God Sent the Rain, But We Need an Angel to Build the Infrastructure to Manage It

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If Californians are to avoid a future where they have to endure permanent water rationing because of inadequate water infrastructure, a few members of the economic elite will have 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. But in reality, scarcity is a convenient way to consolidate political power and economic resources in the hands of existing elites, who count on the multitudes to assuage their downward mobility with online Soma.

So who will break with the pack? Who will be an 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 the 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.

Nonetheless, the campaign finds itself offering a solution everyone wants, but nobody wants to pay for.

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 that 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? They supported the 2014 water bond that passed but still nothing has been built, 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 cost of food, water, energy and housing are higher now than they were forty 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. 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, but despite its merit, it has no effective constituency today. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not 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 that 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, 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 the California Globe.

It’s Raining Again, but California Still Needs to Spend Billions on New Water Infrastructure

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It’s only December, and two major storm systems have already passed over California with another one on the way. These storms are encouraging news in a parched state where multi-year droughts have been declared four times just since 2000. But most of the runoff from these storms quickly ends up in the Pacific Ocean. In a 2017 study, the California Public Policy Institute estimated so-called “uncaptured water, river water in excess of the total volume diverted by water users or kept
instream for system and ecosystem purposes,” averaged over 11 million acre feet over the preceding twenty years.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Californians built the most impressive system for interbasin water transfers on Earth. Each year millions of acre feet of water are transferred from the Sacramento/San Joaquin and Colorado River watersheds into the massive coastal cities: the San Francisco Bay Area, greater Los Angeles, and San Diego. This water is diverted from storage reservoirs via aqueducts to treatment plants in these urban centers, where it is used once, with the wastewater then treated and discharged into the Pacific.

Today, however, this impressive system is no longer enough. Too much uncaptured water still flows uselessly to sea, and too much urban wastewater, imported at great expense, is not reused. And not only does California’s water system require expansion to capture and use storm runoff and wastewater, but the existing system is failing. Aqueducts have subsided and cannot operate at capacity. Dams require seismic upgrades. Just restoring what we’ve got will cost tens of billions.

Instead of investing in new water projects, and maintaining existing water infrastructure, however, California’s state legislature and water agencies have become expert at squeezing every drop out of the aging system built over fifty years ago. Over the past few decades Californians have made impressive gains in water efficiency. Total water diversions in California for agriculture and cities – roughly 30 million acre feet per year for agriculture and 8 million acre feet per year for cities – have not increased even while California population has grown and irrigated farm acreage has increased.

But to cope with worsening droughts and a diminished Sierra snowpack, as well as new laws that limit ground pumping and increase allocations for ecosystem health, conservation alone cannot guarantee Californians have an adequate supply of water. To address this urgent new reality, the More Water Now campaign has been formed to qualify a ballot initiative to fund water projects in California, and to streamline the approval process.

The Water Infrastructure Funding Act, a proposed ballot initiative that could face voters in November 2022, aims to solve the challenge of water scarcity in California. Voters and policymakers are encouraged to read the fine print in this thoughtfully written initiative. Rather than pick projects for funding, it defines project categories that are eligible for funding. Principal among them are funds for wastewater recycling, storm water runoff capture, aquifer remediation and recharge, off-stream reservoir construction and expansion, and aqueduct repair.

The value of this approach is to ensure that funding from this initiative is consistent with projects already planned by state, regional and local water agencies. In San Jose, for example, it will cost billions to build wastewater recycling plants. But that would be a high priority project under this initiative to receive the necessary funds.

The centerpiece of the proposed initiative is the requirement to set aside two percent of the state general fund – roughly four billion per year – for water projects until five million acre feet of water per year is produced by a combination of new water projects and new conservation programs. It is likely that two million acre feet per year of new water could be supplied through treating and reusing wastewater throughout the state. The initiative also funds programs to recover up to an additional one million acre feet per year through conservation programs. Another two million acre feet of storm runoff could be captured each year in off-stream reservoirs, floodwater wetlands, and underground aquifers.

But this inspiring 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, also 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.”

