The Underreported Reason for the Decline of Salmon

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As Californians dig out from several major storms just since December, major reservoirs in the state are already filled to within 86 and 104 percent of their historical average for this date, and the Sierra snowpack sits at 205 percent of normal. With additional precipitation likely before the end of California’s attenuated rainy season, and massive projected snowmelt poised to cascade downstream later this spring, water managers are already deciding what to do with the all this water.

To the uninitiated, such a policy decision might seem obvious: Once summer is imminent, and no more storms ought to threaten to overwhelm the spillways and cause flooding down in the valley, let the reservoirs fill to capacity. Save another five million acre feet behind the dams. But when it comes to water policy in California, complexities are layered atop complexities, and nothing is obvious.

Water management in California revolves around several distinct priorities that are often in conflict. Reservoirs provide flood control and store water for delivery via aqueducts to farms and cities, but they also have disrupted the natural flow of the rivers they span. As a result of in-stream dams, the aquatic environment is irrevocably altered. California’s water managers now have to balance the water requirements for food and people against the need to preserve a viable habitat for aquatic species.

For years, controversy has flared over just how much water should be released to preserve endangered species of fish, and how much should be reserved for farm irrigation and urban water agencies. One of the most critically endangered species of fish are the native salmon. This anadromous species of fish was once so abundant that hundreds of millions would hatch from eggs in the headwaters of California’s rivers and fight their way to the ocean, then after a few years return as adults by the millions to fight their way back to those spawning grounds.

Today, many of those spawning beds in California’s upper watersheds are blocked by dams. While some streams remain unobstructed and fish hatcheries raise millions of fingerlings for release downstream each year, California’s salmon population is a fraction of what it was. There is concern the fish could disappear altogether from California’s rivers.

Maintaining a hospitable environment for salmon doesn’t merely require adequate flow in the river during the spawning run upstream, or the subsequent migration of fingerlings downstream to the ocean. The temperature of the water in the river is also a factor. Salmon don’t tolerate water hotter than around 68 degrees, which in shallow waters during a hot summer can be easily exceeded. To cope with this, more water has to be released, preferably from deep reservoirs like the massive Lake Shasta, from which the water initially entering the river is much colder.

If you care about salmon, these gyrations make sense, but during drought years they come at a cost that many of California’s farmers would consider existential. Over the past few decades, and especially over the past few years, as withdrawals from rivers for irrigation were increasingly limited for environmental reasons, farmers were forced to pump groundwater. The resultant overdraft was compounded by the fact that using river water for flood irrigation in many cases was used to replenish those same aquifers.

What frustrates many of California’s farmers is the wisdom they have acquired over generations seems to be dismissed as folklore by the experts, hired by environmentalist activists, that inform legislators and regulators. But farmers in California never wasted water. They know when the ground is thirsty and able to percolate flood irrigation to recharge aquifers. Orchardists understand the water saving benefit of drip irrigation but also understand that each year, in most cases, there is a moment when a half-foot of flood irrigation will percolate to aquifers, flush away accumulated salts, eliminate gophers, and saturate the earth for a winter cover crop.

California’s family farmers, who have watched the rivers naturally rise and fall for countless seasons, also know that in dry years the salmon don’t run. The salmon instinctively sense if the rivers and streams are running dry, they stay in the ocean, and they wait for a wet enough year to make the final journey back to their spawning headwaters.

The Underreported Variable – Bass Eat Salmon

An almond farmer in the San Joaquin Valley who once worked as a fisheries biologist is Christine Gemperle. She shared a revealing story about salmon in California’s rivers, and what may constitute a greater threat to their survival than reservoirs and warmer waters could ever be. Gemperle participated in radiotracking studies back in 2000, where they were tagging salmon smolts (youthful salmon that have migrated from their spawning grounds into estuarine waters en-route to the ocean). As they monitored the smolts, they noticed significant numbers of their trackers moving upstream. This would be completely contrary to the natural path of smolts, since their goal is to make it to the Pacific Ocean.

As it turned out, the trackers, along with whatever remained of the smolts, were in the stomachs of striped bass.

This evidence, that striped bass eat salmon, has probably been known by anglers ever since striped bass were introduced to California’s rivers over a century ago. But marine biologists have had evidence of this for over 20 years.

A recent article written explicitly on this topic, from an expert source, provides an example of current thinking on the issue of striped bass and salmon in California’s rivers. Titled “The Delta Divide: Bass Trends In Salmon Migration Corridors,” the article opens by clearly stating the problem:

“Recent research has established that very few juvenile Chinook salmon survive the migration from their birthplace in California’s Central Valley tributaries, through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and out to the Pacific Ocean. Records from rotary screw traps on the Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers show that most young salmon do not even make it as far as the San Joaquin River, still hundreds of miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge. Numerous elements contribute to the low survival of juvenile salmonids, including habitat alteration, pesticide pollution, and predation by non-native fish.”

And predation by non-native fish. But how much of a contributing factor is this predation? How decisive is it in affecting salmon populations?

That question is not answered. This article does not suggest that bass are the primary problem with salmon survival. Here’s as close as it gets: “Striped bass, on the other hand, were not frequently recaptured during this study. This lower rate of recapture is likely due to the highly mobile nature of striped bass, but future detection of tagged individuals at PIT tag antennas, in long-term surveys, or by other predator research projects, may help uncover their seasonal movement patterns. Genetic and visual analyses of the diet samples have not yet detected any Chinook salmon, but 43% of collected gut samples contained other fish, including both native and non-native species.”

Another San Joaquin Valley farmer told me the consulting firms that conduct studies of aquatic species in California’s rivers cannot point the finger at striped bass because that would undermine the larger environmentalist agenda to continue to mandate higher river flow as well as anger the bass anglers. He claimed these experts cannot be forthright because it will offend their clients.

Gemperle, in a follow up email, corroborated this farmer’s claims, writing “It is no secret that non native bass species (large mouth, small mouth and especially striped bass) eat juvenile salmon. What most people don’t know is that it was originally documented in the year 2000 and it has taken 23 years for it to be acknowledged as a huge hurdle in the salmon population’s recovery if that is even possible.”

In a November 2022 presentation by the state’s Delta Lead Scientist Laurel Larsen to the Delta Stewardship Council, titled “The Role of Water Quality in Salmon Predation,” there wasn’t a single mention of striped bass. Larsen explored competing hypotheses regarding what habitat variables render salmon most vulnerable to predation, with the common emphasis being that California’s rivers need more flow and cooler water temperatures.

In general there seems to be consistent rejection of the theory – evident in plain sight – that salmon smolts are bait for bass. In a 2016 article published by the San Jose Mercury, UC Davis researchers are quoted as saying that even if bass populations are reduced, other predators will take their place. This seems fishy. Environmental remediation invariably prioritizes removing invasive species, often going to extreme lengths to do so. Why are striped bass exempt from the environmentalist penchant for eliminating invasive alien species?

Water for Salmon, Salmon for Bass, Bass for Anglers, and Farmers Don’t Farm

One might find a clue to this mystery in the 2012 recommendation from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to triple the catch limit and reduce the size limit for bass. Experts there had clearly determined this would help with salmon recovery. But the state Fish and Game Commission immediately rejected the plan. Why?

We may begin by recognizing that every agency in California answers to special interests. When it comes to any state agency tasked with managing California’s rivers the most influential special interest is environmental activists. But there is considerable overlap between the agenda of, for example, environmentalist groups such as the Audubon Society, and groups advocating for the sport hunting and fishing industry such as Ducks Unlimited.

One can only speculate as to the discussions that occur behind closed doors between these and many other advocacy organizations, their lobbyists, their litigators, and their campaign strategists. But this powerful alliance shares a common goal: Leave more water in the rivers. Anglers want the bass protected because fishing for trophy bass is an extremely popular sport in California. Environmentalists welcome the support from sportfishing groups because it adds political weight to their ongoing pressure on water managers to prioritize water to maximize river flow and minimize river temperature.

And so this year, just as in every year, increasing percentages of available stored water will be sent down the river in hopes that will enable more salmon to survive the gauntlet of voracious bass. The cost of this choice is measured in the tens of billions of dollars. In dry years, which hundreds of years ago were just as common as they are today, the salmon simply stayed in the ocean. Now, instead of keeping millions of acres of farmland in production, in dry years California’s rivers still flow in defiance of historical precedent – in amounts inadequate to nurture healthy salmon but enough to confuse the salmon into migrating up the rivers anyway – while millions of acres of productive farmland are fallowed.

Also measured in the tens of billions of dollars, is the costly choice facing Californians in dry years: either build new ways to capture and store water, since existing systems are now geared primarily towards maintaining river flows for salmon to escape bass, or subject 40 million Californians to water rationing and the expense of completely retrofitting their appliances and killing their landscaping in order to conserve.

