Latest Attack on Proposed Sites Reservoir – Not Enough Water

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When it comes to attacking anything that will make so much as a scratch in the earth, California’s environmentalists never run out of arguments, and their litigators never run out of money.

So it goes with the proposed Sites Reservoir, which is enduring a withering new bombardment from environmentalists in the wake of Governor Newsom’s recently announced Water Supply Strategy in which the governor endorsed the Sites Project and even had the temerity to suggest environmentalist obstruction is stopping as many good projects as bad ones.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week, and dutifully highlighted in Maven’s Notebook, “California’s largest reservoir in nearly 50 years may be derailed by water shortages.” Apparently there isn’t enough water flowing down the Sacramento River to fill the 1.5 million acre foot reservoir. But that entirely depends on who you ask.

Shown below, courtesy of the US Dept. of Geological Survey, is flow data for the Sacramento River, upstream at Colusa, which is near to where the planned diversions into the Sites Reservoir will be made. The data is expressed in “CFS,” which stands for cubic feet per second.

What is immediately evident from this chart is how it vividly depicts the volume of surplus water that hit Northern California even during what has been described as the driest winter in decades. If during the on-and-off wet months from October 1 to April 30 just 20 percent of the Sacramento River’s flow had been diverted into the Sites Reservoir, nearly 550,000 acre feet could have been stored, more than a third of its capacity. And since the pumps in one of the original designs for the Sites Reservoir had a capacity of 5,900 CFS, which is equivalent to 11,700 acre feet per day, during the peak runoff events from October through December, at least another 100,000 acre feet might have been stored.

Put another way, if one-fifth of the Sacramento River’s flow upstream at Colusa had been diverted, and only during the seven mostly dry months from October 2021 through April 2022, the massive 1.5 million acre foot Sites Reservoir could have been filled nearly half way to capacity. In just one season, during a drought.

And why not? Drawing 1.0 million acre feet or more from the Sacramento River to fill the Sites Reservoir during wet years, and over a half-million acre feet even in dry years, would not significantly reduce the flow of fresh water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Sacramento River at Colusa is upstream from the Feather River, which adds its powerful flow 40 miles further south, as well as the American River, which joins the Sacramento River another 20 miles south. In addition, flowing into the Delta from the South is the San Joaquin River with its many tributaries.

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.” 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.”

When the average “uncaptured” water flowing through the Delta, “above and beyond those required by regulations for system and ecosystem water,” is 11.3 million acre-feet per year, suggesting there won’t be enough water to fill the Sites Reservoir is an argument resting on thin foundations.

Environmentalists can’t have it both ways. Either we’re going to have massive atmospheric storms that will require massive systems to capture storm runoff, or we’re going to enter a period of chronic droughts where there isn’t enough water no matter what we do. Even the New York Times, just last month, in an article entitled “Why the ‘Big One’ Could Be Something Other Than an Earthquake,” admonished Californians to prepare for a “monthlong superstorm” of rainfall. What better way to prepare than to build off-stream reservoirs? If anything, Sites is too small.

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

Governor Newsom, when he introduced his California Water Supply Strategy on August 11, also said this: “We did some analysis of those big flows that came in November and December of last year, and if we had the conveyance and the tools to capture that storm water, it’s the equivalent of those seven projects that I just noted that take decades to build in terms of stored capacity… Mother Nature is still bountiful, but she’s not operating like she did 50 years ago, heck, she’s not operating the way she did 10 years ago, and we have to reconcile that. We had a vision in the 50s and 60s to do just that, and we want to reinvigorate that capacity in California.”

“Reinvigorating that capacity,” governor, means you are going to have to start firing some of the people staffing the commissions and agencies that have been complicit in the environmentalist assault that has stopped every major water project in its tracks for the last 50 years.

If you want to be taken seriously in California, so the conventional wisdom goes, you have to play nice with environmentalists. To be welcome in polite company, to retain professional credibility, one must ignore the sad fact that much of environmentalism today has morphed into a nihilistic, anti-human, extremist movement. But to ensure that California’s dazzling civilization, 40 million strong, survives and thrives into the next century, maybe it’s time to stop being quite so nice with environmentalists. At the very least, begin to challenge the notion that every scientific argument must invariably tilt in favor of their agenda. Scientific assessments of infinitely complex aquatic ecosystems are rarely beyond scientific debate.

To restore a more humanitarian and progressive balance to California politics, it’s time to tell our state’s all-powerful environmentalist lobby that they cannot always get their way.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Questions About Water for Governor Newsom

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Borrowing a page from the More Water Now campaign, which unsuccessfully attempted earlier this year to qualify a water funding initiative for the November 2022 ballot, Governor Newsom announced a new water supply strategy on August 11.

Perhaps with the presidency in mind, or perhaps because he really means it, Newsom’s remarks were surprisingly accommodating towards those of us who have been fighting for more water supply infrastructure.

