Getting Real About Water

I recently went to a most enlightening presentation by Bill Tweed, retired Chief Naturalist at Sequoia National Park, on the long-term water situation in California, especially Central California.  I must say it's drastically changed my views.  The bottom line is that we will not be able to keep intensively farming the entire Central Valley.  Year after year, the process uses more water than nature provides.  It's fundamentally unsustainable.  Here is an outline of his masterful presentation based on my notes.

Bill began with 10 facts about California water:

1. Water here is variable.  Precipitation varies on average from 4 inches a year in Coalinga on the west side to 9 inches in Visalia on the east, to 50 inches at Lodgepole in Sequoia at 7,000 feet.  Much more falls in Northern California than Central and Southern.
2. Yearly rainfall is unreliable.  From year to year it varies by a factor of 5 times.
3. The economic basis of the Central Valley region, agriculture, depends on reliable water-which is not the norm.
4. Only one-third of our needs are met by the natural flow.
5. There is insufficient water to maintain current usage.
6. The deficit is made up by importing water.
7. There is an annual overdraft of ground and imported water (as through the California Aqueduct) of 3 million acre feet a year-equal to the combined entire annual flows of the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers.  The former 20-foot-deep water table is now more than 300 feet.  The deeper you have to pump, the more you pay in energy.  At some point, the ground water will be gone. 
8. Not all current farmland is "prime." There is much marginal hard pan, alkaline and saline irrigation runoff land, for instance.
9. It's going to get harder, not easier.  The warming climate will result in a reduced winter snow pack.  All climate models agree that the warming climate will produce even more annual unpredictability.
10. It's going to get warmer.  It's already 2 degrees warmer than the 1960's, more at higher elevations.  That means more evaporation from lakes, rivers and vegetation. 

Additional Considerations:

Sacramento Delta: It's a "broken system, about to fail."  It's already below sea level and polar ice melt means the sea level is rising.  The earthen levees that protect it are deteriorating.  If we pump more water out of it or reduce the flow into it sea water intrusion will happen even faster.  Saving Central Valley farmland would thus entail sacrificing Delta farmland.

Water Storage: We have already built and dammed the best sites.  New storage will come at a higher marginal cost.  Silting at existing sites is beginning to appreciably reduce current storage capacity.

Growing Population: California added over 3.4 million people from the 2000 census to the 2010 census. Usually, city water needs in the end win out over rural ones.  Cities are where the votes are.

Desalination: It costs $1.01 per thousand gallons compared to 10 to 20 cents per thousand gallons for surface or ground water.

Fracking of the Monterey Shale: It takes a lot of water, already our scarcest resource.  Do we use our water to get oil?  If so, what water uses are we willing to do without? 

Concluding Choices:

We need to rethink what we want for the Valley long-term.
We cannot continue to farm the whole San Joaquin Valley.
On the West Side we have created an artificial industry which is not sustainable.
We have many competing interests: Individual versus society, short term versus long term.
We cannot do everything.  The resources are not there.
All current suggestions for ending the problem amount to "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

The Basic Question:

"How, in  a democratic society, do we limit ourselves?"  Political leaders, to stay popular, must promise all things to all people.  Because we demand them to, they promise plenty of inexpensive water for all interests, urban and rural.  In the long term this is not deliverable.  

If I may summarize, the situation calls for realism.  Do we go on the way we are until the wells run dry, devastating the region all at once?  Do we quintuple the price of water, making all farming uncompetitive here?  Or do we limit use according to a fair, sustainable and rationally planned program?  It will be one of the three, whether intentionally or not.  As the old saying goes, "Not to decide is to decide."

Tough Choices Need Courage

We have seen some rapid action lately on some of our most pressing national problems. The stimulus package and energy legislation mandating better gas mileage and emissions controls are examples. The bank bailouts, distasteful as they were, were also necessary to prevent financial petrification and are now starting to be paid back with interest. But when problems are less than immediately catastrophic our current milieu seems to have a great deal of difficulty coming to grips with them. The problem is often lack of courage. Leaders know certain things must be done, but they shrink at asking the people they represent to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. The politicians are too often afraid of not getting re-elected. Would that more had a priority of doing what is right and needed rather than what will sell at re-election time.

You certainly have to place a certain amount of blame on the public itself. Too often they demand services but somehow feel they can have all they want without paying for them. Too many office-seekers have been all too eager to make the promises that have encouraged that mindset over the years.

For one example close to home, most of California's water system was put in place when the state's population stood at 18 million. It gives you an idea how well that system was designed 45 years ago when you consider we now have 38 million and most of the state's needs are still being met. Yet, inevitably, we have outgrown it, and increasingly, gaps are appearing. There are effective plans combining conservation with new storage to deliver the quantity now needed. But the legislature is stymied over how to fund it. The Republicans want it all to be by a state bond. The Democrats say the interest on the bond would add another $1 billion a year to an already unbalanced budget. They want to fund it 1/3 by bond and the rest by user fees. While they argue fields lie fallow and the problem grows more acute. You just can't get around the fact that with the state budget the way it is, the money to build this project that both sides agree is necessary will have to entail some form of making those who use the water pay for it. But wedded to their no-tax pledges, the Republicans will not face reality.

The same kinds of dynamics are at work with problems like the coming shortfalls in Social Security. It really isn't rocket science. One or some combination of three things will have to happen: Either the payroll deductions for employees and employers will have to be raised, the retirement age will have to be raised or benefits will have to be cut. If neither of the first two are done, benefits will need to be cut to 73% of what they are now. So, why don't they act? Because nobody wants to tell the people the truth, that's why. They "kick the can down the road," and hope for a miracle, or at least put things off for someone else to have to deal with later--presumably after present congressmen and women are no longer in office.

We'll see how it pays out with health care, too. There are actually two main problems that need to be solved. One is the 47 million people are not covered. That has to be fixed. The other is that costs keep going up faster than economic growth and inflation, the rendering the system unsustainable and guaranteed to lead to a crash like the housing-banking-derivatives crash we have just been through when the economy can no longer support the price structure. Those two are the bedrock needs that have to be faced. Instead, too much of the debate has been stuck on outlandish fears and gotcha points. I happen to feel a "public option" would help a great deal to keep prices in line. But there are other paths to that goal, such as really stringent price controls that could accomplish the same purpose, though they would make government much more directly intrusive in the economics of the system. If leaders actually want to solve the problem, they will have to decide. But that would, like the other problems mentioned, take some honesty and courage.

This is an important enough issue it would be very noble for members of congress to truly solve the problem, even if it would lead to their defeat next time around. There is something to be said for being able to look one's self in the eye in the mirror and say, "I saved thousands of lives," or, "I helped keep the U.S. economy competitive." It would be nice to see that kind of courage and integrity in evidence in our own day a little more.