The California State Water Board recently identified a $4.6 billion funding gap just to fix California’s most at-risk municipal water systems. These inadequate water systems disproportionately impact people living in California’s underserved communities, especially those with higher Black or Latino populations. This initiative explicitly includes these projects as eligible for funding.

Another necessary part of this initiative are moderate revisions to the California Environmental Quality Act and the Coastal Act. All the funding in the world will not solve California’s urgent need for more water infrastructure if reasonable time limits aren’t placed on environmental review. And because the initiative leaves the final choice of which projects to approve in the hands of the California Water Commission, it is extremely unlikely a project will go forward unless environmental concerns are adequately addressed.

Californians who are hesitant to support massive public works projects need to understand that taxpayers will foot the bill for water one way or another. If no new water supply infrastructure is built, water scarcity will drive water bills up. Taxes will then be spent on government subsidies to help low income households pay their water bills, as well as to fund rebates for consumers to purchase appliances that consume even less water. Those appliances, even after the rebates, will be costly and they don’t work very well. Even worse, water scarcity will mean food prices will soar. And without abundant water, it will also be harder to increase the supply of new homes, driving housing prices up.

This economic fact is often lost on critics who oppose government spending of any kind: Socializing the cost of public works, especially to increase the overall water supply, is a tax-neutral proposition that yields a future of abundant water instead of scarce water, enabling broader economic growth and a lower cost-of-living.

The rains have come back to California. Nobody knows how long they’ll last. But rain or shine, we should not pass up the chance to solve water scarcity forever in the Golden State.

This article originally appeared as a guest opinion in the Epoch Times.

California Needs More Water Now

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AUDIO: California’s water infrastructure was built in the 1950s and 1960s to supply water to a state with a population of 20 million. Today, with nearly 40 million people living in California, the state’s neglected water system lacks the capacity to cope with multi-year droughts. California must invest in a new water system for the 21st century. Edward Ring with Bryan Miller on Nation State of Play.

https://omny.fm/shows/nation-state-of-play/edward-ring-california-needs-more-water-now

Rebuttal to LA Times Criticism of the More Water Now Initiative

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You can say this for Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik, he doesn’t conceal his biases. His description of our attempt to fund water projects to prevent a drought induced water supply crisis in California? He writes: “A majestically cynical ploy being foisted on taxpayers by some of the state’s premier water hogs,” one that is “costly and dishonest,” and will “wreak permanent damage to the state budget and force taxpayers to pay for ecologically destructive and grossly uneconomical dams, reservoirs and desalination plants.”

In his column, published December 2 in the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik presents the same arguments against spending on water infrastructure that have been heard over and over again. By doing this, Hiltzik provides a useful checklist against which to express the other side of the story.

First of all, are Californians confronting a drought emergency or not? On October 19, Governor Newsom declared the entire state of California to be in a drought emergency. On November 18, the San Jose Water Company, in response to “extreme drought,” imposed water rationing on over a million customers, with strict fines for violations. Back in August, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time in history. The Bureau is imposing mandatory cuts that will eventually affect urban and agricultural consumers in California that depend on water from the Colorado River.

When confronting water shortages this severe, with no end in sight, at what point does it become necessary to invest in “grossly uneconomical” water infrastructure? How much worse do things have to get? One must ask how California’s Water Projects, a sadly neglected engineering marvel, could have ever gotten built, if the mentality that grips today’s critics of water infrastructure investment had been present back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hiltzik asserts this initiative is “being foisted on taxpayers by some of the state’s premier water hogs,” that will “gift growers and dairy ranchers with millions of acre-feet of effectively free water.”

This will come as a surprise to those California farmers that were just notified by the California Department of Water Resources, that for the first time ever, they “won’t get a single drop from the network of waterways in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta other than what’s needed for health and safety.”

Hiltzik claims California’s farm sector has the potential to reduce its overall consumption of water by an additional 22 percent through “more efficient usage.” But to back that up, he cites a study concluded nearly eight years ago, before farmers completed massive investments in water efficiency to cope with the ongoing drought that didn’t end until 2017. California’s farmers now use some of the most water efficient techniques anywhere in the world.

