By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Remember the $11.1 billion water bond that was supposed to be Proposition 18 on the November 12, 2010 ballot? Polling showed it was losing badly, so then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger poured it down the drain.

Prop. 18 now has gurgled back up through the sewer pipes and is flooding into Californians’ homes. “Gov. Brown and the legislature need to trim the fat from the water bond and serve it to voters,” urges Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton.

But there are much bigger problems with the proposed $11.1 billion water bond than the $2 billion in political pork larded into the initiative, which now will be on the November 2012 ballot and also will be called Prop. 18

First, the so-called water bond is falsely advertised by the media as solely a general obligation bond.  If that is all it was, it could conceivably be authorized without a vote of the electorate and issued by the California Industrial Development Financing Advisory Commission and underwritten by higher statewide water rates.

The proposed consolidated water bond is a radical change to the governance structure of water in the entire state.  Effectively, all water agencies and municipal water departments in the state, including the state Department of Water Resources, would be put under a super-powered water entity formed by the Legislature called the Delta Stewardship Council, which is already in place but without the powers proposed in the water bond.

Delta Stewardship Council as Super Agency

The consolidated water bond would empower the existing Delta Stewardship Council that has been created by the legislature to be able to reduce Southern California’s existing maximum annual entitlement of two million acre feet of water from the state Water Project.  According to knowledgeable water experts, under the Stewardship Council’s mandate to balance the “co-equal” goals of “Delta restoration and water supply reliability,”  Southern California’s water allocation under the state Water Contract could be reduced to 25 percent — 500,000 acre-feet of water — of its existing entitlement

The council would have veto powers over the building of any future reservoirs and canals by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the state Department of Water Resources, Westland Water District, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and other water districts. All future water infrastructure projects statewide would have to be vetted through the Delta Stewardship Council and its tentacle subsidiaries.

Delta Council Would Be New Coastal Commission

The seven-member Sacramento Delta Stewardship Council would have land use police powers — overlay zoning powers — over at least seven cities in the Bay-Delta area: Pittsburg, Sacramento, Stockton, Tracy, Oakley, Isleton, Tracy and Rio Vista. It would hold such powers over five unincorporated areas: West Sacramento, Collinsville, Locke, Ryde and Bird’s Landing, as well as over a vast additional expanse of cities and farmlands that drain water and wastewater into the Delta.  The Stewardship Council would become the Coastal Commission of the Bay Delta area, with wide powers to usurp land-use decisions.

Essentially, what would be at the top of the bureaucratic water pyramid in California would be a powerful Delta wildlife sewer district, but no one would be able to get away with calling it that.

A whole new state entity, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy, would also be created under the Natural Resources Agency to implement the ecosystem restoration of the Delta. A Delta Independent Science Board would additionally be created to advise the Conservancy and Stewardship Council. And a Delta Watermaster’s office would be created and funded to assure water quality enforcement. All these new entities would be linked with a larger web of existing committees and state agencies.

Power to Northern Cal, Bond Payments to Southern Cal

Of the $11.1 billion bond, $3 billion is slated for reservoir projects whose location will be determined by the California Water Commission, of which eight of its nine members are currently from Central and Northern California.  However, Southern California water ratepayers would pay two-thirds of the bond.  If the representation of the commission were based on a pro rata share of population, it is doubtful Northern Californians would vote for it.  The water bond does not assure that any potential reservoir site would clear the environmental permitting process.

This package of bills calls for a 20 percent reduction in baseline daily per capita water use by the year 2020.  It also calls for the volume of agricultural water to be measured for the first time.

Perhaps of most interest to the average person, it establishes a target of 55 gallons per capita daily for residential indoor water use. Taking a shower can use 25 gallons alone.

Conservation Catch-22

The water bill package gives water agencies four options for complying with conservation goals:

1. 20 percent reduction in daily use;

2. 20 percent reduction in regional imports;

3. Utilize performance standards for commercial, industrial and institutional users;

4. A method to be developed by DWR.

Processed water from recycling would not be subject to conservation mandates. The problem with conservation is that it works on the state level by eliminating the need for new costly and environmentally damaging dams and canals. But on the local level, conservation only depletes local groundwater basins by not sufficiently replenishing them, resulting in more reliance on imported water supplies.

