Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the endangered species act process brokenness

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Thrown on driveways this morning, my effort to explain why I think the endangered species act process, as it relates to the silver minnow on the Rio Grande, is broken:

If you believe those who argue we are overusing water in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and headed for a crash (and there’s good data to support that position), it’s likely the problem will first show up in the river itself, as we take out too much surface and groundwater and leave the Rio Grande dry.

The first specific legal and regulatory manifestation of that problem would be a lack of water to meet Endangered Species Act requirements for the Rio Grande silvery minnow.

Farmers and cities will get their water while the Rio Grande goes dry, until someone – federal regulators or an environmentalist with a lawsuit – steps in.

The cliche is to call the minnow a “canary in a coal mine,” a sign of a crashing ecosystem. But it’s also a canary for our water supply problems. As a result, as often happens around the West, society ends up using the Endangered Species Act as a sort of de facto water policy management tool. When water runs short, who has to give some up to keep our rivers wet? We use the ESA to decide that question.

the problem with living in good times

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White, Yampa, and Little Snake Rivers

1,000 years of runoff on the White, Yampa, and Little Snake Rivers

Those pesky tree ring scientists are at it again, spoiling a perfectly good party.

Stephen Gray and colleagues have taken a dig into runoff over the last 1,000 years on three major Colorado River tributaries, adding a new level of granular detail to something that already seemed apparent: Runoff during the 20th century, when we built all this infrastructure and farms and cities, is a bit of an anomaly in the long run, and not in a good way:

[T]hese reconstructions point to the unusual wetness of the gage period, and the potential for recent observations to paint an overly optimistic picture of regional water supplies. The future of the Upper Colorado River will be determined by a combination of inherent hydroclimatic variability and a broad range of human-induced changes. It is then essential that regional water managers, water users, and policy makers alike consider a broader range of hydroclimatic scenarios than is offered by the gage record alone.

Gray, Stephen T., Jeffrey J. Lukas, and Connie A. Woodhouse, 2011. Millennial-Length Records of Streamflow From Three Major Upper Colorado River Tributaries. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(4):702-712. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2011.00535.x

The forecast language dilemma

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River forecaster Tom Pagano, late of Portland, Ore., and Australia, is on the road working on a book about river forecasting, so naturally he’s ended up in Thailand. In a post today, he talks about a language dilemma forecasters face:

A phrase like the “worst case scenario” is a double-edged sword. This is the kind of information that decision-makers crave and request from forecasters. But what is the chance of this worst case scenario happening? 1 in 3? 1 in 10? 1 in 100? History is filled with examples of where the actual outcome was above the worst case scenario and decisionmakers ended being very resentful of this. Of course, forecasters could instead conjure up a wildly high scenario (e.g. take the above map and multiply it by 3), but this leads to wasteful overplanning and its own form of resentment.

(Tom was one of the water-climate scientist characters in my book, The Tree Rings’ Tale, which you should head to your local bookstore to buy in time for that smart young person on your holiday shopping list.)

 

The rent on Hetch Hetchy is not high enough

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John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt

John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt

Just when you think the great comedy act that is California water politics has exhausted itself, another white-faced, red-bulb-nosed, big footed character climbs out of the Golden State’s Great Clown Car.

Comes now the Honorable Devin Nunes, he of the muscular, fiercely independent southern San Joaquin Valley, suggesting that the Department of Interior up the rent it charges San Francisco for the effete liberal city’s use of Hetch Hetchy Valley from the current $30,000 per year to $34,000,000 per year.

In a Nov. 4 letter helpfully posted by Michael Cannon, Nunes wrote to the congressional deficit-cutting “super committee” suggesting legislative language and the argument for making the change:

The Raker Act, enacted nearly 100 years ago, mandated that the City of San Francisco pay the Department of the Interior a meager annual charge of $30,000 for the easement to use Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park as a water reservoir. Even with the negative effects to the environment, this annual charge, set in the early 1910s, has never increased. Furthermore, since the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power System a century ago, the environmental damage to our nation’s flagship National Park has never been mitigated.

Is it wrong of me to see this as a first step toward restoring Hetch Hetchy to its great glory, and to think of Devin Nunes as a great environmental champion? Is Nunes showing his true colors, his inner John Muir?

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, too.

Save water, rates go up, episode III

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In which Carmichael, CA, residents find that upon using less water, their rates go up:

If you’re worried about water bills and you use less water, you should get a lower bill, right?