For example, Newsom said “We have a renewed sense of urgency to address this issue head on, but we do so from a multiplicity of perspectives and ways. Not just from a scarcity mindset – so much of the water conversation in this state has been about conservation – but that is a relatively small component of the overall strategy we are introducing here today. What we are focusing on is creating more water, moving away from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance.”

This shift in emphasis, if it is genuine, cannot come a moment too soon. Over the past decade, total water diversions for cities, farms, and to maintain ecosystems totaled 75 million acre feet per year. Every primary source for all this water is imperiled.

California’s reservoirs, most of which are in-stream, cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December 2021. If early season storms are allowed to fill these reservoirs, should a late-season storm hit the state, there would be no reservoir capacity left to buffer 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.

Groundwater pumping, averaging 18.7 million acre-feet per year, has withdrawn water faster than it can be replenished with percolating runoff. To restore aquifers as a sustainable source of water storage and supply, from now on total annual withdrawals are going to need to be less than the annual amount of natural recharge.

The water California imports via the Colorado Aqueduct, nearly 5 million acre-feet per year, depends on Colorado River runoff that is stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are both at lower levels than they’ve been since those massive reservoirs were first built and filled up.

This is a serious but manageable problem. Save more water in the reservoirs. Change the rules so farmers can sell to urban water agencies their water allocations during drought years without losing their permanent water rights. And build more water supply infrastructure.

Newsom’s just released water supply strategy describes how the projects he’s proposing will create “about 7 million acre feet” of new water per year, but analysis shows that’s not quite true.

The biggest part of Newsom’s new water strategy is to “expand storage above and below ground.” This accounts for 4 million acre feet out of the 7 million acre feet total. But this is misleading, as noted in the footnote on page 3 of the 16 page document, which reads, “Additional storage capacity does not equate to a similar volume of new water supply.”

Indeed it does not. Reservoirs are never completely emptied, and, especially in the case of in-stream reservoirs, they are rarely filled to capacity. As for below-ground storage in aquifers, they can only fill slowly through large spreading basins to capture floodwater in rural areas or via percolation ponds in urban areas, which means water can only be withdrawn from them at the rate water can be injected into them. The so-called “yield” of reservoirs and aquifers is usually, at best, only about one-third of their total storage capacity. These storage projects therefore will not contribute 4 million acre feet per year, but are more likely to add around 1.5 million acre feet.

Nonetheless, if Newsom can pull off these storage projects it will be a huge accomplishment. But how?

The centerpiece of these storage projects is the proposed Sites Reservoir, an off-stream colossus to be built in a dry valley west of the Sacramento River and north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Sites proposal has endured relentless attacks by environmentalists. To appease them, the design has already been downsized from 2 million acre feet of capacity to 1.5 million acre feet. Will Sites ever get built? What about the proposed Pacheco Reservoir, a desperately needed backup to Anderson Reservoir, essential to guarantee water security to the southern counties in the San Francisco Bay Area? Environmentalists have declared war on these projects, and in California, environmentalists always win.

Newsom’s plan also calls for a doubling of the state’s desalination capacity, adding another 84,000 acre feet per year. First of all, this is a pittance. And most of the existing desalination in California comes from just one source, the Carlsbad desalination plant, which delivers 55,000 acre feet of fresh water per year from the ocean just north of San Diego. 

This past May, the California Coastal Commission denied approval to build a similar large plant—after making the contractor spend over 20 years and over $100 million on permit fees and engineering submittals. After this costly setback, it is unlikely any contractor will ever again apply to build a large scale desalination plant in California.

Despite its potential to be a game changer, desalination will never add more than a small fraction of the water California needs, and nothing Newsom’s doing is trying to change that.

Newsom, to his credit, expressed exasperation that environmentalist regulations have prevented as many good projects from getting built as bad ones. Does he mean it? Here’s what he said:

“The time to get these projects completed is ridiculous. Permits take years. One of the principles of this plan is to change our permitting, address the regulatory thickets to fast track these projects, and move things forward.”

How?

The only other significant elements of Newsom’s plan are to increase urban wastewater recycling capacity, a relatively uncontroversial idea that could add a substantial 1.8 million acre feet to California’s annual water supply, and, no surprise here, another 500,000 acre feet of water savings per year via even more urban water conservation.

Altogether, Newsom’s water supply strategy will not add 7 million acre feet of annual new water. If every proposed storage facility is built, and the proposed water recycling and desalination projects are also all eventually completed, it will add about half that much.

It is premature to be cynical about this plan. But making it happen will require unprecedented compromises from California’s powerful environmentalist lobby. Here are some questions for Governor Newsom:

Are you prepared to demand revisions to the Coastal Act to fast track desalination plants at a scale that will actually make a meaningful contribution to California’s urban water supply?

Will you to fire your appointees to the Coastal Commission who vote against desalination plants?

How do you intend to revise CEQA so it can no longer be used to delay or completely derail water infrastructure proposals?

