California Drought Update April 2, 2015

California Drought Update

April 2, 2015

by Patrick Ruckert

The most important development this week is the video presentation given on April 1, by Ben Deniston of the LaRouche PAC Science Team and his new article, “Memo for the Next President– New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis,” published by Executive Intelligence Review and featured on the LaRouche PAC website. Here is the link to the LaRouche PAC version:

Managing the Global Water Supply

Here is the link to Ben Deniston’s video presentation of his new paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlGLbsAA-II

Deniston argues that if you want to get serious about the drought, look at what China has done and is doing. We have known since the 1970s that this water crisis was coming, and Lyndon LaRouche proposed back then the NAWAPA plan and desalination. The solutions have been on the table for decades. The problem is a moral/cultural failure– where the population has lost its connection to mankind being a creative force; a shift away from the policies of what Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy represented.

Following a discussion of the nature of cycles– water, solar and galactic–, and how mankind relates to these cycles, including the topic of climate change, Deniston then presents the solutions. The objective solutions exist, he concludes, adding that what is lacking is the commitment to the future through implementing those solutions.

Introduction

Our introduction is an item from LaRouche PAC:

Western Drought: There Is No Vision, and California Is Perishing

Managing the Global Water Supply

April 3, 2015

As ominous signs have multiplied that California may be depopulated by the years-long intensifying western drought, and is abandoned by the Obama White House to its fate, the state's governor, Jerry Brown, has taken drastic but fruitless action. Brown's order mandating a 25% cutback in all non-agricultural uses of water, followed warnings from Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine that only one year's supply of water remains in California's reservoirs. In addition, the state's annual Sierra Nevada Mountain snowpack report found the fifth straight year of decline, and snowpack now equaling just 6% of the 30-year average — effectively, nothing to melt and provide water this Spring and Summer. 

The western and southwestern drought is becoming an existential threat to the United States, choking economic life out of its most productive regions; yet Obama and his administration completely ignore it. The only hope for tackling it is by a very large-scale Pacific Rim infrastructure plan together with China, which is taking the international lead in nuclear plant construction and thermonuclear fusion research and development. This starts with nuclear desalination plants, and eventually goes to a new water management plan for all of North America which redistributes untouched precipitation in the
continent's northwest. The China-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other "Silk Road" credit mechanisms could be doubled by the United States to take on this vital project to save U.S. economic capacity. But Obama has scorned these international development credit institutions, even while virtually all major nations have joined China in them.

California is thus left in the intensifying agony of the drought. Governor Brown accompanied his austere rationing plan with a "package of anti-drought measures." But none of them has the intention of providing any more water for Californians to use. Two-thirds of the $1 billion package is for local
flood-control, reflecting Brown's view that the state is actually confronted by global warming which will make rainstorms that do come, more severe.

Governor Brown’s Executive Order

Most appropriately, on April Fools Day, Governor Brown finally announced an executive order imposing mandatory rationing of water in California. Whether he is fooling himself or attempting to fool the population of the state, or both, is a question still to be answered.

Brown did a photo opportunity to announce the executive order by accompanying the team from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) for its April 1, manual survey at 6,800 feet in the Sierra Nevada. Normally on April 1, this site has five feet of snow on the ground. Today it was bare ground. Overall the statewide snowpack holds only 1.4 inches of water content, just 6 percent of the historical average of 28.3 inches for April 1. Normally on April 1, snow accumulations are at their peak, but this year most measuring sites are bare ground.

Since 30 percent of the water used by people in the state depends on snowpack melt filling the reservoirs in late spring and summer, the readings on April1, mean there’s next-to-nothing to melt and flow into the streams and reservoirs.

Here is a graph prepared by KQED comparing the snowback on April 1, over time. This year is the lowest ever.

Now, back to the Governor’s Executive Order (EO) imposing mandatory rationing throughout the state. Without going through all the details I’ll just note a few points. First, and most importantly, the order mandates a 25 percent cut in water use for all non-agricultural areas of the state. Most of the rest of the EO are the details of implementation, like reduced use of water at golf courses and other large non-agricultural facilities. Incentives will be made available to get more people to tear out their lawns, get low-flow appliances, and to force water districts to more accurately report usage.

Here is a link to the press release issued by the Governor’s office:

http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18910

As for longer-term actions the state government still has no idea what to do. In the EO, desalination of sea water is mentioned twice– once in the context of making the licensing process more speedy, and secondly, in the section on new technologies which stupidly promotes “renewable energy-powered desalination.” The only solar-powered desalination facility now operating in California, that I know of, produces an amazing 8 gallons of clean water per minute. At that rate, just guessing, it would take several hundred years to fill just one of the empty reservoirs.

