Tag Archive for: water infrastructure

Creating Water Abundance in California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

California’s Legislature is Making the Water Crisis Worse

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oligarchs Have a Vested Interest in Water Scarcity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Government Subsidizing Construction of Water Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Abundance Choice (part 14) – Infinite Abundance

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

“Infinite abundance.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the abundance choice.

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

The Abundance Choice (part 11) – The Desalination Option

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

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

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

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

The Energy Cost of Desalination is Not Prohibitive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Units of Energy Intelligible

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing Other Concerns About Desalination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Can Solve California’s Water Crisis

AUDIO: There is an abundance of water if we build the infrastructure to harvest it and process it. We can capture storm runoff, we can recycle wastewater, and we can desalinate water from the ocean. So why don’t we? – 18 minutes on KFI Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the John and Ken Show.

The Abundance Choice (part 7) – An Environmentalist Juggernaut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is the streamlining of environmental review necessary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposed ballot measure would create water infrastructure

Silicon Valley is known for its startup culture where so-called angel investors provide financing to launch companies that aspire to change the world.

Innovations spawned in Silicon Valley have indeed changed the world, and in the process, made the San Francisco Bay Area home to thousands of near-billionaires and billionaires.

With wealth like that comes social responsibility and political power, and many of the individuals wielding this wealth have stepped up. Powerful individuals from Silicon Valley are changing the destiny of the world.

Might not the world’s destiny be improved if there was abundant water, everywhere? Shouldn’t California set an example to the world, instead of accepting a future of water scarcity and rationing?

The More Water Now campaign was formed to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act to appear as a state ballot initiative in November. Nearly every expert in California agrees that more water infrastructure is necessary; that conservation alone will not protect Californians from the impact of climate change. Projects to capture storm runoff and recycle urban wastewater are urgently needed, and this initiative provides the funding to get it done.

Nonetheless, the campaign finds itself in the inexplicable position of having a solution everyone wants, but nobody wants to pay to qualify it for the ballot.

Private sector construction unions, who could enlist hundreds of thousands of their members to sign petitions, are hesitant to take on the environmentalist lobby. Construction contractors have deep pockets, but don’t want to see environmental activists target them in retaliation for their support. Water agencies all over California desperately need the funds this initiative would unlock, but don’t want to rock the boat too much.

Farmers offer the most poignant example of why the More Water Campaign still hasn’t attracted more financial support. With no water to irrigate crops, they’re just trying to survive. Now, with an initiative that focuses as much on urban water recycling as on storing runoff, the farmers expect help from other sectors, as they should.

So where are the angels? With the real cost of food, water, energy and housing higher now than they were 40 years ago, whatever happened to the Silicon Valley mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”? Does that value only apply to cyberspace, and not the real world?

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. With the threat of climate change, the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less.

This initiative funds projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the California Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not positive. Lowering the cost of water means lower prices for food, utility bills, housing and all other products and services that depend on affordable water.

This means tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low- and middle-income households. And the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification and water infrastructure that are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. Voters deserve the chance to make that happen.

Where are the angels?

This article originally appeared as guest commentary on the website Cal Matters.

Here is a plan to create more water for California

Former Congressman Tom Campbell’s recent commentary “Why the delay on critical water storage projects,” published on these pages on January 3, criticized the California Water Commission’s ongoing failure to build the water storage projects that were approved by voters in 2014. There is an answer to the concerns raised by Campbell: The Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022, a constitutional initiative proposed for the November 2022 state ballot.

This initiative, currently being circulated for signatures, requires two percent of the state’s general fund be used to construct new water supply projects, and it doesn’t sunset until new projects add five million acre feet per year to the state’s water supply. Two million acre feet per year can come from waste water recycling, another 1 million from conservation programs, and the rest from runoff capture into off-stream reservoirs and aquifers. And to ensure projects are environmentally responsible, it still gives the California Water Commission the final authority over what projects to fund.

Instead of identifying specific projects for funding, this initiative carefully defines eligible projects to include everything that would produce more water, from conservation and water recycling, aquifer recharge, new reservoirs and aqueduct restoration to runoff capture and brackish/ocean water desalination. It also funds remediation projects, such as replacing the pipes in public schools in Los Angeles.

The initiative is attracting broad based and bipartisan support. The centerpiece of the proposed initiative is the requirement to set aside two percent of the state general fund until 5 million acre feet of water per year is produced by a combination of new water projects and new conservation programs. But this goal is accompanied by a provision of equal importance, a project category eligible for funding that focuses not only on water quantity, but water quality, and water equity. Quoting from the initiative itself (Section 3, subsection (b), part 6), eligible for funding are “projects designed to increase the clean, safe and affordable supply of water to all Californians with emphasis on California’s disadvantaged communities.”

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. If climate change is a genuine threat, then the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less. This initiative funds projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not positive. Lowering the cost of water means lower prices for food, utility bills, housing, and all other products and services that depend on affordable water. This means tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low and middle income households. And the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification, and water infrastructure that are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. Voters deserve the chance to make that happen.

Edward Ring is the lead proponent of the Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022, a proposed state ballot initiative.

This article originally appeared as a guest opinion in the Orange County Register.