Recognizing that off-stream reservoirs are capable of storing flood water from early season storms, unlike in-stream reservoirs, are you going to use your executive authority to fund and fast-track construction of the proposed Sites Reservoir, Pacheco Reservoir, Los Padres Reservoir, and others?

Are you willing to use your executive authority to fund and fast-track the rehabilitation of the Anderson Reservoir, and the seismic retrofit and expansion of the San Luis Reservoir?

What do you intend to do to repair the California Aqueduct, the Delta Mendota Aqueduct, and the Friant-Kern Canal, in order to restore their full capacity to deliver water to agricultural and urban water agencies?

It will cost about $20 billion to build the capacity to recycle all of California’s urban wastewater. Are you ready to spend this money? Are you making sure the direct potable reuse standards will be complete early next year as promised, so cities can inject treated water right back into the water mains, and aren’t forced to build costly pipe systems to deliver treated water to aquifers?

Will you not only fight and win the battle to keep Diablo Canyon open, but also build new reactors, so Californians can have ample electric power for purposes that would include the power necessary to treat urban wastewater, desalinate seawater, and pump water to consumers?

When it comes to water supply strategy in California, these are just a few of the tough questions. We may hope Governor Newsom is prepared to go out on a limb to answer them all in the affirmative. It may even help him in his inevitable campaign for U.S. president. But so far, all we have are somewhat encouraging words and yet to be implemented half-measures.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Newsom Promotes “Water Abundance”

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Standing on the site of a new desalination facility in Antioch, Governor Newsom announced a new water supply strategy on August 11. In his remarks he introduced a disruptive and encouraging theme, one that injects long overdue and much needed balance into the discussion over how to address California’s water crisis.

“We can’t just talk about conservation,” he said, “that is a scarcity mindset. Conservation is a relatively small component of our strategy today. Now we are focusing on creating more water.”

It would be premature to be cynical about the governor’s remarks. Sooner or later, California’s ruling elite will have to face an inescapable truth: during multi-year droughts, conservation alone cannot possibly balance supply and demand for water. The shortfall, or the required sacrifices, is simply too big.

According to the California Department of Water Resources, over the past decade, total water diversions for cities, farms, and to maintain ecosystems totaled 75 million acre feet (MAF) per year. Every major source for all this water is imperiled.

To begin with, groundwater pumping, averaging 18.7 million acre-feet per year, has withdrawn water faster than it can be replenished with percolating runoff. This has caused wells to dry up, led to ground subsidence, and in some cases, is causing underground aquifers to collapse and degrade to the point where they no longer can be refilled. To restore aquifers as a sustainable source of water storage and supply, not only will annual withdrawals need to drop well below 18.7 million acre-feet per year, but until the water levels in the aquifers are restored, total annual withdrawals need to be less than the annual amount of natural recharge.

And then there’s the water California imports via the Colorado Aqueduct, nearly five million acre-feet per year. This depends on Colorado River runoff that is stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are both at lower levels than they’ve been since those massive reservoirs were first built and filled up. At the same time as the entire Colorado River watershed continues to suffer a blistering multi-year drought, the burgeoning cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix are asserting their water rights. In the years to come, we may expect a dramatic reduction in the amount of Colorado River water that will be delivered to California’s farms and cities.

If that isn’t enough, because most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, their first priority is to prevent flooding. For this reason, they cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December 2021. If early season storms are allowed to fill these reservoirs, should a late-season storm hit the state, there would be no reservoir capacity left to buffer 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.

In his remarks, Newsom quantified these looming shortfalls by estimating that if we do nothing to increase supply, available water to Californians will decrease by 10 percent. That’s 7.5 million acre feet per year. His just released water supply strategy describes how the projects he’s proposing will create “About 7 MAF” of new water, but analysis shows that’s not quite true.

For example, the plan calls for a doubling of the states desalination capacity, adding 84,000 acre feet per year. This falls far short of what could be done. Most of the existing desalination in California comes from just one source, the Carlsbad desalination plant which delivers 55,000 acre feet of fresh water per year from the ocean just north of San Diego. But last May, when the Coastal Commission denied an approval for a similar large plant – after making the contractor spend over 20 years and over $100 million on permit fees and engineering submittals – Newsom didn’t fire his appointees to the water commission. It is unlikely a large desalination plant application will ever again be attempted in California. Despite its potential, desalination will never add more than a small fraction of the water California needs, and nothing Newsom’s doing is trying to change that.

By contrast, the most significant component of Newsom’s new water strategy is to “expand storage above and below ground.” This accounts for 4 million acre feet out of the 7 million acre feet total. But this is profoundly misleading, as noted in the footnote on page 3 of the 16 page document, which reads “Additional storage capacity does not equate to a similar volume of new water supply.”

Indeed it does not. Reservoirs are never completely emptied, and, especially in the case of in-stream reservoirs, they are rarely filled to capacity. As for below ground storage in aquifers, they can only fill slowly through large spreading basins to capture floodwater in rural areas or via percolation ponds in urban areas, which means water can only be withdrawn from them at the rate water can be injected into them. The so-called “yield” of reservoirs and aquifers is usually, at best, only about one-third of their capacity. These storage projects therefore will not contribute 4 million acre feet per year, but are more likely to add around 1.5 million acre feet.

