On headlines

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L.A. Times headline

L.A. Times headline

Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click?

  1. “California has about one year of water left.”
  2. “California has about one year of reservoir storage and then we must rely even more on groundwater”

The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last Friday. It was a scary as hell, a click-generating machine. OMG, California’s gonna run out of water! Why aren’t we talking more about this?

 

Sunday evening, Jay seems to have grasped the misunderstanding the headline had caused. The body of the piece has a bit more nuance, noting that it’s talking about surface storage, and that this as a result placing growing pressure on groundwater, and Jay’s rightly concerned that overpumping of groundwater is a thing we ought to worry about:

That’s an OMG too, but the first version – “OMG, California’s about to run out!” is the one that has run amok, clickbait style, and it’s terribly misleading.

Not blaming Jay here. Many’s the time I’ve been bitten by a headline written by someone else atop my work. But it’s a reminder that communicating about water policy is hard.

The problem with Victor Davis Hanson’s case for California’s water policy failures

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In a twitter discussion this morning, Brian Jordan shared a telling graphic that exposes the problems with Victor Davis Hanson’s recent City Journal essay about California’s water problems. Hanson’s argument is that California abandoned a dam-building program that, had it been pursued, would have provided the necessary storage to meet needs in this year of drought:

Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition.

Hanson’s reflexive culture wars rhetoric makes him painful to read (“All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico that would help double the state’s population in just four decades”, capitalization in the original), but if you peel back what he’s saying, he’s really making an unexamined argument for the use of what David Zetland (pdf) calls “other people’s money” in providing water for his beloved agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley.

What he doesn’t say (and he really can’t, given the free market values that are central to his world) is that the dams whose lack he bemoans would have to have been built with “other people’s money” – the taxpayers of the state of California or the federal government. This is really expensive capacity, far beyond the financial reach of the farmers who would be using the water. And once you ask for other people’s money, their values come into play. (This would be the point, if I were adopting Hanson’s culture wars rhetoric, for the obligatory “welfare farmer” reference, but I don’t think that’s right, and I think neither that nor his “Green” and nativism frame are useful or correct – better to assume good faith on all sides.)

Jordan’s graphic of expanding storage capacity in Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District exposes the hole in Hanson’s argument:

 

Hanson notes Southern California’s substantial water storage reserves, but is blind to the reason they exist.

Met recognized the need for storage to provide, in drought, a more reliable supply of water for Southern California. Met spent its own money – billions over the years, according to Jordan, including hundreds of millions per year recently – to built the storage buffer that has enabled it to weather the current drought.

There are two important points here.

First, it wasn’t “other people’s money”. Metropolitan Southern California largely ponied up the cash to meet its own water security needs. This goes back to the construction of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which L.A. paid for itself.

Second, municipal users can afford to pay a lot more for water security. This is very expensive stuff, and I don’t think we’ll every see ag communities able to afford that level of reliability on their own. To get it, they need other people’s money, and at that point other people’s values come into play.

Overheard on the bus: Beowulf

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Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque….

Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?”

Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.”

I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a beat up paperback Beowulf. “It’s a poem,” the guy says, opening it randomly, pointing to text. “Old English” – he points to the left page, then to the right, adds – “translation”.

They both got off the bus.

Tree rings in the Rolling Stone

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Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone?

“It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest growth, massive mortality. In the afternoons, I’d go on jogs on the trails outside my office and take mental inventory of who was dying and who was living. All over New Mexico, trees keeled over. It was like they’d been transported onto a new planet where climate is entirely different than what they were evolved for.”

Except I realize on second reading that, despite being essential to the story of Park Williams’ groundbreaking work on climate and our future forests, tree rings didn’t get a direct mention.

So you should probably still click on this link and buy my book.

In California, a new face of water conservation?

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One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it.

That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north:

With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight water agency from Los Angeles has come calling on Sacramento Valley rice farmers, offering up to $71 million for some of their water.

The price being offered is so high, some farmers can make more from selling water than from growing their rice.

Users (in this case rice farmers) conserve in a dry year and are compensated. Overall system water use (by “system” I’m talking about the state’s interlinked artificial watershed) is reduced. The shock that might otherwise happen if the shortage happened arbitrarily (one or the other parties to this transaction simply running out of water) is avoided.

Potential uncaptured externalities: the people who sell farm equipment to the rice farmers, and their employees. This is not without negative spillovers.

A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water

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There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something.

At issue is a new EPA stormwater permit for the greater Albuquerque area intended to improve water quality in the Rio Grande. Stormwater, especially from New Mexico’s summer thunderstorms, washes all kinds of crap into the river. This rightly concerns the EPA, which is charged with keeping crap out of rivers. But the new stormwater permit, according to a Feb. 26, 2015 letter from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission to the EPA, pursues this goal in part by reducing the amount of water that gets to the river.

