The Abundance Choice (part 15) – Our Fight for More Water

There are plenty of ways to ration water, and California’s state legislature is pursuing all of them. Restrict agricultural water allocations until millions of acres of California’s irrigated farmland is taken out of production. Ban outdoor watering entirely in urban areas. Monitor residential indoor water use and lower it to 40 gallons per day per resident, with heavy fines to urban water agencies that cannot enforce those restrictions. But this is a lose-lose proposition, wreaking economic havoc and diminishing the quality of life for all Californians.

The initiative we came up with and attempted to qualify for the November 2022 ballot acknowledged the importance of conservation, but focused on supply. Passage of this initiative would have eliminated water scarcity in California. Looking to the next two year election cycle, the latest possible filing date for a new attempt to place an initiative on the November 2024 ballot is September 2023. A smarter approach would be to file an initiative around March 2023 in order to be gathering signatures from late spring through early fall in 2023. That would avoid competition with other political campaigns that promise to overwhelm 2024, and it would allow signature gatherers to approach voters who are likely to be enduring a second consecutive summer with the most severe restrictions on water use they have ever experienced.

The sad reality however is these plans are worthless without either access to millions of dollars in donations, or a volunteer movement with unprecedented scale and unity. But building a grassroots movement to demand more water supply infrastructure can easily be disrupted by opponents.

This was evident in the press coverage our campaign got, where we were tagged both as extreme Republicans as well as puppets of big agriculture. The smear campaigns worked, as we may have expected. In California, even moderate Republicans – which are a minority of the GOP grassroots but attract the majority of the GOP donations – will not get involved with anything that they think is associated with either the Newsom recall effort, or the so-called MAGA movement. Independent voters and Democrats, even if a cause is explicitly bipartisan, as ours was, will not associate with “extremists.” The impact of these schisms is to kill larger grassroots movements before they’re even born. You can’t unify an electorate in California, or a donor community, if over six million of your potential allies are branded as too toxic for anyone else to dare associate with.

It certainly doesn’t end there. As we have seen, the farmers were divided among themselves. And potential supporters, everywhere, would often vehemently object to one aspect of our plan, and on that basis withdraw their support even though they approved of the rest of it. The most controversial elements of our initiative were to include reservoirs and desalination as eligible projects, and to include provisions that would have streamlined environmental regulations. In each of these controversial cases, we believed they were too important to leave out. But our opponents portrayed those elements of our initiative as extreme threats to the environment. This was unfair and it was inaccurate, but as always, it was very effective. Nobody wants to destroy Mother Earth!

Not only were we tainted as right-wing extremists bent on destroying the planet, we were accused of being puppets of “Big Ag.” This was a smart divide-and-conquer tactic, because it helped cement the perception in the minds of urban voters that farmers are the problem, that farmers are taking all the water. And just as there is some merit to the environmentalist position that our current mode of middle class living is unsustainable, you can make the case that “Big Ag” has gotten more than its fair share of subsidized water. To review a vivid portrayal of the Big Ag players in the western San Joaquin Valley that is so cynical it’s entertaining, read the series “A Journey Through Oligarch Valley,” a 31 page screed written by Yasha Levine in 2013.

Oligarchs Have a Vested Interest in Water Scarcity

You can disagree with Levine without dismissing his entire argument. Where he missed the point by a mile, however, is that oligarchs – all of them, not just “big ag” – have a vested interest in less water, not more water. To the extent that some of the alleged villains in Levine’s book considered supporting our initiative, they were doing it for altruistic reasons more than for their own self interest. Our initiative, had it been approved by voters, and based on how it was written, would have likely resulted in tens of billions of dollars from the state’s general fund going to Los Angeles and other major coastal cities to pay, for example, to reuse 100 percent of urban wastewater, to restore portions of the Los Angeles River with natural habitat and spreading basins to recharge aquifers during storms, and replace the toxic pipes in Los Angeles public schools.

Steve Greenhut, in his 2020 book Winning the Water Wars, has this to say about the financialization of water and land: “The state needs to reform its regulatory barriers to water trading, so water-rights holders are better able to sell water to those who need it most. California also needs a better pricing system to allow markets to work their magic. But pricing must come against a backdrop of water abundance rather than one that leaves everyone fighting over an artificially capped supply.”

When water pricing comes “against a backdrop of water abundance,” one thing is certain. The price of water will drop. The primary beneficiaries of lower prices will not be the so-called oligarchs of Big Ag and the hedge funds that are gobbling up farmland for the water rights. In many cases lower prices for water will impede their efforts to buy out smaller farmers and it will undermine speculative investments in farm properties. The beneficiaries of lower prices will be farmers that produce vital row crops that are only economically viable when water is affordable, ensuring California continues to produce diverse agricultural products in-state. The beneficiaries of lower water prices will be urban water agencies and their ratepayers, including businesses that rely on affordable water. And the only way to accomplish this is for the state to pay for massive investments in water infrastructure, just like it did back in the middle of the last century.

To pay for more water, the price tag we’re looking at today is actually more affordable than it was back then. The 1957 California Water Plan had a total estimated construction cost of $11.8 billion. The state budget in 1957 was $1.9 billion, with capital outlay of $440 million, 23 percent of the entire budget. Through a combination of bonds and general fund allocations, back in 1957 the California state legislature resolved to spend an amount equal to six times their annual budget to build water infrastructure.

These comparisons are stunning, because they illustrate just how big these legislators back then were willing to think.  In 2022 dollars, $11.8 billion is worth $113.8 billion. For water infrastructure, that’s a huge number, dwarfing the amounts that have been suggested in even the most ambitious recent proposals. Yet it is only is equal to 40 percent of today’s $286 billion state budget. While California’s legislature is spending money today on things they couldn’t imagine back in 1957, that doesn’t mean California’s policymakers can’t commit to spending one hundred billion dollars, or more, on water infrastructure today. Sixty five years ago, as a percentage of that year’s state budget, California’s legislators committed more than twelve times as much.

A 21st Century Water Plan to Match the 20th Century Plan

Imagine what Californians could do with $118 billion dollars to spend on water infrastructure, keeping in mind this hypothetical budget is only using state funds and doesn’t account for local or regional government matching or private investments:

Every one of these budget items would qualify as an eligible project under our initiative as it was written, with the only limitation being that funding would cease when 5.0 million acre feet of water per year was being produced by new projects. The order in which the projects to increase the supply of water appear on this chart is not random. Notwithstanding the fact that getting reliable and consistent cost projections per project category is difficult because projects in the same category can often have very different costs based on very different circumstances, these projects are listed in the order of cost-effectiveness. And at the top of this list, fairly unambiguously ranked as the most cost-effective way to get more water, is to raise the height of the Shasta Dam.

To delve too far into the politics or the costs of these various projects and project categories is not the point of this report. Yes, Shasta Dam is a Federal project, but it belongs in any discussion on how to increase California’s water supply. And some of the urban wastewater recycling quotes I saw, from authoritative sources representing water agencies in Northern California, showed a projected ultimate per unit cost that exceeded current projections for the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant. That certainly doesn’t mean we eliminate wastewater recycling as an option.

The point of this report is the amount of money it would take to create permanent water abundance in California in this century is an amount that the planners back in 1957 would have considered trivial. What is 118.5 billion in today’s dollars, only forty percent of the state budget, in 1957 dollars was six times the state budget at that time. The argument that one typically hears from conservatives – government spending is wasteful – may be true but could not be less relevant in this case. And the argument often heard from liberal economists, that even wasteful government spending creates a positive ripple effect because all that wasted money gets spent over and over again in the economy, could not be more true in this case.

The Case for Government Subsidizing Construction of Water Infrastructure

The reason the government subsidizes water projects is because affordable and abundant water lowers the overall cost of living and doing business. It lowers the cost of food. It lowers the cost of housing. It lowers utility bills. This is an economic ripple effect that has no rival. Government funds spent on high speed rail create good union jobs, and the increased spending by those workers stimulates the economy. But that’s as far as it goes. High speed rail, if it’s ever built in California, will be a permanent drain on the economy. There are better, faster, cheaper solutions to transportation challenges. But affordable and abundant water is a core enabler of economic prosperity.

Conservatives ought to see the appeal in the case for subsidizing water infrastructure because without the subsidies on the front end, to build huge capital projects that smash the price equilibrium for water and make it affordable, there will be a greater need for subsidies on the back end. Billions will instead have to be spent on an enforcement bureaucracy to ration scarce water, along with the enforcement hardware – such as dual residential meters to monitor indoor vs outdoor use – and additional billions will have to be perpetually spent to subsidize low income families that cannot afford their water bills, food, and housing.

Investing in abundance at the level of basic economic essentials – water, energy, and transportation infrastructure – is the role of government. Without debating whether or not other spending priorities are an appropriate role for California’s state government, they should not have arisen at the expense of infrastructure spending. Not only has the state legislature effectively created a zero sum game, where new spending priorities supposedly preclude massive spending on infrastructure, but what infrastructure spending survives is mired in bureaucracy and litigation.

It would be a productive compromise to accept the reality of bureaucracy and litigation doubling or tripling the cost of infrastructure, if the most worthwhile projects were ultimately built. After all, that wasteful excess spending would trickle through the economy as bureaucrats and litigators spent their paychecks. Accepting this compromise seems to be the consensus among most infrastructure advocates at water agencies around the state. Let’s wait thirty years to get permits, let’s give the environmentalists everything they ask for, let’s settle for pennies on the dollar in terms of actual usable water, because that’s better than nothing.

The problem with this reasoning is it accepts the legitimacy of scarcity. It accepts the premise that a middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. It rejects the possibility that technological innovation will solve the challenge of producing abundant and affordable energy, and ignores the fact that producing another five million acre feet of water per year in California would only require a minute fraction of the additional generating power the state legislature is going to need to achieve their goal of an electric age.

Choosing abundance by investing in providing the basics of life, starting with water, is the only way California can set an example to the rest of the world. It is also the only choice that accurately reflects California’s legacy and culture. It is a choice that embraces the power of adaptation and chooses optimism over pessimism. It is also a realistic choice, because choosing abundance by adopting an all-of-the-above approach to producing water is the only path consistent with how every aspiring nation on Earth intends to serve their citizens. California’s designs, for dams and desalination plants, wastewater treatment plants and facilities for stormwater capture, can be the cleanest, best solutions in the world.

The initiative we developed, perhaps more than anything else, was an attempt to inspire Californians to think big. Across so many of California’s industries throughout its history that has been an intrinsic theme. Today California’s high tech industry is changing the world. California’s music and entertainment industries remain one of the defining cultural influencers on earth. California is a land of big mountains and big trees, a big valley, a perfect climate, and one of the most beautiful coastlines anywhere. California is a land of dreamers who made their dreams come true. California’s first water plans exemplified the best of that century’s ideas and potential and created a marvel that remains unrivaled. Using everything we’ve learned, it is time to do the same in California for this century. It is time to make the abundance choice.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 14) – Infinite Abundance

From the inaugural Stanford Digital Economy Lab gathering in April 2022, noted venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson posted the following quote to Facebook: “Our goal is to usher in an era of infinite abundance.”

“Infinite abundance.”

This phrase epitomizes the ongoing promise of California’s tech culture. Despite every political shortcoming California may suffer, its technology sector continues to set the pace for the rest of the world. “Infinite abundance,” evocative of an earlier tech mantra “better, faster, cheaper,” is not only a defining aspiration of tech entrepreneurs, it is closer to being realized every day.

So why is it that Californians can’t generate abundant electric power? Why is it that Californians can’t figure out how to deliver abundant water? And how does a future of rationed, scarce energy and water square with the dreams of infinite abundance that inspire every one of California’s high tech entrepreneurs and investors? And insofar as the political clout of California’s high tech sector gives it almost infinite influence, when will its high-tech innovators confront this paradox?

For almost every significant resource of consequence to normal working families – energy, water, transportation, housing, and food – ordinary Californians have been betrayed by their elected officials. Everything is running out. Everything costs too much. But when Californians realize that the punitive cost-of-living they’ve endured was the result of poor political choices, and not an inevitable “new normal” they will need to be presented with alternative policies.

Somewhere between the grenade throwing pundit who persuasively condemns everything that’s gone wrong, and the confirmed wonk whose turgid policy prescriptions are never read and typically stay within rigid ideological lanes, we need more people who will instead try to propose practical solutions. Straying well afield of both the complaining cynic and the lost-in-the-weeds wonk, last year I attempted to recruit a team of experts to come up with a policy solution to water scarcity in California. Despite our effort to qualify our initiative getting crushed in its cradle, I believe we succeeded.

The Water Infrastructure Funding Act, unaltered, would have created water abundance in California. Even an attenuated version of this initiative, with a few key elements removed but largely intact, would dramatically improve California’s water supply challenges. But if most of California’s financial special interests oppose water abundance, and powerful environmentalist organizations appear unwilling to support any big new water infrastructure projects, how will Californians ever escape high water prices and rationing?

More generally, if abundance in all things harms financial special interests and is opposed by environmentalists, how will any sort of abundance ever be realized? How will Californians escape a future of rationed scarcity?

This isn’t merely a question for California. As goes California, so goes America. And barring global conflict too terrible to contemplate, as goes America, so goes the world. The Lords of Scarcity will rule the world, coopting their counterparts in other nations, and a new era of feudalism will descend on humanity.

It might not be so bad. Vertical farming and cultivated meat will ensure that nobody starves. New social mores that stigmatize pregnancy as a crime against the planet, combined with a hedonistic culture that condemns traditional families, will result in a diminishing, aging global population. Androids will become caregivers and companions, frequently going into energy saving sleep mode as the apartment dwelling billions, reduced to existence in a handful of megacities, strap on their VR goggles and inhabit the thriving metaverse. Prescription drugs will pacify, palliate, and at the appropriate time, euthanize the old and infirm. Oligarchs will rule the world, machines will produce goods, algorithms will regulate information, and the vast majority of humans will have no idea what they’re missing. The planet’s ecosystems will thrive.

That’s an extreme scenario, and perhaps a cynical portrayal, although we may plausibly imagine far worse. The other extreme scenario, currently marketed by virtually every established institution in the Western World as factual and beyond debate, is that humanity must decarbonize and lower its environmental footprint or the planet will soon become uninhabitable. And based on California’s current politics of scarcity, the inescapable consequence of that premise is that a middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. One must either endure rationed scarcity – in a manner hopefully not as ghastly as imagined in the preceding paragraph – or life on earth will come to an end in a succession of cataclysmic climate catastrophes. That is the extreme narrative that we threatened with our initiative. But ideas without agency is like a head with no body, and agency requires power, and power requires money.

Maybe there’s a civic minded and contrarian billionaire who will spend $5 to $10 million to qualify an initiative to create water abundance in California, then spend another $20 to $50 million to convince voters to approve it. We tried to find one. But without at least a few powerful financial players deciding to challenge the ideology and conventional wisdom used to justify current energy and water policies and use their resources to fight for policies that instead nurture abundance, the Lords of Scarcity are going to win the war. In the meantime it is worthwhile to examine the assertion that middle class lifestyles are unsustainable. Even though it must be challenged, the argument is not unfounded.

The next chart illustrates a stark truth about middle class lifestyles as enjoyed in America. If everyone, including Americans, consumed roughly half as much energy as Americans consumed per capita in 2020, global energy production would need to increase by 87 percent. Applying that same criteria to water would require fresh water availability in the world to increase by 37 percent.