Considering the opposition any storage projects elicit from environmentalist lobbyists and litigators, who implacably oppose pretty much anything that makes so much as a scratch in the ground, if Newsom can pull off these storage projects it will be a major accomplishment. But how? The plan only estimates groundwater recharge at 500,000 acre feet per year. The plan then commits to finally building the storage projects approved by voters back in 2014, which it claims would increase storage by 2.8 million acre feet.

But the biggest part of that plan, the proposed Sites Reservoir, has endured relentless attacks by environmentalists, and to appease them, the design has already been downsized from 2.0 million acre feet of capacity to 1.5 million acre feet. Will Sites ever get built? And what about the Temperance Flat Reservoir, a badly needed reservoir south of the delta that voters approved in 2014 but is not on Newsom’s list? What about the Pacheco Reservoir, a desperately needed backup to Anderson Reservoir, essential to guarantee water security to the southern counties in the San Francisco Bay Area? Environmentalists have declared war on these projects, and in California, environmentalists always win.

Newsom, to his credit, made mention of this, expressing exasperation that environmentalist regulations have prevented as many good projects from getting built as bad ones. Is Newsom just triangulating, as he ups his game to run for president? Or does he mean it? Here’s what he said:

“The time to get these projects is ridiculous, absurd, comedic. The environmental community is getting in the way. Permits take years and years. One of the elements of this plan is to reform the rules. We will address the regulatory thickets and fast track these projects.”

Those of us who have watched California’s infrastructure wither away thanks to endless environmentalist lawsuits can only hope Newsom is serious. Belaying that hope is Newsom’s failure to fight harder for the desalination plant that got torpedoed last May. And right before that crucial water commission vote, the Pacific Institute released a study that claimed Californians could increase their water supply by as much as five million acre feet per year merely by capturing storm runoff and recycling wastewater.

Was the timing of that highly publicized study designed to provide cover for the Coastal Commission to kill a major desal project that would have made a major contribution to eliminating water scarcity in the Los Angeles Basin? If so, it worked. And if so, is Newsom’s new water strategy, announced at a critical time, just a tactic to prevent support from building to put a water initiative on the ballot in 2024 that might force the state to fund water supply infrastructure and rewrite environmental regulations that have stopped everything cold?

The only other elements of Newsom’s new plan are to increase urban wastewater recycling capacity, a relatively uncontroversial idea that could add a substantial 1.8 million acre feet to California’s annual water supply, and, of course, another 500,000 acre feet of water savings per year via even more urban water conservation. Finding another half-million acre feet of water savings would require household water use to drop from the current average of 60 gallons per person per day, to 48 gallons per person per day. Residents who are already enduring annoying restrictions on their ability to shower, wash, or grow greenery around their homes may decide if another 20 percent reduction is desirable.

Altogether, Newsom’s water supply strategy does not add 7 million acre feet of annual new water. If every proposed storage facility is built – extremely unlikely without dealing a major defeat to the powerful environmentalist lobby – and the proposed water recycling and desalination projects are also all eventually completed, it will add about half that much, around 3.5 million acre feet per year.

Again, it is premature to by cynical about what Newsom has done. But to make even this much happen, he will have to overcome a hostile bureaucracy and environmentalist machine that finds joy and fulfillment in cracking down on “water wasters,” and views conservation as the only acceptable policy.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Desalination on the Sea of Cortez

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Proponents of desalination tout its potential to quench the thirst of a water-deprived civilization. The logic is compelling. If fresh water is in short supply, why not remove the salt from the vast oceans? With an estimated volume of 1.1 million billion acre feet (an acre foot is the amount of water volume that would cover one acre, one foot deep) of seawater, there will always be enough ocean.

For all its potential, desalination has yet to be a game changer. Worldwide freshwater consumption is estimated at 7.5 billion acre feet per year. Of that total, roughly 20,000 desalination plants worldwide produce an estimated 30 million acre feet of fresh water per year. That’s an awful lot of water, but it’s less than 1 percent of global water consumption.

Nonetheless, desalination plays an outsized role in arid coastal regions around the world. In Israel, for example, five massive desalination plants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea produce nearly a half-million acre feet of fresh water per year, an amount the nation plans to double by 2030. Israel’s Sorek Desalination Plant, located a few miles south of Tel Aviv, produces 185,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, from a highly automated operation that occupies only about 25 acres. Approximately 80 percent of Israel’s municipal water comes from desalination, and this nation of 9 million people is now exporting surplus water to Jordan.