Against these choices, one might think the state would reconsider extending the season, raising the limit on the catch, and reducing the size limit for bass. It would cost California’s taxpayers nothing. And if it didn’t work, bass populations – a most adaptable and resilient species – would easily rebound. It’s worth a try.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

California’s Mega Water Wasters

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It’s illegal to serve drinking water in a California restaurant unless the customer asks for it. Billboards sponsored by the state urge residents to put a bucket in their shower to capture water for their gardens. These symbolic pittances, along with escalating restrictions on water use by farmers and households that are anything but trivial, are the products of a deeply flawed mentality governing water policy in California.

At the same time as government bureaucrats commit to ongoing water rationing, ferocious winter storms lash the state with hundreds of millions of acre-feet of precipitation. If this storm runoff were captured and stored, there would never be water scarcity again. But instead, it merely causes flooding and havoc, then runs into the vast Pacific Ocean. This is the story of California’s mega water wasters, one of the most delusional, self-righteous, destructive cults in the history of civilization.

In California, when it rains, it pours. So far in 2023, up and down the state, rain and snow are pouring down, one storm after another. Rainfall totals in the San Francisco Bay Area are an astonishing 600 percent of normal for this time of year. In almost every watershed throughout the state, total rainfall is well above normal, and in the Sierras, the all-important snowpack is now sitting at exactly 200 percent of normal.

With all this rain and snow, it might seem like California’s multiyear, devastating drought has come to a welcome and very wet end. But according to the experts, we can’t believe our lying eyes. When Politico reporters asked California’s state climatologist, Michael Anderson, if the drought was over, “in short, no,” was his answer. Anderson had just “had a conversation about that” with a UC San Diego water expert who had the temerity to suggest that California’s drought was over.

So, it’s raining and snowing like hell these days, with no end in sight, but we’re still in a drought. That’s the official line, and wavering is not allowed.

As reported by News 1 in Los Angeles, “Despite storms, state reservoirs aren’t likely to return to normal levels this year.” From NBC News: “California has been hammered with rain. It may not be enough to reverse its drought.” From Bloomberg: “California Deluge Is Still Far Too Little to End Drought’s Grip.”

Why California’s Man-Made Drought Will Continue

Despite experts predicting for years that Californians would need to rely less on a diminishing snowpack and more on harvesting water from storm runoff, the state has done little to prepare. Even if that isn’t a permanent new reality, it’s happened often enough in recent years to warrant adaptive measures. But here we are, in 2023, and when the rain stops, and if the snow melts prematurely, Californians will likely face another year of drought restrictions.

California has massive reservoirs, sufficient to supply the state through drought years, but state water managers won’t allow them to fill up in January. If they do, runoff from spring storms and melting snow may go straight over the spillways, causing flooding downstream. The assumption had always been that these reservoirs should be left half-empty throughout the winter to protect communities downstream from flooding, and would not be allowed to fill until May or June as the snow finally melted and the probability of large new storms was lower.

Knowing when to stop releasing and start saving water in California’s reservoirs requires knowing if more late spring storms are coming, and whether or not an early heat wave will send the snowpack cascading out of the mountains prematurely. This is impossible to predict, so California’s water managers err on the side of caution, and year after year, they let the water out.

The problem is compounded by environmentalist-inspired regulations, perpetually expanding, to leave a minimum flow in the rivers to protect fish. The result during dry years is that farmers and urban water agencies downstream from these depleted reservoirs are not permitted to withdraw water because the flow is necessary for the ecosystems. Never mind that in the days before dams, anadromous fish species simply stayed in the ocean in the years when the rivers ran dry.

However valid concerns over flooding and aquatic habitats may be, there are known solutions. But they face the gauntlet of obligatory, protracted, biased studies, endless environmentalist litigation, legislative indecision, hostile government bureaucracies, and powerful business and financial interests that profit from water scarcity.

Missed Opportunities

If downstream flooding is a concern, as it should be, there are remedies. One fix is to construct new dams upstream from existing flood control dams. The lower dam could then be used as it always has been, mostly for flood control, and the upper dam could be allowed to fill.

But in the face of relentless pressure from environmentalists, two major dams that might have fulfilled these criteria were never built. On the North Fork of the American River, the proposed Auburn Dam would have stored 2.3 million acre-feet of water and would have been upstream from the existing Folsom Reservoir, which could then have been used exclusively for flood control. Environmentalists declared filling the Auburn Canyon would be an ecological catastrophe, and the Auburn Dam project died.

Also killed by environmentalists was the Temperance Flat Reservoir, which would have been upstream from the existing Millerton Reservoir on the San Joaquin River. Temperance Flat, which could have been filled up by the torrential rains that have already blown through California this year would have stored another 1.3 million acre-feet.

Another way to reserve runoff without compromising flood controls is to build off-stream reservoirs. These are constructed in arid valleys with minimal runoff and no major rivers, but they are pumped full using water taken from California’s rivers and aqueducts during storms. Only one major off-stream reservoir exists in California, the massive San Luis Reservoir, with a capacity to hold 2 million acre-feet, even though dozens of promising locations were identified during the heyday of the California Water Project in the 1950s and ’60s.

As it is, a few major off-stream reservoirs are still being considered, but they’re not getting anywhere despite the will of the people.

California’s voters in 2014 overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a water bond that would have funded the proposed Sites Project, an off-stream reservoir originally planned to hold 2 million-acre feet. But Sites remains tied up in litigation, endless planning, and only half-hearted and belated efforts by the state to secure matching federal funds.

Meanwhile, other badly needed off-stream reservoir proposals are getting nowhere. The Pacheco Reservoir, which would provide essential backup storage for urban water agencies serving Silicon Valley, is tied up in environmentalist litigation and funding controversy. The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir, designed to serve farmers in the upper San Joaquin Valley, is barely out of the concept stage, but the day it becomes anything more than a dream it is sure to end up with environmentalist lawsuits that will tie it up in knots.

Even if all these reservoirs were built and allowed to fill, how much of the subsequently released water would be untouchable and reserved exclusively for aquatic ecosystem health? It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the environmentalist mantra—and one never effectively challenged in California—goes something like this: “The more water you leave in the river, the better, and the only truly acceptable management strategy is to leave all the water in the river.” This is a recipe for perpetual water scarcity, and that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Unless it rains all winter and well into the spring, and perhaps even if it does, millions of acres of farmland will be taken out of production, and urban residents will be required to kill their lawns and take short showers. The absurdity of this policy in action can be seen in how water is currently managed in the biggest hydraulic choke point in the state, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In just the first two weeks of this year, over 3 million acre-feet of fresh water have passed through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and flowed into the San Francisco Bay, but of that, only 260,000 acre-feet has been diverted by the state and federal pumps into the aqueducts Californians depend on to deliver water to reservoirs in southern and central California. This is only two-thirds of their pumping capacity, which in any case is grossly inadequate and hasn’t been upgraded in over 50 years.

There is no rational justification for this. This volume of water has not swept through the Delta since the floods of 2017. Moving a much higher percentage of this much floodwater into southbound aqueducts and aquifers cannot possibly harm Delta ecosystems, when the remaining flow is still more water than the Delta and San Francisco Bay estuaries have seen in several years. Where is the hardware? Where is the will?

Why isn’t it possible, when levees throughout the Delta region are currently failing from flooding rivers, for existing infrastructure to be used to move desperately needed water south to badly depleted storage facilities?

Practical Solutions Encounter Endless Delays and Obstacles

The solutions to flooding and the solutions to drought have a compelling symmetry. If you solve one, you have probably also solved the other. California could have all the water it needs through smart investment in infrastructure. The system of dams and aqueducts built 50 years ago still holds up remarkably well, and upgrading and adding to those assets to meet 21st-century requirements is well within the technical and financial capacity of Californians. The problem is all political.

New and innovative proposals permitting more fresh water withdrawals from the Delta even during periods of reduced precipitation should be evaluated and fast-tracked. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Blueprintproposes to install perforated pipes into engineered channels with the Delta to divert additional tens of thousands of acre-feet per day without disrupting currents or harming fish populations.

Along with more surface storage, California’s capacious aquifers can store millions of acre-feet of runoff. While percolation basins permit slow recharge of groundwater, recently discovered underground flumes in the Central Valley could allow rapid water diversions into underground storage. It is estimated there are over 100 million acre-feet of available underground storage capacity in California’s Central Valley aquifers, and possibly much more.

Across California’s cities, a recent study by the Pacific Institute claims up to 3 million acre-feet of urban storm runoff can be harvested and treated every year, equaling nearly 50 percent of California’s total urban water demand.

Desalination plants, which could deliver hundreds of thousands of acre-feet each year to California’s arid coastal cities regardless of drought conditions, are perhaps the most fiercely opposed of any project by environmentalists. Despite successful installations from Israel to Australia and from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, only one major desalination plant ever got past the activists in California: the Carlsbad plant just north of San Diego.

There are plenty of ways to solve California’s new set of water challenges, and there is plenty of money to get it done. What is lacking is the will to legislate remedies to the many bureaucratic and litigious obstacles, so Californians can plan and complete these projects in years instead of decades.