California Needs an Angel to Promote New Infrastructure to Harvest the Rain

It’s raining again in California. In fact, it’s pouring. But nearly all that water, tens of millions of acre-feet, is running into the ocean. California has a water system built for 20 million people. Neglected and failing and strained to the brink, it nonetheless now serves a state of nearly 40 million people.

The conventional wisdom in California impels politicians to build nothing, attribute water scarcity to climate change, and limit household water consumption to 50 gallons per person per day. It impels them to redefine “infrastructure” as redistribution of wealth in order to achieve “equity,” while castigating actual infrastructure as an unwarranted consumer of planet-destroying energy and a stain on sacred ecosystems.

This is a scam. Saving the planet may be the supposed moral imperative behind policies that create scarcity, but the true motivation is power and greed. In reality, imposing scarcity is a convenient way to consolidate political power and economic resources in the hands of existing elites, who hope and expect the multitudes will assuage their downward mobility with online Soma.

Genuine infrastructure creates opportunities for everyone. Neglecting public infrastructure—the real kind, i.e., water, energy, and transportation assets—is itself regressive. The wealthy don’t care if their water bills or their electricity bills triple. Corporate monopolists benefit when basic utility inputs triple in price, because it kills the emerging competition which increases their market share. This is an elemental truth that everyone from John Steinbeck to Ayn Rand warned us about. But the progressives in California ignore it, to the incredulous delight of every hedge fund predator on Earth.

If Californians are to avoid a future where they have to endure permanent water rationing because of inadequate infrastructure, it would only require a few individuals among the economic elite to break with the pack. As it is, in the wealthiest, most innovative place on earth, ordinary citizens are being conditioned to accept algorithmically monitored lives of scarcity, supposedly to save the planet.

Where Are the Angels?

Silicon Valley is known for its startup culture where so-called angels provide financing to launch companies that aspire to change the world. Innovations spawned in the Silicon Valley have indeed changed the world, and in the process, made the San Francisco Bay Area home to hundreds, if not thousands of near-billionaires and billionaires.

With wealth like that comes social responsibility and political power, and many of the individuals wielding this wealth have stepped up. Whether nurturing new startups with the potential to usher in the next generation of innovations, or political activism at a scale rarely seen in American history, powerful individuals from Silicon Valley are changing the destiny of the world. Might not the world’s destiny be improved if there was abundant water, everywhere? Might not California set an example to the world, instead of accepting a future of water scarcity and rationing?

So who among the elites will expose the scam? Who will be a populist angel? For a few million dollars, a sum that any one of California’s hundreds of mega-millionaires might throw down the way normal people buy a latte, an initiative to fund water infrastructure could be placed on California’s state ballot. This, at least, would give Californians a choice.

The More Water Now campaign was formed earlier this year to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act to appear as a state ballot initiative in November 2022. Virtually every expert in California agrees that more water infrastructure is necessary, that conservation alone cannot guarantee a reasonable and reliable water supply to Californians, much less cope with climate change. Projects to capture storm runoff and recycle urban wastewater are urgently needed, and this initiative would provide the funding to get it done. California does not have inadequate water. It has inadequate water policies.

The campaign nevertheless finds itself offering a solution everyone wants yet nobody wants to fund.

Private-sector construction unions, who could enlist hundreds of thousands of their members to sign petitions, have an understandable reluctance to take on the environmentalist lobby. Construction contractors who design and build infrastructure have deep pockets but don’t want to see well-funded activists target them in retaliation for their support, jeopardizing existing projects. Water agencies all over California desperately need the funds this initiative would unlock, but worry that the proposals for which they currently await approval would be denied by state bureaucrats with a demonstrated hostility to new infrastructure.

Farmers offer the most poignant example of why the More Water Campaign hasn’t attracted more financial support. With no water to irrigate crops, they’re just trying to survive. And for the few with the resources to fight, why bother? They already supported a 2014 water bond that passed; but still nothing has been built. Then farmers backed the 2018 water bond that was narrowly rejected by voters, and the 2020 “Dams Not Trains” initiative that didn’t qualify for the ballot. Now, with an initiative that focuses as much on urban water recycling as on storing runoff, the farmers expect help from other sectors, as they should.

So where are the angels? Where is the angel who famously said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters?” Doesn’t that reflect a more sweeping sentiment, that we need to invest in genuine productive assets, because the real costs of food, water, energy, and housing are higher now than they were 40 years ago? Whatever happened to the Silicon Valley mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”? Does that aspiration only apply to cyberspace, and not the real world?

Water Abundance Helps the Environment and the Economy

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. If climate change is a genuine threat, then the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less. This initiative would fund projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure, but despite its merit, it has no effective constituency today. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax-neutral proposition, if not a net positive. By lowering the cost of water, the price of food, utility bills, housing, and all other products and services that depend on affordable water go down. This means the tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low and middle-income households. At the same time, the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. Now it’s rarely even discussed, and when it is, it’s dismissed by libertarian Republicans as wasteful folly and by progressive Democrats as crony capitalism. But back in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification, and water infrastructure—all of which are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, still enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. It is time to upgrade all of California’s infrastructure. But thanks to institutional fear and hidden economic agendas, the conventional wisdom is to frame inadequacy as virtue. Where are the rebels with the means to challenge this destiny? Where are the rebels with the temerity to embrace a future of abundance?

Where are the angels?

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.