Just over one year ago, desalination as a way to solve water problems was proposed in an unlikely place. A July 2021 report submitted to the Pima County, Ariz., board of supervisors explored the feasibility of desalinating seawater from the Sea of Cortez, the body of water that lies between the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican mainland, and piping it over the mountains and across the border with Mexico to Tucson. The challenges posed by this scheme — political, financial, technical, and environmental — exemplify the difficulties of desalination as a means of resetting the supply vs. demand equilibrium to yield abundant water in parts of the world desperately in need of it.

As described by the Arizona Daily Star, shortly after the proposal was submitted by engineers at the Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department, critics pounced, decrying the project as grandiose, impractical, costly, and an environmental disaster. Their first line of attack was the cost to ratepayers. It was estimated that the project could add $60 to $90 per month to the typical Tucson-area homeowner’s water bill.

The critics are not wrong. Because Tucson is so far from the Sea of Cortez, this project would be costly, even in comparison to other desalination projects. The cost of a 200-mile pipeline would be an estimated $3 billion, compared with an estimated construction cost for the desalination plant itself of $1.1 billion. Getting 90 million gallons of water per day (just over 100,000 acre feet per year) pumped from sea level to a peak elevation of over 3,800 feet and then back down into Tucson at an elevation of 2,300 feet is a massive undertaking.

The pipeline’s projected operating cost, estimated at $98 million per year, would be primarily for electricity for the pipeline pumps. They would require just under 100 megawatts of continuous power, which at $.10 per kilowatt-hour would total $85 million per year. Building desalination plants in locations far removed from the customer does not come cheaply. The cost to run the desalination plant, by comparison, was estimated at $73 million per year, with $45 million of that to pay for electricity to pump ocean water through the filtration membranes to remove the salt.

The projected cost for this plant to deliver 100,000 acre feet per year from the Sea of Cortez to Tucson also includes the cost to pay off the construction loans and the overall operating cost. Altogether, the report calculated the water would cost consumers $3,761 per acre foot. That’s expensive water. But these financial obstacles are not insurmountable.

A scenario put forth by the report’s authors proposed that 50 percent of the $4 billion price tag for construction take the form of a federal grant. If so, the retail price per acre foot would drop to $2,732. That’s still costly, but it moves into the range of other expensive solutions. If water sourced from desalination is part of an agency’s portfolio of various water-supply solutions, taking its place alongside treated wastewater, naturally recharged groundwater, and whatever supplies are still available from, for example, the Central Arizona Project that moves water from the Colorado River to Tucson, then the blended price can remain affordable to consumers.

Another challenge facing any proponent of desalination is the energy cost to desalinate the water. Here, however, critics of desalination may be overstating their case. Using existing, fully commercialized technology, seawater desalination requires — ocean salinity varies, so this is an average — about 3.5 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of fresh water produced. Using the number the Tucson engineers relied on, 3.6 kilowatt-hours, and applying that worldwide, it would take 257 gigawatt years to desalinate 500 million acre feet of seawater per year, which is nearly 17 times current worldwide desalination output.

Supplying half a billion acre feet per year of new and perpetually available fresh water could eliminate water scarcity in every major coastal city on earth. Simultaneously investing in total reuse of interior urban wastewater and exploiting new indoor agriculture technologies would multiply this benefit. The total energy to desalinate this stupendous quantity of water, 257 gigawatt-years, is equivalent to 8.1 exajoules (the mega energy unit currently favored by economists). That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but according to the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, it would be only 1.4 percent of the total energy produced worldwide in 2020.

Which brings us to the brine, the seawater that doesn’t make it through the filters, and is returned to the ocean. For every gallon of desalinated water, another gallon of brine, twice as salty as before, has to be processed. In practice, this usually means returning it to the ocean. Passionate debate rages as to just how harmful brine discharge is to maritime ecosystems, and here again, the Sea of Cortez does not align favorably. Compared, for example, with a site on the California coast, past which the robust California Current moves 250 trillion gallons per day, a desalination plant on the Sea of Cortez would discharge waste into a stagnant pond. If the dose makes the poison, and it always does, then the challenge of disbursing brine in the Sea of Cortez is magnified by its placidity.

When it comes to delivering an adequate supply of water, Pima County faces a quadruple threat: County authorities have already squeezed about as much rationing as they’re going to get out of their residents; the level of groundwater pumping they can sustain has been halved as the average precipitation has dropped from twelve inches per year historically to only six inches per year during the ongoing drought; the Colorado River allocations via the Central Arizona Project are threatened as never before, as Lake Powell and Lake Mead drop to historic lows; and the population is projected to increase from 1 million to 1.5 million water-consuming residents between now and 2050.

In the report on the feasibility of desalination as a solution for Tucson, one of the authors told me they “strategically bypassed the question of brine management,” based on the confidence that by the time a project of this magnitude completed its multi-decade planning process, innovative solutions to brine disposal would have been discovered. This is certainly possible. And since desalination is, ultimately, just another form of evaporation, a sufficiently distributed dispersal of brine into the Sea of Cortez ought to satisfy reasonable concerns about environmental impact.

