California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
April 16, 2015
For the most thorough and solution oriented development this week, see the April 17 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, which devotes an entire issue to “The Drought and The Presidency.”
http://larouchepub.com/eiw/private/2015/2015_10-19/2015-16/pdf/eirv42n16.pdf
What is the real nature of Governor Brown’s policy? When a government demands of the population that it cut its own throat and insists there is no other alternative, that is fascism. The Brown Shirts implementing Brown’s policy when confronted with the clear alternative presented by LaRouche PAC, lose control and start screaming “you can’t say that.” For a blow-by-blow description of just such an incident see, “The Brown Squirts Will Kill You Faster Than the Drought,” by Michael Steger:
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2015/2015_10-19/2015-16/pdf/04-15_4216.pdf
Group Think vs Humanity Demonstrated in Sacramento on April 9
In Sacramento on April 9, at an event sponsored by the Association of California Water Agencies, all the state’s leaders on water policy and representatives of local agencies presented the disaster the state is now in, forecast a worse disaster to come, and outlined how to carry out governor Brown’s Executive Order mandating rationing and conservation.
The exception to that agenda was presented by Paul Wenger, President of the California Farm Bureau, punctured a lot of myths and outright lies about agriculture’s use of water. He emphasized that for three years farmers have been cutting water consumption, receiving less than 20 percent of what they require, while those in the cities did not even know there was a drought. Farmers, he said, have been cut by 80 percent and now the cities will only have to cut 25 percent. The cut in water deliveries does not absolve the farmers from having to pay for them anyway, he added, saying it is like a person who is only allowed to use one-quarter of his house but still has to pay the full mortgage.
Wenger said farmers around the state are idling farmland and that he is also reducing production.
“We’re taking out 10 percent of our orchards this year so we can have water to put on the rest of the orchards,” he said. “Never would I have thought the day would come when we would have to do that.”
In addition, Wenger said that, like other farmers forced to fallow ground and rip out orchards and vineyards, he will continue to pay property taxes on his non producing land and cover any fees associated with ownership, as well as pay fees for water not delivered while being unable to use the ground because of lack of water.
Wenger brought a big dose of morality to the audience, stating that California farmers feed most of the nation and a good part of the rest of the world. We are, he said, a critical cog in feeding the world. He said the U.S. now imports 50 percent of its food from other nations, indirectly importing their water, so complaints about California crop exports are at least hypocritical if not dishonest. There are, he continued, 7 billion people in the world, we have to feed them.
Wenger had met with Governor Brown the day before and referenced Brown’s claim that we humans live an artificial life-style, but in the end nature rules. Not so, said Wenger, and the World War II generation would never have accepted that idea. They built everything that we have lived off of, and now we are suppose to tell the next generation they can’t have anything. That is not acceptable he said.
Later, in press interviews, Wenger took the other glove off, and said that farmers are being treated like the Japanese in California during WWII by the media, explicitly referring to the internment camps, and the media’s barrage against farmers using 80% of the water. He refuted that lie, saying that farmers use 40%, cities use 10% and 50% is either actively released by reservoirs for environmental purposes or is not collected and let run back into the ocean.
Referring again to his meeting with the Governor, he said there was no one there representing the poor urban communities, whom are directly affected by the food price increases due to production cutbacks. He said everyone in that meeting really wouldn’t care about their food prices going up– their concern is the delta smelt. But the poor urban communities care about putting food on their table.
He concluded saying that the environmental concerns have gone too far, and then referred to the late Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, saying that when she was confronted by demands from the greenies to stop using DDT, she said, “I have 750,000 cases of encephalitis every year, what do I care about a bird’s eggs.”
Response to the Demand for 25% Cuts in Water Use
The State Water Resources Control Board solicited comments from the public, cities and water, agencies on the Board’s initial plan for cuts across the board for everyone, though the cuts will range from 10% to 35%, depending on the per-capita water use for various areas of the state. More than 200 letters were received by the Board, mostly pointing out the flaws in the plan.
Here is an excerpt from the letter from the Central Los Angeles City of Compton, which underlines the point that Paul Wenger made in Sacramento on April 9 (see item immediately above), that the well-off environmentalists in Sacramento or the Silicon Valley do not give a damn about the poor. As far as they are concerned the poor are “useless eaters.” Here is the letter:
Jessica Bean
State Water Resources Control Board
April 13, 2015
The City of Compton has one of the lowest incomes per household rates in the state and as a result residents simply can’t afford many of the basic services available (water, electricity, gas) to the community. As indicated on the draft table “Urban Water Suppliers and Proposed Regulatory Framework Tiers to Achieve 25% Use Reduction”, the City of Compton’s gallons per capita day (GPCD) of 65. The low GPCD is more of a direct reflection of the economic hardship much of this community continues to endure from the recession versus changes in watering habits. Many of our residents only get paid once a month from state or federal assistance. We have heard countless stories from our customers begging for assistance, extensions, and payment plans to pay lesser amounts that will allow them to keep water services on and use their remaining money to buy medication, food or pay rent. If you drive through the City of Compton most of the front yards are brown. Therefore, the prospect of achieving an additional 20% reduction from this community is not feasible.
Chad Blais
Deputy Director of Public Works
City of Compton
Cut Water Consumption All You Want, But It Does Not Provide More Water
The narrative predominating the reportage on the drought is conserve water, cut consumption, with nary a word about creating new water cycles as Ben Deniston does in his article “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis:”
larouchepac.com/20150401/new-perspectives-western-water-crisis
On April 14, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (WMD) announced that water deliveries to its 26 member agencies– all of Southern California– would be cut by 15 percent, thus joining San Diego and other metropolitan areas in enforcing Governor Jerry Brown’s “final solution” to the California water crisis. Board Chairman Randy Record made the announcement today, commenting that Southern California has been in the forefront of water conservation for years, having cut per capita use in the region by 25 percent since 1990, thus using less water today than used 25 years ago, even with a population increase of five million more people.
