California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
August 6, 2015
http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org
https://www.facebook.com/CaliforniaDroughtUpdate
Note to Readers:
This week’s report, after a couple of short news-type items, will rerun some of the more recent past items that I think focus us on both the cause and solution to the water crisis, generated by the drought, but made into a disaster by 40 years of criminally wrong policies.
Ben Deniston of the LaRouche PAC Science Team was interviewed for 7 minutes on July 9 by Tomi Lahren on the “On Point with Tomi Lahren” show, out of San Diego. The topic was the California drought, why the water crisis, and solutions. The video link is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFdr1np0pNA
And here is an August 1, six minute interview with Ben Deniston, also by Tomi Lahren on the “On Point with Tomi Lahren” show. The topic was “The fraud of the climate change scare:”
http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/2015/08/01/the-fraud-of-the-climate-change-scare/
The Brownshirts strike again
As reported by the Sacramento Bee on August 4, the state judicial system has gotten on board the Brownshirts’ policy of cutting off the water to farmers. Under the title, “Judge backs California drought regulators,” the article reports:
“A judge has cleared the way for California’s drought police to go after water districts accused of illegally diverting water.
“In a closely-watched case, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Shellyanne Chang late Monday declined a Delta water district’s request for a preliminary injunction against the State Water Resources Control Board. The board is pursuing administrative enforcement actions against a handful of water districts for allegedly taking water to which they had no legal right.”
For more coverage of the battle between the Water Board and the irrigation districts and the farmers see the archive on our website: http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org
That was the headline in the Visalia Times on August 4, demonstrating once again that the Brown administration does not give a damn about the people of California. As reported by Dennis Taylor:
“For the week ending Aug. 3 there were 19 more wells that went bad, either in water volume or quality, on top of 47 that went bad the week before. Cumulatively, there has been 1,518 domestic well failures since January 2014 – 1,294 of those have still not been resolved.
“As the water table drops, not only is there less water but the water that’s left becomes more contaminated with unhealthy compounds, officials said. Many wells in the Valley have tested positive for contaminants such as nitrates, arsenic and bacteria, according to Visalia-based Community Water Center. Continuous drought conditions are forcing more groundwater pumping, causing water tables to sink and water pumps to lose pressure and suck in contaminants.
“Kristin Dobbin, Visalia regional water management coordinator for Community Water Center, said there ‘have been some bumps along the road’ that have interfered with efforts to get water to some of the more disadvantaged residents in community such as East Porterville. Among them no sources of water to fill water tanks and a manufacturing glitch that squeezed the supply of tanks.
“‘The majority of people still do not have a tank installed,’ she said.”
Wildfires grab the headlines
While the Rocky Fire in Lake County, as of this writing, has burned more than 70,000 acres, it is only one of about 25 fires now burning out of control in the state. After four years of drought and the historic criminal policy of not building infrastructure and restricting logging, the state has become a tinderbox.
So far this year, Cal Fire has responded to 4,200 wildfires that have burned nearly 100,000 acres. Normally, by this time of the year, there would be about 2,700 fires burning a total of 50,000 acres.
From Our Archives
From the July 23, 2015 issue of California Drought Update
By way of introduction, first a comment on a story-line that has resurfaced the past week or two: Last January’s Los Angeles Times story by Jay Famiglietti’s that California had a one year supply of water remaining before it all runs out. As Clarice Son commented in a post on the My Job Depends on Ag face book page, Famiglietti treats “’California water’ as one giant bucket and suggests a ‘one giant bucket’ solution”– mandatory rationing throughout the state for all sectors– the cities and agriculture. Son goes on to say, “we’ve really got a thousand smaller buckets in various stages of ‘running out’ (or not). Water management happens at the scale of those thousand buckets.” Son’s full comments are here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/694281934016818/permalink/726227010822310/
I will go further. As the State Constitution clearly states, adequate water supplies for all the people of the state is a right, and it is an obligation of the government to ensure that right is fulfilled. When some areas, like agriculture are receiving zero water, then we must say that the state is already out of water. Brown’s declaration of a state of emergency, but his refusal to do what is required to meet that Constitutional obligation, is enough cause for his removal. But that will not provide water. The issue of this report of July 9, 2015, presented both a conceptual approach to ensuring future water supplies and the actions required now to address this immediate crisis. I reprint those points here:
What is to be done?
First, recognize that this is not a California water crisis, but a political, cultural and economic crisis of the nation. There has been zero water infrastructure built in this state in more than 40 years– we ceased creating a future for ourselves and for future generations. After the death of President Kennedy, and the death of his policies of building nuclear-powered desalination plants and the North American Water and Power Alliance, the nation gave up the idea of progress and development and turned the nation into a speculative gambling casino with an ideology of environmentalism to match.