A study prepared for the U.S./Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission in 2020 examined desalination opportunities in the Sea of Cortez. The study included a detailed assessment of emerging technologies. Conventional brine management solutions include ocean discharge and dispersion, which certainly ought to work in locations (unlike the Sea of Cortez) where there is a strong ocean current, along with evaporation ponds, which at scale would consume literally hundreds of square miles, and deep-well injection. But other solutions may be on the way.

For example, the so-called zero-liquid discharge solution to brine management involves extracting all the fresh water, leaving mineral solids that may have beneficial uses. Unfortunately, existing technology to accomplish this requires extreme amounts of energy, and innovative uses of the solid byproducts — such as turning sodium chloride into cement — are still in the concept phase of development.

Other innovations in desalination show more immediate promise. The energy required for reverse osmosis, which is the technology that modern large-scale desalination plants currently use, is 3.5 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter. Commercial desalination plants are pushing that limit. New mobile plants in Saudi Arabia have reduced the energy consumption to 2.3 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter. Just ahead, new filtration technologies and new ways to manage the filtration process promise to further lower the energy required to desalinate. The theoretical minimum amount of energy to desalinate seawater is just 1 kilowatt-hour per cubic meter. It is likely that 20 years from now, the energy required to commercially desalinate water from the ocean will be half what it is today.

In the meantime, maybe desalination is not yet a viable solution, however imaginative (and credit should be given to those investigating creative solutions for the region’s water problem), for landlocked Tucson, located 200 miles away and 2,000 feet above Pima County’s source of saltwater, a sea with minimal current to disburse the brine. But despite relentless litigation and lobbying by environmentalists to block desalination, no such excuse can be made in Southern California, where a water-hungry megapolis squats on the edge of a coast that boasts one of the strongest ocean currents in the world. Desalination at scale does work. It just depends on where you look.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

California’s Water Mismanagement

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As Californians cope with another blistering summer during what is their third consecutive year of drought, the state legislature has still done nothing of substance to upgrade California’s water supply infrastructure. From the Klamath Basin on the Oregon border to the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, farmers can’t irrigate their crops, and in every major city, residents are having their access to water rationed.

Not only is California’s state legislature and various state and federal agencies failing to invest in new water infrastructure, but they are actively undermining attempts to deliver more water to the state’s residents. In May, the California Coastal Commission denied a permit to Poseidon Water to build a desalination plant that would have produced 60,000 acre feet of water per year.

If desalination is the irredeemable problem child of water infrastructure according to environmentalists, surface reservoirs are its evil cousin. Hence the proposed Sites Reservoir, which would provide another 1.5 million acre feet of badly needed storage capacity, still faces what may be insurmountable odds: the requirement to allocate half of its yield to ecosystems means the remaining water the Sites Project Authority will be permitted to sell to cites and farmers may not be sufficient to qualify the project for construction loan guarantees.

The environmentalist assault on California’s water enabled civilization, unchallenged by the state legislature, is full spectrum. On the Klamath River, with an urgency that is entirely missing with respect to constructing the Sites Reservoir, or any other reservoirs, plans to remove four hydroelectric dams are moving quickly towards realization. Similar plans to demolish two dams on the Eel River are also moving forward.

There remains only one politically acceptable solution to water scarcity in California, and that’s rationing. But the cause of scarcity isn’t merely the worsening droughts we’re experiencing. It’s the active demolition of existing water infrastructure assets, an active and very effective institutional hostility towards constructing new water infrastructure, combined with relentlessly escalating prohibitions on how much water can be withdrawn from rivers and groundwater basins.

Water is life. If the planet is getting hotter and dryer, the last thing we should be trying to do is turn our cities into heat islands with desert landscaping, and taking our farmland out of production. We should be producing more water than ever, using every innovative infrastructure solution possible. We should be greening our cities and protecting our agricultural economy. We should be adapting, creating water surpluses to mitigate the hotter, drier seasons, not retreating into a parched, micromanaged and rationed dystopia.

If environmentalist objections aren’t enough to stop water projects, the tremendous cost of these projects becomes the justification for inaction. But California’s state general fund, per capita and adjusting for inflation, has doubled in just the past decade. What have Californians gotten for all that spending? More crime, failing schools, mismanaged forests, outmigration of people and businesses, and water rationing? State funding of water supply infrastructure is necessary so amortization of the capital cost doesn’t impose an unsustainable financial burden on ratepayers. With so much growth in spending, no state politician can honestly claim there aren’t billions available to invest in water.

The clincher for opponents of water supply projects is the energy cost. But this, too, is inaccurate. Even the most energy intensive way of supplying water, though desalination, would require only a small fraction of the electricity Californians are planning to generate to usher in the electric age. If California’s grid eventually averages a 100 gigawatt load, and that is the absolute minimum necessary if the state legislature is serious about going all-electric, desalinating 2.5 million acre feet of seawater per year would only use one percent of that load. Even the massive California aqueduct, with six pumping stations to transport water 450 miles from northern rivers into the Los Angeles Basin, only requires a net energy cost per unit of water delivered of about two-thirds that of desalination. As for wastewater recycling, millions of acre feet can be recovered at an energy cost equal to only one-third that of desalination. There is plenty of energy available to eliminate water scarcity in California.

