California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
April 30, 2015
Here Is What Is Important to Understand About the Drought and the Water Crisis
What follows are a few excerpts from the transcript of LaRouche PAC Science Team member Ben Deniston’s presentation to the weekly LaRouche PAC webcast of April 24, 2015. Deniston both rips to pieces the popularly accepted discussion of the drought and the water crisis, and provides the only perspective that can seriously deal with it.
The full transcript can be found here: http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4218lpac_wbcst_apr_24_ben.html
The webcast can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1IQB1RQbE0
“That fact that we have a lack of water in this location or that location, isn’t necessarily a ‘water crisis’ per se. It’s a cultural crisis. It’s a crisis, as Mr. LaRouche was saying earlier today, with the lack of understanding of leading policy-makers with the very nature of mankind, what it means to be human. As Matthew referenced, Mr. LaRouche was saying earlier today, we have legislators who legislate for a species that they don’t really understand.
“And, perhaps, typical, leading this type of idiocy, is Jerry Brown. He’s said this in his own words. He makes it useful, because you can just quote him, so you don’t have to do much work. You just repeat what the guy said, and you get a clear expression of the problem. When push came to shove on this water issue, and there he is, as the responsible governor for the state facing an imminent crisis for a lack of water, his reply is that, ‘Well, the state really only used to have 300-400,000 people anyways. Now we have almost 40 million. So, we’re obviously way beyond the capacity of the state.’
“Yeah, that’s a true statement. There used to be 300-400,000 people in California. But you could say that about any part of the world. What you see in such statements, is a profound lack of understanding of the fundamental nature of mankind. There’s no fixed ‘carrying capacity’ for mankind. Yeah, there used to be 300,000 people. Mankind changed his relationship to the environment. Mankind progressed. Mankind increased the potential relative population density. Mankind was able to wield an effect, and we created, out of a desert, the most productive state in the entire country. That’s typical of what mankind does, as real human nature.
“And just to continue the discussion from the past weeks, you take a first look: You’re dealing with water, what do you see? We see we have a global system. First it’s not a finite supply, we’re not using up water supplies. You have a cyclical system going on that involves the whole planet. And what mankind’s been able to do is manage those cycles, manage those systems, to make them more productive, to allow mankind to support more like, to expand populations, develop deserts, develop arid regions, develop agriculture, and mankind has managed, not drawing down some finite supply the way people talk about it today, but we’ve managed these cycles, these systems of water on the planet, to
our needs, to ensure we make the system able to support higher living standards of growing population. That’s characteristically human; that’s what makes us human. There’s no limit to our ability to do those types of things.
“But what we’re putting on the table, and what is really the challenge for those of us who choose to approach this crisis from the standpoint of being human, rather than animals, is that we now have insights into a higher level understanding of this system, and it’s not even just the Sun; it’s not even just the Solar System, but that the water cycle as we experience it, as we depend upon it, as we manage it, expresses the relationship between our Solar System and the galaxy more generally.”
Here is a link to an excellent graphic representation of the global water cycle, which you should distribute far and wide:
https://larouchepac.com/water-infographic
Meeting Resistance, Jerry Brownshirt Wants More Power To Cut Water
Jerry Brown held a press conference with a few legislators April 28, to demand turning austerity screws tighter on water users in California. Having previously ordered that water utilities or marketing boards that do not enforce the draconian 25% cuts in water use be fined $10,000 a day, Brown now wants to be able to impose such fines on individual businesses, and even individual residents of the state. To do this, he wants new legislation.
Adding some teeth to the conservation calls, Brown’s pledge would authorize city, county and local water agencies to issue fines of up to $10,000 for water wasters, up from the $500 per day maximum established by the state last year.
Brown’s pledge to streamline environmental reviews for local projects will not extend to the construction of dams and reservoirs. A legislative panel on Monday rejected a bill supported by Republicans to expedite construction of waterstorage projects near Fresno and north of Sacramento by streamlining environmental reviews.
Also on April 28, Brown issued a new goal of reducing greenhouse gasses to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, acting on his often repeated lie about man-caused climate change. This would be more ambitious than Obama’s plan, and is the most aggressive plan in the country.
Soon, if you tolerate all this, you can be cited for drinking too much water while driving.
