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."