The message the state legislature clearly has not even bothered to acknowledge, much less promulgate, much less act upon, is the value of abundance. In a world of worsening water and food scarcity, it is the obligation of a place as wealthy and innovative as California to set an example not of austerity and rationing, but of abundance and resiliency. This is a pragmatic and a moral choice that will offer hope to everyone in the world.

Who will challenge politicians, media, corrupt bureaucrats, opportunistic oligarchs, and environmentalists, with a message of abundance and hope? Who will unswervingly assert that we do not have to succumb to rationing and impoverishing our lives in order to protect ourselves and the planet, that we can adapt, we can thrive, we can prosper, and we can set a inspiring example for the world to emulate?

Californians can produce surplus water. It is technically feasible, it is economically feasible, and it is environmentally sustainable. If the state legislature will not act, voters can accomplish these goals with citizen ballot initiatives, and by doing so can rapidly overcome decades of accumulated gridlock. We can change the conventional wisdom, and in the process return California’s culture to its essence of freedom, prosperity, trend setting creativity, and abundance in all things, starting with water.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Information for Californians That Want More Water

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AUDIO: As the entire American West continues to dry up, California’s state legislature continues to behave as though water rationing is the only acceptable solution. Here is a discussion of a new book that describes how the initiative process can bypass the state legislature, the impediments to getting such an initiative before voters, and what provisions such an initiative would offer in order to create a future of water abundance instead of scarcity. Edward Ring with Bryan Miller on Nation State of Play.

https://omny.fm/shows/nation-state-of-play/ep-233-edward-ring-the-abundance-choice

How to Solve California’s Water Crisis

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AUDIO:  A discussion of how California’s policymakers refuse to approve and fund water supply infrastructure, instead falsely believing that conservation alone can solve California’s water crisis – 14 minutes on KOGO San Diego – Edward Ring on the Carl DeMaio Show.

California’s Legislature is Making the Water Crisis Worse

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AUDIO: A discussion about why California’s legislature and bureaucracy is determined to dismantle water infrastructure and ways we can fight back: – Edward Ring on the Steel on Steel Show with John Loeffler.

California Coastal Commission Rejects Desalination

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If the climate catastrophists are to be believed, “water wars” are just around the corner, and severe drought is already driving millions of “climate refugees” out of their arid homelands. To cope with expanding populations and diminishing rainfall, nations around the world are adopting desalination technology. From Singapore to Tel Aviv, desalination plants have replaced water scarcity with water abundance. But in California, in the middle of one of the most severe droughts in modern history, desalination at any meaningful scale is not an option.

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

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

A balanced appraisal of desalination would acknowledge its potential while also recognizing the absurdity of suggesting it is a panacea. On one hand, desalination can be an indispensable solution to water scarcity. In Israel, for example, five massive desalination plants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea produce nearly a half million acre feet of fresh water per year, an amount the nation plans to double by 2030. Israel’s Sorek Desalination Plant, located a few miles south of Tel Aviv, produces 185,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, from a highly automated operation that occupies only about 25 acres. Up to 80 percent of Israel’s municipal water comes from desalination. Thanks to desalination, this nation of 9 million people has achieved water abundance and is exporting its surplus water to Jordan.

On the other hand, just as renewable energy provides only a small fraction of the global energy supply, desalination constitutes only a small fraction of global water supply. Altogether, not quite 20,000 desalination plants worldwide produce less than 50 million acre feet of water per year. That’s an awful lot of water, but it’s less than 1 percent of global water consumption. To make a dent in the estimated 7,500 million acre feet per year of worldwide water consumption, desalination capacity would have to increase by, say, 500 million acre feet per year. In turn, that achievement would require about 200 gigawatts of continuous power, equivalent to the continuous output of 100 Hoover Dams.

The Energy Cost of Desalination Is Not ProhibitiveThen again, the frequently heard assertion that there isn’t enough energy available to spare any more of it for desalination is not true. For starters, 200 gigawatt-years is only 5.98 quadrillion BTUs. (A gigawatt-year, equivalent to 8.7 terawatt-hours, is the amount of electricity a one-gigawatt power plant, operating continuously, would produce in one year. BTU, or British thermal unit, is a unit of heat energy; when economists estimate the energy consumption of states and nations, they commonly do so in terms of quadrillion BTUs.) Daunting-sounding numbers, but total global energy production in 2020 was estimated at 528 quadrillion BTUs (or 17,653 gigawatt-years, or 557 exajoules, which is currently the energy mega-unit of choice of the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy). Therefore, to desalinate 500 million acre feet of water per year would consume only 1.1 percent of current global energy production. While worldwide demand for energy often exceeds supply, using 1 percent of available energy to relieve water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people is a reasonable priority.

