices seemed easy when the crisis could be defined as farmers / food supply against fish.

Aside from the ecological impact, such decisions also affect our food supply and individual livelihoods. Cheney stepped in to tinker with the science so that instream uses were canned in favor of diverting water to the farmers. The collateral consequences of this tinkering were 77,000 dead salmon, the federal government declared a “commercial fishery failure”, Congress provided disaster aid of $60 million to the fishermen and $15 million to farmers to not farm in order to reduce water usage.

It is obvious that wiser solutions are required, solutions that consider long range impacts on entire ecosystems and not just individual uses at a given location and a particular point in time. That is what ecology is all about.

Unfortunately, when Rook tries to define his own solutions, he makes the same mistakes, putting people outside the ecosystem instead of including us along with all other life. He ignores the manner in which bio-regions exist and proposes gigantic infrastructure spending to redistribute the fresh water that we have rather than to consider changing the distribution of water needs, of reducing usage, of not planting cotton in the desert and all of the other dumb things the people do.

We would honor Rook by taking action now to prevent as much of the coming climate change as we can, hopefully before it becomes a climate collapse. We would honor all life by learning to live with the planet we have instead of re-distributing it's resources in unsustainable ways. We have done enough of that already.

Water Crisis Impacts Power Crisis

One of the defining characteristics of a good Green, is being able to connect the dots between seeming unrelated phenomenon.

CNN Money takes a look at the connection between water shortages and power production:

Power generation takes water. Pumping water takes power. As the nation struggles to meet electricity demand - expected to surge 50% in the next 30 years - big sections of the country are suffering from drought conditions.

The article begins with an old Western saying: "Whisky is for drinkin' and water is for fightin' ."

Water Wars Continue... Politicians Hide.

We are finally beginning to see the shape of what the experts deem to be the future of water in California. The 2nd draft of A Vision for California’s Delta has been released and will be under discussion today and tomorrow in Sacramento.

Given what it is, a report put together with major input form the water agencies and not enough input form the public, it appears to me to be saying that we need to do all of the above: new dams, new underground storage, new canals, etc. It is cloaked in enough fine words that even major environmental groups are not strongly criticizing in in public... and I don't know about what they say in private.

“There’s a lot of good things in here,” said Barry Nelson, a water policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “A lot of these are issues that the agencies have been ducking for a long time.”

The Blue Ribbon Task Force will make it's recommendations by the end of November, so there is little time do much to change it, though there will be 3 rounds of public comment afterwards.

Here is a list of quick observations:

• The current firestorms in Southern California show us exactly how dependent we are on a fragile system and how interconnected all of this is. The time to view anything as other than interconnected is long past.
• Much of the rhetoric will frame this as a conflict between people and endangered species. This is a dangerous framing and far from the truth.
  
• Water agencies will never take a stand that implies any limitation to growth or demand.
  
• Neither major political party is willing to take the step of addressing the number one use of water in the State. Think "Got Milk." California agriculture is heavily invested in crops that are water intensive: cotton, alfalfa, rice. The predictions of climate change scientists are that rainfall and temperature changes will necessitate changes in agricultural practices, crop selection, etc. The time to start this is now.
  

The report does call for changes in the agricultural use in the Delta.

Specialized forms of agriculture that are particularly well suited to the Delta must be encouraged, such as subsidence-reversing crops, carbon-sequestering crops, and wildlife-friendly farming practices.

It fails, however, to recognize the need for making other basic changes, assuming that their job is only to deliver the water that agriculture needs. But then, Central Valley Water Districts help write the report.