Newsom’s True Opponents? Water and Fire

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Not quite one year ago, Gavin Newsom did something that took political courage. It was also the right thing to do. He removed from one of the state’s local water boards one of the most outspoken critics of a desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach.

Unlike critics of desalination (once referred to as desalinization, and swiftly being rebranded yet again as desalting), Newsom understands a fundamental fact: When the Colorado Aqueduct reduces its annual contribution to the water supply of Southern California from over 1.0 million acre feet to zero, and the Delta pumps stop sending additional millions of acre feet of water down the California Aqueduct, in the midst of a drought that lasts not three years, but twenty years, all the water conservation in the world will not slake the thirst of Southern Californians.

Water conservation, when pushed to the limit, does more harm than good. It raises the price of water, since the entire operational infrastructure delivering water has a relatively fixed overhead that must be paid even when quantities delivered are reduced. It results in rationing, with consequences that are glibly dismissed. When lawns and trees die, more than “culture” is lost. Life is lost. Trees and lawns are life. They filter and cool the air, they nourish the human spirit. And every place you see a lawn, what you are really seeing is water resiliency. Surplus in the water system is healthy. Bend every fraction of surplus out of the equation, and when the prolonged drought comes, the system breaks.

Unfortunately, when it comes to water, Newsom hasn’t done nearly enough. California’s farmers and inland cities, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, are already experiencing extraordinary hardship. One more dry winter, and every Californian will endure similar trauma. Water politics are complicated, and every water engineering solution generates controversy, but the cause of this predicament is simple: California hasn’t invested in increasing the supply of water to cities and farms in over 30 years.

Water is running against Newsom in the upcoming recall election, and water is winning. When state regulators recently shut down access to water for every farmer that isn’t a mega corporation with mega wells and mega lobbyists, where was Newsom? When back in 2014 the California Water Commission was authorized via Prop. 1  to spend billions to increase California’s water supply, and then, eight years later, has built almost nothing, where was Newsom?

Why won’t Newsom call an emergency conference of legislators and stakeholders, put them in a room, and tell them: “Conservation is not enough. We’re not a communist dictatorship and we’re not a banana republic. Determine what investments in new infrastructure will produce another five million acre feet of water per year for our farmers and our cities, and don’t leave until you’ve agreed on the plan.”

If water is one of Newsom’s implacable opponents this year, imagine how much more formidable an opponent water will be next year. If Newsom survives the recall coming up next month, he’ll face another recall of sorts when he runs for reelection in November 2022. He’d better hope that it rains and it pours between now and then.

It’s fire, however, that is Newsom’s even bigger opponent this year, as he fights for his political survival. And on this, Newsom has nothing to show. After the devastating fires of 2020, Newsom’s reaction was to mandate more sales of electric cars. This is idiotic posturing, not because electric cars don’t have a place in our automotive future, but because they have nothing to do with the fires currently raging through California’s forests.

California’s fires are obviously worsened in their intensity by drought conditions. But the primary cause of these fires is a century of fire suppression, combined with a perfect storm of counterproductive policies: California’s timber industry is one quarter the size it was just 30 years ago, and a punitive, time consuming, bewildering, expensive permit process prevents effective efforts at forest thinning and controlled burns. California’s forests are dangerously overgrown. That’s why the trees are dying. That’s why we’re having superfires. Period. Fact. Any other explanation is denial and deflection.

Why hasn’t Newsom challenged the firefighters union, whose leadership had the audacity to drag their members into marching with the United Teachers of Los Angeles in January 2019, to instead use its political clout to reform forest management in California? Why didn’t Newsom expand the inmate firefighter programs, instead of cutting them back?

Newsom needs to do the right thing, regardless of whether or not any particular special interest benefits or is harmed by his actions. Here again, Newsom could call an emergency conference of legislators and stakeholders, put them in a room, and tell them: “We used to manage our forests, but over the past 30 years we’ve done everything wrong. So figure out how to reengage the timber and biomass industries to thin the forests, figure out how to get drug addicts and petty thieves off the streets and back onto the fire lines, make it easier for property owners to thin their land and do controlled burns, and don’t leave until you’ve agreed on the plan.”

That would be leadership. Get busy, Governor Newsom. You would not only save your political career. You’d save California. Water, and Fire, would be your allies instead of your enemies.

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

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Restoring the California Dream

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AUDIO:  A discussion of solutions to California’s policy challenges, with a focus on water and housing – 18 minutes on KUHL Santa Barbara – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.

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Fixing California – Part Three, Achieving Water Abundance

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As Californians face another drought, the official consensus response is more rationing. Buy washers that don’t work very well. Install more flow restrictors. Move down from a 50 gallon per person, per day limit for indoor water consumption to 40 gallons per person per day. For California’s farmers, recent legislation has not only lowered what percentage of river flow can be diverted to agriculture, but now also restricts groundwater pumping. The impact is regressive, with consequences ranging from petty and punitive to catastrophic and existential.

Wealthy homeowners pay the fines and water their lawns, while ordinary citizens are forced to obsess over every drop. Corporate farm operations navigate the countless regulatory agencies while family farmers are driven insolvent. And the worse it gets, the more the story stays the same: We have wasted water, destroyed ecosystems, and now we must embrace an era of limits. But this is a perilous path.

Maybe the consensus model of water management in California works for corporations that want to consolidate the agricultural industry. Maybe it benefits developers who want to build apartments with no yards, where the interiors are equipped with “water sipping” (lousy) appliances. Maybe the public utilities prefer a model where they don’t have to build new infrastructure because per capita consumption is driven down. Maybe the “smart growth” advocates for “infill” love the idea they can sell high density more easily because if everyone uses half as much water, twice as many households can occupy the same square mile of urban space. But as demand is ratcheted down closer and closer to supply, the system loses all resiliency.

The concept of abundance isn’t merely to preserve the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Abundance also protects against downside risk. What if the next drought doesn’t last five years, but goes on for a few decades or more? There is historical precedent for that in California, regardless of current worries about climate change. What if there’s a terrorist attack, a cyberattack, a war, or another natural disaster and California’s water infrastructure suffers significant damage?

Abundance means redundancy, diversity, resiliency. The case for water abundance in California is compelling not merely so California’s residents can enjoy amenities that citizens of a developed, modern nation are entitled to expect. Water abundance also means Californians are better prepared for cataclysms.

This was well understood in the 1960s, when California’s pragmatic Governor Pat Brown, and his successor Ronald Reagan, presided over the construction of the California Water Project, which remains the most impressive system of water engineering ever built. But starting in the 1970s, when Jerry Brown (Pat’s son) first became governor of California, water infrastructure became less of a priority. For the last 40 years, apart from some investment in wastewater recycling, there has been no significant new project in California designed to increase the supply of water. Conservation, a commendable objective, bought Californians 40 years. In that time, the population has grown from 25 million to nearly 40 million, while the supply of fresh water for people and agriculture has remained fixed.

Coming up with projects to restore water abundance to California is relatively easy: Build a few more surface storage assets, most notably the proposed Sites and Temperance Flat reservoirs. Upgrade and increase the capacity of existing surface storage, such as the San Luis and Shasta reservoirs. Complete the transition to total wastewater recycling to potable standards in all of California’s major urban areas, and supplement that, especially in Southern California, with additional coastline desalination plants. Repair existing aqueducts and upgrade the Delta levees—and voilà, you’re done.

Even at California prices, this entire assortment of major civil engineering projects could be accomplished for around $50 billion. With some of the work financed through revenue bonds, the entire debt burden on the average California household would be under $100 per year.So why don’t we do it?

