Water: Why “the Rubik’s Cube of public policy” misses the point

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Rubik's Cube

Rubik's Cube, courtesy Wikimedia, subject to GFDL

In an interview with Sacramento’s Capital Report, California resources secretary John Laird got off the water wonks’ quip of a lifetime:

Water is the Rubik’s Cube of public policy.

It will be quoted for all eternity. But really, it’s a lousy metaphor. Here’s the meat of what he said:

The thing that probably works to our advantage to get towards some agreement is, for the first time in a long time, the status quo in the Delta benefits no one. The fish populations are crashing. Judges were turning off the exports. So there’s almost no one that isn’t dissatisfied with what’s going on in the Delta.

And the two dual goals are somewhat elegant in that sense. I’m always fond of saying everybody is firmly committed to one of the two goals.

With a Rubik’s Cube, everyone agrees about what a solution might look like. It’s really hard to get there, but we all agree that the goal is a cube where each face is covered by squares of a single color.

But the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is not like that. The problem is “wicked”, by which we mean that there is no general agreement on the nature of the problem, and our solutions all hinge on the argument over the problem definition. Laird himself is acknowledging that when he admits that the “co-equal goals” aren’t really co-equal – that all the actors really favor one or the other. Co-equal is make-believe. And when you spread out into the delta itself, we’ve really got a lot more ways of defining the problem.

So no, Rubik’s cube not so much.

Central Basin Municipal Water District ignores the first rule of holes

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In my automated news searches on California water issues, I’d run across a number of stories of late on a web site called “News Hawks”, which seemed to be devoting an inordinate amount of time to detailing the efforts of an obscure Southern California water agency called the Central Basin Municipal Water District. I didn’t spend much time on the stories, or blog them, because they frankly were pretty worthless in terms of advancing my understanding of California’s tough water issues – poorly written, obvious fluff.

I better understood why News Hawks was so interested in CBMWD’s activities after this LA Times story ricocheted around the water and journalism communities this week:

Readers who type “Central Basin Municipal Water District” into Google News get a series of upbeat articles.

One story hails the benefits of Central Basin’s new recycled water system. Another piece praises the agency’s legal battle over groundwater rights. Others catalog the successes of its conservation programs.

What the average reader doesn’t know is that Central Basin is paying nearly $200,000 in taxpayer money for the glowing coverage. In a highly unusual move, the water district hired a consultant to produce promotional stories “written in the image of real news,” according to agreements reviewed by The Times.

The story, backed up by documents published by the Times, nails CBMWD. Within a day, Google news had dropped News Hawks as a result. You would think that the agency, which can apparently afford pricey PR advice, would recognize the problem, fess up, and slink away quietly.

But no. CBMWD has become the gift that just keeps on giving, taking to twitter and the web demanding a retraction:

Mr. Allen’s story indicates that Central Basin has a contract with News Hawks Review…. In fact, Central Basin does not have a contract with the organization.

Well no, CBMWD, that’s not what Sam Allen’s story said. Here’s what Allen’s story actually said:

The articles appear on a professional-looking news website called News Hawks Review. The site is indexed on Google News, carries its own advertisements and boasts an “experienced and highly knowledgeable” staff of editors and reporters. But records show it is directly affiliated with Coghlan Consulting Group, the corporate communications firm under contract with Central Basin that pulled off this deal.

CBMWD’s call for a retraction misrepresents the part of the story they want retracted. Allen was quite clear that the contract was with Coghlan, and that Coghlan claimed the ability to place stories, for money, with its corporate affiliate News Hawk. So we’re clear on what’s going on, here’s the sales pitch that corporate communications firm made to CBMWD’s board:

A member of the Coghlan Consulting Group has been designated as a Google News Channel…. It is, in old media terms, like a weekly newspaper that is constantly in need of fresh and relevant content.

That “member of the Coghlan Consulting Group” is newshawksreview.com. And what does the CBMWD get for its money? Stories that show up “in the image of real news”. Coghlan is embarrassingly explicit in his pitch memo to CBMWD about the laundering to be done to make their press releases look like real news.

