Water Madness by Tom McCaffrey
The federal government is draining Folsom Lake, one of California’s larger reservoirs-in the midst of a historic drought. We had a good Sierra snowpack this year, so the lake was almost full at the end of May. In the past when the lake was full, we could leave our boat in its berth at the marina until December, when the Bureau of Reclamation drains the lake to make room for the winter rains. But this year the Bureau is already draining the lake-to benefit the salmon in the Sacramento River, so we must pull our boat out in July.
One good snowpack is not enough to make up for four years of bad ones. Last summer faucets ran dry in some communities in the Central Valley, irrigation water to farmers was cut off, and thousands of farm workers were put out of work. You can see dead or dying orchards up and down Interstate 5. This summer the State-imposed restrictions on water use remain in place. Dead lawns and dying trees abound in our neighborhood. But still the feds are draining the lake. And they expect the rest of us dutifully to abide by the restrictions they have imposed on us.
The standard response to this sort of madness, among those able to recognize it as madness, is to blame it on radical environmentalists. But this is not the work of ideologues operating on the fringes of the environmental movement. This is standard-issue, mainstream environmentalism as practiced by the green establishment in Washington and Sacramento. This is not to deny that draining a major reservoir in the midst of a drought is a radical act. The point, rather, is that mainstream environmentalism is itself a radical ideology, and the current water shortage in California is Exhibit A.
From its beginnings in the 1960s, as I argue in my book Radical by Nature, environmentalism has been about preserving natural landscape where it exists, and restoring it where it does not. In California, this has meant, among other things, halting economic growth and development as much as possible. And what better way to halt growth than to restrict the supply of new water?
Since 1970 the population of California has increased 100 percent. But the volume of water stored in her reservoirs has increased only 26%. The last major dam in California, the New Melones, was built in 1980. Environmentalists tend to oppose new dams. In recent years, it has been all we can do to prevent them from tearing down existing ones.
California voters recently approved a $2.7 billion bond for water improvements, among which are two proposed dams. But Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute thinks dams are a bad idea. “Storage is the old way to think of water problems. The biggest thing we are missing is that we’re really underinvesting in conservation and efficiency, which is the most effective solution. It’s the cheapest, fastest, and most environmentally sound solution.” In other words, we should all accept fewer toilet flushings, shorter showers, and plastic lawns as the new norm. Make do with less; that is the environmentalist way.
But reservoirs behind dams aren’t the only source of water. Consider the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. Cadiz is a private company on private land in the eastern Mojave Desert. They sit above a natural aquifer that is replenished by rain that falls in the nearby mountains. Eventually, the water in the aquifer works its way to several dry lakebeds, where it percolates to the surface and evaporates. Cadiz developed a plan to tap into the aquifer and use the water to supplement municipal water supplies in dry years. In wet years, those municipalities would be able to pipe water surpluses to Cadiz to be stored underground in the aquifer for future use.
A key element of the plan was to be a 43-mile long pipeline connecting Cadiz to the Colorado River Aqueduct, a pipeline that would run within an active railroad right-of-way across federal land. But at the behest of Senator Diane Feinstein, the Bureau of Land Management disallowed the pipeline. The senator argued that the project would drain the aquifer faster than it can replenish itself, thereby harming the “fragile desert ecosystem.” She said the use of the railroad right-of-way, which would have enabled Cadiz to avoid certain environmental reviews, represented “an egregious misuse of federal policy.”
Feinstein’s claim about draining the aquifer echoes the complaints of Gifford Pinchot and other early advocates of “conservation” a hundred years ago that private owners of natural resources could not be trusted to use them responsibly. Pinchot was a father of the movement that eventually made the federal government permanent custodian of a third of the nation’s land.
As for Feinstein and her environmentalist patrons, increases in the water supply are a problem to be avoided. As a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity said of the Cadiz project, by making more water available to southern California municipalities, it would “increase urban sprawl” along the coast. Stop the water, and we stop the growth. Problem solved.