For one thing, special interests benefit from politically contrived scarcity and conservation mandates. And while these special interests exploit environmentalism, that doesn’t negate legitimate environmental concerns that can’t be ignored. Groundwater depletion has caused land subsidence. That’s the real reason for salt water intrusion into the Delta, far more of a factor than the relatively negligible impact of sea-level rise. Land subsidence has also damaged California’s aqueducts. And eventually depleted aquifers become so degraded they can no longer be recharged. Something had to be done.

Similarly, the health of aquatic ecosystems—California’s rivers and the Delta—are not only aesthetic and moral imperatives, but have a practical impact on commercial fisheries. Balancing the need to protect the environment with the needs of agricultural and urban consumers cannot be dismissed. But none of these considerations should preclude the commencement of new projects to increase California’s annual supply of water. Conservation is simply not enough.

And it is here where the role of California’s environmentalist lobby has been destructive.

Environmentalists and Other Obstructionists

Environmentalists in California, unfortunately, object to virtually every major project that would increase the supply of water. Desalination is relentlessly attacked, despite being in use throughout the world. Environmentalist litigation is the reason that desalination plants cost two to five times as much to construct in California as they do in other places, from Israel and Saudi Arabia to Singapore and Australia. As for surface storage, even off-stream reservoirs, such as the proposed Sites Reservoir that don’t impede the flow of any river, or those situated in-stream but upstream of existing dams, like the proposed Temperance Flat, or raising the height of the Shasta Dam, are anathema to environmentalists.

Objections to these projects are cases where environmentalists go too far. But they’re not alone. Libertarians and, more generally, anti-tax crusaders, are also unhelpful when it comes to the infrastructure that California badly needs. Even when projects are proposed that encounter fewer environmentalist objections, such as wastewater recycling, well-organized opponents who can’t accept any government spending on infrastructure dutifully join the fray. Both of these camps, the greens and the anti-tax gangs, have acquired influence that can only be countered by a broad revision in public attitudes.

Using general obligation bonds to finance water infrastructure socializes the cost of these amenities to all Californians. By financing half of a water project with general obligation bonds, the burden to the general public is reduced. For example, if half of a $50 billion water infrastructure budget were financed through general obligation bonds, the repayment burden on California’s 13 million households would only be $125 per year, and most of that would fall to the higher income groups for whom $125 means one less bottle of wine per year. But the benefit would accrue to allCalifornians. Because the other $25 billion in revenue bonds would be matched by general obligation bonds, the rates farmers would pay for water stored behind new dams would be cut nearly in half, as would the rates that urban households would pay for desalinated or recycled water.

This is a model for affordable abundant water in California. This is the achievement that has precedent in the water projects of the 1960s and could be realized in the 2020s if there were a change in attitude and a new consensus. This is the grand bargain that can inspire Californians to demand practical environmentalism and accept debt for worthy projects. This is a model to lower the cost of living.

By making California’s coastal cities independent of imported water, and by collecting millions of additional acre feet behind new dams during wet years to release during dry years, both farmers and California’s aquatic ecosystems have far more available water. Suddenly the tradeoffs between the needs of the environment and the agricultural industry become manageable.

Pragmatic solutions exist. Beyond a new resilience, abundance is possible. And optimism is the fuel to make it happen.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Dams and Desalination – California Needs Both

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When Californians can take showers, without flow restrictors, for as long as they want, and when Californians can have lawns again instead of rocks and cacti in their front yards, water infrastructure in California will once again be adequate.

When California’s farmers can get enough water to grow food, instead of watching their suddenly useless holdings of dead orchards and parched furrows get sold for next to nothing to corporate speculators and subsidized solar farm developers, water infrastructure in California will once again be adequate.

One of the difficulties in forming a coalition powerful enough to stand up to the corporate environmentalist lobby in California is the perception, widely shared among the more activist farming lobby, that desalination is more expensive than dams.

That’s not true. It depends on the desalination, and even more so, it depends on the dam.

As a baseline, consider the cost of desalination in California’s lone large scale operating plant in Carlsbad north of San Diego. The total project costs for this plant, including the related pipes to convey the desalinated water to storage reservoirs, was just over $1.0 billion. At a capacity to produce 56,000 acre feet per year, the construction cost per acre foot of annual capacity comes in just over $17,000.

When it comes to the price of desalinated water, payments on the bond that financed the construction costs form the overwhelming share of the cost per acre foot.

For example, California’s second major desalination project, the proposed plant in Huntington Beach, will have a total project cost of $1.3 billion. Similar to Carlsbad, this plant will produce 50 million gallons of fresh water per day. A 20 year bond paying 7 percent will require annual payments of $122 million. That payment, applied to the hundred cubic foot increments, or CCF, that typically appear on a consumer’s water bill to measure their consumption, comes up to $5.03. By contrast, the cost per CCF for the desalination plant’s operating expenses is only $0.41, and the price per CCF for a desalination plant’s electricity consumption (at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour) is only $1.08. Initial construction costs, comprising 77 percent of the price of desalinated water, are the only reason desalination is considered expensive.

Compare this to the price of water from reservoirs, keeping in mind that paying off the construction costs for the dams are also the biggest variable in determining how much consumers have to pay for that water. With dams, unlike desalination plants, two factors come into play: the storage capacity, and the annual yield. With desalination plants the yield is up to the managers. Run the plant, out comes fresh water. With dams, how much water is released from the reservoir to downstream consumers in any given year depends on rainfall.

For this reason, the average annual yield of the reservoir is the most accurate way to measure its cost effectiveness. And this amount can vary widely. One of California’s biggest proposed new projects is the Sites Reservoir. It would be situated in a valley west of the Sacramento River, north of the Delta. As an off-stream reservoir, it would have water pumped into it when storm runoff is causing flooding. A twin to the already existing San Luis Reservoir, located west of the California Aqueduct south of the Delta, the Sites would have a capacity to store 2.0 million acre feet. But its yield is estimated at 500,000 acre feet per year.

In the case of the Sites Reservoir, this compares favorably to desalination. The Sites project is estimated to cost $5.0 billion, so the construction cost per acre foot of annual capacity comes in at $10,000, better than desalination at $17,000.

On the other hand, the case of the proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir is not so clear. The estimated cost for this dam is $2.6 billion and the planned storage capacity is 1.3 million acre feet. So far so good. But while estimates vary, the most optimistic projected average annual yield is around 100,000 acre feet per year. This equates to a construction cost of $26,000 per acre foot of annual capacity, considerably worse than desalination.

Does the fact that desalination yields a better return on construction costs than Temperance Flat mean that the Temperance Flat Reservoir project should be abandoned? Not necessarily. Back in 2017, during record rains, the San Joaquin River flooded, and that water – desperately needed by San Joaquin Valley farmers – could have still been in that reservoir and available for use today. The advantage of big surface storage reservoirs is not their return on capital investment, it’s that they can prevent flooding in wet years, and hold massive quantities of water in reserve for dry years.

Similarly, foes of desalination point to the more cost-effective Sites Reservoir proposal as evidence that desalination is too expensive. But the productivity of desalination is impervious to droughts; the water just keeps coming, year after year, no matter what. And the electricity required to run desalination, while significant, is no greater than the electricity currently used by a series of massive pumping stations necessary to transport water from north to south, over the mountains, and into the Los Angeles Basin – over 2.5 million acre feet per year.

Infrastructure development in California has been paralyzed by litigation and legislation. The result is a self-imposed scarcity of water that can be solved by an all-of-the-above strategy to develop new dams and desalination plants. Civilization requires a footprint, a plain fact that wasn’t lost on previous generations. We’ve learned how to mitigate the worst impact of new infrastructure, but cannot let the ideals of ecological perfection be an excuse to impoverish ourselves.