The data on energy is gathered from the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy and is updated through 2020. The data on water relies on a 2012 study “The Water Footprint of Humanity” conducted by researchers in the Netherlands and cited later that year in Scientific American.

The energy data is fairly straightforward, although BP’s latest energy mega-unit of choice, “exajoules,” has been converted to gigawatt-years in deference to the electric age which, depending on who you ask, is either dawning with enlightened splendor, or being thrust upon us with no regard to efficacy or necessity. For a more thorough discussion of units of energy, refer to the earlier installment “Fighting Scope Insensitivity,” or, put another way, “Numbers Don’t Lie.” That installment offers plenty of details, but for the current discussion, only the proportions matter.

The data on water is anything but straightforward, and not merely because the mega-units were converted from cubic kilometers to million acre feet, but because a nation’s higher than average per capita “water use” doesn’t automatically equate to water waste. A nation with high per capita water use may have a lot of irrigated farmland, and export a lot of agricultural products. The 2012 study found that 92 percent of the global water footprint was for farming.

Even taking into account some limitations in the available data, anyone fighting for abundance must nonetheless confront an inescapable fact: Every American on average uses four times as much energy as people in the rest of the world, and they use three times as much water. Furthermore, if anything, the per capita water use for Americans is understated. Nuances can alter the implications of fractional differences, but they cannot explain away multiples of three or four times. Can abundance for everyone be achieved without destroying the planet?

There are several factors that have to be taken into account to answer this question. Perhaps to begin, here are some premises to introduce as worthy of vigorous debate, since to defend each of them would go well beyond the scope of a book dealing with water policy in California. So for better or for worse, they are:

  • Reserves of fossil fuel – coal, oil, and natural gas – exist in sufficient abundance for global energy production to double within the next few decades, and last for at least another century. Indisputable data to support this claim can be found in the BP report.
  • Emerging nations of the world are not going to abandon using fossil fuel until renewable energy is demonstrably cheaper and available at the scale they need to develop their economies.
  • Renewable energy technologies have not demonstrated they have a cradle-to-grave ecological footprint that is significantly more benign than clean fossil fuel, and the raw materials currently required for their manufacture and operation may actually be more finite than fossil fuel.
  • Abundant and affordable energy is highly correlated with, if not a prerequisite for, broad individual prosperity, female literacy and emancipation, urbanization, and lower birth rates.
  • Lower birth rates and urbanization both lead to less pressure on wilderness habitats, agricultural land, and overall demands on natural resources. This is already happening in most of the world.
  • Emerging energy technologies include fusion power, advanced fission reactors that reuse fuel, factory farmed biofuel, satellite solar power stations, clean hydrogen stripped from fossil fuel or generated from electrolysis, direct synthesis of carbon-based fuel from the atmosphere, and plenty more that we cannot yet imagine.
  • Abundant energy translates directly into abundant water.

It’s important to emphasize that none of the preceding statements offered any challenge to the prevailing theories of CO2 induced climate change. But the sum of these statements amounts to a recipe – and a moral argument – for creating energy and water abundance for all the nations of the world. Adapting to climate change in California via rationing of energy, water and land, which is precisely what we are doing, will not influence the actions of the demographic heavyweights of the world, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, or any other nation that aspires to elevate their citizens to the lifestyle enjoyed by Californians.

Moreover, exporting our policies in the form of international agreements and foreign investment strategies that effectively impose rationing of energy, which is exactly what America is doing today, will perpetuate poverty in those nations. In turn this will defer the voluntary population stabilization that accompanies prosperity, replacing it either with coercive restrictions on childbearing, or Malthusian famines caused by the politics of scarcity. Needless to say, it will also drive these nations to seek resources and financing from aspiring superpower rivals to the U.S.

What California’s policies are currently accomplishing runs contrary to the finest ideals of this state, exemplified from the earliest days of the modern era but especially now, as our technology elites introduce one pathbreaking innovation after another. Scarcity of water and energy, which translates to scarcity of housing and food and good jobs, is the precise opposite of what California ought to stand for, and it is an entirely avoidable condition.

California is blessed with almost every natural resource necessary for a modern civilization to thrive. So why aren’t California’s legislators passing laws to nurture prosperity and abundance in all things, only starting with water and energy.

Why has California’s logging and milling industry been regulated nearly into oblivion? Lumber has become prohibitively expensive in a state that as recently as 1990 harvested over six billion board feet a year of timber and now only harvests one quarter as much.

Why is California importing fertilizer for its eight million acres of irrigated farmland, when plentiful existing resources can be extracted right here to produce it? Why isn’t California trying to keep all of its farmland in production during this time of global food insecurity?

Why is California phasing out natural gas when it is the cleanest fossil fuel?

Why is California banning the internal combustion engine, when alternative combustible transportation fuels including hydrogen, natural gas, factory farmed biofuel, and carbon fuel extracted from the atmosphere are all possible ways to power advanced hybrid vehicles?

Why is California making it almost impossible to build houses on open land when the state is only five percent urbanized?

Why is California shutting down Diablo Canyon’s two reactors, instead of building the plant to its original six reactor design?

All of these policies are causing harm to ordinary Californians. As previously discussed, the idea that California, much less the world, can replace and then increase its total energy production with wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power systems is ludicrous. California should be pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy with energy and water, using the cleanest and most efficient technologies we can come up with.

Replacing the destructive policies of scarcity with policies that nurture abundance would set an example to the world, and allow Californians to export leading edge products and technologies that appropriately address an insatiable, wholly justified demand – that everyone in the world achieve the standard of living that we take for granted.

That is the abundance choice.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 13) – The Lords of Scarcity

One of the farmers who supported our attempt to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act for the November 2022 ballot was John Duarte. It was a privilege to speak with Duarte, because his reputation had preceded him. Duarte is the man who had the temerity – and uncommon courage – to sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when they ordered him to stop farming one of his properties. The Corps argued that the rain puddles that formed on Duarte’s 450 acres in Tehama County were vernal pools.

The case was eventually settled in 2017, but only after the government counter-sued and a federal district court rejected Duarte’s claims. Facing the infinite resources of the federal bureaucracy, Duarte decided against filing an appeal and paid the fines. During our first conversation, and subsequently, it was Duarte who coined the phrase the Lords of Scarcity. It is a vividly accurate way to describe the many special interests, public and private, that benefit from regulations and rationing.

This economic fact remains underappreciated: When regulations are imposed on businesses and public agencies that make it almost impossible for them to build something, whatever that something produces becomes more expensive. This fact rests on the law of supply and demand, and only requires a minor intuitive leap from that foundation: When demand exceeds supply, because supplies have been restricted, whoever owns existing supplies makes more profit. These owners are the Lords of Scarcity, and California is their citadel.

One of the profound ironies of our time is how, especially in recent years, financial and corporate interests that once were pariahs to the American Left have now become their champions. There’s plenty to chew on in that statement, since social issues have been coopted now by corporate America almost to the point of parody, but let’s stick to the issues of economics and the environment. Corporations and financial special interests have long since realized that environmentalism is a means to control markets and capital.

The consequences of that realization are predictable and have been in full effect for years. Environmentalist overregulation is no longer an economic burden to large corporations, if it ever was. Rather, it is a way to create barriers to entry to emerging competitors, and a way to wipe out existing competitors that lack the scale or the financial resilience to comply with new environmental edicts. And here again, irony abounds.

Our initiative campaign was vilified as a vehicle for “wealthy landowners” and “powerful multinational corporations” to “subvert environmental protections” and “create a bottomless slush fund for the super rich.”

But what is really happening? Could it be that the biggest, wealthiest landowners do not want the price of water to go down? Why would they want that? They also do not want the price of land to go down. The more these necessities cost, the wealthier they get. Here is the exact transcript of an email I received from a wealthy landowner, in response to my request to support our initiative:

“I am not for it. I think it will not be helpful.”

You don’t have to try too hard to read what is unwritten in that statement. Affordable land and abundant water are unhelpful if your wealth is tied up in land with water rights.

As for powerful multinational corporations, here is the exact transcript of an email I received from a member of a partnership formed to financialize water markets:

“Thanks for the details, Edward. Unfortunately, I can’t support this as I think it is fundamentally the wrong strategy. More supply? Really? The exact opposite of my beliefs.…”

Precisely. There is no incentive for wealthy landowners or powerful multinational corporations to see the value of land or water go down. There is no incentive for companies that want to privatize water supply infrastructure to see the value of water go down. And yet the environmentalist community, which derives its support from millions of left-leaning voters and activists who digest left-leaning rhetoric that opposes the privatization of water, somehow became apoplectic over our initiative, which would have socialized significant costs for water infrastructure, thus lowering the market price of water for everyone.

Years of successful environmentalist opposition to more water supply infrastructure is driving a consolidation of property ownership, as smaller farmers, lacking the financial resiliency to outlast the drought, are being forced to sell their holdings. The buyers are huge agribusiness corporations or hedge funds. Often the motive for the buyers isn’t even to grow food, but merely to acquire the water rights. In a drought, water becomes more expensive — and the more water costs, the more valuable their investment.

This explains why Harvard’s $32 billion endowment is buying land for the water rights in Central California, and why Saudi investors are buying land for the water rights in the Imperial Valley. It explains why Trinitas Partners, LGS Holdings Group, Greenstone, and other out-of-state investment firms and hedge funds are buying out California’s financially stressed farmers and ranchers. Their profit model relies on water scarcity.

The Lords of Scarcity have correctly identified energy and water as essential prerequisites for almost every other product or service. In a guest editorial published in Eurasia Review on April 20 by Michael Shellenberger, a writer who is currently running for governor against Gavin Newsom, he identifies nuclear power and desalination as two game changing options that have been suppressed.

In his column, Shellenberger, who has long advocated for construction of more nuclear power plants, presents the original blueprints for Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, showing that PG&E originally planned to construct six reactors. As it is, Diablo Canyon’s two operating reactors are scheduled to be shut down by 2025, which Shellenberger alleges is 40 years premature based on their design life. With its continuous output of 1.1 gigawatts, just one reactor at Diablo Canyon produces enough energy to desalinate over two million acre feet of water per year. But there’s much more to this story. Shellenberger writes:

“Why is Newsom talking out of both sides of his mouth? Because he cares more about running for president than he does about the people of California. And he believes that running for president requires the support of pro-scarcity environmentalists like Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and their financial backers. The two groups oppose desalination and favor closing Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. They have a combined annual revenues of nearly $300 million, a significant share of which comes from the very same natural gas and renewable energy companies that stand to make billions replacing the energy from Diablo Canyon. [italics added] Naturally, many of the same financial interests back Newsom. Some pro-nuclear people think they can change Newsom’s mind by appealing to his donors, but a big part of the reason Newsom sought to kill Diablo Canyon was to deliver a scalp to his pro-scarcity donors.”

This is yet another economic agenda that favors the policies of scarcity. The more expensive energy becomes, the more investment goes into renewables. This is a good thing if you believe renewable energy is more sustainable and planet-friendly than conventional energy, but it certainly doesn’t make the case for shutting down Diablo Canyon. The reason continuous energy from nuclear power is a threat is not only because it displaces renewables, but because it also displaces natural gas power plants which, unlike nuclear power, can be rapidly brought on and offline and thus are needed to fill in when intermittent renewable power falters.

Energy scarcity in California is the result of political choices, driven by economic special interests that profit from that scarcity. The evolution of Shellenberger, who was honored in 2008 by Time as a “Hero of the Environment,” is a defining example of how the conventional wisdom could change in California. One of Shellenberger’s earliest works was the EcoModernist Manifesto, which proclaimed that prosperity and environmentalism are not in inherent conflict, and that we can achieve both. Taking this inspiring message from concept to implementation, however, is undermined by the Lords of Scarcity. Shellenberger, who recently authored a book about environmentalist alarmism with the self-explanatory title “Apocalypse Never,” came to realize that excessive environmental laws and regulations are very profitable for the few, at the expense of prosperity for the many.

Another critical resource that must be abundant and affordable in order to nurture economic prosperity is land. Here again the Lords of Scarcity have managed to use environmentalism to create prohibitive barriers to land ownership and land use. It isn’t as if there is a shortage of land in California. But the process of clearing the land for any sort of development requires so much time and money and political connections that most people don’t bother. New housing is the obvious example. What few parcels of land are approved for subdividing aren’t nearly sufficient to make up for the demand.

The many cost variables that combine to make housing unaffordable are all attributable to environmentalist policies. Water infrastructure isn’t built, which means fewer homebuilders are able to identify a source of water to supply to the homes they intend to build, which means fewer building permits are issued. California’s timber industry has been decimated – one of the unheralded true reasons for super fires – which means more expensive imported lumber has to be purchased by homebuilders. And then there is the land itself, thousands upon thousands of square miles of open land, most of it only suitable for grazing, situated along the major freeway corridors.

California is only five percent urbanized. Five percent. The significance of this bears further explanation. The state of California sprawls across 163,000 square miles, there are 25,000 square miles of grazing land and 42,000 square miles of agricultural land. Of that, 14,000 square miles are prime agricultural land. You could put 10 million new residents into homes, four per household, on quarter acre lots, with an equal amount of land set aside for roads, parks and commercial districts, and you would only consume 1,953 square miles. If you built those new cities on the best prime agricultural land California’s got, you would only use up 14 percent of it. If you scattered those homes among all of California’s farmland and grazing land – which is far more likely – you would only use up 3 percent of it.

The reason this doesn’t happen is because in every case, on every potential building site, there is an irreplaceable ecosystem that must remain pristine, and well funded environmentalist attorneys prepared to engage in endless litigation to preserve it. If California’s current land use policies were in force for the last hundred years, where would anyone live? Would anything have ever been built?

The Lords of Scarcity, using an extreme and self-serving interpretation of environmentalism as moral cover, have declared war on every essential resource necessary to deliver Californians an affordable and decent quality of life. Every building block of prosperity and every enabling economic foundation of the civilization we enjoy – water, energy, housing and food – is under attack.

The consequences of unaffordable housing only hurt ordinary families who want to own a home and build wealth. By contrast, unaffordable housing benefits the investment community which has recognized that by limiting the supply of real estate, they can invest in real estate and realize spectacular profits. So now families that aspire to own their own homes must also bid against real estate trusts, hedge funds, and major “multinational corporations” that stand to earn billions thanks to the policies of scarcity.

At this point, and once again, we must step back and reaffirm that everyone cares about the environment. The problem isn’t the value of environmentalism, which any conscientious person acknowledges. The problem is the balance between the needs of the environment and the needs of ordinary working families has been lost. And the reason it has been lost is because environmentalism is a useful political weapon for any financial special interest that benefits from scarcity.

Most people critical of environmentalist overreach will correctly point out that these policies cause disproportionate harm to low income and underserved communities. That observation has been repeated so often it has become a cliche. But it’s true and it’s tragic. The Lords of Scarcity are California’s privileged elites, unwilling to accept the lower profits that come with a more competitive marketplace, or a vision of environmentalism that embraces resource development and rejects self-serving anti-growth extremism.

The Lords of Scarcity have taken over California. They hide behind environmentalism to further their financial interests. If broad based economic prosperity is to return to California, the narrative they’ve successfully sold to voters must be challenged, and the power they wield must be broken.