California’s Animist Hoi Polloi and Their Enablers

If you want to characterize the mentality of California’s elites, it’s easy enough to encapsulate in a few phrases: “This land belongs to the wildlife, and humans are intruders.”

This is more than an ideology. It is the official state religion of California. It requires its practitioners to worship the earth and the animals, and place these creatures above themselves. It is the animist antithesis of Christianity, which enjoins humanity to worship God and to steward the earth.

This would explain why California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, with wolves reintroduced into California, is now considering petitions to reintroduce grizzly bears. It would explain why ranchers are prohibited from shooting coyotes that threaten their livestock. They can’t even kill wild boar, an introduced species of uncommon intelligence and destructiveness. By the time you get the permit, your calves are dead.

This animist religion is why, to return to the subject of water management in California, you can’t declare open season on striped bass, an alien predator that is killing far more salmon than altered river habitat. Enabled by sport fishing associations that want to keep the bass large and plentiful, water experts are designing contorted schemesto micromanage river flow and temperature in order to maximize the salmons’ chances against the bass.

Water for salmon, salmon for bass, trophy bass for anglers, a dustbowl for farmers, rationing for residents, and fully actualized animist activists. This is life in California under its chic green alternative religion. Animals are sacred, while humans are toxic and must be restricted and rationed.

To appreciate just how elitist and hypocritical this animist bias has become in California, consider the members of the California Coastal Commission. In May, commissioners voted unanimously to deny approval of a major new desalination plant in Southern California. One of the commissioners on this 12-member board has lived on a $35 million estate in Los Angeles’s tony Pacific Palisades. Sitting on over an acre of lush landscaping, this 11,000-square-foot home is part of a neighborhood sprinkled with the mansions of film executives and movie stars. Imagine how much water these households consume.

How can someone that fortunate, whose “water footprint” can’t possibly come anywhere close to the 42 gallons per person per day limit the state legislature has mandated to take effect by 2030, justify voting against a desalination plant that would have made life easier for hundreds of thousands of Californians? Here’s your answer:

According to the Coastal Commission’s voluminous report denying the desalination project: “The Regional Water Quality Control Board determined that Poseidon’s ongoing impacts to marine life would be equal to a loss of productivity from 423 acres of nearshore and estuarine waters.”

That’s the extent of it. A “loss of productivity” in an area of ocean less than one square mile in size. If you can’t do something that minimal in exchange for 56,000 acre-feet of guaranteed fresh water per year, you can’t do anything.

This antihuman religion and elitist hypocrisy infect thousands of influential Californians. But reforming the bureaucracies that are imposing water scarcity on millions of other Californians would require more than replacing the directors. Nearly every bureaucrat staffing these massive regulatory organizations is a product of a deep green, faith-based educational system that preached animism. Thoroughly indoctrinated, they care more about animals than they care about people.

Californians are squandering millions of acre-feet of storm runoff even as they face permanent water rationing. Until tens of millions of Californians stand up to the thousands of activist bureaucrats who wield power over their water and energy, and demand balanced policies that embrace abundance, nothing will change.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Harvesting the Deluge is an Opportunity for Californians

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It doesn’t take a hydrologist to know Californians are getting an unusual amount of rain. Totals in the San Francisco Bay Area are an astonishing 600 percent of normal for this time of year. In almost every watershed throughout the state, total rainfall is well above normal, and in the Sierras, the all important snowpack is now sitting at exactly 200 percent of normal.

With this quantity of water already delivered from the sky, with so much more on the way, one might think that drought restrictions could be lifted. But not so fast. Despite predicting for years that Californians were going to need to rely less on a diminishing snowpack and more on harvesting water from storm runoff, the state has done little to take advantage of the new normal. When the rain stops and the snow melts prematurely, Californians will likely face another year of drought restrictions.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 2014 voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a water bond that would have funded the sort of water storage projects that we could use right now. But that was over 8 years ago, and not one project has started construction. The proposed Sites Reservoir, an offstream facility originally planned to hold two million acre feet, remains tied up in litigation, endless planning, and only half-hearted and belated efforts by the state to secure matching federal funds. The proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir, which would have held 1.5 million acre feet and which would have been built upstream from an existing reservoir, was killed by state bureaucrats in defiance of the will of the voters.

But even if these reservoirs were built, would they have been filled? In just the first eight days of 2022, over 1.5 million acre feet of runoff has flowed through the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, but of that, only 138,000 acre feet has been diverted by the state and federal pumps into the aqueducts we depend on to deliver water to reservoirs in southern and central California. This is less than half what these pumps are capable of moving south.

Californians should be asking why, when levees throughout the Delta region are currently failing from flooding rivers, it isn’t possible for existing infrastructure to be used to move desperately needed water south to badly depleted storage facilities?

The solutions to flooding and the solutions to drought have a compelling symmetry. If you solve one, you have probably also solved the other. New proposals that would permit more fresh water withdrawals from the Delta even during periods of reduced precipitation should be evaluated and fast tracked. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint proposes to install perforated pipes into engineered channels to divert tens of thousands of acre feet per day without disrupting currents or harming fish populations.

Along with more surface storage, California’s capacious aquifers offer the means to store millions of acre feet of runoff. While percolation basins permit slow recharge of groundwater, recently discovered underground flumes hold the potential to allow rapid diversions of water into underground storage.

Across California’s cities, a recent study by the Pacific Institute claims up to 3.0 million acre feet of storm runoff can be harvested and treated every year, an amount equal to nearly 50 percent of California’s total urban water demand.

There are plenty of ways to solve California’s new set of water challenges, and there is plenty of money to get it done. What is lacking is the will to legislate remedies to the many bureaucratic and litigious obstacles, so Californians can plan and complete these projects in years instead of decades.

This article originally appeared in the print edition of the Orange County Register.

These Projects Can Solve the Water Crisis and Protect Farms

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Despite seasonal rainfall at normal levels so far this year, the California Department of Water Resources on Dec. 1 announced an initial State Water Project allocation of 5% of requested supplies for 2023. Unless heavy rains or new policies change this decision, it will mark the third consecutive year that the State Water Project delivered only 5% to its customers.

This is an avoidable problem. By the end of December 2021, for example, only three months into the water year, two massive storm systems had already dumped more than 104 million acre-feet onto California’s watersheds. Almost none of it was captured by reservoirs or diverted into aquifers.

For nearly 40 years, the political consensus in California has been to cope with droughts by increasing conservation mandates. During that time, the state’s population has increased from 24 million to nearly 40 million, and farm production has increased in virtually every category. But due to conservation, agricultural water use has been constant, averaging about 34 million acre-feet per year.

Several factors are breaking this model despite a 40-year history of alleged success. Replacing flood irrigation with drip irrigation was a short-term solution. Flood irrigation in the fields downstream from the Sierra mimicked annual flooding prior to the construction of dams and levees—and replenished the aquifers.

Increased environmental requirements for less water diversion from rivers for agriculture have forced additional groundwater pumping at the same time as those aquifers were no longer being replenished by flood irrigation. As depleted aquifers collapse and percolation is no longer possible, the soil dies.

California policymakers have decided to prioritize river flow to protect salmon and other native fish, even though invasive striped bass have now been identified as a major cause of salmon losses. Those flow policies, combined with destruction of aquifers thanks to drip irrigation and a failure to construct any new facilities to capture more storm runoff have left Californians unable to cope with droughts.

Until a new consensus is reached on water policy, draconian rationing is the only option. Expect millions of acres of fallowed or ruined farmland and cities devoid of outdoor landscaping.

There is an alternative. Here are some water projects that ought to be moving forward in California:

• Build desalination at scale: Desalination has the unique virtue of being an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. But so far, there is only one major desalination plant in California, located just north of San Diego. The $1 billion Carlsbad Desalination Plant went into operation in 2015 and desalinates 56,000 acre-feet of water per year, enough to serve 400,000 people.

• Build off-stream reservoirs: The virtue of off-stream reservoirs is they are constructed in arid valleys and won’t disrupt the flow of natural rivers with a high dam. Instead, flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events.The largest proposed project, the $4 billion Sites Reservoir north of Sacramento, would store 1.5 million acre-feet. Its annual yield could irrigate more than 150,000 acres of farmland.

• Build wastewater recycling projects: The proposed Carson plant in Los Angeles County is planned to recycle 168,000 acre-feet of wastewater per year at a projected construction cost of $3.4 billion. This, however, is just a fraction of the total available wastewater stream in the Los Angeles Basin. If all urban wastewater in California were recycled, it would add an estimated 2.0 million acre-feet per year to the water supply, as well as improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.

• Support environmentally friendly Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta diversions to San Joaquin Valley aquifers: The draft “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley” proposes constructing channels inside delta islands where fresh water could be safely taken from perforated pipes beneath a gravel bed during periods of excess storm runoff, while at the same time continuing to provide fresh water in the Delta necessary for farming.

The Blueprint also proposes a new $500 million central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the pipes in the delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre-feet. Groundwater supplies could be greatly enhanced from this canal, which would include connections to Friant-Kern and Delta-Mendota canals and the California Aqueduct, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers.