Second, the central issue to be put on the table is the real nature of progress; the real nature of progress for mankind. Mankind is the only species that creates his own future through the action of the creative power of his mind. It is scientific discovery, and applying that to increasingly master the universe that that future is created. By allowing that to be destroyed we are creating the conditions for our own extinction.
Third, creating new sources of water requires the recognition that processes on our planet, like the water cycle, are largely determined, not by processes on Earth, but by galactic forces like cosmic radiation which affects how water vapor behaves– whether there are clouds, where they are located, and when precipitation falls. Initial experiments in several nations of artificially ionizing the atmosphere have demonstrated initial success in increasing rainfall. An aggressive program to put such experiments into action must be carried out now.
Providing more water to this state and to all arid areas of the world depends upon unleashing the creative power of mankind to discover how to control those processes. That is the fundamental solution. That requires a new Presidency; it requires the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act to bankrupt this speculative system; and it requires a return to classical principles of culture to once again unleash the creative powers of our people.
In the meantime, an Apollo Project-style mobilization to build desalination plants over the next few years is what is required to minimize the current disaster. The Carlsbad desalination plant now being built will begin delivering 50 million gallons of water per day to San Diego later this year. That facility will have taken less than two years to build. By putting the construction of dozens of plants, from San Francisco Bay to San Diego, on a 24 hours a day/ 7 days per week schedule, in less than a year, rivers of water will flow from the sea to the land. Providing the electricity required will require another crash program to build nuclear power plants. We have accomplished such great tasks before, and we can do it again.
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At the same time, recognizing and acting to end the domination of the state by the Brownshirts of the California State Water Board, whose actions of sending millions of acre-feet of water out to sea to protect fish at the expense of human needs, can immediately prevent the further destruction of food production and end the environment of virtual terror they have created.
From the July 7, 2015 issue of California Drought Update
There are too many balls in the air
As I reported last week, the Water Board and the Bureau of Reclamation had cut the release of water from Shasta Lake by 20 percent to save colder water for later this summer for salmon, forcing the release of more water from Folsom and Oroville reservoirs in order to ensure salinity levels in the Delta are not intolerable. Now Folsom lake will reach a critical level by September, threatening the water supply of as many as 200,000 people.
The juggling of water resources by the Water Board became more difficult as they added a new ball to those they already have in the air with the announcement on June 30, that to ensure that six Northern California water districts don’t run out of water, that, for the first time, the Delta-Mendota Canal will be reversed to transfer water north from the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County to the city of Tracy in San Joaquin County. “This is the proposal? Unbelievable,” said one water official. Construction of the canal was completed in 1951, and it has always, until now, shipped water to farmers from north to south.
Here are some excerpts from a report on June 30, from KXTV:
“Nine giant pumps are being installed in three locations to lift canal water a total of 18 feet along a 62-mile stretch from the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County to the city of Tracy in San Joaquin County.
“We’re making it flow in the opposite direction,” said Bob Martin, engineering director for the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which operates the canal under an agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
“The Del Puerto Water District, the West Stanislaus Irrigation District, the Patterson Irrigation District, the Banta-Carbona Irrigation District, the Byron Bethany Irrigation District and the city of Tracy together had banked 80,000 acre feet of water in the San Luis Reservoir to get them through the summer.
“Typically, they would pull water from the Delta-Mendota Canal closer to the Delta and exchange it for the water stored in the reservoir farther south.
“Last month, they were notified there wouldn’t be enough water in the canal this summer for them to trade.
“The pump installation is expected to cost up to $700,000 with the water districts paying nearly a half-million dollars per month just for fuel to run generators that power the pumps.
“Although the project is expensive, Martin said there was no alternative.
“The situation is so dire that if our districts don’t get this water, they lose their orchards,” Martin said.”
Martin is referring to the fact that these farmers already have $1.3 billion worth of crops in the ground.
While most of the juggling is taking place in northern California, the southern part of the state is not far behind, as seen in the report below on the new threat to the Los Angeles water supply from the falling level of Mono Lake.
It is this juggling game that should clarify the hysteria of the Water Board in response to the resistance of farmers and water districts to their orders. At least four lawsuits by districts are now in the courts, and as many as two-thirds of those ordered to cease taking water have not complied. As reported last week the State Attorney General in her statement to the court in one case shocked everyone by stating that the Water Board has no legal authority to order the restrictions, nor to enforce fines and penalties. But, then then the attorney for the Water Board stated that yes, the notices to stop diverting water were ‘informative’ and don’t carry fines, but that the state would respond to unauthorized water draws with penalties, using its power to protect diminishing water supplies.
The punch line is simple: If the farmers and the water districts will not submit to the orders of the Water Board, then the entire juggling act will come apart, and all the balls will be dropped. All the transfers, cut-offs and emergency measures will not prevent a disaster erupting somewhere in or throughout the system. As I headlined it last week: “Something Is About To Break!”