Another new source of water is the millions of gallons of waste water from California’s oil fields at the south end of the great Central Valley. During the current drought, oil companies have been selling this water to farmers for irrigation. Now environmentalists want to halt the practice until it can be proven “safe.”
Still another possible source of water, and perhaps the most promising of all, is the Pacific Ocean. Desalination now provides one fourth of the fresh water used in Israel. There is no technological reason why desalinated water could not be used to turn all of California’s deserts into verdant gardens. But environmentalists will never allow this to happen.
There are seven desalination plants now operating in California, and three more sitting idle. In December of 2015, the largest desal plant in the western hemisphere opened at Carlsbad, north of San Diego. It is now supplying about seven percent of the potable water used in the San Diego region.
But the Carlsbad plant was not unopposed. It took twelve years to win all the necessary approvals (from 13 different state and federal agencies), resolve a half dozen lawsuits, and complete construction of the plant. This is the standard environmentalist strategy: make it so time-consuming and expensive to build anything that, even if a given project manages to get built, similar, future projects begin to look less and less economically feasible. The Pacific Institute reports that as recently as 2012 there were 19 desalination plants proposed for California. But now, despite four years of punishing drought, there are only 9 proposed, plus 2 in Mexico that would be joint U.S.-Mexican ventures. The pro-desalination forces may have won the battle at Carlsbad, but, if things go true to form, they eventually will lose the war to make desalination a major source of new water in California.
Environmentalists believe that a natural landscape is preferable to a man-made one. In California, whenever they have to allow a man-made project to go forward, they routinely impose all sorts of conditions on the builder to minimize the environmental “impact” of the project, conditions such as requiring homebuilders to devote a significant portion of the land in their project to “greenbelts,” or to leave a percentage of the native trees in place, or to provide pathways for wildlife to move through the project.
The developers of the Carlsbad desalination plant, for example, had to construct 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay “to offset the plant’s environmental harm,” as the San Jose Mercury News put it. That “harm” consisted of building a desalination plant on what had been vacant land. The plant is treated, in effect, as a necessary evil; if a plant must be built on natural land, then a new tract of natural land must be extorted from the developers to make up for the “harm.” This is the environmentalist view, and developers are forced to sanction it, at least implicitly, in order to see their projects through to completion.
But every single thing that gets built on this planet must cause some degree of change to the environment. The more the environmentalists succeed in persuading the rest of us that such change constitutes “harm,” the easier it will become for them eventually to halt all further development. In my own county during the last election, even some members of the local Tea Party were seduced into supporting the “Keep Our County Green” movement, this in an effort to stop some proposed developments in our largely rural county.
One of the common complaints environmentalists have about desalinated water is the cost. Having to satisfy 13 regulatory agencies and defend against a half dozen lawsuits will tend to drive up the cost of a just about any kind of project. But desalination also requires large quantities of electricity, and, thanks to environmentalist efforts to restrict the supply of electricity in the state, California’s rates are among the highest in the U.S. (California’s rates are 28 percent higher than neighboring Arizona’s, 46 percent higher than Oregon’s, and 66 percent higher than Nevada’s.)
But the cost argument exposes an important environmentalist premise. In the old days, before environmentalism, the cost of a project was the developer’s problem. If he underestimated the cost, he lost money, and it was no one’s business but his and his investors’. But environmentalists treat all land and water as, in the final analysis, “our” resources. How those resources ought to be used thus becomes a public matter, to be settled politically (or, increasingly, administratively).
Imagine, instead, that America still worked the way it did in Grover Cleveland’s day. An entrepreneur buys several thousand acres of desert land. He then builds a desalination plant on the coast, purchases a right-of-way to his land in the desert, and builds a water pipeline from the plant to the land. Now his low-value desert land has become high-value real estate, and his desalination plant pays for itself many times over. This is how capitalism works. It is how a free country works. California’s water problems could be solved overnight with a good dose of old-fashioned American freedom. It ain’t too late.
Tom McCaffrey is the author of Radical by Nature: The Green Assault on Liberty, Property, and Prosperity.
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