For on April 23, state regulators ordered about 1,500 farms and individuals in the Central Valley to stop diverting water from rivers and streams for irrigation. This is just another of recent, and more to come, restrictions designed to provide a level of water in streams and rivers for endangered fish.
This leads one to ask, what about the people with no water? Right now in Tulare County there are over 1,000 dry domestic wells which is the only source of water for those people. Some of these 1,000 families have been without running water in their homes for over one year. The state and the county are providing trucked-in water, and people have outdoor showers in a church parking lot, but “there is no money to hook those homes up to a functioning water system.” But there are several hundreds of billions being spent right now to restore salmon to the San Joaquin River.
It becomes more absurd, and highlights the anti-human outlook of the Brownshirts. As reported in the San Jose Mercury News on April 24, environmentalist groups have filed a lawsuit to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which is the water supply for 2.6 million Bay Area residents from San Francisco to San Jose to southern Alameda County. San Francisco voters defeated a measure to do that overwhelmingly in 2012 by 77-23 percent.
The author, Paul Rogers, quotes Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council saying, “Who needs a historic drought when there’s a group that wants to tear down one of California’s critical water storage and clean energy systems?”
But even the Brownshirt environmentalists can’t trust their leader, who on April 30, announced a revision of his “Twin Tunnels” project through the Delta. The new plan will only restore less than one-third of the 100,000 acres of wetland and wildlife habitat originally planned.
The Drought and the Water Crisis
Too many reporters and commentators mix up these two nouns. A drought is the lack of precipitation, which can be very mild or extreme. For example one year ago 25 percent of the state of California was classified as in the most extreme category of drought– “exceptional drought.” As of today, April 30, 47 percent of the state is in “exceptional drought,” almost twice that of a year ago.
A water crisis is the lack of water where it is needed. Thus, California is in both a drought and a water crisis. As discussed by Ben Deniston above, this crisis was not only unnecessary, but caused by the failure of the political leadership of the nation and the state to create new and expanded water management systems. As I covered in the April 9 issue of this report, in the 1960s the Congress passed and authorized the funds to build the first nuclear-powered desalination plant in Southern California, the first of many. The final section of this week’s report will follow-up on that report, addressing the question of what happened to that plan?
Colorado River and Lake Mead Near Record Low
April 24, 2015
An article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on April 24, highlights the impact of the drought on Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. By this Sunday, the lake is expected to reach a record low, a level not seen since 1937, when the reservoir was being filled after the completion of the dam. The reservoir is at less than 40 percent of capacity. The Colorado River Basin has been in drought for 14 years.
With the Colorado Basin snowpack well below normal this year, runoff into the lake means that the lake will continue to fall as the summer begins. The river, which supplies water and power to 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico, is expected to have a flow of about 52 percent of the average year. It may even go lower.
The threat to Las Vegas, which draws roughly 90 percent of its water from the river, became clear more than a year ago as the lake level fell, threatening to be below the intake pipes. In response, a new deep-water intake began to be constructed, which will go online by the end of summer. Further measures are being planned if the reservoir falls another 185 feet. If it does, that is considered “dead pool,” the level at which that Hoover Dam can no longer release water.
Federal forecasters expect Lake Mead’s the lake to continue to decline through of June, but then begin rising again.
“Dead pool” also means that the dam would not produce electricity, a nightmare scenario for power requirements throughout the Southwest. Last June the dam was already producing less power, since as the water level falls there is less pressure as the water enters the intake towers and falls toward the turbines that run the electricity generators. The dam produced 2,100 megawatts of generation capacity in early 2014, but is down to about 1,200 megawatts now.
In January, it was reported that Federal officials were predicting that if the river keeps falling a declaration of “shortage” is likely by 2017. By agreement, farmers in Arizona have already taken a cut in their water deliveries. A “shortage” declaration would trigger further cuts, both to farmers and suppliers like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
News Briefs
As reported in The Hill, a publication read widely in Washington, D.C., electric power production from California dams has fall 60 percent in the last four years. In normal years hydropower provides 23 percent of California’s electricity. This that number is expected to decline to 7 percent. Some dams have already shut down as a result of almost no snowpack.
“The long running drought has ‘created explosive fire conditions,’ said Mike Mohler, a fire captain with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). ‘Five years ago without a drought in California you would still get wildland fires. But the vegetation wouldn’t burn as quickly. Now there’s zero moisture and you get explosive fire growth.'”
