Why did Flint happen?

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We’ve got a ton of hero/villain narratives underway around the water contamination problems of Flint, Michigan. But there’s always a risk of post hoc storytelling here. As storytelling beings, we gravitate to narratives like that. But inevitably the heroes and villains are embedded in deeper institutional structures that are a necessary precursor to the problem, and fixing problems like this, broadly, requires fixing the conditions that allow this villainy to exist and require this heroism to fix it.

This is one of the important insights of the “solutions journalism” movement, and this is precisely what I love about the work Laura Bliss at Citylab, including this piece on Flint and the problems of places like it:

One crucial concept is environmental federalism, the basic enforcement structure underlying America’s big environmental protection laws. The federal government sets environmental standards, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act. States are the “primacy agencies” charged with implementing and enforcing those standards on a local level. Local governments and public water districts are supposed to comply with the state (and, by extension, the feds).

But environmental federalism creates some common trip-ups. First of all, “local and state politics always affect compliance,” says Teodoro. Local governments might determine that the cost of complying with federal and state standards is simply too high, too burdensome, or too politically onerous. For instance, compliance might require raising water rates, a risky move for local leaders seeking reelection. Or maybe the local population served by the water agency is politically marginalized, and thus deemed unworthy of the funding necessary for compliance.

Bliss is explicit in not excusing Flint’s villains. But her work shows why it’s important to go one step beyond and look at the institutional structures that push things in Flint’s direction.

persistent fish

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Lynda Mapes and her colleagues at the Seattle Times built a beautiful multimedia piece on the return of nature to the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula now that the dams are gone.

It has an amazing picture from 2010, pre-dam removal, of Chinook salmon at the bottom of the dam with this caption:

In this 2010 photo adult Chinook salmon are blocked in their journey upriver by Elwha Dam, built five miles from the river mouth with no fish passage. Even after 100 years they persisted, circling at the face of the dam every spawning season, trying to get upstream.

Oh my. 100 years.

Flawed rate structures cost California water utilities half a billion dollars

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Tara Lohan at Water Deeply had a great interview last week with Tom Ash of Southern California’s Inland Empire Water Agencies about the problem of water revenue in a time of conservation and drought:

Tom Ash: What I learned is that it doesn’t matter where in the world – China, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Israel – we all have the same problems in terms of water rates. We all have droughts, we all are facing climate change, we all have population growth. And in most countries they are having trouble recovering the cost of service.

Agencies in California in the last year probably will have lost about half a billion dollars in water revenues.

My Twitter quip was that the agencies had lost half a billion dollars because of conservation, but Jessica Blois correctly pointed out that was not quite right:

 

Ash goes on to offer a useful explanation of the difference between charging for the sale of water and charging for the basic infrastructure delivery:

Its job is to deliver clean, safe water, 24/7. Most of those costs to do that are fixed and the fixed costs are put into the cost of water. On average, let’s say 75 percent of costs are fixed for most public water agencies – it’s not the water that is expensive.

The entire interview is worth a read.

Sorting out the Salton Sea mess

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I joke that I kept trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book, because it’s such a hairy problem that in threatened to derail me in so many ways. Of course I failed, because the Sea is a critical piece of solving the distributional problems of scarce Colorado River water. Agricultural reductions in the Imperial Valley reduce tailwater flows to the Sea, shrinking critical habitat and creating health risks for the communities that surround it. (Mike Cohen offers a good rundown of the issues here.)

Via Ian James, some modest but encouraging news this week on that front:

The federal government plans to spend $3 million this year constructing a new wetland along the Alamo River in order to rehabilitate habitats and help clean up some of the polluted water flowing into the Salton Sea.

$3m is just a fraction of what is needed, but it’s bigger than zero.

Can we talk about La Niña yet?

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I don’t want to get out ahead of things, because we’re still trying to understand what the current gonzo El Niño means for global weather, but the monthly outlook from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center now has the odds at 50-50 that we’ll be in La Niña by fall:

Most models indicate that El Niño will weaken, with a transition to ENSO-neutral during the late spring or early summer 2016 (Fig. 6). Thereafter, the chance of La Niña conditions increases into the fall. While there is both model and physical support for La Niña following strong El Niño, considerable uncertainty remains.