These four project categories have the potential to eliminate water scarcity in California forever. If Californians are destined to endure decade-long droughts with minimal snow and only a few big storms each year, these projects will ensure that sufficient water is harvested and stored to keep cities and farmland healthy and green.

This commentary originally appeared in Ag Alert, a publication of the California Farm Bureau.

Revitalizing the Los Angeles River

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“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.”
Ezekiel 47:9

From the dawn of recorded history, humans built cities along rivers. Over 6,000 years ago, Sumerian city-states grew along the fertile banks of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers system, relying on these rivers for irrigation and transportation, water to drink and fish to eat. And in the millennia to follow, from the Yangtze to the Mississippi, across the continents, rivers have been the enabling arteries of civilization.

With the arrival of the industrial revolution came rapid population growth and an explosion of new technology. In 1800 the earth and its rivers sustained 990 million people; today, that number approaches 8 billion. As cities expanded along their rivers, to prevent winter floods, dams and levees at an unprecedented scale were constructed to contain them. And at the same time as many urban rivers were transformed into gigantic drainage culverts, their waters were fouled by contaminated runoff, poorly treated sewage, and outfall from industry.

The turning point in the desecration of urban rivers was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the modern environmental movement began in reaction to polluted air and water. A defining event of this era came in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it literally caught fire. The Cleveland Press at the time reported the Cuyahoga as a river so polluted that it “oozes rather than flows.”

Since then, significant progress has been made cleaning up urban rivers in America and around the world, although in nations that are still rapidly industrializing, progress has been more aspirational than actual. But concurrent with this progress, another trend emerged, starting in the 1980s, which is not only to clean up urban rivers, but to revitalize them. From Philadelphia to Portland, cities across America are rediscovering their rivers not only as waterways to be purified, but as aesthetic treasures to be restored.

Nowhere is the potential and complexity of urban river revitalization more evident than in the multifaceted, continuously evolving efforts to restore the Los Angeles River. It encompasses all the highlights of a universal story. In the beginning the river ran unobstructed from its headwaters in the San Gabriel Mountains into the Pacific. With many peaks in excess of 9,000 feet, and the crest barely 30 miles from the ocean, when clouds dumped rain against these ramparts the runoff dumped rich silt onto a broad floodplain.

Early settlers believed they were living in an Arcadian paradise, and as the city grew from a small pueblo into a bustling town, the Los Angeles River provided ample water for people and farms. But with the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which tripled the available water for the growing city, the value of water from the Los Angeles River became less appreciated, at the same time as its propensity to overflow its banks became a liability.

After two massive storms hit Los Angeles in early 1938, generating floods that caused massive damage and killed over 100 people, the citizens overwhelmingly supported a solution that would finally tame the volatile river. The 1930s was a decade characterized by big engineering projects in America, and into Los Angeles came the Army Corps of Engineers to channelize the entire 51 miles of urban waterway.

By 1960, with its transformation complete, the Los Angeles River had acquired its now iconic look. A gigantic culvert. Surrounded by high voltage power lines, industrial depots, sweatshops and prisons, it became a dystopian wasteland, its natural splendor erased. Apart from serving as the biggest prop in movie history, an often post-apocalyptic backdrop for hundreds of movies and television shows, the Los Angeles River was forgotten.

The national awakening to environmentalism in the 1970s brought renewed awareness by local residents to the Los Angeles River as an example of industrial disregard, and also, increasingly, as a neglected amenity with spectacular potential. Over the past 20 years, serious efforts have begun to transform the river into a glorious connective centerpiece of a great city. It’s not going to be easy.

Revitalizing an urban river is an undertaking that requires incorporating and balancing several potentially conflicting objectives. For starters, whatever transformation is ultimately realized must still fulfill the function offered by the giant culvert: major storms must not cause major flooding. To do that, either the flood channel needs to be left mostly intact, or diversions have to be created along the entire 51 mile length to buffer the runoff during extreme weather. Fortunately, those buffers also serve to accomplish other important objectives.

For example, “daylighting” the many smaller tributaries of the Los Angeles River, which means opening up below ground storm drains and turning them into above ground streams, permits rewilding sections of the urban watershed, percolation in the unlined new channels, diversion to additional storage ponds and spreading basins, and primary filtration of toxic runoff as it flows through vegetation. Daylighting, as described, also reduces the volume and velocity of runoff during storms.

Among the goals for the future of the Los Angeles River, the preservation of flood control cannot be overemphasized. In December 2021, in one day, 2.3 inches of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles. The downpour was that much or more across the Los Angeles River’s 823 square mile watershed, but even at that rate, 108,000 acre feet of rainwater fell from the sky, and most of it came down that river because it fell too fast to soak in upstream, and ran right off the paved surfaces in the urban area.

For comparison, 108,000 acre feet in one day is equal to 35 billion gallons per day, whereas wastewater treatment plants on the Los Angeles River which have restored a placid flow to middle portions of the urban river discharge 30 million gallons per day, one-thousand times less. Clearly to whatever extent revitalization reduces the river’s capacity to handle storms, diversions and storage must make up the difference.

An April 2022 study released by the Pacific Institute claims urban storm water capture could add as much as 3 million acre feet to the urban water supply. Doing that would require removing a laundry list of pollutants that are swept into runoff before it hits urban storm drains including nitrogen, phosphorus, copper, zinc, hydrocarbons, synthetic organics, pathogens; the list is long. But treating and storing runoff, while expensive, solves several problems simultaneously – it stores water for urban use, it prevents flooding, and the water that is released into the river is less contaminated.

Along with fulfilling its primary role as an actual river, however, comes the myriad demands of a massive city. The opportunities and challenges of lining its beautified banks with people friendly amenities. Accommodating the dreams of local politicians and investors. Respecting environmentalist concerns. Welcoming and coordinating participation from thousands of agencies and private interests. And then, somehow, weaving all of this into a coherent vision for a revitalized river and finding the money to pay for it all.

To this end, countless detailed proposals have been produced, of which at least three are influential planning resources. In 2007, the City of Los Angeles produced its “Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan.” In 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a “Los Angeles River Ecosystem Restoration Integrated Feasibility Report.” and in June 2022, the County of Los Angeles published the “LA River Master Plan.” All of these lengthy reports, each with predecessors and subsequent updates, constitute a blueprint for turning the Los Angeles River back into a river.

An encouraging theme shared by these documents is the recognition that no one entity will be able to fund all of the work or perform all of the work. To that end, for example, in the City of Los Angeles document, a “river management area” is defined, and a community planning framework is established to coordinate a relatively decentralized development effort involving government, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic sources of funding and implementation.

Along the entire river corridor, shared goals include restoring water quality, runoff capture and flood storage, and where possible restore a functioning ecosystem. Also, if possible, construct an unbroken river greenway complete with public access points, bike and walking paths, parks and wetlands, along the entire 51 mile stretch urban river from Canoga Park upstream all the way down to the estuary in Long Beach.

Nothing about this is going to be easy. Ironically, water quality and flow in the river began to improve when three wastewater treatment plants began discharging over 30,000 acre feet per year of clean, treated water into the LA River. This flow, which has created a perennial stream in the downtown section of the LA River, is now jeopardized as the cities operating these treatment plants make plans to upgrade the treatment to direct potable reuse. If those plans come to fruition, all that wastewater will no longer go into the river, but instead will go right back into the water mains to be reused.

This possibility highlights a reality facing any attempt to revitalize an urban ecosystem, which is that whatever vitality is created will not be the same as what was once there, and to the extent a perennial flow can be preserved in the river, it will require more money and face questions of sustainability. Should water be imported hundreds of miles into the LA Basin merely to maintain year-round flows in the Los Angeles River? Can treated water continue to be discharged into the LA River, but then be recaptured in downstream aquifers to minimize waste?

Another difficult paradox that revitalizing the river corridor brings is the impact of gentrification. By creating desirable green space along what had previously been a bleak concrete culvert, property values soar. As posh restaurants suddenly line the banks of an urban canyon where kayakers frolic below in whitewater rapids, riparian land values soar, and multigenerational families get priced out of their homes and apartments. How to redevelop a place without driving away the people who could only afford to live there before it became prime real estate is a classic riddle. The river in Los Angeles is no exception.

In what is perhaps the most thorough recent discussion of how the Los Angeles River may reinvent itself, in the journal Places, USC Professor of Landscape Architecture Alexander Robinson wrote “There remains an urgent need for further exploration of ambitious strategies.” That’s not easy, for at least two reasons. First, of course, because of the extraordinary complexity of the undertaking, with many goals inherently in conflict with each other that must be balanced.

But also because the world has changed. For better or worse, ambitious strategies to alter the urban canvas, however inspiring, encounter resistance that didn’t exist a century ago. More stakeholders. More litigation. Imperatives that perhaps should have been attended to in the old days, but we either didn’t know any better or didn’t care. Taking everything into account, the idea that a 21st century version of the urban planning autocrat Robert Moses could achieve his vision for the river in a few short years is laughable, however ambitious it might be.