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of wildfires early in the year. Between January and April, on average, there would be 492 fires burning 1,300 acres. In 2014, it was 862 fires burning 2,417 acres, and in 2015, 838 fires burning 3,534 acres.
The Central Valley is Sinking
The USGS has sounded the alarm over the impact of subsidence on all aspects of California infrastructure, due to drilling for more and more water at great depths. The local San Francisco affiliate of CBS reports that desperate farmers are paying up to $300 per foot for drilling, and that some wells are going 3,000 feet down (that’s almost $1 million per well). CBS quotes Michelle Sneed of the USGS: “Roads, railways, canals, pipelines. Any kind of infrastructure like that isn’t flexible will break, and that is why people essentially care about subsidence for the most part is because it is expensive.” USGS photos show subsidence has been going on for decades, CBS reports, “but the sinking is happening faster than ever before,” and “buckling water canals are just one sign of the damage.”
Real Damage to California Agriculture
A survey by the California Farm Water Coalition found that 41% of the state’s irrigated farmland will lose its entire surface water supply, an area 10 times the size of Los Angeles. The survey also found that approximately 620,000 acres are estimated to be fallowed this year, and associated job losses could reach 23,000. Actual acreage loss could reach one million acres.
A Year That the U.S. Congress Demonstrated Leadership That Is Unknown In the Congress of 2015– Part II, 1969
Part I, in the “California Drought Update” of April 9, 2015, reported on the actions of the U.S. Congress to pass legislation in partnership with the State of California for an aggressive development program to build nuclear-powered-desalination plants on the coast of California.
Part II is the follow-up under the question: “what happened to it?” As we shall see from the report of the U.S. Congressional Record of 1969, some of the utilities partnering with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California(MWD) and the U.S. Government, backed out. And although the MWD had plans to proceed on its own, the environment for great infrastructure projects was rapidly changing. While the Congress continued some authorizations for further research and development, the Nixon Administration failed to play its necessary role.
Still, the MWD was committed to proceed on its own. What happened with that? Hopefully, I can answer that question in a future report.
Two bills were before the Congress in 1969:
H.R. 6716– A BILL to authorize appropriations for the saline water conversion program for fiscal year 1970, and
S. 1011– to authorize appropriations for the saline water conversion program for fiscal year 1970, and for other purposes
The scene of action is the April 25, 1969 hearing in the House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.
Early in the meeting a letter read to the committee from the Department of the Interior, January 17, 1969, signed by Stuart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, included the following:
“As you know, in 1966 we obtained authorization to construct the world’s first dual-purpose nuclear power and desalting plant on a man-made island off the coast of Southern California in cooperation with the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric Company and the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It is very questionable whether this project can proceed at this time. The utilities have withdrawn their support and WMD has decided to proceed on the project at a latter time.
“Under the new timetable, construction would start in the mid-1970s, and the plant would begin producing 50 million gallons of desalted water daily about 1980. The previous timetable had called for the start of construction in 1968, initial operation in 1974 and expansion of the plant to a capacity of 150 gpd by 1978. We are investigating other opportunities for reaching this historical milestone in the application of desalting technology.
“Under an agreement between the U.S., Mexico and the International Atomic Energy Agency signed in 1965 the use of very large dual-purpose desalting plants in the Southwest was given detailed consideration. The study team considered for the first time the total water needs of a vast arid region and the potential of desalting to provide fresh water on such a scale. The study firmly established the technical feasibility of nuclear power and desalting plants for the arid regions of California and Arizona in the U.S. and Baja California and Sonora in Mexico.
“In order to take advantage of large-scale equipment, the team selected water-power plants producing 1 billion gpd of fresh water and 2000 megawatts of electricity as the basic unit size. The first plant could be on-stream in the 1980s at a site such as the El Golfo de Santa Clara area, near Riito, or on the U.S.-Mexico border near San Luis Rio Colorado. The construction of a series of these plants would produce a new river of fresh water to satisfy the needs of one of the fast growing regions of the United States.”
The first to testify in this hearing was Carl L. Klein, Assistant Secretary of Water Quality and Research, Department of the Interior. Here are some excerpts from Mr. Klein’s testimony:
“In some parts of the Nation, the clash between dwindling supplies and increasing water demands has already arrived. The Southwestern United States already suffers serious shortages….
“Of all the water conservation and development programs underway today, the saline water conversion program is the only one that provides a new or additional source of supply….”