When I harped on this yesterday on Twitter, the CBMWD shared this with me:

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No, CBMWD, reading your own documents clearly shows Allen got it right, and that it’s your retraction letter that gets it wrong.

Why am I so annoyed about this? Real journalists have enough of a problem as it is with weak and unethical actors in our midst who churn press releases, and with the frequently overblown allegations that result. For CBMWD and Coghlan and News Hawks to claim this is a legitimate business model is bullshit, and needs to be called out as such.

Piers Corbyn, Twitter Spammer?

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The following appeared in my twitter feed last night:

Corbyn tweet

Corbyn tweet

Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. I guess in spamming terms, that’s not a lot. So if Corbyn is a spammer, he’s not a terribly good one.

Unpacking the water storage question

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Great job by Jay Lund in unpacking the issue of California water storage – how much it has, how it’s used and what role it might play going forward:

Climate warming is reducing the ability of California’s snowpack to store water seasonally. Fortunately, downstream reservoirs on many streams are already large compared to seasonal changes in streamflows and flood peaks. Model results show that with the right management, climate warming might be inconvenient, not catastrophic, for most water uses.

It’s not all about climate change, it’s really about how the system fits together. I recommend the whole thing.

Desal is apparently now a jobs program

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I’m all for a serious discussion about the costs and benefits of desalination as a source of water supply in the arid southwestern United States. But I find this argument, from Ted Owen of the Carlsbad, Calif., Chamber of Commerce, less than helpful:

Jobs. Everyone in business and government is talking about the need to create jobs, but so few seem to have any real jobs to offer. On Tuesday, the Carlsbad City Council will be put to the test, and we will witness a display of leadership that will help reaffirm our faith that local government can be part of the jobs solution.

On the City Council’s agenda is an agreement between the city and the San Diego County Water Authority that will advance the long-awaited Carlsbad Desalination Project. The agreement probably doesn’t give the city everything it originally wanted, and the same is likely true for the County Water Authority. And it is this compromise that exemplifies what leadership is all about —- having the foresight to put the greater good of the region above parochial interests.

The desalination project is one of the largest shovel-ready water infrastructure projects in the state of California. It will support 2,000 skilled jobs and generate more than $350 million in economic stimulus during construction, and contribute more than $50 million per year to the regional economy once operations begin in 2014.

It is also the case that having Carlsbad City Council hire hooligans to go around breaking windows downtown would create jobs for people who fix windows. But that is not sufficient motivation for hiring the hooligans. Now, to be fair, Owen does mention in passing the argument that the desal project offers some water policy benefits as well. But desal only works if it’s affordable, which has been one of the rips against the Carlsbad project. And the notion of the desal plant as a jobs program works best if it’s extravagantly expensive. It seems the two lines of arguments are at cross purposes here.

Badlands Express

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If our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses*, what does the “Badlands Express” ride at the New Mexico State Fair tell us about the modern West? Are these kids standing in for our lost Hayduke?

Badlands Express, New Mexico State Fair, September 2011

Badlands Express, New Mexico State Fair, September 2011

*Note: I don’t think our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses. I just thought the cactus and fake little 4×4’s were hilarious. They had Fords too.

Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians

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While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians:

By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires occurred frequently, about once every 2-10 years. He found some trees with scars dating back to the mid-1600s.

As we’ve seen here, the anthropogenic influence is easily detectable:

[F]ires showed a dramatic decrease after the 1930s.

“That’s about the time the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies started to increase public awareness of forest fires, and they introduced the ‘Smokey the Bear’ campaign to tell people that they could prevent forest fires,” he says. “And when a wildfire did occur, they suppressed it to halt its spread. Their efforts worked — the trees show that it did because they are fewer fires in the last 50 to 70 years.”

There’s lots more on the stories tree rings tell in my book, The Tree Rings’ Tale.