The issue that journalists – and the voters they influence – have to confront honestly is simple: Are Californians prepared to deal with prolonged droughts by subjecting urban and agricultural users to mandatory water rationing? Do Californians believe that conservation alone can deliver an adequate supply of water to cities and farms, or should the state subsidize investments to upgrade and expand water infrastructure?

This is a bipartisan issue. Forcing the California State Legislature to prioritize investment in water infrastructure is not an ideological goal, it’s a pragmatic necessity. Water doesn’t flow Right or Left. With budget surpluses, spending two percent of the state general fund each year on water projects will not impose a new burden on taxpayers. The legitimate function of government is to subsidize public works in order to take pressure off ratepayers, wherever they are, so necessities like water are abundant and affordable.

Solving the Problem

With that in mind, the Water Infrastructure Funding Act is written to eliminate water scarcity in California. It allocates funding, roughly $4 billion per year, until five million acre feet of water is being produced annually by new water projects. To accomplish this goal, an all-of-the-above approach is taken when defining projects eligible for funding.

For example, additional conservation programs are funded to achieve up to 1.0 million acre feet of reduction in use. To achieve the remaining four million acre feet, the potential to reuse wastewater can likely recover another two million acre feet per year. Even environmentalists agree that wastewater reuse is necessary not only to reduce the amount of river water that has to be imported into California’s massive coastal cities, but also to end the discharge of nitrogen rich treated effluent into the ocean.

The cost to achieve the goal of total wastewater reuse flatly contradicts Hiltzik’s accusation that farmers stand to gain the most if this initiative is approved by voters. The cost to upgrade the water treatment plants serving Los Angeles County, combined with the cost to remediate the capacious aquifers in the Los Angeles Basin, easily exceeds $10 billion. Worthy projects like these require state funding.

To reach the ultimate goal of five million acre feet, along with conservation and reuse projects there are the more controversial solutions of reservoirs and desalination. But reservoirs, which will still have to be approved by the California Water Commission, can be off-stream. The proposed Sites Reservoir, if built to its original specifications, would not only yield a half-million acre feet of water per year, but would offer pump-storage to absorb surplus renewable electricity to be discharged every day during peak demand on California’s power grid.

Hiltzik expresses skepticism that new infrastructure can “squeeze an additional 5 million acre-feet out of the stones that are California water sources.” He’s wrong. Most of that five million acre feet can be achieved through conservation and wastewater recycling. But capturing runoff to store in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers can reliably deliver the rest, if the requisite infrastructure is built. This is well documented.

An authoritative study issued in 2017 by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water.” (italics added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

Surely it is possible to harvest 20 percent of this uncaptured water to store each year in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers.

Unsurprisingly, Hiltzik expresses concern about the initiative’s modifications to CEQA and the Coastal Act. But these changes don’t eliminate environmental review, they merely reduce the time required for project approval to a year or two instead of a decade or two. Virtually every water expert among the hundreds we spoke with, agreed that without some environmental regulatory relief, it would be extremely difficult to build new water infrastructure by the time Californians are going to need it.

Journalists – and the voters they influence – are invited to study the full text of the Water Infrastructure Funding Act and consider its inclusion of eligible projects that don’t directly increase California’s supply of water but nonetheless are absolutely essential to the well-being of Californians. Replacing the toxic lead pipes in the LAUSD public schools. Repairing and extending water mains to underserved communities. Restoring riparian habitats – with the accompanying benefit of recharging aquifers – in urban environments. Where are California’s cities and counties going to get this money, if the state doesn’t make it a spending priority?

Investing in infrastructure to guarantee abundant water in California would create tens of thousands of jobs. It would make housing more affordable since homebuilding permits depend on reliable water. It would keep food affordable. It would lower utility bills to consumers and make rationing unnecessary. It would create resilience against climate change and against civil disasters.

Back in 2012, Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill (AB) 685, making California the first state in the nation to legislatively recognize the human right to water. The Water Infrastructure Funding Act will put meaning to that legislation, benefiting people and the environment.

To learn more about the progress of this game changing initiative, visit the website https://MoreWaterNow.com.

This article was originally published on the website of the More Water Now campaign.