This article originally appeared one the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 12) – Fighting Scope Insensitivity

Scope insensitivity happens whenever a statistic has huge emotional impact but in reality has little relevance to the issues and challenges it purports to illuminate.

It is scope insensitivity that makes conscientious Californians willing to put a bucket in their shower. They believe that by faithfully capturing some of that shower water that otherwise goes down the drain, and painstakingly reusing that water to fill their toilet tank, or water some houseplants, they’re going to help manage water scarcity in California.

This is well intentioned but ridiculous. Imagine if 40 million Californians saved a gallon of water from their daily shower every day, never missing a day, as if every Californian would ever do such a thing. That would amount to 44,836 acre feet per year, which equates to one-half of one percent of California’s average annual urban water consumption. And water going down the drain in California’s homes is already either reused, or could be with investment in upgraded wastewater treatment plants.

Examples of scope insensitivity abound. On a grander scale, consider the previously mentioned impact of the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant, which if they ever built it, would release 55 million gallons of brine into the ocean every day. That seems like a terrifying amount of brine, even though desalination brine is merely somewhat saltier seawater. But the California current sweeps an estimated 250 quadrillion gallons per day of ocean water past the west coast. The Huntington Beach desalination plant’s projected 55 million gallons of daily brine represents roughly one five-millionth of the water moved by natural current along the coast each day.

In both of these examples, two causes of scope insensitivity can be identified. The first is the unit. If you express a quantity using a smaller unit of measure, you can come up with a bigger number. So instead of saying 169 acre feet, why not say 55 million gallons? An eight digit number sounds far more impressive than a three digit number. The second cause of scope insensitivity is when there is a lack of relevant context. Putting something into an honest context is to offer a relevant denominator.

In the example of the bathtub bucket, for example, the numerator is 40 million gallons per day, and the unit is gallons. A numerator that would put this into a genuinely informative context would be acre feet per year, i.e., 44,836 acre feet per year. One can then assign a relevant denominator, which is all urban water consumption per year, i.e., 7.7 million acre feet per year. If the goal is to make an impact on urban water consumption by convincing 40 million Californians to perform this daily exercise, then Californians deserve to understand whether or not it will actually make any difference.

Instead, the type of context one typically gets is “enough water to fill 61 Olympic sized swimming pools every day, which emphasizes the message – this is a lot of water. But that comparison is just replacing one numerator, buckets in showers, with another, big swimming pools. There is no denominator. There is no context.

Combatting scope insensitivity ought to be a top priority for objective journalists, but thanks to either bias, innumeracy, or both, they rarely bother. And thanks to America’s decision to join with Liberia and Myanmar to remain the only three nations in the entire world that retain the Imperial System of weights and measures, even if you try, it’s not easy to intuitively perceive proportions and easily make meaningful comparisons between small and large, between numerator and denominator.

America’s Confusing Choice of Units to Measure Water Volume

Using the metric system, it is much easier to develop an intuitive grasp of how much impact a change in some small unit will have on a big unit. Everything is based on the decimal system. Ten millimeters equals a centimeter. Ten centimeters equals a decimeter. Ten decimeters, or 100 centimeters, equals a meter. One thousand meters equals a kilometer. For area, it is equally straightforward. A square that is one hundred meters per side is a hectare. A square that is one thousand meters per side is a square kilometer.

As for water volume, the metric system is also straightforward. A one millimeter cube is a microliter. A cubic centimeter is a milliliter. A cubic decimeter is a liter. A cubic meter is a kiloliter, and that volume of water is a metric ton. And one billion cubic meters is a cubic kilometer.

That’s about all you have to know. The rest follows logically. Learning the metric system may not be a cakewalk, but how much more numeric aptitude does one require to understand the imperial system? Without a decimal based system of measurements, how many people can possibly make intuitive comparisons between large and small units? Consider this summary of the imperial system:

Three teaspoons are a tablespoon. Two tablespoons make an ounce. Eight ounces make a cup, and sixteen ounces make a quart, which is also a pound. Four quarts make a gallon. It takes 7.48052 gallons to equal a cubic foot, and a foot is twelve inches, and inches are typically divided into eighths and sixteenths. An acre is 208.71 feet on a side, and a mile is 5,280 feet.

Are you kidding? The imperial system of weights and measures is an archaic joke, and all it does today is make it harder to overcome scope insensitivity. Back in the 1970s the United States was on the verge of adopting the metric system with the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. But conversion was voluntary, and it never took off. It would be harder now, because today’s ubiquitous and powerful computational tools make it far easier for engineers to use these byzantine measurements. But ordinary people who want to figure out what’s going on with American water infrastructure are among the losers.

Even if Americans used the metric system, it still would not be easy to put data in context. Even if weights and measures were all using the decimal system, there would still be units of time which must always be taken into account. Units of time, for example, require a year to be divided into approximately 365.25 days, a fractional inconvenience that is nonnegotiable. Perhaps hours and minutes could have been put into the decimal system, but like Esperanto, that’s probably not going to happen.

So here are some helpful flow conversions: One cubic foot per second is 724 acre feet per year. One gallon per minute is 1.6 acre feet per year. One million gallons per day is 1,121 acre feet per year. And here are some useful volume conversions: One million acre feet is 1.23 cubic kilometers. One trillion gallons is 3.1 million acre feet. And so on.

Rather than belabor these conversions, the interested reader may download this WATER CONVERSIONS SPREADSHEET. Instructions are on the spreadsheet. If you mess it up just download a fresh one. There are two tabs, one for flow conversions and one for volume conversions. Any journalist or analyst writing about water policy may find this useful, if not indispensable.

Without Abundant Energy, Water Abundance is Impossible

As we have seen, where there is water, there is energy, and no discussion of optimal water policies can ignore units of energy. Without water, there is no hydroelectric power, and without electricity, water cannot be pumped anywhere, not through treatment filters, nor over mountains and into taps. And since electric energy must be generated, i.e., converted, from some raw fuel, whether it’s photons, or mechanical, or chemical, or combustible, we can’t ignore other units of energy. For that matter, since environmentalists are concerned that most of the current forms of energy in the world are unsustainable and dangerous, we have to consider overall global energy production. Can we produce enough sustainable energy in the world to produce abundant water?

That question will generate as many answers as there are experts to ask, and an attempt will be made to address it in a later chapter. For now, let’s focus on California. Here again, we must overcome scope insensitivity. To do that, let’s establish the denominator: Total energy consumed in California. To get an idea of how complex the process is of getting from raw energy sources—fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar—to actual electrons running appliances or furnaces heating homes, Lawrence Livermore Labs and the U.S. Department of Energy have produced a flow chart that merits close study.

While there is a lot to digest in this energy flow chart, it offers valuable insight even without bombarding the observer with numbers. On the left, source fuel inputs are depicted, with the thickness of the lines (not the boxes) denoting the relative quantities of each fuel. Because electricity is not a source fuel, but has to be manufactured either using solar photons, or a fuel cell, or using a generator turned by wind, water, or fossil fuel, the box “Electricity Generation” shows up in the center left of the flow chart, in order to aggregate and redirect the quantities of source fuels that were converted into electricity. Further to the right, four boxes are used to aggregate and categorize what sectors make use of the various fuels including electricity, they are “Residential,” “Commercial,” “Industrial,” and “Transportation.”

It is immediately obvious that solar (yellow line) and wind energy (purple line) currently contribute an insignificant share of the total. Moreover, the method used by the study’s authors  to estimate the amount of solar energy contributed to the grid greatly overstates the actual amount. Their error was to take the amount of actual solar electricity generated in 2018, 27.5 gigawatt-hours which converts to 93 TBTU (trillion British thermal units), and improperly inflate it.

Instead of recognizing that photovoltaic power generation is directly transmitted to the grid without significant loss, the amount of solar power shown in the yellow box on the upper right of the flow chart declares 382 TBTUs of energy flowed into the grid. The reason for this error, based on a flawed assumption that is explained in the footnotes on the flow chart (which I confirmed with an electricity grid expert at the California Department of Energy), was to assume that solar power is subject to the same conversion inefficiencies as burning fossil fuel.

The implications of this are interesting. Out of 7,404 TBTUs (adjusted for the error, 7,115 TBTUs) of raw source fuels consumed, only 93 TBTUs came from solar electricity; that’s 1.3 percent. That means Californians are a long way off from entering the solar electric age.

And yet the fact that solar electricity loses very little power when going from photovoltaic power to the grid to an EV battery to an engine is an encouraging fact. Electric transmission losses are about 5 percent, with another 10 percent lost in a modern onboard battery’s charge/discharge cycle and the electric motor’s conversion of electrons into traction. Compare this to the average natural gas power plant, which can only achieve efficiencies of around 42 percent, or a gasoline powered automobile, which at best can achieve efficiencies of 35 percent.

The consequences of energy inefficiency—the amount of source fuel inputs that are lost to excess heat and friction—are seen on the far right of the flow chart, in the box “rejected energy,” which is twice as much as the box “energy services.” Of the estimated 7,404 TBTU of source fuel consumed by Californians in 2018, 4,907 TBTUs were wasted, and only half that much was enjoyed by Californians in the form of lighting, heating and air-conditioning, vehicular traction, and so on. By how much could Californians reduce the amount of fuel input, while keeping level or increasing their actual energy services, if they went totally electric?

Understanding Units of Energy

Anyone who has spent enough time reading the publications and reports that tout a clean energy future sees the marketing images: windmills presiding benignly over green pastures, solar panels glinting in the sunlight, row after row, set against a scenic horizon. But how many of California’s politicians, much less the marketing consultants and graphic artists who are selling this dream, have actually tried to parse gigawatt-years into quadrillion British thermal units? It’s not tough math. But it’s awfully tedious.

The first variable to understand is quadrillion BTUs. A BTU, or British thermal unit, is a measurement of energy typically used by economists. It is the amount of energy required to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. Economists refer to the total energy consumption of entire states and nations in “Quad BTUs,” which refers to 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) BTUs. California, in 2019, consumed 7.8 Quad BTUs of energy (up five percent from 2018). Another common term is TBTU, which stands for “trillion British thermal units” (1,000 TBTUs equals 1 Quad BTU).

The second variable to understand is gigawatt-years, discussed in previous chapters, which is a measurement unit used to measure large amounts of electricity. A gigawatt-year is the amount of electric energy that would be produced by a one gigawatt power plant, operating continuously for one year. Economists, energy planners, and utility executives typically prefer to report terawatt-hours, probably since most consumers understand kilowatt-hours. But gigawatt-years is a more useful measurement of electric power.

Conceptually, these units of energy measurement are all convertible. Which is to say that one Quad BTU is equivalent to 33.4 gigawatt-years, and one gigawatt-year is equivalent to 8.8 terawatt-hours. For all units of energy, from horsepower to joules, to kilowatt-hours to British thermal units, or cubic feet of natural gas to barrels of oil, there are conversion constants that allow any unit of one form of energy to be expressed using units of another form of energy. Understanding how BTUs of natural gas or gasoline convert into electricity is necessary in order to estimate how much electricity is required to eliminate natural gas or gasoline.

Another essential energy concept is conversion efficiency. If every form of energy converted into another form of energy with 100 percent efficiency, the conversion constants would be all that was ever needed. But as previously noted, natural gas converts into electricity in a modern power plant at about 42 percent efficiency. Gasoline converts into traction in modern automobiles at around a 35 percent efficiency. And solar electricity can be delivered through the grid to an EV and converted into traction at up to 85 percent efficiency.f

How Much More Electricity Would California Need to Go 100 Percent Electric?

Returning to the question of how much fuel input can be reduced while retaining the same amount of energy services, note that on the NREL flowchart, 7.4 QBTUs (quadrillion BTUs) of raw energy is input, while only 2.5 QBTUs of energy is actually utilized. This is an overall efficiency of 34 percent. If the entire energy input were electrical, at an overall efficiency of 80 percent, you would only have to come up with 3.2 QBTUs of electric power input. Since 33.4 gigawatt-years is equal to one quadrillion BTUs, it would take just over 100 gigawatt-years of electricity, i.e., on average a continuous generation of 100 gigawatts into California’s grid, for the state to go all-electric. How those 100 gigawatts would be generated, of course, is the trillion dollar question.

To bring all of this back to California’s water future, and to combat scope insensitivity, here are a few connections between water and energy in the state. The following chart shows the additional generating capacity that would be necessary for California to run 100 percent of its economy on electricity. The chart also shows how much additional electricity would be required to produce and supply 1.0 million acre feet of additional water under three scenarios – via aqueduct, via desalination, and via wastewater reuse.

The data to prepare this chart is documented in the chapters preceding this one, with the exception of the “minimum gigawatt output for California to go 100 percent electric.” As discussed, that figure, 100 gigawatts, roughly corresponds to 3.0 quadrillion BTUs, which is slightly more than the 2.5 QBTUs California used in 2018. It implies over 80 percent efficiency in transmission, storage and use of electricity, as well as zero growth in absolute energy consumption. This assumes extraordinary engineering achievements as well as aggressive energy conservation programs. It is therefore the absolute minimum amount of electricity required for California to go 100 percent electric.

Much more on what it would take to accomplish this can be found in a 2022 California Policy Center Report “Examining California’s Renewable Energy Plan.” Foes of scope insensitivity are particularly encouraged to wallow in the overwhelming facts in that report, they lead to only one logical conclusion – wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power will not be sufficient to replace existing electricity generation in California, much less nearly double it to usher in an all electric age.

How Much Electricity Would it Take for California to Have Abundant Water?

More to the point, however, are the figures on the second set of rows on the above chart, which show how much electricity it would take to produce more water in California. To transport 1.0 million acre feet via aqueduct, assuming the torrential storms that tomorrow will bring are captured above or below ground, 390 megawatts of continuous power for a year would be required – using the California Aqueduct as the example – or 3.4 terawatt hours. Treating 1.0 MAF of municipal wastewater has the most efficient energy cost at 150 megawatts of continuous power for a year, or 1.3 terawatt-hours. Energy costs for delivering treated wastewater are minimal if the upgraded treatment plant is close to the existing treatment plant, and if those are in-turn near the groundwater storage aquifers. With this favorable topography, expect an energy cost of 40 megawatts of continuous power for a year, or 0.4 terawatt-hours, to deliver 1.0 MAF from treatment plant to aquifer. With an unfavorable topography, expect the energy cost to be twice that much or more.

Which brings us to desalination, which is produced at an energy cost slightly higher than the California Aqueduct. Depending on the delivery topography, desalination can use a lot of energy, as the worst case scenario depicts. But to suggest this eliminates desalination as a viable option is a failure of imagination. If Californians desalinated one million acre feet of seawater per year, and at the same time doubled their electricity generating capacity – which the state legislature is committed to doing – that scale of desalination would only consume one-half of one percent percent of the total energy produced in the state. And those numbers rely on an unfavorable delivery scenario, as well as a magnitude of desalination development that even its wildest proponents have not suggested. Desalination, in a state where energy and water are ultimately rendered abundant and cheap through technological innovation and massive infrastructure investments, can be an essential part of a resilient water supply portfolio.

