Owens Valley and the 100th anniversary of the LA Aqueduct: Chinatown was just a movie

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Lee Vining Intake, Los Angeles Aqueduct

Lee Vining Intake, Los Angeles Aqueduct, Courtesy Library of Congress

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, economist Gary Libecap’s take on “The Myth of Owens Valley“:

The allegations are that Owens Valley water was stolen from farmers by a rapacious Los Angeles and, once it was shipped out of the valley through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the agricultural economy was ruined and the valley was left a wasteland.

Unfortunately for the development of water markets and the smooth reallocation of water, the story is wrong. The water was neither stolen nor was the farm economy left in ruins. There is another and more useful lesson to be drawn from Owens Valley for promoting the development of water markets: Because water is a complex resource with many interconnected uses (some rivalrous and some not), any water trade is likely to have at least a few third-party effects. Fears of those effects bottle up contemporary water discussions. But the Owens Valley experience reveals that the allocative benefits of moving water from low-valued uses to high-valued ones are so large that they most likely will swamp the distributional concerns.

Libecap argues that the decline of Owens Valley farming, part of the foundation of what he calls the “myth”, is the same trend found in other Great Basin farming valleys, a long term shift to livestock:

The export of water reduced crop production as a share of overall agricultural output and encouraged a shift toward livestock. But this pattern also took place elsewhere in the Great Basin. The comparative advantage of the region ultimately was in livestock, so there likely would have been a gradual shift from crops in Owens Valley, even had the aqueduct not been built. Owens Valley was not left a wasteland as is sometimes alleged.

This conversation matters because so much of the West’s water is currently used in agriculture. We only have a long term shortage in the West if we want our cities and our farms to both continue on their current trajectories. Given the relative economic size and importance of the cities relative to the farms, we need to get the “distributional concerns” about farm-to-city transfer right, which means we need to look carefully at what actually happened in the Owens Valley (and other places where ag->urban transfers are underway).

Computers are good at chess, mostly

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If you want a chance at beating a computer at chess, there is one simple way: Make the computer itself move the pieces across the chess board. For all the playing strength of the programs, the computer-driven robots that move the pieces don’t do such a great job.

From Tyler Cowen’s fascinating Average Is Over, about chess, technology and the hollowing of the American middle class.

When streams reclaim flood plains in a human-altered world

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Electa Draper in the Denver Post over the weekend on what happens when streams reclaim their flood plains in a human-altered world:

Before Colorado was settled, its narrow canyons were river channel from wall to wall. Humans added roads and buildings in these tight spots and confined the channel. In one week in September, the stranglehold of asphalt, concrete and riprap on the St. Vrain was broken.

The river, from an ecosystem perspective, was as creative as it was destructive — new beds and paths, new aquatic life habitat in new pools and riffles and runs.

“No question, it was a disaster for people,” Wohl said, “but floods are actually good for the health of the rivers. They are dynamic systems. We try to make them less so. We create bland rivers.”

 

Wood ducks

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I’d come to take the wood ducks living on the Rio Grande Nature Center pond for granted, until I recently picked up a camera. Really lovely birds:

Wood ducks, Rio Grande Nature Center, November 2013, by John Fleck

Wood ducks, Rio Grande Nature Center, November 2013, by John Fleck

The new political economics of moving water

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The politics-economics interface is what fascinates me about this new idea kicking around to replenish the rapidly draining Ogallala Aquifer by moving water across Kansas from the Missouri River. As Brett Walton explained last month in Circle of Blue, it’s a modest study at this point, with costs split between the state and federal government. But the scale of the thing being considered is of the same order of magnitude size as the big water-movers of the West – the Central Arizona Project and its ilk:

Economics are foremost in Rude’s mind, because the aqueduct would be a whopper of a project — at least double the estimated $US 3.6 billion price tag from three decades ago and comparable in scale to massive water diversions like the 540-kilometer (360-mile) Central Arizona Project that was approved before the Carter administration and which was built mostly with federal money.

And there’s the rub. Because it seems clear that the days of federal funding for big projects like this are long over. There are examples of non-federal projects of this scale. Los Angeles has done it. But that’s for municipal water supplies, for which one can charge a lot more. Brett touches on the scale of the political-economic problem:

Rude acknowledges that the days of deep federal investment are probably over. Farmers, who now pay only for the energy to pump water, and other local users will have to shoulder the cost, and that represents the chief uncertainty for the project. How much will water cost? Will people pay for it? Are there possible cost-sharing partnerships with cities and industries along the route?

Do you think my premise is correct – that the days of this sort of federal project are over? If “yes”, is state and local financing in Kansas a realistic option?

teaching sin and rebellion to generations of brutish American youth

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Lou in hell

Lou in hell

Amid the outpouring on the occasion of Lou Reed’s death, a particularly fine epitaph from the folks at the Westboro Baptist Church (pdf):

From his early days as a frontman for the punk band The Velvet Underground and his inclusion as part of Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory, Lou Reed has been teaching sin and rebellion to generations of brutish American youth.

The Cold War “dam gap”

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Circa 1958, a unique argument in favor of the development of the next wave of dams in the Colorado River Basin. At the time, the Eisenhower administration had failed to include any “new starts” for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects in its Fiscal Year 1959 budget. Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana, was alarmed:

Your attention is called to the very real threat by Soviet Russia in outstripping the United States in water resources and hydroelectric power development…. We propose to delve into this subject at public hearings for the purpose of alerting the American people to the threat to the economic stability of this country.

Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Jan. 23, 1958

update: I found that last little bit while reading Congressional testimony about water and power project development in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Tugging on the thread, I found a remarkable Congressional report written in 1957 (sorry, only found it in the walled-off web, can’t find a public copy) purporting to be a thorough inquiry into this incredibly important question. It concluded that we were still ahead of the commies, but warned against complacency:

While the United States is still the leading producer of hydroelectric power and is still the leading industrial nation of the world and Soviet Russia has not yet outstripped the United States, its rate of progress percentagewise is a warning, against the background of the economic cold war, that this country dare not adopt a complacent attitude that would allow us to drift under a false assumption of unassailable superiority.

Relationships of river and related water resource development programs of U.S., Soviet Russia, and Red China, 12063 S.rp.1926, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senate; Committee on Public Works, July 23, 1958

 

 

Watering the desert, circa 1937

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Imperial Valley, 1937, Dorothea Lange, courtesy Library of Congress

Imperial Valley, 1937, Dorothea Lange, courtesy Library of Congress

Full caption:

Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb.

Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for an hour or two, the Library of Congress has quite a collection on line.

Vegas: a race against nature?

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With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature.

That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels are a wonderful way of tracking drought and/or plenty in a single indicator because they integrate both how much water nature puts into the lake and how much water humans take out.

Lake Mead is dropping, and Pat Mulroy is racing, in significant part because the people of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and most especially the farmers of the Imperial Valley, use a lot of water. In fact, as I’ve pointed out previously, Lake Mead’s been getting all the water it’s supposed to get under the Colorado River Compact, year after year, since forever. Sometimes it even gets bonus water above and beyond that. But Lake Mead keeps dropping.

Mulroy’s in part racing against Mother Nature, but in large measure she’s also racing against herself.