MWD and the case for optimism in western water

Posted by on

The folks at Montgomery and Associates recently took a look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as an example of why water management problems, once a region actually confronts shortage, are manageable:

MWD’s response demonstrates that supply-demand imbalances can be resolved through active management. In practice, active water management generally means acquiring more expensive supplies. Basic economic theory tells us that as more expensive supplies are added to a utility’s portfolio, overall cost of water to the consumer rises. In response to these rising costs, customers will reduce their water use. One result is that water demand in the aggregate falls, thus providing another element of the overall solution.

In light of this dynamic process, the question is not whether water will be available — because it will — but rather, how much will it cost, and how will the additional cost be distributed among water users?

making water conservation tougher than we need to

Posted by on

In the Dallas suburb of Highland Park (media household income $172k), efforts to conserve water by not planting lawns have run into a hiccup, as Melissa Repko reports:

A new ordinance, passed on Monday, outlaws artificial turf on front yards. With a town permit, the turf is allowed on side yards and back yards, so long as the artificial turf is out of sight.

“Plastic grass is not in keeping with the design and quality of design we want to have in our town,” said Councilman Andrew Barr in an interview after the vote. “It seemed like, in the early stage, we should address this before it affects the neighbors and the general public.”

 

 

A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling

Posted by on

There’s a pitched battle underway in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin over how much water humans can take from the system for their own use, and how much should be left for the river-fed ecosystem. One of the corollary arguments here in the states involves the human economic value of instream flows for recreation – river rafting, ecotourism and the like. Here’s a very clever Australian farmer trying to blunt that argument – too much water in the river is bad for tourism!

Mr Hatty said thousands of tourists packed his area of the Murray River region during the summer months and school holiday times, especially during the Easter break, swelling the town’s population and boosting the economic “harvest” for battling local businesses. But if the local river system swells by about 20,000 mega-litres per day or more, it can cause water levels to rise significantly and prevent access to beaches and family recreational areas, like those designated for camping.

 

Dendro as a historical tool

Posted by on

Henri Grissino-Mayer and his colleagues have been doing some neat work using tree ring dating as a historical tool – in this case to clear up who really built the buildings on the old McDonald Farm* in Virginia:

We found cutting dates for the collapsed cabin ranged from 1809 to 1810, making the likely builder Samuel Myers and not Joseph Anderson, who is currently given credit for its construction. The logs in the barn had cutting dates ranging from 1830–1831, confirming the 1830 construction date estimated by the historical documents and confirming the builder was Joseph Anderson. The logs from the standing cabin and smokehouse had cutting dates ranging between from 1838 and 1840, refining the “mid-19th century construction” listed in the register nomination. Furthermore, the nomination gave credit of the construction of these latter two structures also to Joseph Anderson, but the builder was actually John Gish who owned the farm from 1837 to 1845.

(I’ve got a chapter about Henri in my book, including a discussion of his fun work on violins)

* No, I’ve no idea if it’s that old McDonald’s farm.

Delta hostages

Posted by on

One of the smartest comments on last week’s Cal-Fed announcement about the California Bay-Delta system came in a blog comment from UC Davis’s Jay Lund:

The Delta has always been about hostage taking – traditionally with local interests using Delta salinity as a hostage on the big water export projects, and water export users using Delta salinity as a hostage to gain the support of local Delta landowners – who depend on Sacramento River flows to dilute salts in the lower San Joaquin River/south Delta. This situation has trashed native species habitat. Unfortunately, the hostages are dying (native species, subsided island levees, and drinking water quality). So new infrastructure and hostage arrangements will be needed.

Lund and Kaveh Madani wrote an insightful paper last year on the political/game theory problem:

Today’s Delta problem has characteristics of a Chicken game, where cooperation is in everyone’s interest, but is unlikely because parties deviating from the status quo are likely to bear more of the costs of a long-term solution. The state of California may become the victim (or chicken) of the Delta game, bearing the greatest costs, if it continues to rely on a policy of leaving parties to develop voluntary cooperative resolution without a sufficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation.

Phil Isenberg made a related point in his piece responding to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan Announcement (he’s actually quoting here from a talk he’s given to several California audiences):

In public, most of the speakers say pretty much the same thing. The most common refrain is “me, and my interest first.” However, when I talk to these people in private, they say things differently. In private, people are more candid, flexible and pragmatic. This difference between public posturing and reasonable private conversation irritates me. I occasionally demand they say in public what they tell me in private. Some smile, but mostly they glower or stare back without responding. This is the American way to negotiate: demand more than you want or need, in the hope of getting something better than you expect. Ask tough questions of your opponents, but duck the ones that come your way. Offer to compromise 30 minutes before a final decision. This pattern is not a great way to make public policy.