On the other hand, the forces working to revitalize the Los Angeles River have steadily grown stronger and the broad consensus to make it clean and beautiful again will only build in the coming years. It will take several decades before the Los Angeles River has fully realized its new incarnation. The process will be painstakingly slow, but the tide has turned. Where for a time there was only an indifferent metropolis of concrete and steel, a ribbon of life will again nurture wild creatures and human souls.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions

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When it comes to cost-effective ways to increase the supply of water to California’s cities and farms, every idea should be considered. The residential, commercial and industrial water requirements of California’s 40 million people add up to about 8 million acre feet of water per year. The nine million acres of irrigated farmland that produces the food they eat, requires another 30 million acre feet of water per year.

With droughts and increasing priority given to letting water stay in the rivers to maintain ecosystem health, this water supply is threatened. Water scarcity and water rationing, along with fallowing millions of acres of farmland, is the only answer California’s legislature seems to support. Efforts to increase the water supply have been incremental at best.

From a cost perspective, most supply solutions are financially viable, but nonetheless quite expensive. For example, only about one-third of California’s urban wastewater is recycled. Construction costs to upgrade every water treatment plant in the state that isn’t already turning sewage back into recycled water for landscaping or even for potable reuse would cost about $20 billion, and give back up to 2 million acre feet per year.

Desalination is another option, but is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about one million acre feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other options are there?

In an era that may involve warmer and dryer winters, with less rain and less snowpack, it is necessary to more efficiently harvest runoff from the storms that do hit the state. The traditional way to do this is via reservoir storage, but in-stream reservoirs cannot be allowed to fill from early storm runoff, because that would take away their ability to prevent flooding if there are late spring storms. Then if late sprint storms don’t materialize, there’s inadequate reservoir storage and another water shortage.

Off-stream reservoirs, by contrast, don’t block the flow of a natural river. they are typically constructed in arid valleys, and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. Using the proposed Sites Reservoir as an example ($4.0 billion for an annual yield of 500,000 acre feet per year), off-stream reservoirs could capture and release one million acre feet per year for a construction cost of $8 billion. But where will the water come from?

A new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley,” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200-acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre-feet per year or more, at a cost of $1 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre-feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to the Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California aqueducts, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

This idea has extraordinary potential. Its preliminary construction cost estimate of $1.5 billion to harvest and recover 2.0 million acre feet per year of Delta runoff is a rough order of magnitude lower than any other possible solution.

Moreover, it may well be feasible to safely harvest more than 2.0 million acre feet from the Delta every year. 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.”

This is a very encouraging fact. 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.

An environmentally friendly Delta diversion project has several appealing aspects. Unlike the Delta pumps, these extraction channels would not harm fish, nor would they alter the current of the Delta which causes salt water intrusion. Their high capacity may make building the controversial Delta Tunnel unnecessary. Storing high volumes of water in San Joaquin Valley aquifers with a known capacity in excess of Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined would take away the need for more reservoirs at the same time as it would make possible almost a limitless capacity to store water from wet years to use in dry years.

The solutions offered by the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint will benefit farmers, but they will also benefit every coastal urban water agency in the state. Many Southern California water agencies have banked water in Lake Mead, and with that lake at a historic low, they are unable to access that water. Having large scale water banking available just over the hill in the Central Valley is a much safer and practical option. The next step for this project is to build a demonstration facility. And here is where reality already intrudes.

Every water expert consulted for opinions on environmentally friendly Delta diversions had the same answer: It’s a good idea, but it will require 25 years of environmental studies, endless litigation, and there’s a good chance at the end of all that, it still won’t get built.

This is the problem. It has nothing to do with nature and droughts and climate change and wildlife protection. It has to do with a special interest juggernaut whose business model is built on obstructionism and conflict. It doesn’t even have to do with the staggering and unnecessarily inflated cost for any water project undertaken in California, because this state can easily afford any one of the above solutions. Those problems are manageable.

But until California’s politicians, from Gavin Newsom all the way down to an elected board director at the smallest water district in the state, stand up to environmentalist extremists and the scarcity profiteers who pull their strings, there will never again be enough water.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Creating Water Abundance in California

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“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.”
Ezekiel 47:9

Water is Life. For as long as there has been civilization, access to water has been an unyielding prerequisite. California is no exception. As its population grew, the state built one of the most remarkable systems of interbasin water transfers in the world. Every year, nearly 40 million acre feet of water is diverted from remote rivers and transported to magnificent coastal cities or used to irrigate rich farmland. But the whole system needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.

Here are some water projects that ought to be moving forward in California:

(1) Desalination at scale: There is only one major desalination plant in California, located just north of San Diego. At a total project cost of just over $1.0 billion, the Carlsbad Desalination Project went into operation in 2015 and desalinates 55 thousand acre feet of water per year. Desalination has the unique virtue of being an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. Every other water source, ultimately, depends on how much rain we get. In combination with wastewater recycling, building several more large desalination plants could enable California’s coastal cities to become nearly independent of imported water. Potential sites for their construction are already available.

New desalination plants could be co-located with existing natural gas power plants on the California coast, or co-locate with Diablo Canyon, or on the site of the former San Onofre nuclear power plant. These power plant sites have infrastructure already constructed that can be repurposed, reducing construction costs. Desalination construction costs about $20,000 per acre foot of annual capacity, which is grossly overpriced, thanks to gross overregulation and incessant litigation. Those excess costs are the result of political choices that the state legislature could fix. Desalination plants are getting built for one-fifth that amount in Israel today.

But even at inflated costs, having secure access to desalinated water would give urban water agencies negotiating leverage when purchasing imported water. And desalination plants can be designed to have a useful life that greatly exceeds the period of time needed to pay off the financing which represents about 70 percent of the annual cost for desalinated water.

The idea that desalination uses too much energy is a myth. It requires 400 megawatts of continuous power to desalinate 1 MAF per year of seawater. This is roughly equivalent to the cost to pump water from Northern California into the coastal cities of Southern California.

(2) Off-stream reservoirs: The virtue of an off-stream reservoir is that it will not block the flow of a natural river with a high dam. Instead, off-stream reservoirs are constructed in arid valleys and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. The water is then redirected to farms and cities as needed during the summer months. Here are three badly needed off-stream reservoirs:

The Pacheco Reservoir in Santa Clara County. This proposed reservoir – to be located in a remote valley that is watered by a small stream, but not a major river – will store water from the California Aqueduct for delivery to South SF Bay customers. At an estimated cost of $2.5 billion it will store 140,000 acre feet.

The Sites Reservoir north of the Delta. At an estimated cost of $4.0 billion, this off-stream reservoir will store 1.5 MAF, tapping storm runoff in the Sacramento River. In the proposal stage for decades, this reservoir has secured about half the funding needed for construction, but like all reservoir proposals, remains the target of vigorous opposition from environmentalists.

The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir. This proposed off-stream reservoir will store 82,000 acre feet of water. It will collect water from the California Aqueduct. Estimated cost $500 million.

(3) Wastewater Recycling Projects: Construction of the proposed Carson water recycling plant in Los Angeles County needs to be fast-tracked, with immediate follow up to construct another one in order to recycle 100 percent of water imported into Los Angeles. At a projected cost of $3.4 billion, the Carson plant is currently planned to recycle 168,000 acre feet of water per year. This is just a fraction of the total available wastewater stream in the Los Angeles Basin.

The problem with treated wastewater, in the Santa Monica Bay and also in the San Francisco Bay, is primarily the negative impact excess nitrogen has on aquatic ecosystems. If all urban wastewater in California as recycled (if it isn’t already), that would add up to nearly 2 million acre feet per year to the water supply, as well as improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.

In Northern California, all of the wastewater recycling plants along the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta need to be upgraded. These urban areas cumulatively are probably contributing nearly one million acre feet per year of treated but nitrogen rich discharge into the San Francisco Bay. Upgrading these plants would not only proportionately reduce the amount of water these cities have to import from the State Water Project, Hetch Hetchy, and elsewhere, but, crucially, these upgrades would improve the water quality in the San Francisco Bay. This in turn would lessen the quantity of floodwater that must currently be allowed to flow through the bay to dilute and wash out the pollution coming from these treatment plants.

The estimated cost to upgrade all urban wastewater plants in California to reusable standards (either irrigation or indirect/direct potable reuse) is $20 billion. I expect the real number is higher. It must be done.

(4) Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions to San Joaquin Valley Aquifers: An exciting new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200 acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre feet per year or more, at a cost of $1.0 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California Aqueduct, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

These four projects have the potential to eliminate water scarcity in California forever. If Californians are destined to endure decade long droughts, where there is minimal snow and only a few big storms each year, these projects will ensure that sufficient water is harvested and stored to keep cities and farmland green.