There is little mention that the water bond mandates $5 billion in additional matching-fund requirements to be imposed on regional and local water districts, raising the effective cost of the bond to $16.1 billion.  With interest, the bond would cost $34.1 billion.  That means the putative $11.1 billion cost would triple. Local water agencies taking water-bond monies for local water projects would have to come up with matching funds during a protracted economic recession.

Eclipse of Democracy

Once the Delta Stewardship Council is empowered under the water bond, most voters across the state will not have a voting representative on the Stewardship Council, raising issues of taxation without representation.  If passed by the voters, would any fees, fines or taxes have to comply with the supermajority vote requirement of Proposition 26?  Whatever form of governance of water is selected — democratic or totalitarian — it may form the template for all other forms of government in California.

Given all of the above, the $2 billion in political pork is perhaps the least of the problematic facets of the state water bond on the 2012 ballot.  Neither the media nor the already formed Delta Stewardship Council are doing a good job in educating the electorate about the governance issues involved in the water bond.

The new California Forward project, run by political elites to bring about government reform, hasn’t even addressed the issue of good water governance. Neither has the Little Hoover Commission registered an opinion on the organizational and governance aspects of the water bond.

If the bond is passed, it is likely the governing of California’s water system will resemble more that of the Netherlands or perhaps even Stalinist Russia than the water system of water baron William Mulholland or even 1960s Gov. Pat Brown, the infrastructure-building father of the current governor, Jerry “Era of Limits” Brown.  The proposed water bond will shift power in California from the people to an unelected bureaucracy.

Concluding Fable

A-Sop’s Fable of the Smelt, the Shark and the Fat-Free Sea Hog

A tiny minnow fish, called the Sacramento Delta Smelt, convinced a Shark not to eat it because it was contaminated with pesticide. The Smelt told the Shark that there was such a thing as a healthy free lunch and that the Shark could eat a Fat-Free Sea Hog — a small whale — instead.

The Shark took the bait and ate a bite of the Fat-Free Sea Hog.  But the Fat-Free Sea Hog was tainted with natural parasites and the Shark got sick and died.  Whereupon the tiny Smelt prevailed over the mighty Shark.

Moral: Fat-free pork may be hazardous to your health.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

On Sept. 16, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger threw the Delta smelt minnow back into the waters of the Sacramento Delta.

He ruled the federal government’s case was too small to grant a stay — a court-ordered continuation — of the man-made “X2’” line where fresh water and ocean water currently mix in the Sacramento Delta at 74 kilometers (46 miles) from the Golden Gate Bridge near a spot between the cities of Pittsburg and Antioch.

However, due to the current flow of freshwater into the Delta from winter and spring rains and snowpack in the High Sierra mountain range, the judge held off until October changing the existing X2 location at 74 kilometers.  This may give time for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, to file an expected appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Brandon Middleton of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a free-market public-interest law firm in Sacramento.

Small Fish, Big News

The court’s denial of a stay was an extension his 140-page ruling on August 31. It found no scientific merit in the federal government’s case to artificially set Delta X2 at the 74-kilometer spot, purportedly to protect the Delta smelt. In that decision, Wanger found that it made sense to establish the X2 line westerly of where the freshwater San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers meet. But there was no scientific basis to the claims of the so-called experts hired by the government and NRDC that moving the line to the East would threaten the extinction of the smelt.

According to a report by Brandon Middleton of the Pacific Legal Foundation, “Judge Wanger found further that the testimony from the manager in charge of federal delta smelt regulatory measures was ‘that of a zealot,’ making her ‘unworthy of belief.’  He expressed sadness and ‘remorse for our justice system for what has been placed before the Court.’ The court concluded its hearing by finding that, as a whole, the federal agencies in this case are ‘unworthy of the public trust’.”

The brackish water zone where fresh water and salt water mix — called X2 — is no longer controlled by nature alone, but also by how much water is pumped out of the Delta at the Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant about 11 miles northeast of Livermore.  The plant is the intake and initial pumping system for the California Aqueduct and the South Bay Aqueduct.

One hundred years ago or so the spot where fresh water and salt water mixed in the Bay-Delta was set by nature. During peak floods, the spot extended half way across the state to Stockton, in the process wiping out freshwater habitats of fish and other wildlife and entire towns. The process is documented in the book, “Battling the Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy and the Sacramento Valley,” by Robert Kelley (1989).

Think of Japan’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 occurring on an occasional basis in the Delta, but without the Tsunami wave.

Without the giant water hydraulic system of the California Aqueduct and the Delta dike system in place, the Delta would return to a danger zone of flooding that decimated both man-made and natural habitats indiscriminately.