Those member agencies who go over the alloyed amount set by MWD will be charged as much as $2,960 an acre foot. For comparison, until three years ago the going price for water in California was about $100 an acre foot; desperate farmers last year paid as much as $2,500 an acre foot; and the water from the Poseidon desalination plant in San Diego, scheduled to go on-line in December will be charging $2,000 an acre-foot.
By cutting deliveries to their customers local water districts run into a new problem. As their customers use less water revenues to the districts fall. So by using less water the population will be charged more in order to ensure the districts are able to keep the water flowing. The cost of running a water utility is cannot be cut, since pumping, treating and delivering water is relatively fixed. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is announcing this week that its rates it charges associated agencies will be raised 28 percent. The districts, of course, will pass that increase onto its customers.
If utilities do not cut their consumption by about 25 per cent, as ordered by Governor Brown, they face fines of up to $10,000 per day.
Meanwhile, communities in the Central Valley, the mountains and isolated towns along the coast are faced with the real possibility that their water supplies will give out by September, say state and local water officials. Some reservoirs are expected to go dry and perhaps thousands of wells will be pumping mud and dirt, not water.
Here are some excerpts from The Press Democrat of March 28, by Guy Kovner:
“We’re in a world of hurt,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist, forecasting a fallowing of up to 1 million acres of irrigated farmland this year, twice as much as last year.
And with a fourth dry year unfolding, Sumner said there is a nagging sense in farm country that California has “established a new normal” that includes severe cutbacks in deliveries from two major water systems.
Irrigating 9.6 million acres of farmland takes about 34 million acre-feet of water in a typical year, accounting for 80 percent of human water use in the state, with the rest going to cities, according to the Department of Water Resources.
An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons and is generally described as enough water to sustain a family of four for a year.
Forecasts of the agriculture loss in 2015 and 2016 may be low, Sumner said, since the estimates were made last year and did not assume the drought would be as bad or worse this year.
Water Privatization– a Rerun of Enron
The story of Enron and its criminal conspiracy to manipulate the deregulated electricity market of California should be familiar to all residents of this state. A new Enron is in the works– the privatization of water.
The following excerpts are from the article, “An ‘Enron for Water’? The Threat from Wall Street,” by Paul Gallagher in the April 17, 2015 of Executive Intelligence Review. The full article can be found here:
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2015/2015_10-19/2015-16/pdf/46-50_4216.pdf
April 11—Over the past 30 years, global financial firms have pushed for the privatization of public water supply systems all over the world, and in the past 15 years they have developed exchange-listed “water price indices” to introduce “trading floors” into the world of populations’ water supplies. While doing so, these global capital holders have been preparing for serious water shortages and intense drought conditions to appear, enabling them to play black marketeers, as Enron did so brutally with California’s electricity supplies under deregulation in 2001.
Given that the U.S. Western drought will continue, and likely intensify, until scientific solutions can be mobilized for it, we have to keep the hands of Wall Street and the water privatization lobby off Western water supplies.
the world overview of Nestle’s Austrian chairman Peter Brabeck, expressed in 2011 at Davos as follows: “If you do not give a value to the water, those [infrastructure] investments are not going to be
made, because nobody has an interest to invest, because you don’t have an economic return. . . . If the water has at least a decent price, the investment can be made.”
The clear “smell” emanating from Brabeck’s statement is the basic reason for privatization of water: Raising the price of water (always done in privatization, as shown below) differentially hits poorer water users, some of whom will lose access to water, food, or hygiene, and either become ill, or malnourished, or die.
Population reduction is the raison d’être of privatization.
He claims that mankind does not invest time and resources into scientific and technological progress—expressed as new infrastructure—unless it commands a high money price for private investors. The extraordinary water supply and management infrastructure of the American West—built for the most part through the Bureau of Reclamation, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Army Corps of Engineers, and continued through the period of JFK’s Presidency, as by then-California Gov. Pat Brown—proves this is false. What we are going to do to revolutionize water management around the Pacific Rim in the future, proves it is false. And water privatization’s history of failures proves it is false.
Close to 50 million customers in the United States had to buy their water from private companies in 2012, with the largest private seller being American Waterworks (of which more below). A state-by-state cost comparison by Food and Water Watch in 2011 found that the average household water bill for a private water utility customer is 33% higher than for a public water utility. And a full one-sixth of privatized water contracts were canceled by the municipality between 2007 and 2011, most often because of bad water quality from the privatized system. Private water companies typically get contracts of 10-20 years, and don’t make infrastructure investments which will take longer than that to pay off economically, such as really new water sources. They try to increase water use in order to raise their revenue, rather than trying to conserve it (like Nestle in Sacramento); and they typically keep expert staffs, on which water quality depends, to a minimum.
The New York Times on March 31, in a column much like Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck’s pronouncements
quoted at the outset, published Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Scott Moore, on the California water crisis. “Water Pricing, Not Engineering, Will Ease Looming Water Shortages,” was the title. The United States, Moore wrote, “needs to move away from engineering solutions in favor of economic approaches.” Water prices are “simply too low,” he argued, “giving users little incentive to conserve.” The solution: Create water markets.
“Under a market approach, regulators set a cap on the total amount of water that can be used in a given area. The right to use a certain portion of this amount is granted to different water users, including farmers and utilities. Water users who use less than their allotted amount can sell the surplus to other water users at a profit, encouraging conservation and investment in more water-efficient technologies and processes.” The Enron electricity smash-and-grab in California showed that users do not sell to homely “other users,” but to financial brokerages like Enron, creating infrastructural chaos and price hyperinflation for super-profits.