These water projects aren’t the only desirable investments Californians should make to create water abundance. Also needed, for example, are facilities for harvesting urban storm runoff, and provisions to return some of this runoff to reservoir storage to maintain river flows. The Los Angeles River, for example, currently flows year round in the upper urban portion of the river, thanks to three wastewater treatment plants, which once upgraded, will no longer offer perennial outfall.

This evinces another crucial consideration; new water supply infrastructure, and water abundance, is also necessary to maintain ecosystem health. In barely two centuries, a civilization, now 40 million strong, has descended on what had been a nearly empty state. Massive civilization has a massive footprint, and nature in California will never be the same as it once was. Effectively nurturing the natural ecosystems of California requires recognizing they too require artificial, human inputs and human management. Against a backdrop of abundance, why shouldn’t desalinated water flow down a revitalized Los Angeles River? Why shouldn’t water stored in reservoirs guarantee perennial flows in the San Joaquin River?

It is possible to deliver 40 million acre feet per year to California’s cities and farms, while also diverting and releasing additional millions of acre feet every year to sustain flourishing aquatic ecosystems. Investing in water abundance, by upgrading California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century, can make this a reality.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

California Water Facts for Legislators

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Everyone in California agrees that water policies need to adapt to changing times. There is even growing agreement that enforcing draconian reductions to farm water allocations (which will eliminate all but the most powerful corporate agribusinesses) and outlawing household outdoor watering will not only fail to solve the problem, but is a tough and undesirable solution. And so the debate over more rationing versus more water supply projects goes on.

Missing from the debate over water policy in California, however, especially among the state legislators who need to do something about it, are some basic overall metrics regarding how much water we need, what various types of water projects cost, how much potential capacity each type of project delivers, and how much energy is involved. Here’s a summary.

When quantifying macro variables of this nature, first it is important to note that for any project category, costs are not uniform. A wastewater recycling plant, for example, will cost more to construct and more to operate depending on the type of wastewater it has to process. The cost to build and operate a conveyance to deliver water from a recycling plant or desalination plant direct to the consumer or to a storage facility will vary depending on the length of the conveyance and any necessary elevation changes. So these are rough numbers. They are nonetheless vital to begin a more informed discussion of water policy options in California.

The primary measurement used to describe large amounts of water are units of one million acre feet (MAF). To provide an overall perspective, in a wet year, up to 300 MAF of rain falls within California’s borders. With the exception of the upper Klamath Basin, and a few lesser examples, California’s geography is such that our watersheds are roughly congruent with our state border. In a dry year, as little as 100 MAF of rain falls in California. This rainfall either percolates, transpirates, evaporates, or runs down the streams and rivers to the ocean.

Also each year, Californians currently divert about 75 MAF as follows: about 8 MAF to urban water consumers, 34 MAF to farmers, and 34 MAF of “environmental water” to maintain wetlands, river ecosystems, and the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. These numbers represent the seven year average between 2011 and 2018 as reported by the California Dept. of Water Resources.

During these same seven years, to divert 75 MAF each year, California got 5 MAF from the Colorado River, 19 MAF from groundwater extraction, 15 MAF from reuse and recycled water, 6 MAF from federal projects, and 7 MAF from local projects. For much more details on what’s behind these numbers, refer to the 2018 update of the California Water Plan.

To harvest more water from increasingly unpredictable rainfall, to recycle more water that would otherwise be treated and released into the Pacific, and to desalinate brackish water inland and ocean water on the coast, here are some cost estimates. As an aside, this is a hypothetical plan. Do not be alarmed. Plans change. Let’s all work together.

The total amount noted here, $118 billion, is not chosen by accident. The 1957 California Water Plan had a total estimated construction cost of $11.8 billion.  In early 2022 dollars, $11.8 billion is worth $118.5 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. Yet $118.5 billion is only 40 percent of today’s $286 billion state budget.

When evaluating the economics of water supply projects, the construction cost divided by the annual output (or “yield” in the case of a reservoir) is a useful ratio. For example, the projected cost to build the proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir divided by its expected annual yield is equal to $20,000 per acre foot, exactly the same as the cost/output ratio to build a desalination plant.

One may argue that Temperance Flat is on the extreme end of the cost equation – which by the way should not eliminate this critical south-of-the-delta reservoir opportunity from consideration – but desalination costs are also overstated.

For example, raising the height of the Shasta Dam is an extremely cost effective way to secure more water supply, at $4,000 of construction cost per acre foot of yield. But that cost-effectiveness is matched by desalination projects in Israel today that are not subject to California’s insane regulatory environment, protracted permitting process, needlessly inflated materials costs, and endless and very costly litigation. Desalination projects cost one-fifth as much to build per unit of capacity in Israel as they do in California, and as with all infrastructure in this state, most of the difference is the result of political choices.

Surprisingly, surveying various proposals for urban water recycling to potable standards yielded a range of costs much higher than anticipated. These costs, however, also displayed the widest range of variation, depending on every imaginable factor – differing topography, real estate values, labor costs, design standards, the local political and legal environment, and the character of the wastewater being treated. In general, expect construction costs for wastewater treatment to cost less than desalination in most cases, but not much less. The $18 billion cost cited above to treat 2.0 MAF/year is based on a proprietary study examining a statewide solution. It’s a lot of money, but worth every penny.

What about energy?

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. What about the energy needed to increase California’s water supply?

Using electricity to pump a million acre feet per year via the California aqueduct to Los Angeles consumes about 400 megawatts of continuous power, less about 100 megawatts that is recovered as the water flows back downhill into the Los Angeles Basin.

Desalinating one million acre feet of seawater per year requires 400 megawatts of continuous power, which is a mere 0.4 percent of California’s 100 gigawatts minimum targeted future generating capacity. Therefore to deliver five million acre feet of new water in either of these manners would consume less than two percent of 100 gigawatts.

The energy cost to reuse wastewater is typically 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.

Providing general information on any specific water project is fraught with controversy. But the energy costs for new water can be easily debunked. If California’s politicians are committed to an electric age, the energy cost for more water is trivial compared to what’s going to be necessary to electrify the state’s residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors.

Critics of building more water infrastructure are also on thin ice when they claim it will cost too much money. Capital investments in water supply infrastructure yield long-term economic returns and greatly improve the quality of life for every resident. Spending $100 billion or more on these projects is well within the capacity of California’s economy to sustain. And at the risk of committing conservative heresy, putting $100 billion into the pockets of skilled construction workers will stimulate the economy in the short term, just as having all this new water will stimulate California’s economy in the long term. So channel some of those public education bucks into vocational training. We need the workers, and skills pay better than BAs.

If heavy and perennial rains return to California, spending $100 billion on these projects will ensure perpetual water abundance. But if rains don’t come back stronger than ever, spending this money will create secure climate resilience. Either way, it’s a win.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Fate of the Los Angeles River Epitomizes the Choices Facing Californians

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From its pristine headwaters in the San Gabriel Mountains all the way to its sordid finale as a gigantic culvert emptying into Long Beach Harbor, the Los Angeles River – what’s happened to it and what the future brings – is an apt metaphor for California’s story and California’s ultimate fate.

Until a few years ago, the Los Angeles River was an unrelieved victim of human progress. In less than 150 years, its lower watershed has been transformed from an Arcadian floodplain to an urban metropolis with over ten million inhabitants. After a series of floods in the 1930s devastated the growing city, the Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to tame the river. By the time they were done, what had been a verdant ribbon of life had become a concrete wasteland, dry enough and wide enough for car chase scenes in countless movies, occasionally deluged with safely channeled floodwaters whenever California’s infrequent storms hit the mountains and the water raced down to the sea.

Starting around 1980 the citizens of Los Angeles began to view their river as more than an intriguing eyesore. Under pressure from artists, journalists and environmental activists, the city and county of Los Angeles, with help from the Army Corps, issued a series of studies that imagined a restored river. Most recently, in June 2022, the County of Los Angeles published the “LA River Master Plan.” All of these lengthy reports offer blueprints for turning the Los Angeles River back into a river.

The obstacles that must be overcome in order to restore the Los Angeles River exemplify the gridlock that grips California in every imaginable context involving infrastructure: energy, water, land development, environmental protection. Even relatively simple projects must navigate a labyrinth of federal, state, regional and local agencies, all of which can veto a project. Permit costs and fees are excessive. Approvals take years if not decades. Regulations change and often conflict with each other, and every time any of them are revised, new sets of designs have to be prepared. Tribes in rural areas and disadvantaged communities in urban areas have to approve of whatever gets built. Organized labor has to be accommodated. Powerful environmentalist organizations oppose almost everything. For every scratch in the ground, for every quarrelsome constituency, trial lawyers can litigate projects to a standstill. And for all of these same reasons, construction materials are scarce and expensive.

The opportunity is bigger than these challenges, however. Regardless of how seriously one may view the “climate emergency,” or how aware one might be of the corruption and potential for tyranny that comes with the environmental movement now that it’s jacked up on climate emergency steroids, in the case of the Los Angeles River, there remains the simple and unassailable goal of bringing something beautiful back to life. In the process, there also remains the undeniable practical benefit of mitigating toxic runoff and remediating and recharging urban aquifers.