Klein then presented a report, within which was discussed the status of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s (MWD) 1964 contract with the Atomic Energy Commission to build the first nuclear-powered desalination plant in Southern California (the Bolsa Island project). Because cost estimates had risen, the utilities also in that agreement withdrew from it. The document then went on to discuss how the MWD, on its own planned to go ahead with the planning of the first facility, with construction to begin in 1973-74, and for it to be on-line by 1980. That contract had thus been extended to 1969.
That report went on to describe an expansion of the Federal Government’s plans for nuclear-powered desalination, including the plan to build a facility in Santa Barbara, CA.
A section of this report titled, “Section 5 U.S./Mexico dual-purpose Desalting and Power Plant,”s, in part reads:
“The overall project relates to the construction of nuclear power and water desalting plants to supply municipal and industrial and irrigation water for southwest United States and northwest Mexico sufficiently large to satisfy the water deficiencies of this region through 1995. The study was established in 1965 as a result of an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico and the IAEA. The first phase of this effort was the preliminary assessment of the technical feasibility of large dual-purpose plants using nuclear energy to provide power and fresh water for that area…. This report was completed in 1968 and is now available for distribution.
“The study concludes that dual-purpose desalting plants are technically feasible for that region and designates three possible site areas. The report considered a single plant producing 1 billion gpd and 2000 mw of electricity and recommended that a comprehensive follow-on program be initiated immediate determine the economic feasibility of constructing this plant….”
The report further discusses the Bolsa Island project, the plan to build a nuclear-powered desalination plant on an island off of Orange County, CA. As stated above, the contract expired in March, 1969. Though the project was terminated, the work that had been done on it accomplished results that would be useful in the future. Most important was a, “Complete feasibility study for dual-purpose nuclear electric power and desalting plant.”
In a letter submitted for the Congressional Record from The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) on November 14, 1968, the proposal was discussed that instead of the building of the complex on a man-made island, the complex be built at San Onfre or Camp Pendleton.
This lengthy letter includes the following:
“1. To adequately meet the future water requirements of a steadily growing Southern California economy, the respective merits of additional long distance importation from new surface sources, local waste water reclamation, ground-water storage management, and sea water desalting processes require constant review and evaluation.
“2. Sea water desalting, singly or in combination with one or more of the above possibilities, needs to be considered by Metropolitan. Looking ahead to the year 1990 or 2000 or beyond, it is essential that Metropolitan have a large demonstration sea water desalting plant in operation….”
The letter concludes with a strong statement that Metropolitan believes that the Bolsa Island project is the one to be pursued.
In addition a “Statement of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California,” was read into the hearing record, which included the following:
“Our Board, in its action of December 10, 1968, has set a new target date of 1980 for operation of a large-scale plant requiring that construction begin in the mid-1970s. Now that we have chosen to delay moving forward with an immediate demonstration of large plant technology and economics, we are hopeful that the intervening period will be a highly productive one through the various OSW (the Federal Office of Saline Water) research and development programs, and that when we are able to proceed with a project, a considerably enhanced technology will be available….
“We feel that it is essential that the Office of Saline Water program move forward vigorously and that every effort be made both in basic research to permit the advancement of new techniques and in the use of more efficient materials and in applied technology so as to improve existing processes. As we face mounting population pressures, we must be ready to provide this growing number of people with water….”
Immediately following the MWD statement, a statement from the Director of the Department of Water Resources for the State of California was read into the Congressional Record. Note the sense of urgency and mission that the following excerpts communicate and the content of the bill from the State Assembly:
“While the Department of Water Resources generally supports the objectives of the federal desalting program, we are especially interested in development of large-capacity prototypes useful for making economic analyses of desalting alternatives. The California Legislature has expressed this very well in the the Cobey-Porter Saline Conversion Law, as follows:
“‘It is hereby declared that the people of the state have a primary interest in the development of economical saline water conversion processes which could eliminate the necessity for additional facilities to transport water over long distances, or supplement the services to be provided by such facilities, and provide a direct and easily managed water supply to assist in meeting the future water requirements of the state.’”
In the end the Congress did authorize and pass the bills for continued research and development as carried out by the Office of Saline Water. But over the next few years, under President Richard Nixon, and with the rise of environmentalism, the aggressive Apollo-type program required was never adopted.