General obligation bonds to defray the cost to farmers and residents are something the people of California might accept. Then if the rains don’t come for years on end, Californians will still be able to purchase food grown in-state, and enjoy more of the normal amenities of life – a long hot shower. A healthy lawn.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Solving California’s Urban Water Scarcity

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A study by the Public Policy Institute of California in 2019 found that per capita urban water use in the state has dropped consistently over the years, from 231 gallons per day in 1990 to 180 gallons per day in 2010, then dropping to 146 gallons per day during the drought in 2015. This clearly bodes well for addressing the next drought, which could be on the way, but doesn’t address the challenges posed by suburban households with yards, which tend to use far more water than average.

In 2014, as Californians coped with the last severe drought, the Pacific Institute compiled data from the water districts serving urban consumers across the state in order to report per capita water use by region. The findings indicated that suburban households in the drier parts of the state were consuming water a per capita rate nearly three times the average; well over an acre foot per year per household.

Confronting this challenge addresses one of the key arguments of the anti-suburb movement: If every one of California’s 13 million households consumed an acre foot of water per year, residential water consumption in the state would be 13 million acre feet per year instead of the current 5 million acre feet per year.

There are many answers to this challenge, but exploring these answers, and the attendant policy solutions, should not merely rest on draconian restrictions on water use combined with a war on new suburban development. The other solution is to invest in infrastructure that guarantees water abundance even in drought years.

The advantages of this approach ought to be obvious: California is a so-called first world economy, with a standard of living that presumably should not submit to rationing. Californians should not have to worry about punitive fines if they take showers that last long enough to properly rinse the soap out of their hair. They should not have to wash their clothes in on-off high tech washers that take hours to complete a cycle and do a lousy job. They should be able to have a lawn if that is an amenity they value and are willing to pay a reasonable price to keep watered.

California’s suburbanites have a right to have these expectations. The economic cost to fulfill these expectations is manageable, as is the environmental impact. And by investing in infrastructure that creates water abundance in the state, a deep resilience is created that guarantees a secure water supply even during mega-droughts, or during civil emergencies where parts of the infrastructure are disrupted.

The principle that should govern suburban water use can be simple: They can use all the water they want if they’re willing to pay for it. Theoretically, there’s no reason why a suburban water consumer can’t bring their averages down that of an apartment dweller: Stop all outdoor watering and let the plants all die, install low flow, water sipping appliances inside the house, and voila, you’re down to the magic 55 gallons per day per person or less. But you’re also creating a dust bowl, and living a diminished, micromanaged life. So how much should it cost a household, if they want to consume an acre foot of water per year?

The most expensive but inexhaustible source of fresh water is via desalination. The price to the consumer for desalinated water in California today is about one cent per gallon. That is on the high side, since developers of desalination plants have to withstand decades of regulatory delays and spend hundreds of millions on permits, fees, and litigation. Removing those barriers, along with tapping into new modular designs for desalination plants that do not require as much custom engineering, ought to be able to cut those costs in half.

As it is, however, at a penny per gallon, it would cost a household $3,258 per year, or $271 per month, to consume an acre foot of desalinated water per year. That should be the benchmark.

Keeping this price in mind has useful implications. It means that if local water districts are contemplating punitive rates for people who exceed their consumption targets, those rates should not exceed $.01 per gallon. It means that coastal water districts that are already billing their customers at a rate in excess of $.01 per gallon ought to be subjected to a withering audit of their operations. Desalination is frequently derided as a ridiculously expensive way to produce fresh water. Fine. If that’s true, than start charging people less for water sourced by other means. And other means are plentiful.

For example, treated wastewater in Los Angeles County is still discharged into the Pacific Ocean at the astonishing volume of over 1.0 million acre feet per year. All of this water was imported via aqueducts, primarily from the Sacramento River and the Owens Valley. As Orange County has demonstrated, as they are within a few years of recycling 100 percent of their wastewater to potable quality, creating drinkable water from wastewater can be done for roughly half the current price of desalination.

At the same time, storm runoff in the Los Angeles Basin requires treatment as well. Rain in Southern California is infrequent but often torrential when it does hit, washing toxins off impermeable surfaces and pouring them into the storm drains. All of this water should also be treated, with some of it reused and the rest discharged into the watersheds with the toxins removed.

All of this costs billions of dollars. But by using the cost of desalinated water as a benchmark, it is clear that the ratepaying consumer can bear this cost. To the extent rates might go too high, general obligation bonds can pick up the slack. And what about developing less expensive sources of fresh water?

Why aren’t California’s water agencies investing more aggressively in runoff capture and underground storage, so that when the atmospheric rivers hit California – even in drought years there are a few of these – and dump far more water onto the state than the ecosystems require, millions of acre feet can be captured and stored for urban and agricultural use? Why weren’t the delta pumps running at full capacity back in January during what may have been the only big storms of 2021, sending water south to be stored?

The discussion of water policy as Californians face the possibility of another drought revolves around core issues, one of which is a huge political question: Are suburbs sustainable? The answer to this should be an emphatic yes. Families should be able to move to new, affordable suburbs. But to make this possible again, California must continue to invest in enabling infrastructure. Creating water abundance should be at the top of the list.

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

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Objections to Desalination are Shopworn, Discredited Cliches

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Anyone who still thinks that the Huntington Beach desalination plant poses a significant threat to the environment should ask themselves: Why would Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who depends on donors that never saw an environmentalist overreach they didn’t like, going out on a limb to support this project?

The reason is simple. Newsom’s talked with all the experts, he’s weighed the costs and benefits, and he supports desalination. An article earlier this week discussing the progress this project has just made towards finally getting built has triggered several in-depth criticisms, which deserve a response. But before all that, consider Exhibit A: Gavin Newsom is fighting to get this plant built.

It’s about time. Nothing gets built anymore in California, thanks to a powerful partnership between environmentalist litigators and anti-tax libertarians. Both of these special interests, both wearing ideological blinders, oppose anything that uses public funds to make so much as a scratch in the ground. From the left and from the right, they’ve combined forces to leave California’s infrastructure in tatters.

Other special interests benefit from this game. Back in a saner, less corrupt era, California’s public infrastructure was often built and maintained out of operating funds. Now bonds are even issued for “deferred maintenance,” i.e., we’re borrowing money just to maintain what we’ve got, and all that money in the state and local government budgets that used to pay for infrastructure is now fed into the insatiable maw called CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the rest of the public employee pension funds. Bond underwriters make more money, and as for pension reform, what’s that?

California’s tech sector, more omnipotent these days than ever, also loves the scarcity that comes from a neglected infrastructure. Less water? Less electricity? Better buy our gadgets. Along with the manufacturers of every not-so-durable appliance, the nerd billionaire lobby puts chips into everything from the toilet to the coffeemaker, to “help” us consume less. Don’t call it rationing, call it saving the planet. Meanwhile we’ll get rich selling the chips, and richer still selling the data the chips collect.

But Newsom knows all this, and these special interests are his constituency. So why is he defying them? Because California has been hit with mega-droughts periodically for thousands of years. It is a risk irrespective of modern climate change. And this time, that drought will find 30 million Californians living on an arid coastline, hundreds of miles from whatever shrunken supply of water might still be available. Or maybe it will be an earthquake, or a terrorist attack, at any point along California’s hundreds of miles of aqueducts and pumping stations, that abruptly halts the water being moved into California’s coastal cities.

What part of this do opponents of the Huntington Beach desalination plant fail to understand?

