Californa Water Grab: Repudiating the OMG Worst Drought (Robert in Monterey, Calitics)

Mar.12, 2009 in Drought, Public Works, Water Conservation, Water Crisis, Water Industry, Water Management, Water Rights

(March 11, 2009, Robert in Monterey, Calitics)

As someone who has written before of the water problems our state faces, and who has repeated the “omg worst drought ever” frame, it’s important that I give some necessary attention to Michael Fitzgerald of The Stockton Record, who called bullshit on the whole thing today:

California’s “drought” is overblown. The alarmists calling it a historic disaster are trying to pull a fast one…. Besides, state officials, SoCal water importers and other Chicken Littles don’t mention they drained Northern California reservoirs prior to February’s storms.

“In the first year of the drought, we passed water like a drunken sailor,” said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

Some perspective: In the 1990s, the state and feds exported 4 million acre-feet of Delta water annually. In this decade – and well into the drought – officials imprudently powered up exports to more than 6 million acre-feet a year.

They irresponsibly sucked reservoirs down. They nearly killed the Delta. They stopped only when a federal judge called a halt.

“We cannibalized Northern California to sock it away in the Kern water bank and Diamond Valley water bank down south,” Jennings said, “giving no thought to the question of a second or third year.”

In short, those who have the weakest water rights claims – such as sprawling Southern California exurbs – have been recklessly drawing down our water supplies to support a totally unsustainable use of the land. We’ve had intimations that this is going on, with the collapse of Delta fisheries and the West Coast salmon population. But the media often reported this as an unfortunate consequence of mandated water deliveries from the Delta, through the pumps at Tracy and down the delivery chain that the drought (and everyone agrees we’re in some sort of drought) has exacerbated.

Funny thing about those “mandated water deliveries” though:

The 80-year average for Delta water is 29 million acre-feet annually. The state and feds wrote contracts promising 130 million acre-feet: 41/2 times reality.Other contracts bring total export contracts to an insane 245 million acre-feet, an ocean of paper water promised to people who gauged their farms, businesses or urban water consumption accordingly.

In other words California water policy has been built on debt, just as I’ve been arguing. To water the suburban sprawlconomy and the agricultural sprawl necessary to feed that sprawlconomy, we created a kind of “water bubble”, where contracts to deliver water were written without regard to mother nature’s ability to pay. This almost exactly parallels what went on in banks during the housing bubble.

And like the collapse of the housing bubble, those who engineered the water bubble are saying the answer is to spend more public money on bailing them out – in this case through more canals and dams.

Don’t get me wrong, California does face water problems and does need to change how we use water here. But the answer isn’t to waste more water on sprawl. Instead it’s time we got serious about providing water security by reducing how much we use, retrofitting urban areas to do more recycling, and implementing more water-friendly and environmentally sensible farming practices across the state.

(Original Post Here)