From the June 25, 2015 issue of California Drought Update
Something Is About To Break!
I began the report last week with this:
“The farmers of the Central Valley of California are being “waterboarded,” as week by week, more and more of them are being cut off from their water supplies by the appropriately named “Water Board.”
The shocker to farmers this week was the announcement by the Water Board on June 12, that senior water rights holders would be cut off.
“As reported by Maven News on June 12, ‘the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) announced today that there is insufficient water available for senior water right holders with a priority date of 1903 or later in the San Joaquin and Sacramento watersheds and the Delta.’ The order affects 276 pre-1914 appropriative water rights holders.” Those with water rights older than 1903 are not affected, yet. The Water Board, in its statement, warned that more cuts are coming.”
As in any physical system, one can run it to its limits and then it breaks, the California Water Management System is about ready to break. At some point soon, somewhere in that remarkable and productive system that provides water to 38 million people, something is going to break. And then, the truth of the results of the criminal policies of the last 40 years will be in our faces. The headline in the Sacramento Bee on June 25, captures the moment: “State water system stretched to limit, officials say.” And about to break, they might have added.
On the heels of the June 12 order to senior water rights holders to immediately cease pumping from rivers and streams, on June 17, it was announced by the Water Board and the Bureau of Reclamation that water releases from Lake Shasta will immediately be reduced by 20 percent to keep water temperatures in the lake cool enough to protect threatened Salmon, but by doing so, the already planted crops of thousands of more farmers are threatened.
But, this is only the beginning of an unraveling of the intricate, interconnected water management system of the entire state. As of this moment, three of the four major elements of the California Water Management System are delivering little or no water for the first time since the system was completed in 1972. The Central Valley Project, the California Water Project and the Los Angeles Aqueduct are all effectively shut down. Only the Colorado River Aqueduct and the Imperial Valley system, which get their water from the Colorado River, are functioning at this time.
The major focus of this report shall be the Sacramento River system and the Central Valley.
As Kate Campbell in Ag Alert on June 24, put it: “A water temperature miscalculation at Shasta Dam could send water transfer agreements worth millions of dollars toppling like dominoes. She goes on to then quote David Murillo, the regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, “Changes in Shasta operations will have a system-wide effect on Central Valley Project and State Water Project operations and water supplies.”
How all this works is complicated, but just for starters, follow this: To replace the Shasta Lake releases, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has now sharply increased flows out of Folsom Lake to both protect other fish and to ensure enough fresh water flow into the Delta to keep salinity levels at their proper level. But, Folsom is already at the lowest level for this time of year that it has been in decades. The lake now contains 150,000 acre-feet (about 15 percent of capacity), and the intake valves that draw water from the lake may not work if levels fall to 80,000 or 90,000 acre-feet. One official stated that the intake values may not even work at the 120,000 acre-foot level, since it has never been tested at that level. What could be threatened here is the primary water source for several Sacramento suburbs, in addition to agricultural interests.
Further up the Sacramento Valley, as reported in the Sacramento Bee article of June 24, cited above, is Lake Oroville, which is also being drawn down to help replace the Shasta Lake water:
“Lake Oroville, the main reservoir of the State Water Project, is on track to be reduced to 900,000 acre-feet this summer. ‘That meets historical low points for Oroville,’ said John Leahigh of the state Department of Water Resources, which operates the reservoir.
“Much below 900,000 acre-feet, it becomes harder to operate the lake, he said. A state-run hydropower plant at Oroville will lose some of its generating capacity, he said. In addition, state officials are worried about having less water available to ‘carry over’ to next year.”
All this threatens thousands of farmers, all who have already spent millions in planting this year’s crops, which in the ground and harvested are worth billions. As one farmer said, “I can’t unplant my crops.”
Farmwater.org reported on June 24, under the title: “State Water Resources Control Board could cost California’s agricultural economy $4.5 billion,” that the water the Bureau of Reclamation is releasing into the Delta is water that farmers had “loaned” to the State Water Resources Board to protect Salmon, and now that water, which farmers had already paid for, is not only not being repaid now, when farmers need it, but is in fact being cut off completely by the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation reported above.
Farmwater.org concludes: “Water agencies in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys provided estimates to Reclamation indicating the total cost of lost water and farm production if the water board does not approve the payback provision would be in the range of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion and an additional 485,000 acres of farmland fallowing.”
The damage already is approaching those figures. Already this year farmers have fallowed near 700,000 acres of farmland, and 44 percent of the states 9.6 million acres of irrigated farmland will be receiving no surface water this year. It will get worse, as the state Water Resources Control Board has repeatedly stated that they will be issuing cut-off notices every week.