To summarize: California’s average electricity consumption is 57 gigawatts. Very best case, to convert all end user energy to electric – transportation, heating, everything – would require California’s grid to expand its capacity to deliver on average just over 100 gigawatts. Using electricity to deliver an additional million acre feet per year via the California aqueduct would consume 400 megawatts of continuous power, roughly the same as the amount necessary to desalinate one million acre feet of seawater; 400 megawatts is 0.4 percent of 100 gigawatts. Therefore to deliver five million acre feet of new water in either of these manners would only consume two percent of 100 gigawatts.

The energy cost to reuse wastewater is less than half that, i.e., about 150 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year. In the case of desalination and wastewater reuse, energy is also required to deliver the water, but because these facilities are typically located near municipal groundwater basins or municipal water systems, the required delivery energy is unlikely to ever require more than half-again as much power, i.e., no more than 75 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year; depending on the topography, potentially much less. Water pumped via aqueducts will typically develop enough pressure as it is pumped over the hills from inland sources and then piped downward into coastal cities to not require additional power for final delivery to consumers.

Anyone who has waded through this entire assault on scope insensitivity is to be commended. The fact that the top-down totals regarding the key financial and quantitative denominators of water and energy in California had to be painstakingly and inadequately compiled in this report, instead of being widely available, is a shortcoming of California’s water agencies, especially at the state level. Informed estimates for these variables – how much power it takes to produce and distribute water, and how much these projects cost – need to be at the fingertips of every elected official in the state. The figures produced here should be available from more authoritative sources, in formats that are equally if not more accessible to non-experts. Journalists can be forgiven for not successfully navigating the numerical realities that must inform energy and water policy, but they cannot be forgiven if they don’t try.

The conventional wisdom in California has been that we must conserve water, as if that is all it’s going to take. If you examine the quantitative facts, with appropriate sensitivity to scope and scale, the conventional wisdom is proven wrong and must be challenged. Conservation is an important part of the solution to water scarcity, but it cannot possibly be enough. Numbers don’t lie.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 11) – The Desalination Option

On May 12, the California Coastal Commission Board of Directors voted 11-0 to deny the application from Poseidon Water to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Since 1998, Poseidon has spent over $100 million on design and permit work for this plant. At least half of that money was spent on seemingly endless studies and redesigns as the Coastal Commission and other agencies continued to change the requirements. Poseidon’s denial makes it very unlikely another construction contractor will ever attempt to build a large scale desalination plant on the California coast.

This is a historic mistake. If you’re trying to eliminate water scarcity, desalination is an option you can’t ignore. Desalination has the unique virtue of relying on a literally inexhaustible feedstock, the world’s vast and salty oceans. At an estimated total volume of 1.1 quadrillion acre feet (1.1 billion million acre feet), there will always be enough ocean.

A balanced appraisal of desalination would acknowledge its potential while also recognizing the absurdity of suggesting it is a panacea. On one hand, desalination can be an indispensable solution to water scarcity. In Israel, for example, five massive desalination plants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea produce nearly a half-million acre feet of fresh water per year, an amount the nation plans to double by 2030. Israel’s Sorek Desalination Plant, located a few miles south of Tel Aviv, produces 185,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, from a highly automated operation that only occupies about 25 acres. Up to 80 percent of Israel’s municipal water comes from desalination. Thanks to desalination, this nation of nine million people has achieved water abundance and is exporting its surplus water to Jordan.

On the other hand, just as renewable energy only provides a small fraction of the global energy supply, desalination only constitutes a small fraction of global water supply. Altogether, not quite 20,000 desalination plants worldwide produce less than 50 million acre feet of water per year. That’s an awful lot of water, but it’s less than one percent of global water consumption. To make a dent in the estimated 7,500 million acre feet per year of worldwide water consumption, desalination capacity would have to increase by an order of magnitude, to 500 million acre feet per year. In turn, that achievement would require about 200 gigawatts of continuous power, equivalent to the full output of 100 Hoover Dams.

The Energy Cost of Desalination is Not Prohibitive

Then again, as we will see, and for a variety of reasons, the frequently heard assertion that there isn’t enough energy available to spare any more of it for desalination is not true. For starters, 200 gigawatt-years is only 5.98 quadrillion BTUs, and worldwide, total energy production in 2020 was estimated at 528 quadrillion BTUs (or 17,653 gigawatt-years, or 557 exajoules, which is currently the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy’s energy mega-unit of choice). Therefore, to desalinate 500 million acre feet of water per year would only consume 1.1 percent of current global energy production.

Taking all of this into account, it’s fair to say that desalination is clearly part of the solution to water scarcity. The potential for a perpetual input of water from desalination plants to tilt the demand and supply equilibrium from one of scarcity to one of abundance should not be underestimated. Israel’s experience is proof of that.

Here in California, the energy required to desalinate seawater is considered one of the prohibitive obstacles towards wider adoption of the technology. But when the alternative to desalinating seawater is paying the energy cost of pumping it from the Sacramento Delta through nearly 300 miles of aqueducts, then lifting it over the Tehachapi pass, the energy costs become less daunting.

The following two charts illustrate the amount of energy necessary to deliver water to Southern California’s coastal cities from three differing sources: upgraded local wastewater treatment to indirect potable standards, interbasin transfer via the California Aqueduct, and desalination. Both charts examine the energy required to deliver 1.0 million acre feet of water. The first chart shows how many units of electrical energy are required, the second chart shows how much flow of electricity a power plant would have to generate in order for each system, operating continuously, to deliver one million acre feet in one year.

The first chart clearly shows that processing wastewater for indirect potable reuse is far more energy efficient than the alternatives. These figures are based on the average, taking into account the power requirements of two treatment plants, the Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), along with the wastewater recycling plant which is proposed to be built in the City of Carson in the Los Angeles Basin. According to engineers at GWRS, the plant draws 13 megawatts to treat 103,000 acre feet per year. Information provided by Met on the Carson plant’s design estimated a 30 megawatt draw to treat 168,000 acre feet per year. Based on the average of these two figures, these plants would require 1,309 gigawatt-hours to produce one million acre feet of water.

By comparison, the figures for desalination are based on the Carlsbad plant which draws 23 megawatts to produce 55,000 acre feet of water per year – not including power to deliver the desalinated water. That equates to 3,529 gigawatt-hours to produce one million acre feet of desalinated seawater.

As described earlier, the figures for the California Aqueduct were calculated based on adding up the power consumption per unit of water lifted for each of the six pumping stations that start with the Banks pumping plant just south of the Sacramento Delta, and terminate with the Edmonston pumping plant at the base of the Tehachapi Mountains. This titanic transfer of water has an energy cost of 3,448 gigawatt-hours per million acre feet of water delivered, only slightly better than desalination.

Because every urban setting will have unique requirements for a reuse or desalination project, based on the scale, and the location and elevation of the existing wastewater treatment plant and delivery destinations, it is impossible to generalize with respect to the delivery energy required. But the estimated energy necessary to pump water from the proposed Carson wastewater treatment plant in Los Angeles through up to 60 miles of pipelines to recharge several remote aquifers probably represents the higher amount any project is likely to need. As can be seen in the final row of data below, it is significant. Based on the best estimates made available, the energy necessary to distribute a unit of water from the Carson treatment plant to its destination adds 60 percent to the total energy requirement. This is nonetheless far more efficient than the energy needed to deliver water to Los Angeles via the California Aqueduct.

Making Units of Energy Intelligible

Because units of energy and water are often communicated to the public merely to serve as nuggets of credibility, with no attempt to put them in context or even explain them, four columns appear in the above chart. Each of these units is expressing the same amount of energy. One thousand megawatt-hours (column one) is equal to one gigawatt-hour (column two), and one thousand gigawatt-hours is equal to one terawatt-hour (column three). The fourth column also depicts the same amount of energy as reported in the first three columns, but expresses it in gigawatt-years. As discussed in previous installments, using gigawatt-years (or megawatt-years) is a good way of intuitively and immediately being able to estimate the yield of a renewable energy installation, or the up-time of a power plant, or the through-put of a hydroelectric dam, and so on.

By comparing the megawatt or gigawatt “nameplate capacity” of any project that generates or consumes electricity to that same project’s actual gigawatt-year output or consumption per year, you know the efficiency of that project without having to get out a calculator. As it is, column four – gigawatt-years – is simply the number of gigawatt-hours (column two) divided by the number of hours in a year (365.25 x 24).

In this case, gigawatt-years offers an additional intuitive benefit. It makes it easy to immediately get an idea of how much of California’s total power generation would be absorbed by one of these projects delivering 1.0 million acre feet per year. For example, in 2018, California consumed 57 gigawatt-year units of electricity, which means that on average, the energy flow through California’s energy grid was 57 gigawatts to consumers throughout the state. Therefore, desalinating 1.0 million acre feet of seawater, as can be seen, would consume not quite one percent of the total electricity currently being generated in California (.403 / 57). On the other hand, most of that electricity would be offset, because the California Aqueduct would not be required to pump that 1.0 million acre feet over the mountains if that water was being desalinated locally. Then again, unlike water from the California Aqueduct that flows downhill from the top of the Tehachapi pass and gathers sufficient pressure to gravity feed every distribution extremity in its entire network, desalinated water, like treated wastewater, has to be pumped to its destination, requiring additional energy.

The next chart, below, shows what size power plant would be required to produce 1.0 million acre feet per year based on each method. This chart, which reports flows of energy, assumes continuous operation for one year to deliver the 1.0 million acre feet. A power plant twice as big could deliver 1.0 million acre feet in six months, or 2.0 million acre feet in one year, and so on.

It should be emphasized that if the reader is not familiar with the distinction between units of electrical energy and flow of electrical energy, they are urged to spend some time with this. Given the simplicity of these concepts, engineers may laugh at such unwarranted pedantry. But surprisingly few journalists, politicians, political staffers, or zealous activists are sufficiently versed in these basics, much less conversant enough in them to be familiar not only with the nature of the variables, but their actual values with respect to critical infrastructure. How can anyone evaluate policy options, or even opine with any credibility, without at least trying to see the numerate big picture? For that matter, if it comes as a surprise that desalination only consumes slightly more energy than moving an equivalent amount of water through the California aqueduct, get ready for more surprises. Advances in desalination technology are moving fast.

Addressing Other Concerns About Desalination

Ultimately, the energy cost for desalination means it cannot easily compete with wastewater reuse which requires only about half as much energy per unit of output. But the inexhaustible feedstock, the imperative to have diverse sources of water in the event of supply disruption, and fact that at some point breakthrough technologies will dramatically lower the cost of energy, all make desalination an option that ought to be part of California’s portfolio of water supply projects.

While the energy cost is one major objection to desalination, there is also concern over how the intake pipes and brine disposal pipes affect aquatic life. The debate over the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant, which would have been a twin to the recently constructed Carlsbad desalination plant, has generated a lot of information to address these environmental concerns. In March, 2021, I interviewed Scott Maloni, a vice president at Poseidon Water, the company that was attempting to build the Huntington Beach Plant. Here are excerpts:

1 – Isn’t desalinated water is contaminated with boron, which is a by-product of the desalination process?

Ocean water has higher concentrations of boron but it is removed by the reverse osmosis process. Boron isn’t a public health and safety concern, but high concentrations of boron can affect the vitality of certain crops and ornamental flowers. Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) raised a concern 6 years ago that higher boron levels in desalinated water could affect their ability to operate recycling plants because the byproduct of their plants might exceed regulatory requirements. The Huntington Beach project’s reverse osmosis system is designed to get the boron down to 0.75-1.0 mg/l, which fully addresses IRWD’s concerns.

2 – The Orange County Water District has said they will just store the desalinated water in their aquifers. Won’t that contaminate them?

Desalinated water will not contaminate the groundwater basin. The Orange County Water District (OCWD) puts 100 million gallons of treated wastewater into the groundwater basin every day using the same treatment process that the Huntington Beach desalination plant will use, reverse osmosis. OCWD has not made a decision whether to deliver the desalinated water to cities and water agencies directly through the potable water pipeline system or to inject some or all of the desalinated water into the groundwater basin. The groundwater basin is simply a means of distribution. Putting desalinated water into the groundwater basis allows cities throughout Orange County to pump more groundwater and rely less on imported water.

3 – Won’t marine life will be harmed both by dead zones at the point of brine disposal and destruction of larvae and plankton from the open intake pipes?

The facility is required by state regulations to incorporate the best available and feasible seawater intake and discharge technologies to minimize the intake and mortality of all forms of marine life. The plant will have 1-MM wedgewire screens on the intake with a through screen velocity of less than 0.5 feet per second and a brine diffuser on the outfall. The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board permit published last month [February 2021] and scheduled for approval in April [2021] finds that the project with these technologies complies with all state marine life protection regulations. There will be no “dead zone” from the discharge. Salinity from the discharge will be 35.5 ppt [parts per thousand], 2 ppt above ambient salinity, at an average radius of 79 feet from the point of discharge. Finally, despite the fact that numerous state agencies have found the unavoidable entrainment of microscopic fish larvae to be insignificant, Poseidon must still mitigate for these impacts as a condition of the Regional Board permit. Poseidon will preserve, restore and create 112 acres of coastal habitat to offset these larval fish impacts including 4 projects in the Bolsa Chica wetlands and a 5th project in the form of a 41-acre artificial reef off the coast of Palos Verdes.

What ought to be obvious from Maloni’s answers is that there is no place on earth that will be more attentive to environmental concerns than California. For that reason alone, California should build more desalination plants, and build them right, in order to set an example to the world.

Something that Maloni didn’t mention was the potential of the California current to disburse brine, the saltier water that remains after fresh water is pushed through the filtration membranes. Not only is desalination brine released under pressure so it will more quickly disburse, but the California current ensures it will never concentrate in one area but will always be swept away. The California current sweeps a mind boggling 250 quadrillion gallons per day of ocean water past the west coast. The Huntington Beach desalination plant is designed to produce 50 million gallons per day of fresh water. The corresponding quantity of daily brine, around 55 million gallons, represents roughly one five-millionth of the water moved by natural current along the coast each day.

To better understand the significance of this fact, consider the studies done on the impact of brine on the Mediterranean Sea, where the equivalent of ten Huntington Beach desalination plants now operate. Compared to the California coast, there is almost no current in the Eastern Mediterranean. And yet these marine environments are not seriously compromised, and adjustments are being made continuously to ensure it stays that way. In fact, most studies concluded that there was more disruption to the marine environment from the movement of water caused by release of the brine under pressure, than by the chemistry of the brine itself. Those studies can be referenced here, here, and here.

It would be a mistake to overemphasize desalination technology. The fact that our initiative campaign included desalination among the categories of projects eligible for funding allowed our opponents to focus, disproportionately, on that specific provision. They used that to mobilize activists that have been fighting desalination for years, and to repeat all of their one-sided arguments against desalination, most of which are addressed here. But it was not a mistake to include desalination among the eligible projects in our initiative. If Californians are serious about solving the water crisis, and achieving a diversity of water sources as a hedge against disaster, they must include desalination. It might never contribute more than a small fraction of California’s total water supply, but it will be a perennial source of water, serving the arid and densely packed coastal cities in Southern California where water is imported from other regions at great cost.

In the meantime, with or without California’s involvement in desalination, the nations of the world are adopting this technology. As the Coastal Commission prevents construction of new desalination plants in California, the state loses yet an0ther way it might overcome water scarcity. But perhaps worse, California loses the opportunity to set an example of best practices to the world.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 10) – Time to Stop Wasting Wastewater

If there is any source of water that ought to be optimized, it is the wastewater produced by California’s urban centers. Perennially issuing from sewage treatment plants throughout the state, every year this torrent of mostly treated effluent is equivalent in volume to the San Joaquin river in a wet year.