For agriculture, which is the section of the population of the state that wastes the least amount of water (since it is scarce and the cost is rising), farmers will be required to report more water use information to state regulators, the aim being to increase the state’s ability to prevent and punish illegal diversions, waste and unreasonable use of water.

Those complaining, like some of the more clueless environmentalists, that the EO did not include farmers conveniently forget that, “The farmers are already receiving reductions, mandatory reductions by the state and federal water projects, and the local water projects,” said Jay Lund of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. Some, I guess, need to be reminded that farmers will receive this year zero percent of the water they need from the Central Valley Project, and only 20 percent of what they need from the California Project.

One farmer, Cannon Michael, put it this way: “Compare a 25 percent reduction in urban use to a zero percent allocations for thousands of farms. I think it’s pretty clear that ag has already mandated to make considerable cuts.”

Mike Wade at the California Farm Water Coalition responded today to the EO: “They (the farmers- PR) have spent $3 billion since 2003 to install more efficient irrigation systems, one and a half times the amount Southern California water users spent building Diamond Valley Lake for new water storage. The use of drip, micro and subsurface irrigation more than doubled from 1991 to 2010, from 16 percent of the state’s irrigated acreage to more than 42 percent today.

“These activities and more have become an everyday practice on California farms and will continue as farmers maintain their commitment to provide a safe and reliable supply of food for consumers,” he said.

The only press commentary on Brown’s EO that I have seen that even hints at a different policy is from a U-T San Diego editorial policy statement on April 1, which stated: “Our biggest concern is that there continues to be little concentrated focus on long-term drought solutions, such as seawater desalination, water reclamation and reuse, and infrastructure to increase storage capacity. Last year’s voter-approved water bond was but a start. Do the top officials in California really think this is the last California drought?”

Back to Governor Jerry Brown. He was first elected governor in 1975 and re-elected in 1979. Unlike his father Pat Brown, who built The California Water Project, that provides water to millions of people, Jerry led the shift in California, and the nation, to a no-growth, anti-industrial, anti-nuclear paradigm that today has necessitated the action, that for the first time in California history the state has mandatory water rationing. But until his father died in 1996, Jerry could not betray him, and thus did some finishing work on the The California Water Project. Marc Reisner, in his environmentalist tome, “Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water,” wrote of Jerry Brown: “Through an irony some found delicious the person who took it upon himself to complete the project that Pat Brown had left unfinished was none other than the apostle of the ‘era of limits,’ the first politician to proclaim that ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘less is more’: Jerry Brown.”

The article that seeks to double-down on Jerry Brown’s and the nation’s failed policy of not building infrastructure for 40 years is the Washington Post, in an article on April 2, “Jerry Brown battles Calif. water crisis created by his father, Gov. Pat Brown,” by Justin Wm. Moyer. Moyer argues that if the California Water Project had not been built then the 25 million people and 750,000 acres of farm land that it provides water for would not exist. Simple, yes? And if automobiles had not been invented, then we would not have all those crowded freeways. You can think of other examples.

Now, the rest of this week’s report

The last two weeks has seen an explosion in the number of articles and reports on the drought from both the media and institutions. Everyone is jumping in– sometimes to honestly report on aspects of it, but more often to just say something– true or useful, or not. If one were to read it all he or she would have to give up doing anything else.

This report aims at highlighting some of the more important developments in regard to the drought, but most importantly to get people to think differently– obviously about the drought, but more importantly, to think about what is considered impossible to do but must be done. Again, I urge you to engage your mind with the Ben Deniston presentation.

Sometimes serious thinking can occur when the threat is existential, as is this drought, which is not a “California drought,” but a Western States drought, speading and intensifying in all the Western States. Here are a couple of items that can help you wake up others:

“Hey Mom, where is the salad?

There may be little or no lettuce at your local store at some points this year, or if it is there you may not be able to afford it. In Fesno County the acreage of head lettuce grown has shrunk from 10,000 acres in 2013, to 6,000 acres in 2014, to 3,000 acres this year. California grows 90 percent of all U.S. lettuce.

What you aint ‘got milk?’

To conclude this week’s report I am reprinting in full an article from the Porterville Recorder of March 31, by Rick Elkins:

Dairymen fear for their herds