Q&A Regarding Desalination in Huntington Beach

While the questions that appeared in the comments section of the previous report on the proposed desalination plant were thoughtfully written and brought up important points, when researching the topic further it quickly becomes evident they are the same points that have been brought up, and thoroughly addressed, again and again. Poseidon has spent nearly 20 years and $100 million so far developing this project. It will be one of the most modern, environmentally sensitive desalination plants ever built.

To help answer some of the questions raised, I contacted Scott Maloni, a vice president at Poseidon Water. Much of what is to follow came from him. Here are some of the objections raised, and the responses:

1 – The plant is being built adjacent to a superfund site.

Incorrect. The desal plant is not adjacent to the Ascon superfund site, it’s separated by a flood control channel and several parcels of land including a parcel owned by Shopoff Development and approved by the City of Huntington Beach last month for a mixed-use development including an eco-lodge. No aspect of the desal project (treatment plant or water delivery pipelines) will be affected by the Ascon site or vice-versa. The Potential impacts on and from the Ascon landfill were studied in the City of Huntington Beach’s 2010 EIR. Opponents attempted to bring up this this issue again in the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board process last year and the water board addressed and dismissed the concern as lacking merit. Finally, the Ascon site is in the process of being remediated and this process will be finished before the desalination plant commences construction.

2 – Desalinated water is contaminated with boron, which is a by-product of the desalination process.

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

3 – The Orange County Water District has said they will just store that water in their aquifers, thereby contaminating.

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

4 – Marine life will be harmed both by dead zones at the point of brine disposal and destruction of larvae and plankton from the open intake pipes.

The facility is required by state regulations to incorporate the best available and feasible seawater intake and discharge technologies to minimize the intake and mortality of all forms of marine life. The plant will have 1-MM wedgewire screens on the intake with a through screen velocity of less than 0.5 feet per second and a brine diffuser on the outfall. The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board permit published last month and scheduled for approval in April finds that the project with these technologies complies with all state marine life protection regulations. There will be no “dead zone” from the discharge. Salinity from the discharge will be 35.5 pt (2 ppt above ambient salinity) at an average radius of 79 feet from the point of discharge.

Finally, despite the fact that numerous state agencies have found the unavoidable entrainment of microscopic fish larvae to be insignificant, Poseidon must still mitigate for these impacts as a condition of the Regional Board permit. Poseidon will preserve, restore and create 112 acres of coastal habitat to offset these larval fish impacts including 4 projects in the Bolsa Chica wetlands and a 5th project in the form of a 41-acre artificial reef off the coast of Palos Verdes.

The imported water that the desalinated water will replace is purported to have negative environmental impacts. By offsetting this imported water and over-mitigating for its local impacts the Huntington Beach project will be a net environmental benefit.

5 – Rate payers ultimately foot the bill. Poseidon applied to the State’s California Debt Limit Allocation Committee (CDLAC), a little known agency to ask for $1.1B out of their housing allocation budget to build a plant that will supposedly cost $1.2B.

The Huntington Beach project was invited by CDLAC to apply for PAB bond allocation. But they have not yet applied for financing from CDLAC. But these financing sources take pressure off ratepayers. In 2012, the Carlsbad desalination plant was financed, in part, with Private Activity Bonds (PABs) issued through CDLAC. PABs are tax exempt bonds issued to every state by the federal government in order to incentivize private investment in public-serving infrastructure like housing, water and transportation. The bonds are non-recourse to the state of California and the state and feds have no financial liability. The tax-exempt nature allows for lower interest rates which then accrue to the benefit of the water ratepayer in the form of lower water rates from the desal plant.

Many of the libertarian tax fighters opposed to the desalination plant in Huntington Beach either don’t understand the principles behind a public-private partnership or intentionally ignore the benefits. As the private partner, Poseidon assumes all the financial risk for developing, building and operating their plants. The public agency partners (i.e., San Diego County Water Authority and Orange County Water District) only pay for water that meets contractual specifications for quantity, quality, reliability and price. These contracts include a fixed price for water negotiated and executed before the plant is built. If the plant takes longer to build and comes in over budget, Poseidon absorbs those losses. If the plant can’t operate for whatever reason and we can’t deliver the contacted water, then Poseidon absorbs those financial losses.

The Carlsbad desalination plant has never been shut down due to permit violations. The plant has been temporarily shut down by the plant operator the Israeli Desal Engineers (IDE) on a number of occasions over its 5-year operating history to fix routine mechanical issues or for environmental issues affecting the quality of the source water from the ocean like algal blooms. Under the contract with the SDCWA, if Poseidon fails to cure the shutdowns in a specified period and/or cannot deliver the water they are obligated to deliver then they have to pay SDCWA so they can buy water to replace what they could not get from Poseidon. This is a unique arrangement in the water world and benefits the public agency and its ratepayers. At the end of the water purchase contract the public agency owns the desalination plant, so they are not just paying water they are inheriting an infrastructure asset.

Finally, it’s interesting that the term NIMBY is so readily trotted out by environmentalists when it suits them, but ignored when it does not. If you oppose high density housing, you’re a NIMBY. If you oppose new housing on California’s abundant open land, you’re not. If you oppose a solar farm that blankets thousands of acres with a blistering heat island, or a wind farm that blankets tens of thousands of acres with an avian slaughterhouse, you’re a NIMBY. If you oppose a desalination plant that will prevent people in Southern California from dying of thirst when the rains don’t fall or the pumps fail, you’re not. Fascinating.

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

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SoCal Desalination Plant Inches Towards Approval

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In a rare and commendable display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.

But don’t count on this new water source just yet. Despite clearing major hurdles, the “environmentalists” and their allies in the media are not going to quit.

In a predictably slanted hatchet job, poorly disguised as an investigative report, the Los Angeles Times is doing everything it can to derail the project. According to their February 26 article, “environmentalists” have serious concerns about the proposed plant, set to be constructed in Huntington Beach and using a similar design to one already successfully operating about 60 miles south in Carlsbad. But why are the only environmentalists used as sources for supposedly objective journalists the ones that disparage desalination?

Here are some of the problems that “environmentalists,” who purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment, have with the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Quoting from the LA Times article:

“Though the Huntington Beach facility meets the state goal of diversifying California’s water supply, it would undermine other environmental policies. The plant would require large amounts of electricity; it would sit next to a rising sea; and it would continue the use of huge ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life.”

These objections are easily answered. Every drop of water that is produced by the plant is water that does not have to be transported from reservoirs in Northern California, at an energy cost that rivals that of desalination. Even the most aggressive projections of sea level rise would not affect operations of the Huntington Beach plant, and even if some adaptations eventually were necessary they would be part of a larger project to protect the Los Angeles coast. As for the “intakes harmful to microscopic marine life,” the design of these intakes prevents any significant wildlife impact. The intake filters are huge, which disperses the negative pressure over a very large surface area, and the pressure is periodically reversed, freeing the filter surfaces of microorganisms.

Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed ecosystems upstream.

Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.

Water supply resiliency is not merely dependent on weather. Even if a Sierra snowpack reliably forms winter after winter for the next several decades, residents of the Los Angeles Basin still depend on three aging canals, precarious ribbons that each stretch for hundreds of miles. Earthquakes, terrorism, or other disasters could shut them down indefinitely. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in California’s Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct.

In a recent book “Winning the Water Wars,” published in 2020 by the Pacific Research Institute, author Steven Greenhut concludes the solution to California’s water challenges is to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that embraces abundance, or as he puts it “feeding more water into the plumbing.” He writes: “In addition to building more surface and groundwater storage facilities, California can deal with its water problems by building ocean desalination plants and increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.” If Greenhut, who talked with countless experts while researching his book, and who is a confirmed libertarian, can support the economics of public and private investment in desalination, anyone can.