The California Department of Water Resources estimates statewide urban water consumption at approximately seven million acre feet per year. Just over three million of that total is estimated to be so-called “interior” water use, which means this water is flushed or drained through sewer systems into a wastewater treatment plant. In most cases, after being treated, this water is discharged into California’s rivers or emptied directly into the Pacific Ocean.

But there is an opportunity to do much more. Insufficiently treated wastewater being discharged into the Sacramento Delta and its tributaries have resulted in a buildup of excess nitrogen and other pollutants, harming these ecosystems. This same problem is playing out along the Southern California coast, where millions of acre feet of imported water is used once, insufficiently treated, and dumped into the Pacific.

In all of these cases, this water could be put to beneficial use. If California’s inland cities were to treat their wastewater to higher standards, even if it were still just released into the San Francisco Bay, or the Sacramento / San Joaquin Delta or its tributaries, it would increase California’s water supply, because it would reduce the need to maintain higher natural flows merely to dilute and to flush nitrogen and other pollutants out of the Delta and the San Francisco Bay. Hence more water could be withdrawn for immediate use or stored for subsequent use including fulfilling other environmental purposes.

For example, north of the Delta, the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District’s recently completed wastewater treatment upgrades now remove 99 percent of ammonia (a source of nitrogen) from wastewater. This means that 150 million gallons per day – or 168,000 acre feet per year – is now released into the Sacramento River while causing almost no harm to the downstream ecosystems. The district now intends to upgrade the system to inject some of this water directly into aquifers to serve agricultural clients. This level of treatment should be adopted by every one of California’s inland urban water districts.

California’s coastal cities that import water from the State Water Project face a different challenge. There is no downstream use for their wastewater. Their opportunity is to treat this water, ideally, up to potable reuse standards, and therefore use their wastewater over and over again. The benefit of wastewater reuse is especially evident in Southern California, because of the tremendous energy expenditure required to pump water from distant sources over the mountains into the south coast cities, and also because of the sheer scale of these water transfers.

The megapolis on California’s southern coast stretches from Ventura County on the northern end, through Los Angeles County, Orange County, down to San Diego County on the border with Mexico. It also includes the western portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Altogether these six counties have a population of 20.5 million residents. According to the California Department of Water Resources, urban users in these counties consume 3.7 million acre feet of water per year, while agricultural users consume an additional 700,000 acre feet.

Most of this water is imported. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in these Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct. All of these deliveries are being cut back this year due to the ongoing drought, and the future reliability of water deliveries in these historic quantities is very uncertain.

 

Energy to Treat vs. Energy to Transport

The energy to treat and deliver wastewater on-site in Southern California is offset by the energy no longer required to transport that same amount of water through, for example, the California Aqueduct. Calculating how much energy the pumps consume along the California aqueduct is therefore a useful benchmark against which to compare the energy efficiency of wastewater reuse.

Water pumped from the Sacramento Delta to the Los Angeles Basin through the California Aqueduct requires 3.45 megawatt-hours per acre foot. That’s not a trivial amount of energy, because it’s not a trivial achievement to move millions of acre feet of water several hundred miles, periodically lifting all of that water via six power hungry pumping stations a combined total of 3,251 feet. The following chart, using data from the California Department of Water and Power, presents the numbers underlying this epic accomplishment. The centerpiece of the project is the Edmonston Pumping Plant, which gives the water its final gargantuan push of nearly 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi Pass into Los Angeles. When running at capacity, the Edmonston Pumping Plant draws 776 megawatts, with each of its 14 massive pumps generating power equivalent to eight modern locomotives.

According to this data, if the last link in the chain, the Edmonston Pumping Plant, operated at maximum capacity for an entire year, it could deliver 3.2 million acre feet of water over the mountains into Los Angeles. Taking into account the power requirements of all six pumping stations, delivering 1.0 million acre feet would require a continuous 393 megawatt current for a year. Keeping in mind that the head pressure the water develops on the other side of the Tehachapi Pass within the pipes that descend into the Los Angeles Basin eliminates any need for subsequent pumping, this amount – 3,448 gigawatt-hours per million acre feet, or 0.393 gigawatt-years – is the primary variable to consider when comparing the energy required for Los Angeles to get water from the California Aqueduct versus other water supply project options.

Recycling Water in Southern California

A lot of wastewater is already recycled in Southern California. In 2020, water agencies from Ventura to San Diego counties recycled 455,000 acre feet per year of wastewater, an amount that has nearly tripled since 2000. Orange County Water District, serving 2.5 million residents, now treats 100 percent of its wastewater for “indirect potable reuse.” This means that after treatment, the wastewater is injected into local aquifers, to then be pumped up and reused as potable water.

Orange County’s “Groundwater Replenishment System” is the world’s largest water purification system for indirect potable reuse. As noted on their website, “The system takes highly treated wastewater that would have previously been discharged into the Pacific Ocean and purifies it using a three-step advanced treatment process consisting of microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light with hydrogen peroxide. The process produces high-quality water that meets or exceeds all state and federal drinking water standards.”

Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System Final Expansion (GWRSFE) project, which will be completed later this year, will increase treatment capacity from 103,000 acre feet to 134,000 acre feet per year. The treated water is pumped into local aquifers.

Orange County’s comprehensive wastewater reuse capacity was facilitated by two favorable factors. First, they were able to situate the treatment plant right next to the Orange County Sanitation District’s primary treatment plant, and second, because only a few miles from the treatment plant, there are capacious, uncontaminated aquifers that Orange County has already been using to store their drinking water. This makes the total project cost for the 134,000 acre foot annual yield from their treatment plant under $1.5 billion even when including cost for conveyances and funds from the Sanitation District, i.e., around $11,200 per acre foot.

This suggests ratepayers can finance much of the cost for recycled water, because according to sources at OCWD, the fully loaded unit cost, including operating expenses and amortization of the capital cost, is $704 per acre foot. To help put this in perspective, the Los Angeles based Metropolitan Water Authority (often referred to as “Met”), a massive cooperative of 14 cities, 11 municipal water districts, and one county water authority, that provides water to 19 million people in a 5,200-square-mile (13,000 km2) service area, in January 2022 was charging its clients $1,143 per acre foot of treated water. During the last drought between 2012-2016, “some farmers paid up to $2,200 per acre foot to water high value crops.”

Taking into account these economics, Met is also preparing to make massive investments in wastewater recycling. With construction planned to begin in 2024, Met intends to invest $3.4 billion to build a wastewater recycling plant in the City of Carson, about 16 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. The plant is designed to have a projected capacity of 168,000 acre feet per year, and its output will also be treated to indirect potable reuse standards. The treated water will be delivered through an extensive network of new pipelines to injection wells in four groundwater storage basins spread across Los Angeles County and into Orange County. Taking into account the cost to build the plant and the pipelines, plus annual operating costs of $129 million, Met estimates the water will cost $1,830 per acre foot.

Energy Required to Treat and Deliver Urban Wastewater

The power requirements to reuse wastewater vary significantly. Much this difference arises because every treatment site has different requirements for accessing the wastewater feedstock and delivering the treated water. In Orange County, the plant that treats the water to indirect potable standards is close to the original wastewater treatment plant, so accessing that water requires minimal pipes and pumping. Also working in their favor are the groundwater basins which are also close to the pumping plant. In Los Angeles, by contrast, where up to 60 miles of pipes are planned to deliver water from the Carson treatment plant to five aquifers spread all over the county and even into one in Orange County, far more power is required. According to engineers working at GWRS, Orange County’s water reuse system requires 0.35 megawatt-hours to deliver one acre foot of treated water to storage aquifers. According to engineers at Met, the system proposed for Los Angeles will require 0.94 megawatt-hours to deliver one acre foot of treated water to storage aquifers.

The projected MWH requirement for treatment at the proposed Carson facility, 1.56 megawatt-hours per acre foot, is 50 percent greater than what is required, 1.05 megawatt-hours per acre foot, for treatment in Orange County. It is not clear why Met’s projected power requirement for treatment is so much higher than in Orange County, but these numbers were carefully sourced from engineers familiar with both projects. Informed suggestions to explain the difference are that Orange county may have better source control to pretreat wastewater, Los Angeles has a higher percentage of industrial wastewater which requires more treatment, and that Los Angeles may be intending to treat their wastewater to a higher standard in anticipation of using the Carson plant for direct potable reuse (DPR). This last possibility is intriguing, because next year the state will finalize DPR standards. If the Carson plant were constructed to DPR standards, they would be able to deliver reused wastewater directly to the taps of residential consumers, avoiding the energy costs to transport the water to aquifers and then pump that water back out again for final distribution.

Because of the many variables involved, a serious examination of the energy required for wastewater reuse throughout California goes beyond the scope of this report, but it is nonetheless reasonable to assume that the amount of electric power per acre foot required to treat wastewater in Orange County to IPR standards is on the low end of the range, and the estimate for treatment in the proposed Los Angeles plant is on the high end of the range. And by establishing this range of power requirements, we can still make some useful observations.

The Cost to Build Statewide Urban Wastewater Recycling Plants

A recent and highly publicized study by the Pacific Institute claims that in California the “reuse potential of municipal wastewater is 1.8 million to 2.1 million acre feet” per year. Based on the costs incurred in Orange County and the projected costs in Los Angeles county, a credible estimate of the capital cost per acre foot of water recycling capacity would be $15,000 per acre foot. This suggests that building the new treatment plants to recycle 2.0 million acre feet of urban wastewater could cost up to $30 billion.

Under these assumptions, the capital cost amortized over 20 years at an interest rate of 5 percent yields an annual payment of $1,204 per acre foot of output. While the feedstock – wastewater – is free, along with paying down the construction cost, the price of recycled wastewater also has to take into account energy and other operating costs.

Again, these estimates definitely reveal the need for money from the state general fund to subsidize a major portion of the capital cost for water recycling plants. This takes the burden off of the local ratepayers while improving the overall resiliency of California’s water supply.

One big change coming very soon is the transition from indirect potable reuse to direct potable reuse. California’s Dept. of Water Resources is tasked by the state legislature to come up with final regulations to govern direct potable reuse (DPR) by 2023. Because DPR involves pumping recycled wastewater directly into a public water system, the standards and safeguards are necessarily more stringent than those for indirect potable reuse, where the presence of an aquifer serves as buffer that offers some response time in the event of a “process failure.” Nonetheless, DPR has already been implemented in Texas, standards have already been approved in Arizona, and other states including Colorado and Florida have joined California to begin developing standards.

California’s imminent approval of direct potable reuse standards for wastewater will open up possibilities in counties where the topography, a dense built-out urban environment, the location of existing water infrastructure, the location and viability of storage aquifers or surface reservoirs, do not favor a cost effective indirect potable reuse solution.

One of the virtues of urban wastewater recycling is that there is less opposition to these projects. Because wastewater recycling can only reuse interior water, and because only between 75 and 85 percent of wastewater can be reused, it is only part of the solution to urban water supply challenges in California. But reusing up to two million acre feet per year would be a terrific accomplishment, and even in Los Angeles where the reused water will be pumped through many miles of pipes, the energy used to deliver that water is less than the energy necessary to transport the water into Los Angeles via the California Aqueduct.

Even if political paralysis may prevent implementation of other solutions to water scarcity, California’s state legislature should massively fund the efforts of water agencies throughout the state to reuse 100 percent of their wastewater.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 9) – Reservoirs Are Part of the Solution

In May 1957, Harvey Banks, then director of the California Department of Water Resources, submitted “The California Water Plan” to the governor and state legislature. On page 14 of part one of this comprehensive document, Table 3 depicts what Banks and his team determined to be the “Estimated Present and Probable Ultimate Mean Seasonal Water Requirements.” The scale of their ultimate expectations reveals the magnitude of the challenge they had accepted.

At the time, the estimated statewide water requirements were 19.0 million acre-feet (MAF) per year for agriculture, which they estimated would ultimately peak at more than double that amount, 41.1 MAF/year. The total urban and miscellaneous use per year at the time was 2.0 MAF/year, which they estimated would eventually quintuple to 10.0 MAF/year. In all, California’s mid-century water planners intended to build infrastructure capable of delivering to farms and cities 51.1 million acre-feet per year.

This is a fascinating statistic, because this ultimate goal, set 65 years ago, easily fulfills the goal anyone might set who wishes to realize water abundance in California today. As we have seen, the average total water use in California in recent years for farms and cities was 41.6 million acre feet per year, well short of the 51.1 MAF goal set by Harvey Banks and his team back in 1957.

An examination of what they intended to build in order to accomplish this objective back then, compared to how it could be possible today, can uncover encouraging insights. To view this grand conception, refer to Table 30 on page 212 (ref. part two) of the original Water Plan, “Summary of Features, Accomplishments, and Costs of Physical Works Under the California Water Plan.” Or, for a summary of this summary, refer to the following table.

The 1957 Water Plan called for construction of 376 new reservoirs to be in addition to those already built. These new reservoirs were planned to add 76.9 million acre feet of new storage capacity with an average annual yield of 24.0 million acre feet. The other primary element of the 1957 Water Plan was to rely on interbasin transfers via an astonishing array of new conduits. These included 4,987 miles of canals, 680 miles of pipe, and 598 miles of tunnels.

The Energy and Water Nexus

The attentive reader will note that gigawatt-years is referenced on the summary chart above, instead of “millions of kilowatt-hours,” which appears on the source document. This unit of energy, gigawatt-years, is an underutilized but very useful point of reference. Its utility comes into focus when anyone attempts to determine the yield of an energy project. It makes it very easy to compare capacity in gigawatts (or megawatts), which is a common term used to report how much energy flow can be produced or consumed by a project when running at maximum output, to how much of that capacity is actually used (or produced) by a project over a period of time.

In the above examples, it can be seen that the new hydroelectric dams included in the 1957 Water Plan could have collectively generated an electricity flow of 7.9 gigawatts if all of the reservoirs had sufficient water to spin all the turbines, all the time, in all of the power houses. But given the amount of projected rainfall and timing of releases from these dams, the planners expected them to annually produce only 3.9 gigawatt-years of energy.

By normalizing these two measurements – flow of energy, and units of energy – to gigawatts, it is easy to see that the planners expected a yield of 49 percent (3.9/7.9). In their report, the planners projected a yield of 33,767 million kilowatt-hours, rendering it impossible for anyone viewing that table to intuitively assess the yield of these planned projects. One gigawatt-year is 8,766 million kilowatt-hours. Do that in your head.

If the goal of public policy discussions is to come up with rational public policies, the choice of units matters. For example, when viewing “nameplate capacity” on solar or wind installations, the amounts are typically reported in megawatts, and the yields are then reported in megawatt-hours. Without a calculator, this offers no insight into the yield of these devices. But when a solar or wind farm is installed with a reported output capacity of, for example, 500 megawatts, and the projected annual energy production is reported at 100 megawatt-years, one knows immediately that the yield is 20 percent (100/500). One megawatt-year is 8,766 megawatt-hours (365.25 x 24). More on this later.