From the June 11, 2015 issue of California Drought Update
Governor Brown doubles-down
On June 9, our RICO charged Governor Jerry Brown doubled-down in his public discussion of deliberately reducing the population of the State of California, as he emulates Prince Philip of Britain, who is famous for his statements for population reduction.
Speaking to the Board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Brown repeated the lie that human caused global warming was exacerbating California’s drought. “At some point, how many people can we accommodate?” he said.
Stating that, “It’s a very catastrophic existential threat that we have to take as seriously as though we were facing a military adversary,” Brown repeated his claim that, “We have wreaked havoc on our natural resources,” including “the water systems of this state.” Elaborating, he said, California could face a future of “fires, disease and all sorts of things we don’t ordinarily have to deal with.”
The only thing Brown proposed is building his twin tunnels under the Delta. And, speaking later at a California Conversation forum at the University of Southern California, he capped off his attempt to sell his fascist policy, calling it the adoption of an “elegant” lifestyle: “If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way native people lived, much less the way people do today.. You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things”.
From the June 4, 2015 issue of California Drought Update
The Drought and the Water Management System
Extreme drought conditions expanded by 3 percent in California the past week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor released June 4.
Excerpts from the following commentary published in Ag Alert on May 30, by Lawrence H. Easterling, Jr., provides some useful background on California water and the water management system of the state:
We are witnessing the dismantling of the California water conveyance system that supplies drinking water for 25 million California residents and four million acres of prime farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.
On average, 200.0 million acre-feet of water a year blankets our state. One acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons of water. Of that precipitation, 75% originates north of the Sacramento River. The other 25% falls in central and southern California.
The water that is not manageable by us is 120.0 million acre-feet. Some of it evaporates, but most of it settles into the ground, fills lakes, and what remains heads for the Pacific Ocean. The balance of the water is called “directable” surface water (80,000,000 acre-feet) and this is where we have the opportunity to put it to its best and proper use.
By 2005, according to the Department of Water Resources, 48% of that directable water went to the environment, 41% to agriculture and the remaining 11% to rural areas. This balance of such a precious resource seemed at the time to be equitable to all parties, thanks to the ingenuity of our forefathers in the 20th century. Their foresight gave us a water conveyance system second to none in the entire world.
Some distinctions should be made here as to how much directable water we are actually concerned about. At full capacity, the two California water conveyance systems—the State Water Project (SWP) and the federal Central Valley Project (CVP)—deliver water from northern California to southern and central California. Each system, the CVP and the SWP, has the capacity to each deliver 4.0 million acre-feet water each year. However, this water delivery capacity has never been tested. The record shows that in the years prior to 2005, the average total delivery COMBINED for both projects was 5.4 million acre-feet per year. The ultimate users of this water went to agriculture (60%) and the rural population (40%).
The volume of water available, on average, from the Sacramento River, including the San Joaquin River, is 30.3 million acre-feet. It is from this volume of water that the 5.4 million acre-feet are sent south.
More background is provided by an op ed in the Los Angeles Times on June 2, by Karen Ross and Daniel Summer. Under the title, “California agriculture: It’s worth the water,” they give further evidence blowing a big hole in the big lie that California agriculture is an insignificant part of the state’s economy, since it represents only 2 percent of the state’s GDP. Excerpts follow, which, whether the authors understand it or not, demonstrate how parasitical most of the “economy’ have become since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. California used to have more than 400,000 aerospace workers, but now has more than 400,000 real estate agents.
….And the 2% figure grossly undersells the importance of food grown in California.
California’s economy is incredibly diverse, much like its topography, its climate and its population. That’s a significant benefit when you’re the eighth-largest economy in the world. And agriculture is a key part of that diversity.
Of course, many aggregate sectors constitute a larger share of our economy than agriculture. Finance, insurance and real estate tops the list at 21%. Professional services and government follow at 13% and 12%, respectively.
Beyond those sectors, we have a broad, flat grouping of several categories, each representing just a few percent of the state’s GDP. That’s a remarkably balanced profile that lends resilience and dynamism to our economy.
Let’s look more closely at that data, though. Is agriculture really just 2.1%? As is so often the case with statistics, what’s not in that number is more significant than what is.
Food is central to California in more than just the nutritional sense.
Take the “utilities” category, for instance. It includes power generated for farms and for processing and marketing crops once they’re harvested. The “real estate” piece includes sales and leasing of agricultural acreage and processing facilities. “Non-durable goods manufacturing” includes food and beverage processing. “Wholesale trade” and “retail trade” does not just mean the shopping mall; it includes the supermarket, the food court and the regional produce hub.
Categories such as “transportation and warehousing” and “finance and insurance” are linked into every one of our 78,000 farms, each of which needs trucks, banks and insurance coverage to bring in the harvest.
Karen Ross is California agriculture secretary. Daniel Sumner is a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis.