A series of California Policy Center reports in 2018 expand on the concept of water abundance. Part two of the report, “How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion,” surveys existing investments in desalination and wastewater reuse and comes up with the following capital budget: $7.5 billion to build the treatment plants to annually recover and perpetually reuse the 1.0 million acre feet of wastewater that currently is still treated and released into the Pacific Ocean. Another $15 billion to build desalination plants with a combined capacity of another 1.0 million acre feet per year. And $7.5 billion to upgrade and optimize the capacity to capture runoff, mitigate the capacious aquifers beneath the City of Los Angeles, and use them all for water storage.

This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians. There are 5.1 million households in the three counties that would benefit from this scheme – Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. A $30 billion capital improvement bond would cost each household $384 per year. If revenue bonds were to pass half the cost to ratepayers – a reasonable burden that would bring even desalinated water down to an affordable consumer price – the general obligation bonds would only add new taxes of $192 to each household. Debt like this is referred to as “good debt,” unlike the $100 billion or so in debt that would be necessary to complete a nearly useless, obsolete before it’s even done, make-work project like the bullet train.

Along with thinking big on the policy of water abundance, Gavin Newsom should take steps to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. That would solve the energy challenge associated with desalination overnight. Diablo Canyon, situated on a mere 12 acres, produces 1.8 gigawatts of continuous, clean electric power. Based on the Carlsbad desalination plant’s performance, the energy input required to produce 1.0 million acre feet of desalinated seawater per year is only 560 megawatts, less than one-third of Diablo Canyon’s output.

The biggest impediment to Californians achieving water abundance, along with energy abundance and abundant, affordable housing, are “environmentalist” pressure groups that purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment. These groups have tied infrastructure development and housing development in California up in knots for decades. None are worse than the Sierra Club which, of course, bitterly opposes the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant.

A prime example of the harm the Sierra Club has done is the intense opposition they threw against Prop. 3, the state water bond that faced voters in November 2018.

This bond, losing by less than one percent, would have done amazing things for California. It was a hard won compromise between environmental groups, farmers, and urban water agencies. It would have allocated $9 billion in new funds, roughly half and half between water infrastructure projects including new runoff capture and storage, and environmental mitigation. Absolutely wondrous mitigation opportunities were lost when that bond failed, including reviving the Salton Sea and turning the Los Angeles River back into a river. Currently the Los Angeles “river” is a cliche, a gigantic concrete channel, slick as a runway, known to all American movie buffs as an obligatory leg on every car chase that takes place in downtown Los Angeles. Imagine this river if it were restored, with parks, trees, bike paths, trails and wildlife habitat, winding through the heart of a great city.

It wouldn’t have taken much for this bond to pass, but the Sierra Club objected to funds from the bond being allocated to repair the Friant-Kern canal. Their arguments were based mostly on a belief that the cost of those repairs should have been borne by the farming interests in the South San Joaquin Valley that use water from the canal, but even so, this was a minor defect.

The Sierra Club is well known for ruining what are otherwise viable compromises. For years, forestry experts have understood that the combination of fire suppression, reduced logging, and restrictions on controlled burns were leaving California’s forests dangerously overgrown. Dying trees and cataclysmic fires are the result of this neglect, and hence the conflagrations we’ve seen in recent years would have happened with or without climate change. But for decades, the Sierra Club has relentlessly opposed a return to sensible forest management. Don’t believe it? Ask Senator Feinstein.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Quoting from the Napa Valley Register, “Sen. Dianne Feinstein blames environmental ally the Sierra Club for Congress’ failure to pass legislation last month to thin national forests to reduce wildfire threats in the West.” And from the Senator herself, as quoted in the article: “”The Sierra Club roasted me.”

The bargains required to rescue California depend on extreme groups like the Sierra Club either backing off or being exposed and discredited. Over five million acre feet more water per year can be achieved through a combination of desalination, total wastewater reuse, and increased storage including building the Sites Reservoir and raising the height of the Shasta Dam. Why would sincere environmentalists oppose having another five million acre feet of water that could be left in the rivers? Why would they object to the entire Southland becoming water independent? Why wouldn’t they be thrilled by the options this water abundance would enable, such as restoring wetlands and riparian habitats up and down the state? Is this about the environment, or about money and power?

Meanwhile, the “environmentalists” that have turned California into a state of expensive scarcity get plenty of help from the media. The previously noted article in California’s newspaper of record, the Los Angeles Times, came out on February 26, only days after the Huntington Beach desalination plant got crucial approvals. And what was the thrust of this article? Reminding readers that one of the guests at Newsom’s infamous “French Laundry” dinner was a lobbyist for Poseidon, the company trying to build the desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Guilt by association. The article goes on to quote anonymous “critics” who complain that “Newsom and his political appointees are exerting heavy influence to benefit a private company that would produce some of the state’s most expensive supplies.”

The article then infers that state review of the desalination plant’s application is inappropriate, writing “Emails obtained by The Times and the environmental group California Coastkeeper Alliance through the state Public Records Act indicate that top California Environmental Protection Agency officials have been involved in a water board’s review of the complex proposal.” But why is this inappropriate? The application has been stalled for twenty years. And the state oversees everything that happens on coastal land.

Piling it on, the author writes “In addition, Newsom took the unusual step of replacing a Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board member who was highly critical of the project.” Good! Newsom is doing something right.

Reading this article, if you can wade through all the hackery, offers a grim assessment of how many hoops still remain before there will be one more desalination plant on the California Coast. There ought to be twenty of them operating by now. If and when the rains fail for more than a few years in a row, Californians need to remember how and why they ended up so thirsty.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Creating Water Abundance in California

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AUDIO/VIDEO:  Is water scarcity and water rationing inevitable in California? Is it the only moral and practical choice? Or can a balance be struck between practical conservation measures and new investments in infrastructure that will increase the annual supply of water and guarantee there will never be a shortages  – 24 minute Epoch Times interview – Edward Ring with host Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider.

Abundance, Not Scarcity, Can be the Immediate Future for Humanity

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Assume for a moment that regardless of what really happened, or what should happen, Joe Biden occupies the White House on January 20th. What are some of the biggest issues and initiatives that we can expect from his administration? What are the underlying themes and premises that will inform his agenda?

When considering these questions, equally relevant is how much of Biden’s agenda will be Biden’s agenda? Say what you will about Biden’s many flaws, at least he is an amiable glad-hander whose career has been defined mostly by hewing to the political center. But Biden is way past his prime, and when he’s having another “lid” day, his energetic sidekick Kamala Harris – along with her entire Silicon Valley entourage – will be wide awake.

What this California democrat brings to Washington DC is a culture of almost unbelievable arrogance. Some of it is earned. For at least forty years, and now more than ever, Silicon Valley has been the global epicenter of high-tech innovation and the principle repository of the trillions in wealth that its innovation has generated.

Wealth. Power. Arrogance. Hubris. This is a dangerous combination when wielded on such a scale, and especially if some of its fundamental premises are wrong. And the biggest, almost horrifyingly wrong premise that informs the culture of Silicon Valley is that we are in what Jerry Brown, in his first stint as governor back in 1976, called “the era of limits.”

It’s paradoxical that such a value might come out of the Silicon Valley, a place that has nurtured inventions that have transformed the world. But Kamala Harris, along with the big tech CEOs, Bay Area Democratic politicians, and almost every venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, share a hectoring, monolithic world view that boils down to this: humans are parasites on the earth, especially Americans, and their consumption of everything has to be dramatically reduced.