In specific reference to California’s water infrastructure, normalizing these variables also makes it easy to compare the estimated annual energy yield from the planned hydroelectric dams (3.9 gigawatt-years), and the estimated annual energy consumption of the planned pumps (5.6 gigawatt-years), to the total electrical generation in California. In 2018, according to data compiled by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California generated 1,700 trillion BTUs of electric power, which equates to 57 gigawatt-years (1,000 trillion BTUs equals 33.4 gigawatt-years). This is interesting.

Had the 1957 Water Plan been fully implemented, today those new pumps would be consuming an amount equal to 10 percent of California’s entire electricity consumption today (5.6/57), offset by planned hydroelectric generating capacity that may have given back an amount equal to 8 percent of California’s current electricity consumption (3.9/57).

If the reader will forgive a digression into the nexus between water reservoirs and renewable energy, by normalizing these units, it’s easy to imagine the electricity storage potential of these planned hydroelectric plants if they’d all been not only constructed, but constructed with reversible turbines, making them able to pump water uphill from forebays into the reservoir during hours when peak solar power is hitting the grid.

In one hour, 7.9 gigawatts (their planned capacity) of reversible hydroelectric dam turbines could store – at a pumping efficiency of 80 percent – 6.3 gigawatt-hours of surplus solar power, to be released back down through the turbines now switched back into generating mode during those peak hours when our electric utility PR departments nowadays instruct us to “power down.” There’s nothing fanciful about these speculations. San Luis Reservoir, which has reversible turbines, is already a big battery. So are most of the reservoirs in Norway.

The Cost Then, The Cost Now

An unforgettable detail of the 1957 Water Plan is their projected cost for all of this, $11.8 billion. For all of it. In 2022 dollars, $11.8 billion is worth $113.8 billion. This too, is encouraging. When the Office of Legislative Analyst estimated how much it would cost for our initiative to fund capital projects that would result in supplying an additional five million acre feet of water per year, they wrote the following: “We estimate the cost of implementing new projects to develop 5 million acre-feet of new, reliable, statewide annual water supply will be several tens of billions of dollars, potentially totaling more than $100 billion.”

Californians were prepared to spend that much back then. For this century, we should be willing to do the same. With everything we’ve learned, we can do it in a manner that is far more sustainable in all ways – financially and environmentally.

When reviewing this 1957 plan, what ought to motivate us is that what we already have built today and can envision for the future is a system that can achieve these original goals in large part through innovations that didn’t exist back then.

We can construct off-stream reservoirs like the proposed Sites project. We can limit new in-stream construction to expansion of existing dams such as Lake Shasta, or construction of new in-stream dams upstream from existing dams such as in the case of the proposed Temperance Flat project.

Better yet, we can capture runoff into spreading basins where it will percolate into underground aquifers for storage and recovery, we can recycle urban wastewater, and we can desalinate brackish water and seawater.

By developing these new types of projects, we don’t have to adhere to the original scope of the 1957 Water Plan. As indicated by the map taken from page 149 of part two of the 1957 Water Plan, it was an ambitious plan, and much of it was implemented. The California Aqueduct and its network of reservoirs and secondary conveyances is the most notable among the proposed projects which were built. But as the map from that era shows, significant portions of the plan were never finished. For example, diversions south from the Klamath and Eel rivers were not fully implemented, and the Auburn Dam on the north fork of the American River was never built.

It is the water that might have been available from these planned diversions, never realized, that can instead be fulfilled via urban wastewater reuse, runoff capture into off-stream reservoirs and aquifers, and desalination.

Reservoirs In-Stream and Off-Stream

Which brings us to the most controversial of the eligible project categories we defined in the initiative, surface storage. We must immediately differentiate between in-stream reservoirs and off-stream reservoirs. They have distinct attributes. In-stream reservoirs in general are considered far more disruptive. To note just a few of the most obvious problems with in-stream reservoirs, the dam constitutes an immovable blockade of a naturally flowing river, the canyons behind the dam are inundated, and fish swimming upstream cannot reach their spawning grounds.

There are nonetheless arguments for some in-stream dams, particularly if they’ve already been built. The Shasta Dam is the prime example, because of its unique depth. With a maximum depth that is over 500 feet, the snowmelt that fills Lake Shasta stays cool and can be released year-round in order to manage the water temperature in the Sacramento River. By carefully timing these releases, Salmon eggs which require colder upstream temperatures can survive, while at different times of year, young Sturgeon can benefit from the warmer water they require to survive in the lower river.

If the Shasta Dam were increased in height by just 18.5 feet, at an estimated cost of $1.4 billion, it would add over 600,000 acre feet to its already impressive 4.5 million acre foot storage capacity. This construction price, $2,000 per acre foot of storage, is extremely low compared to most other options.

But despite being cost-effective, and despite the need for more cold water storage to help manage ecosystems downstream, environmentalist opposition to raising the Shasta Dam has kept the project at a standstill for years. Among the many environmentalist objections is the fact that in years the dam collects enough runoff to be filled to capacity, the expanded lake will inundate a few additional miles of the McCloud River, which has raised concerns among Native Americans and fishermen. But these concerns must be balanced against the benefits downstream. And at such a relatively affordable cost, surely there could be generous funds for mitigation projects that might help offset the impact on the McCloud River.

While environmental impact is the primary source of objections to water infrastructure, there is also a familiar and understandable concern from the people living in the areas impacted. In extreme cases they are forced through eminent domain to relocate their homes and businesses. Frequently they see the land and communities they’ve known all their lives completely transformed.

This is never easy. It is never trivial. But it must be understood as a common thread of human history, past, present, and everywhere. First there were Native Americans, then there were the Spanish, then the Mexicans, then the Americans. California’s population in 1848 was approximately 150,000 Native Americans, approximately 6,500 people of either Spanish or Mexican descent, and only an estimated 800 American immigrants of non Hispanic European descent. Today, less than two centuries later, 40 million people live in California. That’s a lot of displacement.

Someone living near the McCloud River, upstream from Lake Shasta, may live in an area that has been bypassed so far by the footprint of civilization. But their situation is no different from anyone, ever, who has been displaced or disrupted by the tides of history. What about someone who lived in the Santa Clara Valley back in 1957, the year when Harold Banks turned in his California Water Plan? In the decades since then its name has been changed to the Silicon Valley, and from all over the world people came, by the millions, to live there. Where less than one lifetime ago, there were blossoms in the endless orchards every spring, now there is a megapolis. This is the story of California. An endless, burgeoning dreamland, a magnet for the world.

Without water, growth stops, prosperity stops, and the dream becomes a nightmare. That is the tradeoff. That is another context from which to view the controversy over the McCloud River.

The unavoidable truth of water infrastructure, along with all other infrastructure, is that it will change the earth. We can handle this with all the money and technology and learning we’ve acquired in the 65 years since 1957, when the engineering challenge was the only paramount concern. But even when designing into new infrastructure the most enlightened and advanced mitigating features, civilization has a footprint. Applying the latest techniques to construct fish ladders and manage sediment are ways to mitigate the impact of in-stream dams.

There isn’t any state or nation, anywhere, that can do a better job than Californians at mitigating the impact of our infrastructure on the environment. But it is not our obligation to impoverish ourselves in the process, and by failing to meet this challenge we also deny ourselves the opportunity to set an example to the rest of the world, which for the most part is populated by people who have had quite enough of impoverishment.

Which brings us to off-stream reservoirs, which most would agree are a slightly less transgressive form of water infrastructure. Instead of blocking a river, off-stream reservoirs in California are designed to occupy an expansive, arid valley, one that typically must be situated either near a large river or close to an aqueduct. The San Luis Reservoir, located just south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and close to the California Aqueduct, is California’s best example of an off-stream reservoir.

Built in just four years and operational by 1967, the San Luis Dam cost $3.1 billion in 2022 dollars. This price included the pumps to lift water over the 380 foot dam, and the forebays below the dam where water is diverted from the California Aqueduct. The pumping plant has eight reversible turbines that can either consume or generate 424 megawatts of electricity, depending on whether they are pumping water from the forebay into the dam, or releasing water from the dam back into the forebay.

By filling the dam from the forebay during periods of surplus electricity, and then generating power by releasing that water back down to the forebay during periods of peak demand and high electricity prices, the San Luis Dam is capable of storing intermittent renewable energy. As previously noted, the pump storage capacity of off-stream reservoirs is a compelling additional argument in favor of their construction, as California’s state legislature continues to rush headlong into an all electric, renewable energy future.

If San Luis Reservoir is a perfect example of what off-stream reservoirs can offer, the proposed Sites Reservoir Project is pretty good. In its original concept, it would have been the glorious twin to San Luis, situated in the hills just north of the Delta and west of the Sacramento River. Like San Luis, the Sites Reservoir was originally conceived to have nearly 2.0 million acre feet of storage capacity. Also, just like San Luis, Site’s original design included pump storage to harvest surplus electricity. But that was the dream.

As it is today, the latest Sites project proposal is still impressive. With a planned a storage capacity of 1.5 million acre feet it will be the eighth largest reservoir in California. Unfortunately it will not have electrical pump-storage. According to officials with the Sites project, downsizing the dam and eliminating pump storage were the result of “affordability, permitting and constructability challenges.” In any case, where is Sites? Its construction was approved by voters eight years ago.

Paralytic Bureaucracies and Endless Litigation

The answer to this question is the paralyzing bureaucratic inertia and perpetual blocking lawsuits that have stopped all major water projects in California for the past thirty years. Our initiative was written specifically to address affordability and permitting challenges – leaving constructability to the engineers. But back in 2020 Jerry Brown (no, not the ex-Governor), the executive director of the Sites Project, posted a video on YouTube to answer this question: What’s taking so long to build the Sites Reservoir Project? Here’s his answer:

“My experience is that for every one year of construction you have about three years for permitting, so for us we have about a seven year construction period, that would mean we’d have about a twenty year time frame for the total project. Our JPA started in 2010, we’re estimated to be completed in 2030, so actually, we’re pretty much on schedule.”

This comment may accurately reflect the reality of how long infrastructure projects take in California today, but it begs the question: Does this mean every major water infrastructure project that hasn’t yet formed a JPA will not be operating until 2042 or later? And how certain is Jerry Brown that Sites will be operating by 2030? What is going to prevent environmentalist lawsuits from continuing for another few decades? And if our state legislature is absolutely determined to power the state’s grid with intermittent wind and solar energy, why was the pump storage feature removed from the final Sites design?

In the February 2021 document “Sites Reservoir Project – Preliminary Project Description,” the introductory section describes how back in 1995 the CALFED Bay-Delta Program “identified 52 potential surface storage locations and retained 12 reservoir locations statewide for further study.” All twelve were off-stream reservoirs. They then narrowed the candidates to four: “Red Bank (Dippingvat and Schoenfield Reservoirs), Newville Reservoir, Colusa Reservoir, and Sites Reservoir.” Sites was chosen as the most feasible project. But why isn’t this study being dusted off and revisited? What about these other potential locations for more surface storage? Why not at least construct the other three finalists? Isn’t California entering a climate era of less snow, and more irregular but torrential downpours?

The reason for asking this question isn’t to indulge a penchant for highlighting projects that environmentalists find the most transgressive. First of all because off-stream reservoirs aren’t nearly as problematic as in-stream reservoirs. The reason to question why more surface storage isn’t being seriously considered as part of a comprehensive plan to create water abundance in normal years, and water security in years of drought or civil disasters, is because surface storage accomplishes goals that are very hard to otherwise fulfill. Reservoirs with pump storage are the most cost-effective way to absorb and then release surplus electricity. They are also the only way to capture a significant volume of storm runoff, which can only then be released slowly from these reservoirs into percolation basins and injection wells for aquifer recharge.

Imagine if back in the 1930s through the 1960s, every major water infrastructure project took three years of planning for every year of construction. Imagine if back then, every major water infrastructure project were tied up in litigation for decades, with the legal fees, settlement costs, and delays adding tens of billions to project costs? Would anything have been built?

Maybe every major water infrastructure project wasn’t ideal. Maybe history will someday applaud the fact that back in the 1970s the state legislature pushed the pause button, and never completed the original California Water Plan conceived back in 1957. But without the reservoirs that we did build, and the aqueducts and pumping plants that accompanied those reservoirs, California would not be home to one of the most iconic, inspiring civilizations the world has ever known.

The environmentalists who oppose Sites, and every other reservoir, even those situated off-stream that can also store surplus electricity, should look to their own backyards. They should consider San Francisco’s relatively drought-proof source of pristine drinking water, Hetch Hetchy, an in-stream abomination that throttled the wild Tuolumne River, and inundated a valley equal in beauty and grandeur to Yosemite.

As Californians along with everyone else in the world navigate the tempestuous road ahead, this state needs an infrastructure with redundancy. Conservation and ultra-efficient water use is analogous to just-in-time inventory. With only a small disruption to the supply chain that has already wrung every drop of efficiency into it, crops and people can die of thirst. An all-of-the-above solution to water scarcity in California is a prudent strategy, and reservoirs are a part of that equation.

There is a moderate path forward. It requires trade-offs. For example, a few of the obvious reservoir candidates for removal, starting with Hetch Hetchy, could be demolished and those ecosystems restored to a wild state. But at the same time, off-stream surface storage reservoirs like Sites are an essential part of California’s recipe for water security, as is raising the height of some already existing in-stream dams such as Shasta. Pursuing a strategy of water abundance permits all of these options. By adding more reservoir storage than we remove, dreams like completely restoring the Tuolumne watershed can become reality.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 8) – The Union Factor

The moment we met Robbie Hunter, then president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, we knew we were in the presence of a man who does not lose. Assemblyman Mathis had urged me to contact the construction unions before we finished our research to write the initiative and began an actual campaign, and through one of his mutual contacts, the meeting was arranged.

Three of us arrived at the SBCTC’s offices in downtown Sacramento back in August 2021, all of us dressed in our Sunday best; suits, ties, dress shoes. Hunter met us in their lobby, dressed like a man who does real work, wearing a t-shirt with a union logo on the front. As someone without experience meeting a union president, much less negotiating with one, Hunter, a burly man with a trace of an Irish accent, fit the stereotype I’d imagined. And that first meeting was encouraging.

We quickly learned that Hunter and his colleagues were very much in favor of more water infrastructure. They were interested in learning about our proposal and willing to assist with the language. Over the next several weeks we carefully included language that would protect the interests of this union, which has 450,000 members in California.

While nobody on our steering committee had any objection to us reaching out to work with a powerful private sector labor union, we had friends in the conservative community who were going to want an explanation. It wasn’t hard to provide one. All major state-funded major construction projects already use union labor. Why on Earth would we hesitate to guarantee to these unions various provisions that they already had? Our primary objective was to make sure our initiative language didn’t needlessly invite opposition from the construction unions.

All of us knew we were going to need support from construction unions, or at a minimum, neutrality. As we moved from the research phase of our initiative effort into the campaign to qualify it, we attempted to gather together representatives from the various interested parties to work together to support the initiative. There were three primary sources of possible support. The unions were one of those sources. And then there were the farmers.

We knew that California’s farmers could not be the only source of funding to qualify the initiative. Some of the big farmers were betting on scarce water to drive small farmers out of business so they could buy them out. We weren’t going to get any help from them. Other big farmers with the capacity to fund the whole qualification campaign were recognizing, probably accurately, that if they paid most of the money to qualify this, it would get branded as a giveaway to “big ag.” The small farmers, on the other hand, were already squeezed financially, trying to cover their fixed costs without enough water to grow crops on all their land.