San Jose Mercury Editorial Reflects Zero Sum Mentality About Water

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Perhaps to atone for an article they’d published a few days earlier, which offered a balanced report on our effort to qualify a ballot measure to fund and fast track construction of water supply infrastructure in California, the San Jose Mercury on November 19 published a blistering editorial that condemned the initiative. But the editorial makes unfounded claims, cherry picks its facts, and caters to extremist versions of environmentalism.

For starters, the proposed “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022” is not merely a product of “Central Valley Republicans and Big Ag backers.” It is supported by a bipartisan and growing coalition of Democrats and Republicans, water agencies, cities, counties, business associations, community groups, construction workers, homebuilders and environmentalists that need the state to invest in water supply projects.

The editorial claims that more water for farmers – to grow food, we might add – “comes at the expense of urban users and the state’s fragile environment.” This reflects a zero sum, conflict mentality that is completely out of character with California’s heritage and culture. More water projects mean more water available for wetlands, more water available for the Delta ecosystems, and more opportunities to manage chronic droughts and climate change. And, to state what ought to be obvious, more water projects also means less imported food, and more affordable food.

What the San Jose Mercury’s editorial reflects is part of a broader malaise. It reflects a commitment to scarcity and rationing as the solution to environmental challenges, instead of searching for policies that can deliver abundance without significantly harming the environment. Which of these approaches is more consistent with the creativity and innovation that has made the Silicon Valley one of the wealthiest places on earth?

Why isn’t the San Jose Mercury appalled that the City of San Jose has just imposed punitive restrictions on residential water use on their residential consumers? Where are the entrepreneurs and problem solvers that typify Silicon Valley? Is this they best they can do? Why doesn’t the San Jose Mercury expose the special interests that benefit from scarcity, that can’t wait to sell mandated sensors and software to help “manage” urban consumers down to 45 gallons per day? Why aren’t they thrilled that, as the Legislative Analyst confirmed, this initiative will take pressure off local budgets, freeing up more money to fund police and fire departments?

Have the Mercury editors actually read The Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022? Do they understand that it would fund upgrades to wastewater treatment plants, so water currently imported from Northern rivers could be reused instead of being dumped, with too much nitrogen and excessive salinity, back into the San Francisco and Santa Monica bays? Do they understand how much more water will be left in the rivers, once these urban reuse projects are built? Are they aware of the provisions that fund replacement of the toxic pipes in Los Angeles public schools and elsewhere, or upgrade water treatment plants in underserved communities, or fund conservation projects to reduce use by another 1.0 million acre feet per year? Do they understand that by funding offstream reservoirs to capture surplus water during storms, there’s more water not only for farmers and cities but also to maintain riparian ecosystems?

One of the biggest criticisms of this water initiative is its changes to environmental regulations. But it doesn’t exempt projects from environmental review, it merely puts a reasonable time limit on how long these reviews can take. Instead of taking decades to get projects approved, now it will take years. Maybe it’s time for opinion page editors, journalists, and voters in California to think about just how much time and money has been squandered on bureaucracy and litigation, and recognize that without reasonable reforms to these regulations there will never be adequate water infrastructure in California.

During this Thanksgiving holiday and thereafter, the proponents of The Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022 call on newspapers and the voters they influence to consider the values of abundance and hope in their editorials on the topic of water policy. Coping with drought and climate change is a challenge that can be met without condemning urban users to 45 gallons of water per day, nor does it require fallowing millions of acres of productive farmland. Massive investment in new water projects is urgently needed, and this initiative offers a solution that will work for everyone.

To learn more about the progress of this game changing initiative, visit the website https://MoreWaterNow.com or send an email to press@morewaternow.com.

This article originally appeared on the website of the More Water Now campaign.

“More water now” is much needed in California

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AUDIO: The challenge of water scarcity in California is often framed as a battle between farmers and urban users. But it doesn’t to have to be a zero sum game. Either via action by the state legislature, or through a citizen’s ballot initiative, California can build new systems to capture, store, distribute, treat, and reuse more water. Rationing is not inevitable. Edward Ring with Trent Loos on Rural Route Radio.

https://www.ivoox.com/en/rural-route-radio-nov-12-2021-more-water-audios-mp3_rf_78180348_1.html

Here is a plan to create more water for California

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Re “California should create more water – much more“; Commentary, Oct. 28, 2021

There is an answer to Jim Wunderman’s position that “state and federal governments should commit to creating 1.75 million acre feet – about 25% of California’s current urban water use – of new water from desalination and wastewater recycling by the end of this decade”: the Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022, a constitutional initiative proposed for the November 2022 state ballot.