California is still paying the price for what Jerry Brown did back in the 1970s to enforce his era of limits – cancelling the completion of California’s water infrastructure and selling off the right-of-ways the state had acquired to construct additional freeway corridors. But the era of limits has morphed, thanks to climate change alarm and the opportunistic expansionist plans of high tech firms, into what is becoming a green police state. To enforce limits, to reduce consumption, cities will no longer be allowed to expand out, only up. Water infrastructure will not be expanded, instead water rationing will be enforced using the internet of things. Similar measures will curb energy use and transportation options. This is Kamala Harris’s Brave New World. This is the so-called Cleantech Revolution.

The consequences of getting this wrong are impossible to overstate. The example set by the United States, and the investments made by American corporations inside and outside the U.S., are going to greatly influence economic growth around the world. The policies the U.S. advocates in the United Nations, and through the many supra-national institutions where Biden/Harris will forcefully reengage, will also greatly influence economic growth around the world.

But the world doesn’t need more solar and wind farms. It needs big infrastructure. Nuclear power. Hydroelectric power. Aqueducts and pumping stations to enable massive interbasin transfers of fresh water. These projects will accelerate economic growth everywhere, and as has been proven without exception over the past few decades, as prosperity increases, population growth slows. The Kamala Harris vision, and the Silicon Valley agenda it represents, will not liberate the people of the world, nor will it save the planet.

Questioning the Era of Limits

With the Silicon Valley’s cleantech revolution about to acquire new momentum in Washington DC, and with environmentalist values set to again command unprecedented influence on federal policy, it is more important than ever to have a vigorous national and global dialogue as to what constitutes clean technology, and what constitutes a legitimate continuum of environmentalist values.

How these questions are answered will have profound impact on the nature and speed of economic growth all over the world, as well as the quality of our lives and the quantity of our individual rights and freedoms. There are two fundamental assumptions that govern environmental values today: (1) use of fossil fuel should be phased out as soon as possible, and (2) resource scarcity is an inevitable reality that will not be overcome for generations. To this end, massive reallocations of wealth are being enacted to subsidize alternatives to fossil fuel, and rationing of resource use is becoming policy in the areas of energy, water and land. But what if both of these assumptions are completely wrong?

There is a case to be made that resource abundance, not scarcity, can be the immediate destiny of the human race, and that scientific innovation combined with free markets are the keys to realizing this optimistic scenario. In every fundamental area, energy, water and land, there are promising trends – unfolding with breathtaking speed – that provide humanity with the opportunity to realize global wealth and prosperity within a generation.

Probably the most difficult notion to intuitively fathom is that land will become abundant again, but for several important reasons, that is precisely what is going to happen. The primary reason for this is that human population growth is finally leveling off. From today’s total of 7.7 billion people, projections now indicate human population will peak at slightly over 9.0 billion around 2050, an increase of only around 20 percent. While this seems like a lot, it is important to remember that in 1970, the world population was only 3.7 billion, meaning the last 40 years has registered a human population increase of 80 percent. We have already seen the dramatic growth in population, and are now in the leveling off phase.

The reason this slowdown and leveling of human population will result in more abundant land is because at the same time as human population growth slows down, human migration to cities continues to accelerate. In 1970 only 1.3 billion people lived in cities, 35 percent of the world’s population. Today 55 percent of the world’s population live in cities, 4.2 billion people. Over the past 40 years the world’s overall population has increased 80 percent, but urban population has increased by 160 percent. Urbanization is accelerating, and is depopulating rural areas faster than projected remaining overall population growth is filling them. Forty years from now, there will be more open land in the world than there is today. And these twin phenomenon, urbanization and population stabilization, are completely voluntary, inexorable, and are occurring at rates that are, if anything, underestimated.

If land abundance on planet earth is going to be achieved by a stabilized population living mostly in megacities, how will we build these cities? How will we transform our cities, already swarming with far more people than they were originally designed to hold, into 21st century magnets for humanity, offering economic and cultural opportunities instead of merely a last destination for the destitute? Here is where Malthusian assumptions, combined with a misguided environmentalist ideology that condemns development, have conspired to stifle the building of next generation infrastructure. The good news is these delays have also allowed us the time to develop better-than-ever technology.

From high-rise agriculture to high-speed rail, from advanced water recycling to ultra-efficient energy conduits and appliances, from cars that are clean, smart and safe, to new roads that convert pavement heat into utility-scale electricity and convey vehicles that drive themselves, hyperlanes for ultra fast cars, passenger drones, cities of the future can be built today – but not if the wealth we need to pour concrete and smelt steel is spent instead on environmentalist lawsuits, and not if the market incentives that animate billions of construction entrepreneurs are squelched because instead we gave the work to government bureaucrats. Creating abundance is human nature – but only individual liberty, property rights, and free markets will enable this nature to be realized. Governments enforce the rules, but only a free people can play the game.

Abundant water is just around the corner because of several interrelated technological opportunities. The most promising of all is the potential of smart irrigation. Primarily this means using drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation, but this also refers to no-till farming, new crops that consume less water, inter-cropping, and advanced irrigation management, where irrigation timing and volume are precisely coordinated with weather conditions. Smart irrigation techniques could reduce the volume of water required for global agriculture by 40-50 percent.

Other means to create water abundance span the gamut from traditional methods – contour berms to catch and percolate runoff, urban cisterns to harvest rainwater, or where necessary, massive new infrastructure projects to move large volumes of water from water rich areas to water poor areas. To save ecosystems and restore fisheries, why not build a canal connecting the massive Ob-Irtysh River to the Aral Basin? Diverting only a small fraction of the Ob-Irtysh’s annual flow would make a decisive contribution to restoring the Aral Sea. Why not divert a small percentage of the Ubangi River north to refill Lake Chad?

Finally, water reuse and desalination will guarantee water abundance in urban areas. High-rise agriculture, for example, can use gray water to irrigate hydroponic gardens at a commercial scale, and the transpiration these plants emit within these enclosed spaces can be harvested to yield pristine drinking water. Desalination is no longer a technology reserved for energy rich nations – it now only takes 2.0 kilowatt-hours to desalinate a cubic meter of seawater. Desalination already provides over 1 percent of the fresh water used world wide, over 30 km3 per year, and this total is rising fast. But water reuse is the most promising source of urban water of all – technologies now exist to create essentially a closed loop in urban areas. Water is used for drinking, then treated and piped back to use for irrigation and to refill reservoirs, then after percolating and filtering back into aquifers, is pumped up, treated, and used again for drinking.

Water abundance will enable us to grow all the food we want, using new strains of crops and new agricultural techniques that are enabling another revolution in yields, guaranteeing abundant food. Water abundance will allow us to finally begin refilling our depleted aquifers, restore our vanished lakes, and never have to wonder whether or not the next war might be fought to quench a nation’s thirst.

To create water abundance, however, and to build megacities, to create 21st century civil infrastructure, and to deploy advanced technologies, we will need wealth and prosperity, and more than anything else, the enabler of wealth and prosperity is energy production. World energy consumption today is not evenly distributed. But energy consumption equals wealth. Even with extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency, say, twice what we enjoy today, for 9.0 billion people to average only half the per capita energy consumption of residents of the Americans, global energy production would have to more than double.

To aggressively curb further development of fossil fuel, instead of promoting it as part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, is to condemn humanity to misery. Let them strip the forests bare for fuel. Let their industry stagnate. Keep them poor. This is the true impact of demanding renewable energy. Using fossil fuel until leapfrog technologies such as commercial fusion power is available is not just an economic choice. It’s a humanitarian choice, it’s a environmentalist choice, and it’s a moral choice.

