CAWater2.0
I watched most of ACWA/DWR’s CAWater2.0 conference yesterday. They were presenting the updated Governor’s Water Action Plan and pimping new Delta conveyance. I found the event… old. It just looked old. The speakers were invariably my seniors. They were relentlessly white, nearly all men. Even the name, CAWater2.0, feels old. Windows2.0 came out in 1987. It is no longer a hip reference to tag a numbered reference to a name, but the Olds might think it is.
It made me think. The Peripheral Canal was voted down in 1982. My sense is that the possibility of the Peripheral Canal has largely paralyzed California water policy since then (with the possible exception of IRWM). If the Peripheral Canal had been entirely off the table, the regions would have adapted by now, gone ahead with storm and wastewater reuse or turf removal or whatever needed to happen. If it had been built, whatever would have become of the Delta would already have happened. Being in limbo has meant that we never got serious about living without it or adjusted to having it. The gentlemen at that conference have spent their professional lives on trying to make it happen, at the opportunity cost of whatever else they could have achieved.
Governor Brown’s Statement
I wish I knew whether Governor Brown’s opening statement was prepared or extemporaneous. Two things stood out to me. First was this paragraph:
We have two very different perspectives. One is, there is no nature, don’t worry about other species, we’re king, just full speed ahead and just exploit to the max. The other side, I’m characterizing but only somewhat, is let all go, we’ve screwed it all up, let’s let it go back to nature, we don’t need any of these projects. Of course if you did that, tens of millions of people couldn’t continue to be here in California.
There is middle ground. Much of the land farmed by the State Water Contractors is resource extraction by the 1%. It doesn’t support farm towns; it delivers additional rents to urban billionaires; these days it is largely in tree nuts exports. It is what you drive by on the 5. We have about nine million irrigated acres in the state these days. If we farmed closer to five or six million acres, we’d still farm the Sac Valley, the Friant, northeastern San Joaquin Valley, the coastal valleys and Imperial. That’s a lot of farmed acreage. Retiring 3 million irrigated acres would release about 9 MAF back to the environment. That’d be a noticeable chunk to return to rivers.
The other thing I noticed was this:
I would say most people in Santa Clara don’t know that more than 40% of their water comes from the Delta, and if that thing goes because of climate change or earthquake, with massive sea water intrusion … {my emphasis}
Governor Brown’s frustration with the Delta advocates is on the surface these days, so this doesn’t reveal any secrets. But Governor Brown referring to the Delta as “that thing” signals to me that his association with the Delta is more like ‘nearly broken machinery’ than ‘a special and unique place’. That’s fine; consistent with his policies. But I raised my eyebrows when I got to that phrase.
National Review Online
The National Review online is real conservative, so I knew what to expect going in. The premise of the piece, that allocating water to fish is a bad tradeoff for farmed acreage was as expected. I found the piece very readable and enjoyed a tone that celebrated the industrialized side of farming. I read a lot of hippie stuff, so it was an interesting change to hear machinery, technology and control praised. I particularly noticed these paragraphs:
Uncertainty is the new normal,” CEO John Harris sighs from the driver’s seat, his smile disappearing. “This is no way to run anything.”
Harris tools the car around untouched pastures, and I am told at length about the Water Troubles. “Without water, we can’t work,” Bourdeau laments from the backseat. “It’s not healthy. We’ll do what we can. We’ll grow what we can grow where we can grow it. But without knowing how much water we’re going to get, it’s so difficult to plan!” A pistachio tree, for example, takes five to seven years to grow. “How can we plant one now if we can’t guarantee we can water it in a couple of years?” Bourdeau asks.
That the drought is making planning all but impossible is a refrain I hear all across the region — both from the established farmers who are desperate to draw this year’s crop map and from the wannabe planters who cannot secure the loans they need to start up on their own. One aspiring rancher tells me that he is thinking of selling his land and moving out. “I wouldn’t lend me the money I need to plant,” he gripes, honestly. “I’m stuck, I guess. I can’t plant. But who will buy my land?”
One way to provide that certainty would be to zone the SJV into regions that get water all the time (the eastside, permanent crops and row crops), sometimes (along the east-west rivers, row crops), and only-in-very-wet years. Farmers would have far more certainty then, as would lenders.
Although the aspiring rancher probably doesn’t appreciate my concern, I did warn my farming readers to sell in the last drought. He’d have done very well had he been a reader and followed my advice.