This initiative, submitted in August, has been analyzed by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which predicted “increased state spending on water supply projects and potentially less funding available for other state activities.” Notwithstanding the multibillion-budget surplus California’s Legislature currently enjoys, this redirecting of spending for water projects is what the initiative proponents intend. The state of California has neglected its water infrastructure for decades.

This initiative requires 2% of the state’s general fund be used to construct new water supply projects, and it doesn’t sunset until new projects add 5 million acre feet per year to the state’s water supply. That would be about 2 million acre feet coming from recycling and desalination, another 1 million from conservation programs, and the rest from runoff capture into off-stream reservoirs and aquifers. It also revises the California Environmental Quality Act and the Coastal Act to streamline project approval.

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. Some of the opponents that have already emerged apparently have not read the measure, because they’re criticizing it for not funding projects which in fact it will fund.

This initiative aims to replace water scarcity with sustainable water abundance. Its benefits translate not only into more water, and hence more options to maintain and improve ecosystems throughout the state, but also an economic boom. Lower prices for water will translate into more affordable food, affordable water for every industry reliant on water, widely available water supplies to enable more home construction, and the creation of tens of thousands of high-paying construction jobs.

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

California’s Green Conundrum

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In 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act.” Determined to leave a legacy that would ensure he remained welcome among the glitterati of Hollywood and Manhattan, Schwarzenegger may not have fully comprehended the forces he unleashed.

Under AB 32, California was required to “reduce its [greenhouse gas] emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.” Now, according to the “scoping plan” updated in 2017, California must “further reduce its GHG emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.”

The problem with such an ambitious plan is that achieving it will preclude ordinary Californians ever enjoying the lifestyle that people living in developed nations have earned and have come to expect. It will condemn Californians to chronic scarcity of energy, with repercussions that remain poorly understood by voters.

It isn’t merely that Californians will experience unreliable energy, as the percentage of energy generated from “renewable” sources continues to increase. That will eventually get sorted out, although at a stupendous cost. Battery farms will replace natural gas plants to fill in those times of day when there is no sun and insufficient wind, and over time, the entire solar, wind, battery, and “smart grid” infrastructure will get overbuilt enough to cope even with those months in the year when days are short and there isn’t much wind. It will cost trillions and despoil thousands of square miles of supposedly sacred open space, but it will get done.

The bigger problem is that this whole scheme is too space-intensive and too expensive to ever be scaled up to the level of abundance. To close the loop, “negawatts” will be required. That is, extreme conservation of energy solutions will become mandatory. This will affect every household, imposing LED lights, “smart” thermostats, “energy sipping” appliances, lights that turn themselves off when the sensors determine a room is empty. Every manner of intrusive, surveilled, algorithmic management of our lives will become mandatory. But it doesn’t end there.

Energy isn’t just required to run a household. It’s also necessary to run an economy. This is immediately obvious with respect to the future of California’s water infrastructure. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, “overall, water use accounts for about 20 percent of California’s electricity use and 30 percent of natural gas used by businesses and homes. This energy is used to supply, convey, treat, and heat water.”

Meanwhile, a rarely acknowledged fact about California is that, despite “green” ideology dominating public policy for decades, over 80 percent of California’s total energy consumption relies on fossil fuel.

This is the conundrum. California’s policymakers know that in order to fulfill their climate goals under the Global Warming Solutions Act, they cannot permit the growth of industry or infrastructure that may consume more energy.

The effect on water use is profound. Want to increase interbasin transfers, to deliver water from regions where water is abundant to regions where water is scarce? That, after all, was the realized intent of the California Water Project, one of the civil engineering marvels of the world. But why fix the collapsing aqueducts, or build additional pipelines and aqueducts, when that would require more pumping, and more pumping requires more energy? Why build desalination plants, when it takes a megawatt-year of electricity to desalinate every 2,000 acre feet of seawater? Why upgrade water treatment plants, when treating wastewater requires energy?