The challenge to achieve resource abundance is not impossible; it is within our grasp. Despite heartbreaking examples of lingering poverty all over the planet, the fact is the overall condition of humanity is remarkably better now than it was 40 years ago, 400 years ago, 4,000 years ago. Disease and starvation remain endemic, but by all objective measures, and despite setbacks, they are on the retreat. This is the trend the future holds, if we seize the opportunity. But to achieve this bright future, we must ask these questions:  What is clean technology, and what are legitimate environmentalist values?

To create prosperity, for example, given 85 percent of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuel, and given there is a staggering abundance of remaining fossil fuel reserves in the form of heavy oil, coal, and natural gas, do we really want to stop using fossil fuel? What if the imperatives of “clean” technology stopped at the point where harmful pollutants were reduced to parts per billion through advanced filtration and efficient burning, instead of having to make that gigantic leap beyond simply eliminating unhealthy emissions to requiring zero emissions of CO2? Given the certain and devastating price humanity will pay in the form of ongoing poverty and escalating tensions over resources – especially if we precipitously abandon developing new sources of fossil fuel – do we really want to stop emitting CO2?

What if solar cycles indeed are all there is causing climate change? What if climate change isn’t anything but normal fluctuations? What if rainforest destruction and aquifer depletion, dried up lakes and misused lands are the reasons for regional climate change? What if we can’t do anything at all about climate change anyway? If you believe the worst scenarios, it is too late – but what if the models are simply wrong? If they’re right, it’s too late, and if they’re wrong, it doesn’t matter. So why on earth would we consign humanity to much higher probabilities of poverty and war, instead of developing clean fossil fuel, at the same time as we systematically develop advanced, alternative sources of energy?

Abundance is the Solution, Not Scarcity

There are vital environmentalist values that everyone should embrace, such as practicing sustainability, eliminating genuine pollution, and taking reasonable steps to protect species and ecosystems. But without the energy, without the mines, without the steel mills, without the paved roads and poured concrete and power plants and pumping stations and water treatment plants and countless other ecologically disruptive activities, humanity will struggle to realize their destiny of prosperity.

Kamala Harris and the people she’s bringing with her to the White House, are going to exert tremendous influence over the doddering Biden. The Silicon Valley mentality they’re bringing with them has a monolithic opinion on issues that strike to the heart of how the United States and the rest of the world will develop over the next few decades. Their wealth and power is matched by their intolerance for dissenting points of view. But if they are allowed to stifle the aspirations of humanity, enforcing rationing, scarcity, micromanagement, technology driven surveillance, and billions for the bureaucrats and litigators, instead of for the bulldozers and builders, their legacy will be one of destruction and decline.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Grassroots Group Fights for Common Sense Water Policies

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The Great Valley of California, variously referred to as the Central Valley, or, north of the Delta as the Sacramento Valley, and south of the Delta as the San Joaquin Valley, is one of the geographical wonders of the world. Nearly 450 miles in length and around 50 miles wide, it stretches from Redding in the far north to Bakersfield in the south.

Many Californians take the Central Valley for granted, if they think about it at all, but that unconcern is unwarranted. It is a unique combination of great weather, fertile soil, an annually replenished snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range to its immediate east, and – thanks to visionary builders in the 1950s and 1960s – it is blessed with the most extensive, ingenious system of water engineering in the world.

Thanks mostly to the Central Valley, California’s farmers produce “a sizable majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on.” All of that is endangered today, because California’s policymakers are not taking the appropriate steps to cope with recent droughts.

The history of California, based on accounts dating back to the earliest settlements, and before that, based on physical data such as tree rings, is characterized by periods of intense droughts. Regardless of whether or not we are experiencing unusual climate change in this era, droughts lasting years, or even decades, have always been part of life in California.

The response to California’s four year drought (that wasn’t broken until the very wet winter of 2016-17) consisted almost exclusively of water rationing. Allocations to farmers were slashed, and urban residents were compelled to reduce their consumption by at least 25 percent. Meanwhile, projects to increase the supply of water, or maintain the existing system of aqueducts and reservoirs, were minimized.

This is evident in the water bonds passed by Californians during and since the drought years. Voters approved Prop. 1 in November 2014 and Prop. 68 in June 2018, for a total of $11.1 billion in spending on water. But of that, only $1.9 billion was allocated to reservoir storage, and only $3.5 billion for other water infrastructure.

In November 2018 voters rejected an $8.9 billion water bond, Prop. 3, that would have allocated $2.7 billion towards water infrastructure and $0.6 billion to reservoir storage, along with $1.6 billion to “other supply/storage” (primarily sewage reuse and aquifer storage). The bill, receiving 49.4 percent yes votes, was narrowly defeated, mostly because the Sierra Club opposed its use of funds to repair the Friant-Kern Canal.

This bears reflection. A compromise water bond package that allocated $3.9 billion to habitat restoration, nearly half of the entire proposed funding, was nonetheless rejected by the most powerful environmentalist organization in California. This cornucopia of hydro-pork, a bill that would have funded Salton Sea restoration, and would have turned the Los Angeles River back from a flood culvert into a scenic urban river, a bill that literally had something for everyone, was not good enough for the Sierra Club.

But water scarcity in California is not inevitable, and water rationing is not the only answer. Through investment in additional above and below ground storage to capture storm runoff even in dry years, along with investment in wastewater recycling and desalination, it is possible to guarantee Californians a perennial supply of abundant, affordable water, while still retaining more than enough to maintain the health of California’s ecosystems.

The Grassroots Resistance to Water Rationing

While urban residents contend with short showers and needlessly dying shrubbery, California’s farmers face an existential threat to their lives and livelihoods.

Beginning in January 2020, pursuant to the California legislature’s recently passed “Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” Central Valley farmers are required to reduce the amount of well water they use to irrigate their crops. Then in March 2020, California regulators set new rules that further reduce how much river water farmers can take.

Obviously it makes no sense to drain aquifers dry, or divert the entire flow of a river for irrigation, but these two regulations hitting farmers at the same time is a perfect storm. Suddenly farms that have operated for generations face the possibility of having to shut down operations. And in to pick up the pieces, flush with subsidies, are renewables “entrepreneurs” who aim to carpet the southern San Joaquin Valley with solar farms.

In response to this potentially fatal squeeze on Central Valley farm families that have helped feed the world for generations, one woman, Kristi Diener is fighting back. Diener and her husband are partners in a 3rd generation family farm that grows garlic, onions, tomatoes, almonds, cotton, hay, wheat, grapes, safflower; a little of everything depending on water allocation and crop rotation.

If the Central Valley is ground zero for farm production in America, and it is, then Five Points, where the Dieners farm, is the epicenter. This rural crossroads, located about 20 miles southwest of Fresno, is in the heart of the 879,000 acre Federal Central Valley Project. If adequate supplies of water aren’t restored, i.e., if the Sierra Club and its Silicon Valley benefactors have their way, farms will disappear from these vast expanses of bountiful land. Instead, the acreages will be carpeted with solar panels, producing electrons instead of food.

In 2015, the third back-to-back dry year in a drought stricken state, after watching 27,000 acre feet of water get released into California’s Stanislaus River to save 23 (twenty three) steelhead trout, Diener decided to start a movement.