The other source of potential support were the big construction contractors. With more time, we might have been able to reach out to more of them. With another dry year, we might have had them coming to us. But we knew that without at least three legs on the stool, the campaign would not have the support it needed. We contacted businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, pitching our idea to any of them that would give us the time. It is interesting to wonder how close we came, because in Sacramento, all of these interest groups – farmers, other business interests, and the unions – had lobbyists and trade representatives who talked to each other.

It was through our union contacts that we were introduced to one of the best polling firms in California, and we thought the polling results would help us. We learned that voter sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of water infrastructure from almost every angle. Voters didn’t mind spending tax revenue on water supply projects. They ranked the drought and water scarcity as top issues of concern. The only area where the results were disappointing was in response to questions about the environment. Most voters in California will not support anything if they’re convinced it will harm the environment. And this was a dilemma. Because every expert we spoke with agreed that without some relief from California’s strict environmental laws, it won’t matter how much money voters approve for major water supply projects. They won’t get built.

And then it rained. The consensus based on the polling was that if we had a dry winter, this initiative would be approved by voters who would be frustrated by severe restrictions on water use through the summer and fall of 2022. But in December 2021, it rained. And rained. And rained. By the time the deluge subsided, people were headed into the Christmas holidays and focusing on family and vacation. While we redoubled our efforts in January, the momentum was lost and we ran out of time. We also ran out of rain, and we now know there is going to be a fourth year of drought.

But why wouldn’t the unions support our initiative? What factors prevented them, this time, from getting behind this project? When asked by Paul Rogers, reporting for the San Jose Mercury, Andrew Meredith, who succeeded Hunter as the SBCTC president in early 2022, said the campaign did not gather enough momentum. “We need to be diligent and ensure that our contributions translate to a net benefit for our members,” he said.

Meredith was making an understatement. While more major state-funded infrastructure projects would immediately and directly translate into more jobs for SBCTC members, for them to have supported our initiative would have constituted a declaration of war against many of the special interests they have historically fought beside.

In particular, the SBCTC would have gone up against the California Teachers Association and other powerful public sector unions representing state and local government workers, which would view allocating two percent of the state general fund to construction projects as taking money away from the programs that employ their members.

The SBCTC would have also had to stand up to the environmentalist lobby, which if anything is more powerful than the public sector unions. As we have seen, environmentalists in California are against almost all forms of land development or big civil engineering projects, and they attacked our campaign relentlessly for as long as we were active.

If taking on these two political superpowers weren’t enough, it’s worth asking whether the SBCTC really needed more jobs for their members. If their membership was at or near full employment, where would the tens of thousands of workers have come from to fill the jobs needed to construct off-stream reservoirs, repair aqueducts, and build wastewater recycling plants and the distribution pipes? One might see managing that membership growth as a tantalizing challenge, but perhaps too much trouble if it meant going to war with the public sector unions and the environmentalist community.

These realities put California’s high speed rail project into a revealing context. Very few competent analysts are left who are willing to claim this project will ever make economic or even environmental sense. It will be a drain on the economy and it is a deplorable waste of natural resources. It’s even destined for technological obsolescence, as high speed smart cars, car sharing, ride sharing, passenger drones, and remote work will obviate the need for high speed rail. But the high speed rail project was endorsed by environmentalists. With high speed rail, the union goal of providing jobs for their members was fulfilled without a war. It does not help California.

There is a larger question here for the unions, however, a bigger one than whether or not to have supported the now dormant Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022. When are unions going to stand up to environmentalists? And when are private sector unions going to stand up to public sector unions, with whom they have almost nothing in common, apart from the fact that they’re both called “unions”?

If the SBCTC, with 484,000 members, wanted to put our water initiative on the ballot, they could have done it themselves, at relatively low cost. They could have mailed the initiative petition to each of their more than 450,000 member households in California, instructing their members to seriously consider signing and returning the petition, preferably after getting some of their neighbors to also sign it. If this had been done, it is quite possible that they would have collected close to a million signatures with just a few direct mail efforts. And if they had done that, other players on the sidelines, the construction contractors and the farmers, would at that point have certainly joined the campaign.

The power of environmentalists in California is literally strangling the state’s economy. It is one of the primary reasons housing is unaffordable. It is the reason electricity and natural gas is so much more expensive here than in other states. It is the reason we can’t source our own lumber, gas and oil, fertilizer or aggregate right here within the state, and have to import most of it instead. It is the reason we are about shut down Diablo Canyon, a fully paid for source of cheap electricity. Environmentalist power is out of control in California, and private sector unions are one of the only forces in the state with the power to stand up to them, if they choose to do so.

The tendency in these discussions is to overstate each side of the case, so let’s pull back a bit. Nobody wants to destroy the natural environment in California. Nobody in their right mind isn’t grateful for environmentalist accomplishments, from phasing in unleaded gas and catalytic converters, to saving the California Condor. But environmentalists in California have succeeded, with the absolute complicity of the media and the education bureaucracy, in stigmatizing moderate views on environmental issues as extreme. There is nothing extreme about capturing runoff into a few more off-stream reservoirs, raising the height of the Shasta Dam, or, gasp, building one or two more desalination plants on the Southern California Coast. But to advocate these projects, or even to include them as we did as falling within project categories eligible for state funds, environmentalists did everything in their power to destroy our campaign.

The people running construction unions in California know better. They know that if you make it impossible, or nearly impossible, to build anything, the only people who benefit are the wealthiest owners and investors who control the limited and sanctioned means of production. You can put any label you wish on this model of political economy. Feudalism comes immediately to mind. But leave that to the intellectuals. For the workers on the street, what matters is the price of electricity, the price of natural gas, the price of gasoline, the price of housing, the price of food, and the price of water. And among those essentials, water is the enabling core. Water is life.

Our union friends can let California’s water become rationed and privatized, priced sky high to profit a small coterie of owners, and they can watch the ripple effect blow the roof off prices for every downstream essential including housing and food.

Or they can use their considerable power to help rein in environmentalist overreach, realign California politics, and save this great state for all working families.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 7) – An Environmentalist Juggernaut

Environmentalists in California, who constitute much of the vanguard of environmentalism in the world, have normalized extremism. The solutions they’ve proposed to supposedly save the planet, and the premises they’ve convinced millions of people to accept as beyond debate, constitute one of the greatest threats – if not the greatest threat – to modern civilization today. It is these environmentalists that are themselves the extremists, not the common sense skeptics who question their edicts, or the beleaguered citizens trying to survive their mandates.

The power of the environmentalist juggernaut, or, to be more precise, what has become an environmentalist industrial complex, almost defies description. Their grip on the media, as we have seen in the previous installment, is near absolute. They exercise similar control over how American children are educated in K-12 public schools, as well as what messages are reinforced in almost every institution of higher learning. They have coopted nearly every major corporation, investment bank, hedge fund, sovereign wealth fund, and international institution including the World Bank, the United Nations, and countless others. From every source, the message is always the same: We face imminent doom if we don’t take dramatic collective action immediately to cope with the “climate emergency.”

The good news is that if you want to build more water infrastructure in California, you don’t have to argue the intricacies of climate science. If the Sierra snowpack is to be permanently reduced if not nonexistent, and if all we can expect in a drier future are occasional and erratic but soaking downpours, then we have to build a new water infrastructure that is adapted to this new reality. But despite this logic, environmentalists seem to oppose all new water infrastructure, everywhere. Their endless opposition to the Sites Reservoir, which is designed to capture storm runoff and store it off-stream, ought to be inexplicable. It can only be understood in the context of their broader agenda, which in practice amounts to micromanaging residential indoor water consumption, mandating desert landscaping around homes, and taking half of California’s farmland out of production.

A front page article in the Los Angeles Times on April 13, 2022, written by Ian James, is a recent and very typical example of what environmentalists are planning for California. In the article, titled “California could shrink water use in cities by 30% or more, study finds,” environmentalist spokespersons are quoted with no tough questions asked or balancing perspective solicited. The crux of the study’s findings amounted to this:

“The state’s total urban water use is estimated at 6.6 million acre-feet per year [this does not square with the estimates from the California Dept. of Water Resources, which report average urban use at 7.8 MAF/year]. The study found that a host of existing technologies and standard practices could improve efficiency to reduce total urban use between 30% and 48%. These efficiency measures include fixing leaks in water pipes, replacing inefficient washing machines and toilets, and replacing lawns with plants suited to California’s dry climate, among other things.”

Imagine that. Cutting water use by 48 percent. Forty eight percent. Why would anyone want to do this, when there alternatives?

James’s article is worth examining in some depth, because it reveals additional claims from the Pacific Institute study, entitled “Waste Not, Want Not: The Potential for Urban Conservation in California,” that belie the need to curtail urban water use so drastically. In particular, it makes the following claims:

“The researchers estimated that California has the potential to substantially boost local water supplies by capturing stormwater and storing it in aquifers, instead of allowing it to run off the landscape. Depending on whether it’s a dry year or a wet year, they said, the state could capture between 580,000 and 3 million acre-feet of stormwater in urban areas.”

And…

“California now recycles about 23% of its municipal wastewater, an estimated 728,000 acre-feet, the report said, and has the potential to more than triple the amount that is recycled and reused.”

What this study therefore claims is that just by capturing regional stormwater and recycling wastewater, California’s urban areas can recover and use between 2.0 million and 4.5 million acre feet of additional water per year, meaning their net water consumption, i.e., the amount of water they are going to need from existing sources can drop from – using their numbers – 6.6 million acre feet per year down to between 2.1 and 4.6 million acre feet per year.

First of all, that ought to be plenty, although it would be interesting to find out if the Pacific Institute researchers actually had a serious discussion with any if the engineers at the urban water agencies and flood control districts that would have to figure out how, for example, to grab five inches of torrential rains hitting the Los Angeles Basin in 12 hours and get all of that runoff into an aquifer or reservoir before it made the at most 30 mile trip from the base of the San Gabriel Mountains to the Santa Monica Bay. We’d be all for that, if it were feasible. But maybe the feasibility wasn’t the point; maybe the Pacific Institute wanted to publicize these figures to help opponents of the proposed Sites Reservoir and Huntington Beach desalination plant. After all, who needs off-stream reservoirs or desalination, if we can just capture urban storm runoff?

More to the point, funding runoff capture and funding wastewater recycling were among the centerpieces of our proposed water initiative! And we left it up to the water commission to decide which project applications to fund, only stipulating that funding would not dry up until five million acre feet of new water could be supplied each year. The Pacific Institute, an organization as environmentalist as they come, has just provided a roadmap to finding up to 4.6 million acre feet of that annual goal, if their findings are to be believed.

Nonetheless, the title and the focus of the article in the Los Angeles Times, indeed, the focus of every policy most fervently supported by environmentalists in California today, is use less. Conserve. Cut back. Ration. Take short showers. Kill your water wasting plants and replace them with desert scrub. Sacrifice. And none of it is necessary, either to save the planet or to save money. But that’s the message. That’s their agenda.

The way environmentalists attacked our attempt to qualify a water infrastructure spending initiative gave no quarter. Early in our campaign phase, barely after we’d submitted our final amended version of the initiative, the board of directors at the Orange County Water District were voting on a possible endorsement (they ultimately did vote to endorse). But already the Sierra Club was on hand to object, making claims that indicated they may not have even read the text of the initiative.

In their public comment, made October 6, 2021, they wrote “OCWD would be best placed to funnel its resources towards increasing conservation, stormwater capture, implementing a green streets project similar to LA County’s, repairing leaks and replacing old pipes, earthquake proofing its water systems and remediation of its North plume including other PFAS contaminated wells.”

The problem with these arguments against our effort, to reiterate, is that our measure would fund all of those suggestions. They all would have qualified as eligible projects to be evaluated by the California Water Commission. All the environmentalists critics of our initiative needed to do was read Section 3, starting on page 2 of the full text, items 1-7. It’s all there. Our five million acre foot per year goal – which one may argue that even the Pacific Institute implicitly supports – was only the trigger to end funding. It did not limit eligible project categories only to those that would further achievement of the 5 MAF/year  goal. Everything the Sierra Club was suggesting ought to be in the initiative, was in the initiative.

None of these facts mattered. Including the forbidden solutions of reservoirs and desalination were unforgiveable sins. Within a few months, the environmentalist opposition had coalesced into a coalition that included the following groups: Sierra Club California, California Indian Environmental Alliance, Society of Native Nations, Idle No More, Restore the Delta, Azul, Golden State Salmon Association, Sunrise Movement OC, California Coastal Protection Network, Health the Bay, Surfrider Foundation, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, Orange County Coastkeeper, The River Project, Heal the Bay, and Social Eco Education.

On a website called StopTheWaterScam.com, funded by the “Stop the Water Scam Committee (ID# 1442883),” some amazingly misleading representations were made. On their home page, our initiative was depicted as “a new threat to literally every priority California faces, from public health to education to affordable housing to climate action.” On the website’s “FAQ” page, they made the following claim about our alleged backing, writing “They’re financed by powerful multinational corporations and polluters who want a bottomless slush fund to profit at taxpayer expense.”

All of these are preposterous allegations. How is abundant water a threat to public health? If having a reliable water supply is a prerequisite for building new homes, how does our initiative threaten affordable housing? If climate change is causing less snow and more severe but erratic rainstorms, don’t we need new infrastructure to capture and store the runoff? And if we build infrastructure that makes more water available for farms and cities, then wouldn’t we also have more water available to manage ecosystems? As for “powerful multinational corporations” supposedly behind our effort; which ones? When? Where? Who?

The reasons environmentalists might have had more arguable objections to our initiative centered on the revisions it proposed to the California Environmental Quality Act and to the Coastal Act. But the revisions we made were thoughtful and measured. Virtually everyone we spoke with believed that without the proposed changes to these laws, the initiative would suffer the same fate as Prop. 1 from 2014 – a voter mandate that is stopped in its tracks by a hostile bureaucracy and environmentalist litigants.

What follows are some of the serious questions raised by environmentalists, and how we responded to those questions:

The initiative creates a mechanism to use public funds to subsidize private, for-profit enterprises such as Poseidon desal. Why should the public fund such a project when Poseidon has indicated they are able to proceed without additional subsidies (they are counting on an annual operating subsidy from the Metropolitan Water district)?

The California Water Commission will have the discretion to allocate funding to eligible projects according to a set of criteria and priorities set forth in the measure. Section 3 of the measure provides that projects proposed by public agencies should be prioritized. Thus, the ultimate funding decisions will be made by the Water Commission in accordance with the goal of the measure—completing projects to begin delivery of water to California’s urban and agricultural consumers. There is no guarantee that any private projects would receive funding under the measure. And if a project does not need funding, it will not get funding.

Why is the streamlining of environmental review necessary?

There is NO streamlining of CEQA proposed. Section 5 of the measure provides for streamlined review of judicial CEQA challenges to eligible water projects. Currently, important water projects can be and are stalled through litigation that can last for many years. Under the measure, any challenge to an eligible water supply project is to be resolved (e.g., decided by a court) within 270 days after the certified administrative record is filed with the court. This is substantially similar to previously adopted legislation including AB 900 and subsequent acts based on AB 900 (which expedited treatment of various projects—See the California Office of Planning and Research website), and various other statues providing for litigation streamlining (see also SB 9 Atkins – Jobs and Economic Improvement Through Environmental Leadership Act of 2021 -adopted this year). Water projects must still comply with ALL CEQA substantive reviews.