California’s green solution is to ration water consumption instead of generating more energy to produce more water. This priority is felt everywhere. Neglect the agricultural canals and let more runoff flow into the ocean. Decimate California’s once legendary agricultural sector. Squeeze the small farming operations into insolvency, and allow hedge funds to buy their land for pennies on the dollar. Replace a farming economy that delivers a diversity of row crops to the entire world with a few commodity monocrops that don’t require as much water, or turn the farmland into solar farms and nature preserves.

The impact on household water consumption is set to become equally severe. The state wants to reduce indoor water consumption to 55 gallons per person per day, then to 50 gallons per person per day, and eventually to 40 gallons per person per day. Ban virtually all use of outdoor water for landscaping. Promote, then mandate, “xeriscaping”—because it’s fun and responsible to send children out to play in the rocks. And hold on, anyway, isn’t having a private home with a private yard exclusionary and unsustainable and racist? Don’t laugh. They’re coming for you.

Californians, even during prolonged droughts, could invest in water infrastructure and maintain an abundant supply of water for farms and cities. But abundant water policies collide with the conundrum. To supply more water requires more energy. To supply more anything requires more energy. It won’t happen.

To implement California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, the state has raised an army of “carbon accountants.” They are charged with determining the carbon impact of everything. Want to bring back the timber industry in California? After all, there’s no better way to sequester carbon than to cut down trees and mill lumber. But wait. First the carbon accountants will have to calculate the net benefit. How much energy will the lumber trucks and the chainsaws require? What about the mills? What about the carbon absorption potential of the trees if they’re left standing? Blah blah blah. To be sure, this level of analysis can’t be done on a spreadsheet. Bring out the parametric database. Bring out the black box. Make sure you include a plethora of regression analyses. To do the “work,” hire PhDs by the dozens. Spend millions. Spend years.

Or never mind.

With a Sierra Club litigator looking over their shoulder, don’t expect carbon accountants to ever greenlight an industrial endeavor in California, unless it’s a solar farm, a wind farm, or a battery farm. And never mind the collateral damage of those projects. So let the forests burn. God forbid the timber companies might come in and clear out around the power lines, maintain the fire roads and fire breaks, and thin the undergrowth, all for free in exchange for the right to log again. That’s what they did up until the 1990s. Today? Not a chance. So burn baby, burn.

One way to address California’s green conundrum would be to embrace nuclear and hydroelectric sources of energy. After all, these power sources do not create any emissions. Keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. Raise the height of the Shasta Dam and immediately have more water and more electricity. But these solutions are anathema to California’s green elite. But why? Is there a “climate crisis” or isn’t there?

Of course, if the goal of green policy in California is to reduce the standard of living of normal residents, implement draconian controls over their lives, and move people out of spacious detached homes and into energy efficient apartments, this is not a conundrum at all.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Recognize that fossil fuel cannot be phased out precipitously and set an example to the world of how to, for example, use clean natural gas in a manner that is as efficient and sustainable as possible. Pioneer new designs for nuclear power stations. Build water infrastructure that guarantees more water for everything—not only the farms and cities, but the streams and rivers. Stop using visions of an apocalypse to limit our lives and line the pockets of environmentalist litigants. Proclaim abundance in all things to be achievable and desirable, and refuse to compromise. There is no conundrum. It is a self-inflicted lie.

As America’s dissident reformers focus on confirming election integrity, maintaining medical freedom, and countering the woke mob—as if that weren’t enough—the agenda of the environmentalist extremists moves relentlessly forward. What’s happening in California is moving East, crossing the Sierras and the Rockies, traversing the plains, and infiltrating every state house and county seat and city council in the nation. Propelled by fantasy and panic in equal measure, and manipulated by fanatics and shameful opportunists, the extreme green agenda must be recognized for what it is: a highly contagious misanthropic pathology that afflicts the young, the impressionable, the uninformed, the well-intentioned but misguided, the profiteers and the tyrants. Beware of them all.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Fixing California – Part Three, Achieving Water Abundance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Environmentalists and Other Obstructionists

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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SoCal Desalination Plant Inches Towards Approval

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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