Five years later, with no money, Kristi Diener’s “California Water for Food and People Movement” has 14,200 members on a Facebook group where they share information and ideas dedicated to restoring common sense and humanity to California’s water policies. Based in California’s Central Valley and agricultural heartland, this group includes thousands of farmers, along with families in farm communities on the front lines in the fight against the green tyrants. They are very well informed. But they haven’t been able to stop the ongoing attacks on their lives and livelihoods. Consider this recent post on their Facebook page:

During November [2020], knowing we could be heading into a multi year drought, northern reservoir managers continued to release water through the Delta, and into the Pacific Ocean anyway. Environmental regulations say the flows are necessary to produce a rebound of endangered Delta smelt and Chinook salmon, yet zero of either species have been collected in all of the latest trawling surveys, where they spend several days a month searching in more than 200 spots. This practice of releasing water and hoping fish improve, has been unsuccessful for nearly 30 years. Both species are close to extinction.

Even with little to no rain to speak of in November, an amount of freshwater equal to a year’s supply for 3,031,560 people for a year, was emptied from storage and added to the supposedly rising sea level. It is equal to 987,836,857,560 gallons (987.8 billion) or 303,156 acre feet. Last week State Water Project contractors, who provide water for 27 million people and 750,000 acres of the most productive farmland on Earth, were given their initial allocation of 10%. Put another way, 303,156 acre feet was sent to the ocean for failing fish-saving policies in one month with little rain, while contractors received 422,848 acre-feet to share among 27 million people and 750,000 acres of food production.

Diener was reached earlier this week for an interview. Her observations and insights reveal a person who is not only living with the consequences of California’s choice to neglect water infrastructure and instead ration water, but also someone very well informed. Here are her remarks:

When did you form the California Water for Food and People Movement?

We founded the movement in April 2015 and it was about three weeks after Brown imposed the 25 percent restrictions statewide. People were skipping showers and not washing their cars. People were actually saving their shower water. Some people were turning in their neighbors. We were living water-poor lives, and then the California branch of the Bureau of Reclamation under Obama announced that 27,000 acre feet were going to be released from New Melones reservoir to help 23 steelhead trout make it to the ocean. This was the last straw.

What is the goal of your organization?

California’s water policy and regulations and projects, federal and state, the endangered species act, it is all so complex and overlapping it is like a foreign language. Our goal is to take the information and present it in a way that people can identify with so they can see how these issues relate to and affect them personally. For decades farmers have been unjustly portrayed as an industry that grabs more than their share of water for profit. Farmers are multigenerational and they just want to farm. They do a poor job of defending themselves because that’s not their forte. We want to give agriculture an additional voice, to show how water is distributed, what it costs and how it’s used, to present all the parts that are routinely omitted in most water articles. We want to try to correct the myths that are routinely circulated; that water is wasted, that water is subsidized. We need to have people understanding the complexities of California’s water system before policies and proposals are put out there for voters to make a decision about.

How do you go about reaching people and making a difference?

We try to be proactive when opportunities present themselves to submit public comments on proposed public actions. We try to take action as a group and be heard whenever possible. We coordinate almost everything through Facebook, where we are able to do a lot of collaborating through posts and messages. Because many candidates run for state and local positions without understanding the complexity of California’s water laws and regulations, we have built a reputation as a group people can come to for the facts and the truth about water. We help candidates formulate water platforms for their campaigns. We offer whatever knowledge we have so if someone gets elected they will carry that knowledge to office.

How would you characterize the role of environmental organizations in California?

It depends on the organization. We all want clean air and water. We all want pristine streams, rivers, lakes. Very few among us are not environmentalists. But when you get to the radical environmentalists you get groups that are political activists. They often destroy the environment to get an outcome that’s favorable to their agenda. The Sierra Club routinely leverages the environment as a tool to achieve an agenda; they are anti-capitalism, pro big government, pro dependence on government, they are about power and control. You can see that with so many nonprofits. The NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] has more than 500 environmental attorneys. They brag about the number of lawsuits they have ongoing at any time. They are notorious for the sue and settle cases. The Friends of the River is now involved in a lawsuit against raising Lake Shasta Dam. Political activists that start in these radical groups later gain positions of power in government.

What are some examples of harm environmental organizations have done to the environment?

We just lived through four million acres being destroyed by wildfires and they burn hotter and longer because of the lack of thinning. There are almost no controlled burns or logging anymore. These environmental organizations have been on the front lines of lawsuits that keep people out of the forests, and now all those species are gone. These fires are just the beginning of the damage when you have poor forest management. We’ve had smoke filled air and destroyed habitat, and we’re lucky there hasn’t been a lot of rain because at least there’s a chance to get in there and mitigate some of the damage. We have fire encrusted ashy ground that cannot absorb rainwater sending sediment and toxins directly into the streams and rivers and reservoirs.

Any other examples of how extreme environmentalism has been harmful?

Another example comes in the form of the Biological Opinions. The Biological Opinions (among other things) regulate how much water is captured into storage through pumping at the south end of the Delta after all of the upstream water rights, needs, and in-Delta consumption usages have been met. If water that has flowed through the Delta is not pumped into storage and saved before it meets the ocean (and I’m not talking about water needed for outflow to prevent saltwater intrusion), the 27 million people south of the Delta who rely on it to meet their supply needs have little to no water.

For the epicenter of our nation’s food supply in the Central Valley, and for the domestic purposes of the lower 2/3 of the state, the Biological Opinions that govern pumping are crucial. The first Bio Ops were written in 2008 for smelt, and 2009 for salmon, but based mostly on science conducted in 2004. These “Opinions” are just that: opinions. “It is our opinion that if you operate the pumps like this, it will spur a rebound of endangered Smelt and Chinook Salmon.” These first Opinions were a massive failure. These fish are now nearly extinct, and they have been devastating to farmers and families too. The Trump administration expedited updating the federal Opinions in 2018, completed them using the best scientific minds and data, and signed the Record of Decision for their implementation in February 2020. But Governor Newsom’s administration along with the radical environmentalists sued to stop them less than 24 hours later.

That action really makes one ask, what are they really trying to do? You have these Opinions intended to produce a rebound of fish, and subsequently take massive amounts of water away from people and food producers, but the Opinions fail to meet their goal. New Opinions are signed that use the latest and best scientific data for a real shot at saving these fish, and return some of that water back to humans. But they sue to keep the old Opinions in place? Were the original Opinions really about recovering fish or controlling water?

The damage from operating the pumps according to the 2008 and 2009 Biological Opinions has been devastating. Not only are these endangered fish not being protected, but we have land subsidence, aquifer collapse, lack of groundwater recharge, degradation of drinking water quality, blowing dust, an increase in cases of Valley Fever, and thousands of fewer acres of farmland in production (which absorb CO2 and recharge groundwater through irrigation). Economically, water rates are rising (use less pay more), farm jobs have been lost, water conveyance infrastructure is being damaged such as canals that are sinking, and the California Aqueduct is buckling.

What sort of message do you think would resonate with Californians in order to change the policies that are harming your community?

Right now, water is being squandered. We used to sail through droughts lasting five, six, and seven years without noticing a thing. Our water security is now being compromised for environmental causes. Many of these policies are taking the water under the guise of producing a rebound of endangered delta smelt and chinook salmon, yet neither population has improved, nor has any fish species been delisted after nearly 30 years. We need to manage outflows, and demand accountability from the environmental experiments for the water taken out of the human supply. We need the ability to store more water in wet years. And for heaven’s sake, we need to support our farmers who feed us three times a day with food that is safe, fresh, and affordable.

How will the California Water for Food and People Movement Make a Difference?

We want Californians to know that there is plenty of water for everybody. We have always had biblical rains alternating with back to back dry periods.  That is normal and that is why we constructed the most magnificent system of water capture, conveyance and delivery in the world. How we manage that system dictates how we meet user needs.

We can’t wait until legislation or ballot measures or water related bonds hit to empower the public with the information they need to make good decisions. If we try to educate the public with the complex back story at that time, we’re too late.

This article and interview originally appeared in the California Globe.

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