La Niña by fall>

La Niña by fall

A reminder that El Niño tilts the odds toward wetter weather across the southern tier of U.S. states, La Niña does the opposite, and the Colorado River Basin as a whole is a coin toss.

On Bard and the language of water “markets” and “incentives”

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The Pacific Institute and others have published a useful new study on “Incentive-based Instruments for Freshwater Management” which raises some interesting issues about the language we use to describe water policy instruments.

The farm district in Bard, California, is negotiating with urban water users to fallow cover crops like this and send conserved water to the city

The farm district in Bard, California, is negotiating with urban water users to fallow cover crops like this and send conserved water to the city

Deep in Abrahm Lustgarten’s excellent new piece about water markets in the West is this description of the arrangement by which the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California pays farmers in Palo Verde (the deserts east of Los Angeles) to fallow fields so that water can be transferred for municipal use in coastal Southern California:

The arrangement is anything but a free market: To ensure that most of the water stays in the valley, the agreement limits the amount of land any one farmer can fallow in a year to 35 percent of his or her holdings. Still, farmers get added income without losing their rights to the water, and the Metropolitan Water District says Los Angeles and its other cities get reliable access to water, which helps them make it through drought years.

The distinction here is between “free market” and more regulatory approaches that specify in law who gets how much and for what, but I think what’s happening in Palo Verde has important market characteristics that matter. I think we’ve been getting wrapped around our axle in trying to fit this square peg into the round “water markets” hole. These things will never be like buying and selling oil. Water, as the Pacific Institute study notes, has a lot of characteristics that make normal markety stuff impossible:

It is heavy, unwieldy, and easily contaminated; it sometimes has dramatic seasonal and year-to-year variability; and it can be easily lost through evaporation, seepage, or runoff…. Further, these externalities may be borne by disparate parties, such as the environment or future generations, challenging efforts to compensate those injured by trading.

One of the points Robert Reich makes in his new book is that markets are at root institutions created by political systems, so by design if you do build a “water market” you end up with institutional arrangements that either do or don’t take the problem stuff into account.

Institutional arrangements are among the most important factors that determine the ultimate success or failure of water trading. Successful water trading requires secure and flexible water rights that recognize and protect users and others from externalities.

When we talk about “markets” in all this, the generic language prejudices us toward a specific notion of freeness of buying and selling, but really these things are always bound up with incredible institutional constraints that make very few of them look like buying and selling hog bellies*. That’s why I really like Cohen et al.’s language of “incentives” instead. It allows for a lot of the characteristics many people like about markety stuff, but allows for a lot of the kind of boundaries and constraints that Lustgarten argues make it “anything but a free market”.

Yes. Exactly.

Which brings us to Bard, the little irrigation district across the Colorado River from Yuma, in the far southeastern corner of California.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Bard Water District last month launched into a new arrangement in which Bard farmers can be compensated for fallowing fields during the hot late spring and summer months. Bard farmers do a lot of winter lettuce, for which they make a lot of money. Then, as is common for the winter lettuce trade, they plant the land in a cover crop – maybe cotton or sudan grass or something – that makes a lot less money. Negotiations are now underway on deals in which Met would compensate farmers $400 an acre to fallow instead during those months.

This has a lot of the characteristics of a market – willing buyers and sellers who have negotiated a price. But it is anything but a free market. There are a lot of constraints – limits on total acres involved, and it only applies to fallowing and water transfer during a few months of the year. Those are constraints intended to manage the externalities – keep agricultural land in production, protecting community of origin values.

I really like the language of “incentives” rather than “markets” here. It gets us past a hurdle that has hampered the conversation.

 

* I got “hog bellies” into a blog post. Achievement unlocked.

In Atlanta, another water use decoupling

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Via Brett Walton at Circle of Blue:

Per capita water use declined 30 percent from 2000 to 2015, and total water consumption within the metro Atlanta area declined over 10 percent despite a 20 percent increase in population.

That’s from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (pdf). As Brett notes, “Georgia now says it does not need a new reservoir that is going through federal permitting.”