Specifically, why should the Coastal Commission rely on the EIR submitted to the lead agency without the ability to require “new or revised environmental review”? (First paragraph, p. 15).

First, the Coastal Commission is a responsible agency under CEQA and can fully participate in the CEQA process of any agency involved in a project in the Coastal zone. The Coastal Commission nearly always acts on a project after a local agency has completed a full CEQA review and approvals have been issued. The Coastal Commission then has a certified regulatory process that operates as a functional equivalent of CEQA. This provision would avoid delays associated with “re-creating the wheel” late in the permitting process.

Also, why should the secretary of natural resources’ override authority be applied retroactively?

This provision allows flexibility so that any project that receives funding or is certified as a drought resiliency project may be reviewed, without imposing an arbitrary deadline.

Coastal Commission Executive Director Jack Ainsworth said, ” “This is an insidious maneuver that could allow wealthy corporations to overturn Coastal Commission actions protecting California’s precious coastal resources, public access and coastal communities. Drought in California is our new normal and the Commission understands that responsibly designed desalination facilities will be an important part of California’s water portfolio going forward. We don’t need to gut the Coastal Act in order to provide safe, reliable, affordable drinking water.” Would you respond to that?

We view the Coastal Commission as playing an essential role in projects that are located along California’s coast. That is why Coastal Commission process is retained in the measure, rather than exempt water supply projects which are crucial to the State from Coastal Commission review entirely. The measure simply provides some timelines for the Commission to act on drought resiliency projects and clarifies the environmental review process before the Commission. The measure also provides for an administrative appeal process to the Secretary of Natural Resources. This is very similar to the appeals process within other agencies, such as the Regional Water Board, whose decisions can be appealed to the State Water Board.

What CEQA protections remain if eligible projects are “exempt from CEQA.” Is there a contradiction between what the campaign is saying about the CEQA provisions and what the CEQA provisions actually say? In the language of the initiative at the top of page 14, it says: “(b) Notwithstanding subdivision (a), the Water Commission’s determination to (1) allocate funding pursuant to Section 2.5 of Article X of the Constitution or the Water Supply Infrastructure Bond Act of 2022 or (2) certify a project as a drought resiliency project pursuant to Section 21159.52 shall not constitute a ‘project’ pursuant to Section 21065 of the Public Resources Code and shall be exempt from CEQA.” How does this initiative still incorporate “substantive CEQA review?”

The initiative does not exempt water supply projects from substantive CEQA review. The initiative exempts certain funding and certification processes at the Water Commission from CEQA review – namely, the Water Commissions’ decision to provide funding to an eligible water supply project or certify an eligible water supply project as a “drought resiliency project.” However, the initiative does not eliminate CEQA review triggered by other discretionary actions, such as local or state permitting processes. For example, a water supply project requiring a discretionary city or county approval would still undergo CEQA review in connection with that approval. As for “drought resiliency projects,” they are any projects that fall within the definition of eligible projects in Section 3 (b) on page 2.

If the California Water Commission were the only agency approving a project funded under this measure, then it would be exempt from CEQA, but if the project required other approvals, like from a city, a county, a regional water board, the state EPA or Department of Fish and Wildlife, it would be subject to CEQA?

Yes. If a project required a discretionary approval from any other agency, it would be subject to CEQA (unless some other CEQA exemption applied independent of the measure). The chances that a water supply project of any size would not require at least one additional discretionary approval is very remote. Virtually any project involving water resources will trigger a local review and a review from various state agencies including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. For example, a water project impacting a stream or river would require permitting from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Can you explain the streamlining of filing lawsuits? It appears that after a project is approved, opponents have 270 days to file a lawsuit under CEQA. Is that right? Or does the ballot language say a court must decide the appeal within 270 days?

Any challenge to an eligible water supply project is to be resolved (e.g., decided by a court) within 270 days after the certified administrative record is filed with the court. This is substantially similar to previously adopted legislation including AB 900 and subsequent acts based on AB 900 (which expedited treatment of various projects—See CA Office of Planning and Research Website), and various other statues providing for litigation streamlining (see also SB & Atkins – Jobs and Economic Improvement Through Environmental Leadership Act of 2021 -adopted this year).

If you’ve waded through the preceding series of questions and answers, at the least you may understand that in no way was our intent to gut the protections embodied in CEQA or the Coastal Act. Rather our goal was to streamline the process, so project proposals would get a yes or no answer within years instead of decades. One would think that is a reasonable expectation.

Moreover, nothing in our initiative affected the many strong Federal regulations designed to ensure that infrastructure projects don’t harm the environment. Nor did we curb the ability for the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife to scrutinize, and as they all too often do, derail any project. Finally, as cannot be emphasized enough, we left final decisions as to which projects would receive funding pursuant to our initiative up to the California Water Commission. To say that body has been adequately attentive to the concerns of the environmental community in California would be a gross understatement.

None of this mattered. We offered a solution that replaced scarcity with abundance, insecurity with security, punitive rationing and intrusive demand management with practical water supply infrastructure. In short, we offered a pathway out of the gloom and doom narrative that is the currency of environmentalists in the world today. And that was unforgiveable.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 6) – Biased, Hostile Media

You can say this for Michael Hiltzik, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist for the Los Angeles Times: He doesn’t conceal his biases. When we talked in late November, his skepticism concerning our initiative felt overt. And while that may only have been my subjective impression of our conversation, Hiltzik’s column, published as a “Perspective” piece by the Times on December 2, removed all doubt.

Hiltzik’s column was called “This proposed ballot measure would make you pay for the ag industry’s water inefficiency,” and featured on page two of the print edition’s front section. Hiltzik fired an 1,800-word salvo at our campaign, making assertions, starting with the title, that were designed from beginning to end to convince readers that we were pushing a terrible idea.

In one of the opening paragraphs, Hiltzik wrote “In California, water is for scamming. The newest example is a majestically cynical ploy being foisted on taxpayers by some of the state’s premier water hogs, in the guise of a proposed ballot measure titled the ‘Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022’—or, as its promoters call it, the More Water Now initiative.” Nothing subtle there.

Hiltzik’s hits came one after another. He called the initiative “costly and dishonest,” claiming it would “wreak permanent damage to the state budget,” and “force taxpayers to pay for ecologically destructive and grossly uneconomical dams, reservoirs, and desalination plants.”

But Hiltzik’s bias against “wasteful and overly costly projects” may violate his own principles.

In an irony that ought not be lost on a journalist of Hiltzik’s stature, within a few weeks after he attacked our campaign, he wrote a column headlined, “Wall Street can now bet on the price of California water.” But Hiltzik can’t have it both ways. Either the state will help pay for water infrastructure with “wasteful” projects, or the price of water will rise to the point where private investors and financial speculators will end up dominating the industry. They will buy up farmland for the water rights and invest in costly, privately owned water supply infrastructure because they will then own that water and profitably sell it at a high price. That’s already happening.

Our initiative would socialize some or all of the cost of capital projects to increase the supply of water. This would lower the price of water in California. How can Hiltzik warn us about private-sector water speculators right after he trashed our plan to socialize a major portion of the cost of water supply infrastructure?

Of course Hiltzik’s report on our campaign included obligatory quotes from environmental experts, starting with Peter Gleik, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, which has a focus on “water conservation and demand management”—rationing, in other words. A column with more logical integrity would examine that premise. Is rationing enough? Gleik’s comment is predictable, given his background, saying “This proposed initiative is a desperate throwback to the idea that there is still more water that can be extracted from California’s already massively overtapped rivers and aquifers.”

But California’s rivers are not “overtapped.” They have inadequate or obsolete infrastructure which is not suited for an era of less snow and heavy, but erratic, rain. The appropriate new way to tap California’s rivers is by using off-stream reservoirs, percolation basins, and underground aquifers to capture storm runoff. And there is plenty of that.

An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (italics added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

Let that sink in. Coming from some of the most respected water experts in California: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the Delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 million acre-feet per year. And we were just trying to find another 5 million acre-feet, with many options to accomplish that, including capturing storm runoff.

What Hiltzik wrote was unfair, but he was just one of many. Orange County Register reporter Martin Wiskol published a hit piece in December titled, “Environmentalists sound alarm over proposed water initiative.” If all you read are headlines, that headline sends a clear message (as does the rest of the article). The alarm bells are ringing! This is a bad thing! And we’ve become so used to this sort of bias, it’s hard to even imagine how an equally accurate headline for Wiskol’s article might have been “Grassroots activists propose common sense solutions to California’s water crisis.” Imagine coverage like that.

Leading off the media campaign against our initiative was the San Jose Mercury News with an editorial published on November 19: “Pull the plug on proposed California water ballot measure.” Typical of media and environmentalist critics of our initiative, it appeared the Mercury News’ editors hadn’t even read the initiative, as they wrote, “Historically, California’s water projects have been paid primarily by those who generate the most benefit. But this proposal would flip the scales. It would use general fund tax dollars to primarily increase the water supply for the state’s wealthy Big Ag interests.”

An honest fact checker would rate this assertion as “mostly false.” Our initiative would have funded projects to recycle 100 percent of California’s urban wastewater, at a cost estimated at around $20 billion. Our initiative would have funded remediation of urban aquifers, urban and small town water systems; it would have paid to replace the toxic pipes in the L.A. Unified School District schools. It would even have paid to restore portions of the Los Angeles River to its natural state. The only constraint was not funding, but retaining flood protection. But the Mercury News never bothered to ask.

For that matter, the editors at the Mercury News apparently didn’t even bother to read an article written by Paul Rogers, one of their staff journalists who for decades has been writing about water policy in California. Published two days earlier in their own newspaper, Rogers’ article was the only example of fair coverage of our campaign by a major media property. Rogers described our initiative as one that would “fast track” water projects in the state. But the exception proves the rule.

What would it take to get fair media coverage? It isn’t as if our initiative was anathema to environmentalist values and objectives. And it even called for more government spending, which typically attracts support from mainstream media. So why did the media attack our initiative without any attempt at balance or nuance? Why did they march in lockstep with environmentalists bent on destroying our effort before it got any real traction?

The answer to this may go back to one of the core premises of the modern environmentalist movement, backed up by the media, which is the belief that a middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. Humanity’s harrowing descent into a self-inflicted global “climate emergency” is the dominant message we get from environmentalists today, and it is reflected uncritically by the media.

But the greatest transgression by the media isn’t that they accept and promote this doomsday message and suppress dissenting theories, although that is bad enough. What is worse is that every project environmentalists oppose, even when there is minimal connection between that stopping that project and preventing climate change, is opposed by the media. Examples of this are plentiful.

More housing on single-family lots will cause climate change, they maintain, but building high density apartments and condominiums will prevent it. Constructing roads will cause climate change, but constructing high-speed rail and light rail will prevent it. Responsibly thinning our forests with commercial logging will cause climate change, but letting them get overgrown and burn like hell every summer will prevent it. Had enough? For each of these examples, there are obvious and compelling counterarguments, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Trying to explain what is behind the collective hostility of the media not just toward water projects that violate the climate emergency narrative, but against all development unsanctioned by environmentalists, is the topic of another essay. But a big part of the problem is there isn’t much of an alternative narrative, because there isn’t much of an ecosystem of organizations promoting an alternative narrative.

Notwithstanding media bias, one of the reasons there aren’t more quotes from experts in favor of more water infrastructure is because there aren’t enough organizations promoting water infrastructure, and the ones that are out there are underfunded, do not allocate resources to mobilizing grassroots support, and behave with an abundance of decorum and a scarcity of passion. By contrast, whenever there is a public meeting for or against a water project, the Sierra Club can be relied on to have mobilized dozens if not hundreds of their members to show up. Where are the statewide organizations that can mobilize hundreds of activists to show up at meetings in favor of more infrastructure?

Maybe that idea was ahead of its time, but life is unaffordable in California for a reason. It’s time now for organizations that support fewer regulations and more infrastructure spending to get more aggressive. Meanwhile, can anyone reading this name one expert in California in favor of more water infrastructure who has managed to make it onto the shortlist of people journalists call whenever something is proposed that might increase California’s water supply? I can’t think of anyone.

Without organizations willing to unite to make the case for more water infrastructure on the same scale as the environmentalist dominated organizations that only promote rationing, all that is left is the competence and integrity of journalists. On that topic, Kristi Diener, a media expert and key member of our steering committee who has interacted with journalists on water issues for many years, had this to say:

“There is a lack of critical thinking in the media. There are many facets to this. If someone makes an argument like, ‘Why should taxpayers pay for capital projects?’ they stop there without exploring the benefits which more than balance the expense. For example, there are projects that enable groundwater recharge and reduce the implementation costs of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, dilute toxic contaminants in well water and replenish wells which eliminate the need for the emergency bottled water delivery program, and arrest subsidence and the sinking of multi-million dollar vital infrastructure which reduces the millions of tax dollars necessarily being allocated to these fixes. Because creating water abundance also lowers water bills, and enables our farmers to put more job-creating land back into production, consumers have more to spend. That economic enhancement to other businesses bumps up tax coffers for community services like police, fire, and education. The media relentlessly criticize beneficial water projects, but neglect any independent exploration. Their conclusions and written opinions effectively become predicated on one-sided, dead-end statements. This is lazy, incomplete journalism.”

Diener continued:

“Another facet to the lack of critical thinking occurs due to the fact that California’s water laws, Opinions, Management Plans, Flow Requirements, Acts, systems of water rights and exceptions to those, Endangered Species Act rulings, etc. have piled up for decades, if not all the way back into the 1800s. They are extremely complex and require explanations and interpretations from experts. But the fact-givers who are supposed to be the water experts and the keepers of the knowledge frequently either get it wrong, or intentionally cherry pick the data. The majority of the media is unwilling, or unable, to fact check the fact-givers. For years the media has accepted what they are told, and the result has been generations of widely spread misinformation packed onto the public, who now believe they know the facts. The difficulty in promoting more water infrastructure sometimes is in having to rewind and replace what people think they know to be true, with the parts that have been omitted that make those arguments false.”

It is unlikely the bias and hostility of the media towards more water supply infrastructure will change on its own, or before Californians run out of water. But it is possible that some of the special interests that currently either oppose water projects or sit on the sidelines, will change their priorities and begin to support new projects. Ultimately, and perhaps contrary to their own self-perception, journalists as a group tend to reflect and promote the political preferences of the elite influencers that own or advertise on media platforms. For that reason, we may hope that if the consensus on water policy among elites begins to shift in our favor, that shift will be reflected and accelerated by members of the media.

When it comes to projects to increase the water supply in California, the media today is predictable and hostile. Scarcity is good, development is bad. Somehow they’ve internalized the false impression that more water supplies will only harm the environment, rather than consider the possibility that more water creates more options for maintaining the health of ecosystems. And California’s journalists are apparently blind to the economic fact that water scarcity only serves the interests of investors and speculators who want to privatize and profit from high-priced water. It harms everyone else.

California’s hostile media can change its tune. But it will take enlightened altruism—i.e., demanding more water supply projects without further delay—from a critical mass of California’s moneyed elites, helped along by massive anger from California’s disenfranchised grassroots.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.