To cope with the complexity of a river that runs through 51 miles of urbanized landscape, traversing 17 cities, passing railyards, paralleling freeways, coursing through downtown, the City of Los Angeles developed a community planning framework, widely shared, to facilitate decentralized development efforts involving government, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic sources of funding and implementation.

Along the entire 51 mile stretch of urban river from Canoga Park upstream all the way down to the estuary in Long Beach, shared goals include restoring water quality and ecosystem health, providing for runoff capture and flood storage, and wherever possible, constructing an unbroken river greenway complete with public access points, bike and walking paths, parks and wetlands.

Nothing about this is going to be easy. Ironically, water quality and flow in the river began to improve when three wastewater treatment plants began discharging over 30,000 acre feet per year of clean, treated water into the Los Angeles River. This flow, which has created a perennial stream in the downtown section of the river, is now jeopardized as the cities operating these treatment plants make plans to upgrade the treatment to direct potable reuse. If those plans come to fruition, all that wastewater will no longer go into the river, but instead will go right back into the water mains to be reused.

This possibility highlights a reality facing any attempt to revitalize an urban ecosystem, which is that whatever vitality is created will not be the same as what was once there, and to the extent a perennial flow can be preserved in the river, it will require more money and face questions of sustainability. Should water be imported hundreds of miles into the Los Angeles Basin merely to maintain year-round flows in the Los Angeles River? To minimize minimize waste, can treated water continue to be discharged into the river, but then be recaptured in downstream aquifers for reuse?

Another difficult paradox that revitalizing the river corridor brings is when there is beautification, gentrification follows. By creating desirable green space along what had previously been a bleak concrete culvert, property values soar. As posh restaurants suddenly line the banks of an urban canyon where kayakers frolic below in whitewater rapids, riparian land values soar, and multigenerational families get priced out of their homes and apartments. How to redevelop a place without driving away the people who could only afford to live there before it became prime real estate is a classic riddle. The river in Los Angeles is no exception.

Working in favor of a slow but ultimately successful restoration of the Los Angeles River is the powerful consensus to get it done. But there is no statewide consensus to create the abundance that is required for this restoration to succeed in a spectacular fashion. The Los Angeles River, like most parts of California, will never be the same as it was before. It has to be completely reinvented. This can be a good thing. There’s no reason why the Los Angeles River has to dry up in the summer, even if that’s what it did historically. With abundant imported, recycled, and desalinated water, the river can flow year round at the same time as the residents of the Los Angeles Basin, all ten million of them, can have ample water for their households and their landscaping.

This is the bigger challenge facing Californians. Shall we live with abundance, or accept scarcity and rationing? Previous generations of Californians built a nuclear power plants, a self-sufficient oil and gas infrastructure, wide and ample freeways and expressways, and the biggest system of interbasin water storage and transfer assets in the world. All of that is now crumbling beneath the gridlock of special interest exploitation and an out-of-balance environmentalism.

The result is we face tough trade-offs that should not be necessary. Water and energy in California can be abundant and inexpensive. Scarcity is a political choice. If Californians were to develop a new generation of clean and safe nuclear power and natural gas power plants, there would be no shortage of energy. Similarly, if Californians were to repair and upgrade their aqueducts and reservoirs, adding new ways to capture storm runoff, recycle wastewater, and desalinate seawater, there would be no shortage of water.

Most of California’s ecosystems will never return to what they were centuries ago. But they can still thrive. California’s overgrown tinderbox forests are burning up because at the same time as we became extremely adept at suppressing natural fires, policies were enacted that reduced the timber industry to less than one-quarter the annual amount harvested as recently as the 1990s, and prohibitive regulations all but eliminated grazing, controlled burns, and mechanical thinning. Restoring all of these practices would guarantee healthy forests with bountiful wildlife.

If California’s forests have to be managed in order to recover from the impact of civilization, and end up healthy and beautiful again, but different, that is even more the case with the Los Angeles River. The multitude of people and institutions working to revitalize the river should not be limited by scarce water and scarce energy. Californians do not have to accept a future of rationing and high prices. A consensus to enact policies that enable abundance will create jobs and prosperity at the same time as it will render more exciting options to not just manage, but enhance ecosystems.

The Los Angeles River can be revitalized, and more to the point, reinvented to be even greater than it was, becoming the verdant heart of an incredible, entirely fabricated oasis, nurturing one of the greatest cities in the world.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Dam Removal in the American West

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The great cities of the American southwest would not exist if it weren’t for dams. Without the massive federal and state projects to build dams, pumping stations, and aqueducts (most of them completed 50 to 100 years ago), more than 60 million Americans would be living somewhere else. Without dams to capture and store millions of acre-feet of rainfall every year, and aqueducts to transport that water to thirsty metropolitan customers, the land these cities sit upon would be uninhabitable desert.

Such is the conundrum facing environmentalists that want to set these rivers free. Without dams, crops wither and people die of thirst. Without dams, devastating floods would tear through towns and cities every time there’s a big storm. Without hydroelectric power from dams, 18 percent of the in-state generated electricity Californians consume would be gone. You can’t just rip them all out. You would destroy a civilization.

But because of dams, fish habitat is lost, and aquatic species can become endangered or go extinct. Because of dams, precious sediment is prevented from running downstream to nurture estuaries and restore beaches. Because of dams, the natural cycle of rivers is disrupted: the cleansing pulse of spring that calls the migratory salmon to come back from the ocean, the dry trickles of summer when these anadromous species fight their way upstream to the cool and perennial headwaters to spawn, the next season’s rains that return newborn fingerlings to the ocean.

There’s often an aesthetic price to pay as well when dams are built. Perhaps the most notable among them is the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, inundating a deep, granite-walled valley once considered a rival in beauty to neighboring Yosemite, less than 20 miles away. Notwithstanding the dividends the ecosystems of this once pristine valley paid to wildlife, its breathtaking splendor inspired human visitors. In describing the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the great naturalist and writer John Muir said, “I have always called it the Tuolumne Yosemite, for it is a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite, not only in its crystal river and sublime rocks and waterfalls, but in the gardens, groves, and meadows of its flower park-like floor.”

When we attempt to assess the pros and cons of dams and dam removal in the western United States today, Hetch Hetchy is a good focal point. Situated at 3,900 feet above sea level and gathering runoff from the 492-square-mile watershed of the upper Tuolumne River, the 430-foot-tall O’Shaughnessy Dam can hold up to 360,000 acre-feet in what was once the Hetch Hetchy Valley. This water is transported 160 miles through pipes and tunnels, generating 385 constant megawatts of hydroelectricity along the way, finally dumping nearly 300,000 acre-feet per year into the Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is located 238 feet above sea level in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just south of San Francisco.

A sensible environmentalism is one that recognizes that environmentalism must involve trade-offs. If you’re going to get rid of dams because they are an abomination to nature — the environmentalist position — you ought to be starting with Hetch Hetchy. Because of that dam, residents of San Francisco and the upper peninsula cities clustered along the bay are recipients of the most reliable, purest water in California. It only takes five feet of snow in the High Sierra to guarantee San Franciscans their full allotment of water and electricity from Hetch Hetchy, a quantity that is achieved in all but the most severe drought years. Progressive environmentalists in San Francisco might talk a good game about removing dams in other areas, but they are curiously accepting of the massive one that benefits them.

The reality in the American west is that every source of water is imperiled. In an average year, California’s farmers rely on about 30 million acre-feet per year to irrigate not quite 10 million acres of crops (15,600 square miles), and urban water agencies require another 8 million acre-feet per year. Diversions to maintain ecosystem health require at least another 30 million acre-feet.

But groundwater aquifers, which have supplied over 18 million acre-feet per year, are overtapped and will require years of reduced pumping if they are to recover. The Colorado River aqueduct, delivering 5 million acre-feet per year to California, depends on water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, both of which are at historic lows. Eithr Californians are going to develop new sources of fresh water by investing in water-supply infrastructure, or they are going to have to take millions of acres of farmland out of production and subject their residents to unprecedented restrictions on water use. They face a deficit of at least 5 million acre-feet per year.

Which brings us back to California’s dams and reservoirs.

Most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, which means the reservoir is behind a dam blocking a river, controlling 100 percent of its runoff. In-stream reservoirs cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December 2021. If California’s in-stream reservoirs are filled early in the rainy season, should a late-season storm hit the state, no storage capacity would be left to control the runoff and prevent flooding. But during droughts, when an adequate Sierra snowpack fails to develop in order to deliver snowmelt well into the summer months, and no late-season rainstorms inundate the state, summer arrives and the reservoirs are empty.