The ISC also plays the Endangered Species Act card, arguing that reduced summer storm runoff reduces the amount of water available to meet flow targets for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow:

While this specific conflict – a federal stormwater permit – is narrowly focused, this raises a broader issue about the way we think about stormwater here in the Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. The Middle Rio Grande Regional Water Plan, for example, proposes to enhance stormwater capture as a water management strategy. My University of New Mexico colleague Bruce Thomson has long argued that we need to recognize that water management approaches like this are entering into a zero sum game – water captured before it hits the river (stormwater, treated effluent) is less water in the river. From a note he send to water colleagues this morning (quoted with permission):

For decades folks have had their eye on stormwater as the untapped resource that was going to save us all from future water shortages. Stormwater collection is in the 2004 MRG Regional Water Plan. The North Diversion Channel goes right past the Water Utility Authority’s treatment plant and they’ve had conversations about diverting storm water down the hill to their plant. And a topic at all of the local & regional water meetings is about repealing the 96 hour rule to allow folks to capture and store stormwater. The reason is simple – nobody has claimed stormwater or has rights to it so everybody’s first thought is we can see it, it’s right there, we might as well take it and use it.

This letter from the ISC is the first formal declaration that I know of to throw down the gauntlet and officially declare that that water serves an important role in the state’s water balance. There are going to be some wonderful battles to watch between the environmentalists, state & federal regulators, water rights holders, water planners and others as they begin to realize they can’t do anything that will impact stormwater flows.

Here’s the full ISC letter:



Agricultural land, drought and taxes

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The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, the New Mexico Acequia Association supports it:

In acequia communities this is vitally important to keep lands in agricultural production and to protect continuity in agricultural use. It protects landowners and families with long-time ties and long-term commitment to agricultural use of the land.

But there are competing/conflicting policy issues.

In the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area, the ag property tax designation incentivizes keeping irrigation going that is clearly non-economic for agricultural purposes alone. (In the most recent census of agriculture, net farm income in the county in which Albuquerque sits was negative.) This suggests that, here, people are farming as a lifestyle amenity, with a day job that pays the bills and a tax break that subsidizes the enterprise.

This may very well be a desirable policy outcome. The community as a whole may sufficiently value that green space to support such a subsidy and to prefer the resulting incentive to divert water to that use. But the discussion should be explicit about that tradeoff.

The legislation: HB 112

update: a couple of helpful comments from Coco over on the Twitters (I wish there was some way to automate this, a lot of the most interesting discussion these days happens over there)

 

 

Good news and bad news for Lake Mead

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The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead.

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck

Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck

Mead ended February at a surface elevation of 1,089 feet above sea level, which is just 41 percent full, the lowest it has been at this time of year since they first began filling it in the 1930s. If it drops much further (1,075), Arizona and Nevada will have to reduce their use of Colorado River water, the first shortage since the system was built.

Good news: We’re all but guaranteed at this point (a 95 percent chance) that there the Bureau of Reclamation will release some “bonus water” from Lake Powell to help keep Mead’s levels from dropping further. Under normal operations, the rules require upstream states to release 8.23 million acre feet per year*, but this year the likely release will be 9 million acre feet.

Bad news: Despite the extra water, Mead is forecast to continue dropping – another 6 feet at the end of September compared to a year previous. How could that be?

The answer is what some people are calling the “structural deficit” (though I’ve gotten some pushback on the term). The basic rules that govern water accounting call for normal deliveries to Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico that, when combined with evaporation and system losses as the water moves downstream, are greater than the amount of water available:

Lake Mead Structural deficit                                           .

In the past, water users were able to ignore this problem because “bonus water” above and beyond the minimum 8.23 million acre feet was routine. But because of unprecedented drought (climate change?), the bonus water is gone. Despite the drought, the Upper Basin states have continued to meet their 8.23 million acre foot base requirement, but the days of bonus water are gone.

It seems obvious that the folks downstream would look at this situation and say, “Hey, we’ve got to stop using so much water!” And they have, to a point. In 2007, they signed a shortage sharing agreement that calls for a reduction in Arizona and Nevada’s share if Lake Mead drops below 1,075. The idea here is that they use the water while they’ve got it, and then cut back when the reservoir drops to troublingly low levels.

When basin leaders were hashing out the details of the 2007 agreement, they considered options that would have cut use sooner deeper, and sooner, but they didn’t do it, so this is where we are now.

* Lawyers will argue about this number, but for all practical purposes, that’s the way the system’s being operated.