But that’s not happening in the Carmichael Water District.

The district has announced it wants to raise water rates 18 percent starting Jan. 1 – on top of an even bigger rate hike already imposed through mid-2014.

The reason: Water use in the district has fallen below historical average by an astonishing 25 percent, thanks to a mild and wet weather year, foreclosed homes and ratepayers using less water because of rising water bills.

With the cut in use, the water district’s revenue has dropped sharply.

The Endangered Species Act as a water management tool – case for the defense

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Here and elsewhere, I’ve been arguing lately that the Endangered Species Act has become the de-facto water management tool of choice (necessity?) in the western United States, but that it has shortcomings as both an environmental policy instrument and a water policy instrument. My thinking on this has been formed in large part by the two case studies I’m following right now, the Rio Grande silvery minnow and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and its much-loved, much-maligned Delta smelt. In both cases, the ESA has become the focus of political and policy discussions, with results that I argue don’t make for very good water policy or environmental policy.

silvery minnow

silvery minnow and humans, courtesy USFWS

I’m on the hunt for counter-examples, and ran across a good one in Cynthia Barnett’s Blue Revolution. In her closing chapter, she talks about the Sierra Club v. Babbit ESA litigation surrounding over-pumping of the Edwards aquifer in and around San Antonio, Texas. Texas operated under what Barnett describes as the “Law of the Biggest Pump,” wherein you could pump the hell out of the aquifer beneath your house, and if that meant your neighbors’ wells went dry, tough shit. Here’s Barnett, discussing and then quoting Judge Lucius D. Bunton III in his decision in the case:

Judge Lucius D. Bunton III told the Texas legislature it must come up with a way to regulate pumping in the Edwards. While he was ruling on the endangered-species case, Bunton set out a much larger vision for a water ethic.

And then she quotes the pertinent passage from Bunton’s decision:

Without a fundamental change in the value the region places on freshwater, a major effort to conserve and reuse Aquifer water, and implemented plans to import supplemental supplies of water, the region’s quality of life and economic future are imperiled.

Pretty bold stuff, frankly. Barnett notes that the ruling led to the creation of the Edwards Aquifer Authority to manage the groundwater system. So this looks like a case in which an ESA battle led to a sane water policy outcome.

More reading:

A bit of history – when US Colorado River water users feared Mexico

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There’s a tangent in Henry Brean’s Las Vegas Review-Journal story about desalination and Las Vegas this morning that provides a reminder of just how far we’ve come in the power structure surrounding the management of the Colorado River in the last century.

Morelos Dam

Morelos Dam, on the US-Mexico border, where the Colorado River for all practical purposes ends

The main thrust of the story is a discussion of the possibility of coastal desal as an alternative to the controversial Las Vegas groundwater pipeline proposal. Pipeline opponents have been arguing that desal is a reasonable alternative – not directly, but through water swaps through which Vegas would fund coastal desal for California or Mexico water users, and get a share of their Colorado River water in exchange.

The tangent is this: Brean quotes Mexican official Jose Gutierrez on how “fiercely” Mexico will defend its share of the river – a share that’s frankly paltry. Its 1.5 million acre feet of water is roughly ten percent of the river’s flow. Given how little Mexico gets, that ferocity is understandable. It also makes it hard to believe that there was a time when US water users feared Mexico would dominate the river’s allocation. But in the 1920s that was, in fact, the case.

One of the great early Colorado River water management histories is a doctoral thesis done by Reuel Leslie Olson in 1926 – after the Colorado River Compact was signed, but before any of the big infrastructure was built to begin moving water around. It’s a fun read because it captures a lot of early uncertainties about things that have long since been settled in ways that in hindsight seem inevitable – as, for example, Mexico getting largely screwed in the allocation of Colorado River water. From the vantage point of the mid-’20s, it seemed anything but inevitable.

At the time, the water needed to irrigate the Imperial Valley flowed through Mexico on a looping path before heading north. There was pressure to build an “All American Canal” (which has long since been done) because of fears that the southern California farmers were at the mercy of Mexico for their water. In fact, it was U.S. landowners in Mexico, most famously Harry Chandler of the LA Times, who were providing the pressure for a larger Mexican share of the river. Here’s Olson:

Mr. George H. Maxwell, long interested in irrigation problems, declares that a great part of the trouble encountered in present plans for development of the Colorado River, arises from the fact that much is now being done to attempt “to nail the Colorado River down for Mexico.”