All of this raises the question: If in-stream dams are to be removed to restore aquatic habitat, why shouldn’t development of new water sources, more than offsetting the lost water supply, be part of the project? Why consider these projects in isolation, instead of connecting them? Off-stream reservoirs, which are situated in arid valleys where water is pumped into them from adjacent rivers during storms, can store millions of acre-feet without disrupting important rivers. Wastewater treatment can reuse effluent that is imported into California’s coastal cities at great cost, only to be discharged into the Pacific Ocean after only one use. Ocean desalination finds an ideal venue on the California coast, yet its potential has barely been tapped. The answer, very often, is the refusal to consider realistic trade-offs.

One of the principal environmentalist groups working to facilitate dam removal is American Rivers, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with affiliates and partners all over the U.S. From a review of the organization’s map of dams removed through 2021, two striking facts emerge: A lot of dams have been removed, and almost all of them have been small dams.

When speaking with Serena McClain, the National Dam Removal Practice Lead for American Rivers, it was clear that her organization didn’t expect to remove any of the 240 very large dams that account for 60 percent of California’s total reservoir storage capacity, or, for that matter, many of the more than 1,200 remaining smaller storage dams. “We don’t have a hit list,” she said, “and we don’t want to remove all dams. We want to find the best solution that helps all parties. The majority of dams are small to midscale. Only 20 percent of the dams that have been removed are in the Army Corps of Engineers’ national inventory of dams, the rest are so small they don’t even qualify.”

“Small” is a relative concept, of course. While the political and financial cost, not to mention the loss of capacity, suggests that it is all but impossible to remove large dams with reservoirs that store hundreds of thousands of acre-feet, some medium-sized dams with reservoirs under 100,000 acre-feet of capacity are definitely targeted. Some of these dams are completely silted up, and their removal faces no opposition.

For example, Matilija Dam in Southern California, 168 feet tall and 620 feet long, built in 1947, originally created a reservoir with a storage capacity of 7,000 acre-feet, but now it is almost completely filled up with silt. Dredging to remove the silt is not cost-effective to recover only 7,000 acre-feet of storage. No longer viable for a reservoir, the dam blocks southern California steelhead-trout migration on the Ventura River, preventing passage to over 50 percent of the primary spawning, rearing, and forging habitat of the river system. The dam also prevents downstream transport of nearly 8 million cubic yards of sediment necessary to maintain the lower-river ecosystem, estuary, and beaches of southern California.

Also in southern California, Rindge Dam is a 100-feet-high concrete dam built in Malibu Creek in 1926. By 1940 the reservoir was filled with sediment, and attempts to remove the sediment were unsuccessful. Removal will allow steelhead trout to access 18 miles of high-quality spawning and rearing habitat in the Malibu Creek watershed.

In northern California, Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam, on the Eel River, are two dams that make up the Potter Valley Project. The Eel River is the third-largest watershed in California, and these dams block salmon and steelhead from reaching the Eel River’s headwaters. But this project is not entirely uncontroversial. Scott Dam, with Lake Pillsbury behind it, has a storage capacity of 74,000 acre-feet. Cape Horn Dam, while small, creates a forebay to divert 70,000 acre-feet per year down into the Potter Valley, to help feed the headwaters of the Russian River. A powerhouse, exploiting the 650-foot drop in elevation, generates 9.5 megawatts whenever water is being diverted into Potter Valley.

Jeffery Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, pointed out that the removal proposal includes retaining the capacity to divert water to consumers on the Russian River, which is of great concern to farmers and water agencies downstream. He told me the only people who may strenuously object to losing Scott Dam are the property owners that enjoy the amenities of Lake Pillsbury, which will no longer exist if the dam is removed.

Mount’s comment, and the Potter Valley Project’s legacy of providing water, power, and recreational amenities, points to a core controversy surrounding dam removal, which is how to define beneficial use. One hundred years earlier, during public debate over whether to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam, proponents pointed to these same public benefits of water, power, and recreation. More recently, the California Water Commission used the concept of public benefit, in which it emphasized benefits to ecosystems (a significantly narrower definition with little room, except indirectly, for the inclusion of human welfare in the equation) as a way to deny adequate funding for some of the dam projects approved by California’s voters in 2014.

The complexity of these issues, the unresolved scientific debate over many of them, and the necessarily subjective choice that has to be made over whether to prioritize human benefit or benefit to wildlife, guarantees that every dam-removal proposal will generate public controversy, but only in proportion to how big the dam facing removal is. A few landowners on the shores of a small and remote lake have almost no political clout.

Put another way, the weight and momentum of the institutional forces that favor removal, which focus on one dam after another, will always overcome local resistance if the dam and its reservoir isn’t very big. These institutional forces include federal and state bureaucrats with an ideological bias against dams, powerful environmental activist groups and the think tanks aligned with them, most sport fishing and hunting organizations, and Native American tribes as well as, in some cases, utilities that want to be rid of silted-up reservoirs with obsolete powerhouses.

Which brings us to four dams on the Klamath River: J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate dams. The reservoirs behind these small-to-medium-sized dams have a combined storage capacity of over 140,000 acre-feet. All are scheduled for removal, and demolition could begin as soon as next year.

One of the biggest rivers in the western United States, but known to relatively few, is the mighty Klamath, encompassing a massive 16,000-square-mile watershed that straddles southern Oregon and California’s far north. With headwaters in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, the Klamath bends its way west into California through deep canyons, finding the ocean in an estuary roughly 30 miles south of the Oregon border.

The Klamath is distinguished not only by its vast extent and unique topography, but by its importance to salmon populations. Until you reach the Columbia River over 400 miles to the north, the Klamath and its tributaries offer the largest spawning habitat for salmon in North America.

Meanwhile, the powerhouses on these four dams have the capacity to generate up to 160 megawatts, which goes a long way in the sparsely populated counties of northern California and southern Oregon. More controversial than the loss of hydroelectric capacity, however, is concern among farmers over what is going to happen upriver once these four dams are removed. Because there’s one more reservoir on the Klamath, upstream from the four targeted for removal.

When the Link River Dam was built at the southern end of Upper Klamath Lake in 1921, the intention was to provide water storage for irrigation to what is some of the richest farmland on earth. By the 1900s, over 200,000 acres were planted with alfalfa, barley, garlic, horseradish, onions, potatoes, sugar beets, and wheat. And then came the water wars.

In March 2020, federal water allocations from Upper Klamath Lake to farmers in Klamath County, Ore., were cut from the historical norm of 350,000 acre-feet down to 140,000 acre-feet, and then in May 2020, after the farmers had already invested in crops for that year, the allocation was cut further, to 50,000 acre-feet. After a 30-mile-long convoy of rural dissidents descended on Klamath Falls to protest the cutback, the 140,000-acre-foot allocation was restored. But then in 2021, for the first time in 120 years, the Bureau of Reclamation — which has the authority to manage water resources in the United States — said the farmers would get a zero allocation; after more protests the farmers ended up with 50,000 acre-feet. In 2022, after another initial zero allocation, the farmers got 80,000 acre-feet.

Rural communities and farm interests throughout the American West view every dam removal as a growing and existential threat. Not necessarily because removal of the dams currently slated for removal are going to deprive them of irrigation for their crops, but because of the mentality of the agencies that control the water and concern for what new dam removals and other restrictions come next.

Is it even “science” that compels the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation to maintain that more water in the Klamath River, year round, improves the survivability of salmon? Don’t the parasites that attack salmon die when rivers naturally run nearly dry in the summer? Doesn’t science rely on testing various hypotheses, rather than adhering to one theory — more water in the river, all summer long — despite no evidence that it’s helping restore fish populations? And how could those summer flows ever be maintained, anyway, without dams?

In Idaho, environmentalists claim that four dams on the lower Snake River — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite — must be removed as part of any recovery plan for endangered salmon and steelhead. Plans are moving forward to remove them but are running into opposition. These are big dams; their four reservoirs have a combined storage capacity of over 1.6 million acre-feet. Replacing the irrigation infrastructure, offsetting the losses in waterway transportation, and replacing the more than 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity would cost an estimated $30 billion or more.

The biggest threat to water supply in the American West isn’t dam removal, which, despite what I have written above, is unlikely to spiral out of control, nor is it terribly objectionable to get rid of small and obsolete dams. The threat is everything that surrounds the dam-removal movement, which is a symptom of a far wider set of problems, such as that posed by powerful bureaucrats who believe that conservation, and nothing else, will resolve the challenge of water scarcity.

Then there are the experts who claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that maintaining strong year-round flows in rivers that historically used to run nearly dry in summer will somehow benefit fish. And let’s not forget the climate-change zealots who think hydropower, along with fossil fuels, can all be replaced with nothing more than wind, solar, and battery farms. Even the possible (partial) solution represented by nuclear power is rejected by many of the eco-activists involved in climate-change campaigning.

Perhaps most of all, the threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure, including new off-stream reservoirs. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water.

There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics. Off-stream reservoirs, wastewater recycling, spreading basins to percolate floodwater into underground aquifers, desalination, and an all-of-the-above approach to energy development — more of these infrastructure investments become necessary when dams are removed from rivers. That environmental activists fail to understand the consequences of their actions will only mean disaster if they continue to get their way.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.