Fire and water

Posted by on

One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening.

Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico:

When more than five inches of rain fell in the area of Bonito Lake, a man-made reservoir located in the White Mountain Wilderness, between July 5 and 9, the lake was inundated with silt, ash and burn debris, rendering the reservoir useless as a source of water to Alamogordo and Holloman Air Force Base. Bonito Lake represents about 15 percent of Alamogordo’s water supply, and the city is relying on other sources to fill the gap while hiring a contractor to determine what is needed to unclog an intake line and dredge the lake, said Alamogordo city manager Matt McNeile.

In the meantime, the city has five pumps sucking water out of the reservoir to free up capacity for the next time rainfall sends large amounts of silt and black ash down the watershed, McNeile said.

At another Lincoln County reservoir, Alto Lake, crews are working to remove 70,000 cubic yards of debris to increase the lake’s ability to absorb run-off.

Lots of helpful background on this issue from the folks at Carpe Diem West’s Healthy Headwaters Program.

 

 

California water’s “grumpy old guy” on BDCP

Posted by on

Phil Isenberg, California water’s self-described “grumpy old guy”, put down a marker today with a particularly useful, nuanced take (pdf) take on this week’s Bay-Delta Conservation Plan announcement, arguing that it is a bigger deal than some of us have been willing to acknowledge.

Phil Isenberg

Phil Isenberg

“Serious public policy people should pay attention,” Isenberg wrote.

As I’ve written before, the Delta is a hairball of a wicked problem. Isenberg sketches what seems to be a solution space he sees taking shape in the proposal announced Wednesday for a tunnel beneath the Delta to carry water from north to south.

Isenberg is one of the most savvy politicians I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. I mean “politician” here in the best sense of the word, with politics being the noble means by which we settle conflicts among competing societal values. Isenberg’s job as head of the Delta Stewardship Council is to do just that. Given that political skill, however, what I don’t know is whether Phil is describing here what he actually thinks is happening in the BDCP, or whether he is trying to frame things in a way he hopes they will happen. Probably a bit of both.

In particular, Isenberg finds it significant that the scheme laid out yesterday includes no guarantees for how much water the exporters (San Joaquin Valley farmers and water-using cities in the Bay Area and Southern California) will be able to extract from the system in the long run:

Absolute guarantees of endless amount of ‘new water’ are slipping from the discussion. This may be the most interesting part of the BDCP announcement. For the entire history of California, people have demanded legal guarantees of water supplies (we also call them “assurances,” or “entitlements”). But if you read all the documents presented this week, it clear that water contractors are not asking BDCP to guarantee a set amount water will be provided – not even a “minimum amount” to be exported (see the Questions and Answers on page 3). Rumbles have circulated through the water world for many weeks that “guarantees are no longer a pre-condition for BDCP approval.” That was so peculiar that many of us thought it could not be true.

I don’t read the “Questions and Answers on page 3” (pdf) as being quite as firm as Phil would suggest:

Our package of recommendations does not currently address any specific guarantees of minimum water exports. Whether and how to shape these “assurances” must await further environmental and cost analyses which will be forthcoming in the reviews currently underway.

That seems to me to leave an opening for guarantees down the road. But maybe this is an example of Phil, the savvy politician, trying to frame the discussion in a useful way?

The related point is that “Science will now guide how to best restore the ecosystem and how much water can be exported.”

This declaration breaks new ground. Not by saying that science should be involved, but by saying that science will guide water operations as well.

Isenberg argues that “this may well qualify as a major change in how California deals with water supply and demand”:

Historically, we have overpromised the total amount of water to be delivered. That was not a big problem when California’s population and economy were small and the supply of water ample. Today, our population and economy is very large and the supply of water has remained static. The tension is also greater because of strong public supports for reversing the environmental damage from previous water development.

Is dropping the demand for guaranteed levels of water a way to talk honestly about supply and demand? I sure hope so. The Delta Stewardship Council has wrestled with this problem, and ultimately decided that the best way to say it “matches the demands for water to the available supply – not the other way around.” The announcement this week sounds very much like this approach.

If you’re interested in sussing out what is happening with BDCP, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem

Posted by on

While it’s easy to get caught up in the climate wars rhetoric about the Colorado River, and the effect of anthropogenic warming on the river’s flows, it’s important to remember that’s only one of the variables changing in my region’s water future:

With population growth pushing up Colorado River Basin water demand as climate change pushes down supply, New Mexico and the other states that depend on the river face a growing gap between how much water nature provides and how much humans want to use.

New Mexico’s population that uses the river’s water, currently nearly 1.5 million people, is expected to grow to between 2 million and 3 million by 2060, according to the latest data from a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation study.