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

Here in California, “finding” the energy required to desalinate seawater is considered one of the prohibitive obstacles to wider adoption of the technology. But when the alternative to desalinating seawater is paying the energy cost of pumping it from the Sacramento Delta through nearly 300 miles of aqueducts, then lifting it over the Tehachapi Pass, the energy costs become less daunting. If we can use energy to transport water hundreds of miles, we can certainly afford to use the same amount of energy to desalinate an equivalent amount of water.

Using data provided to me by engineers working at the California Department of Water Resources as well as at several regional water agencies, I have been able to compare the amount of energy necessary to deliver water to Southern California’s coastal cities from three differing sources: upgraded local wastewater treatment to indirect potable standards, inter-basin transfer via the California Aqueduct, and desalination.

The data show that processing wastewater for indirect potable reuse is far more energy-efficient than the alternatives. These figures are based on the average, taking into account the power requirements of two treatment plants, Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), along with the wastewater-recycling plant that is proposed to be built in the City of Carson in the Los Angeles Basin. According to engineers at GWRS, the plant draws 13 megawatts to treat 103,000 acre feet per year. Information on the Carson plant’s design provided by engineers at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California suggests an estimate of a 30-megawatt draw to treat 168,000 acre feet per year. Based on the average of these two figures, these plants would require 1,309 gigawatt-hours to produce 1 million acre feet of water. However, energy is not, as I discuss below, the sole issue to be considered in weighing which water sources to tap, and the choice, of course, does not have to be either/or. Increasing the range of sources, under current conditions, comes with its own merits.

By comparison, the figures for desalination are based on the Carlsbad desalination plant, which draws 23 megawatts to produce 55,000 acre feet of water per year — not including power to deliver the desalinated water. That equates to 3,529 gigawatt-hours to produce 1 million acre feet of desalinated seawater.

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

Addressing Other Concerns about Desalination

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

While the energy cost is one major objection to desalination, there is also concern over how the intake pipes and brine-disposal pipes affect aquatic life. But these concerns, spoonfed by environmentalist organizations to activists and repeated endlessly and verbatim, are completely overblown.

For example, one by-product of the desalination process is boron, which is present in the ocean but can be harmful to human health. But the reverse-osmosis process reduces concentrations of boron down to less than one milligram per liter, which is well within regulatory requirements.

Opponents of desalination also claim it will contaminate groundwater basins. But the Orange County Water District (OCWD) puts 100 million gallons of treated wastewater into their groundwater basins every day using that very same treatment process — reverse osmosis — that the Huntington Beach desalination plant would have used. Desalinated ocean water is so clean that it can be delivered to consumers directly through the potable-water pipeline system. Even treated wastewater cannot yet meet those standards and still has to be injected into groundwater basins to add another layer of filtration and treatment.

As for the impact on marine life, California state regulations require desalination plants to incorporate the best available and most feasible seawater-intake and -discharge technologies to minimize the intake and mortality of all forms of marine life. For example, the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant would have had screens to limit the intake velocity and a brine diffuser on the outfall. There would have been no “dead zone” from the discharge. At a distance of 80 feet from the point of discharge, salinity from the discharge would have been 35.5 parts per thousand, only two parts per thousand above ambient salinity.

Finally, to mitigate whatever negative impact the proposed desalination plant would have had on the marine environment around Huntington Beach, the contractor would have been required to preserve, restore, or create 112 acres of coastal habitat, including wetlands restoration, and create a 41-acre artificial reef off the nearby coast of Palos Verdes.

Despite all this, environmental activists claimed the Huntington Beach desalination plant would damage marine life up to 25 miles away. The press simply repeated this allegation without any attempt to understand its basis. But anyone with a rudimentary understanding of toxicology — the dose makes the poison — can easily grasp the absurdity of such a claim. The Southern California coast is blessed with the California Current, which ensures that desalination brine cannot concentrate in one area but will always be swept away. The California Current sweeps 250 quadrillion gallons per day (let’s just say that’s a lot) of ocean water past the West Coast. The Huntington Beach desalination plant is designed to produce 50 million gallons per day of fresh water. The corresponding quantity of daily brine, around 55 million gallons, represents roughly one five-millionth of the water moved by natural current along the coast each day.

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

If Californians are serious about solving the water crisis and achieving a diversity of water sources as a hedge against disaster, they must pursue desalination. Build more plants, and build them right. It might never contribute more than a small fraction of California’s total water supply, but it will be a perennial source of water, serving the arid and densely packed coastal cities in Southern California where water is imported from other regions at great cost.

In the meantime, with or without California’s involvement in desalination, the nations of the world are adopting this technology. As the Coastal Commission prevents construction of new desalination plants in California, the state loses yet another way it might overcome water scarcity. But perhaps worse, California — the most environmentally attentive, and technologically innovative, place on earth — loses the opportunity to set an example of best practices to the world.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oligarchs Have a Vested Interest in Water Scarcity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Government Subsidizing Construction of Water Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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