Water War is a Fish War

What the tug of war over the X2 line means is a struggle for 300,000 to 670,000 acre-feet of water in the Delta, depending on whether it is a wet of dry year, to purportedly push a few minnows called Delta smelt a few miles westerly within the Delta Bay.

At the lower figure, this would be enough water to supply the city of San Diego for one year; or at the higher number, enough for the entire city of Los Angeles for one year.

Alternatively, it would irrigate 300,000 to 670,000 acres of farmland. It would at minimum lock up water storage equivalent to Lake Castaic or Clear Lake, or at maximum Lake Havasu on the Colorado River, to hypothetically preserve a fictional brackish mixing zone for a few minnow.

But that water also supplies jobs, bureaucratic turf and funding for numerous government technocrats, environmental consultants, academics, green lawyers and environmental advocacy organizations, many of whose representatives testified during both the X2 issue and the larger court case on the Delta, which will continue.

Delta is Political Mixing Zone

The Delta Smelt issue is a water gauge that determines how much government and how much economy we have.  Just as a fisherman’s ruler measures which are “keeper fish” and which to throw back, the Smelt is an ersatz symbol and measure of what mix of a water political economy we have.

If we dedicate enough Delta Bay water to supply the entire city of Los Angeles for one year, in order to protect a few smelt that also exist outside the Delta X2 zone, then urban water rates will rise to offset fixed costs. And farmers and urban development, landscapers and even urban wildlife will suffer.  But natural resource bureaucracies and the entire food chain of jobs that feed off of them will thrive.

Liberal California politicians are currently possessed with the notion of redistricting so that a one-third majority cannot control unrestrained taxation.  But the same crowd of politicians is not concerned that a very small minority of cognitive elites who benefit from regulation of the Delta smelt are able to shut off the water spigot on farming and the larger economy if their “entitled” jobs are threatened.

When we say California is dysfunctional, what we mean is that it is bureaucratic to the point that bureaucracies are now able to use environmental regulation to trump the larger economy, and even the habitats for wildlife in agricultural and urban areas, to protect bureaucratic habitats.  The role of government serving the citizens has been reversed.

Gov. Jerry Brown shrewdly keeps the media’s attention on his government “austerity” program of low-budget inaugurations, cutting back buying new government cars, stopping the practice of state agencies making personal loans to employees and curtailing the purchase of paper clips while people send documents electronically — all in order to gain moral legitimacy for his policies and programs.  But he dares not touch any of the protected bureaucracies that are strangling the economy.

In California, austerity and the Delta smelt are the small stories; government bureaucracies are the big story.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Sept. 16 is X-Day in the Delta Smelt legal battle. I call tomorrow X-Day — sort of like D-Day in World War II — because it concerns the battle over X2 conditions in the California Delta.

X1

Up to the early 20th century, X1 was made by nature and extended halfway across the state, from the Pacific Ocean to Stockton, where the Delta became an inland sea. Other years, it receded to around the city of Pittsburg on the greater San Francisco Bay.  X1 had nothing to do with the pumping of Delta water into the California Aqueduct from the Banks Pumping Plant where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers come together.

X2

X2 is a man-made line, or salt and fresh water mixing zone, than can be shifted by pumping on the Delta. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service recommended that X2 be located in a zone near the city of Pittsburg on the west to the City on Antioch on the east in the upper Honker Bay of the greater San Francisco Bay — or about 74 to 81 yards from the Golden Gate Bridge — to protect the endangered Delta smelt.

On Sept. 9, the Federal government and the National Resources Defense Council requested a stay of the court’s ruling on the Delta smelt fall X2 action pending further appeal.  Their declarations can be found here and here.

Brandon Middleton of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property rights advocacy group, said of the continued actions of the federal government and the NRDC:

“The court described the information in these declarations as a potential ‘game changer,’ but at the same time remarked that the testimony of the individuals who submitted declarations is ‘somewhat all over the map’based on the individuals’ prior submissions.”

On Sept. 16, Judge Oliver W. Wanger is set to rule on these requests.  The federal agencies and the Natural Resources Defense Council are apparently angling for a new judge on the case, as Wanger has announced his retirement; and the feds and the NRDC are maneuvering an appeal to go to the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

What X2 entails is dedicating 300,000 to 670,00 acre feet of water, depending on whether it is a dry or wet year, to push a few glorified minnows, called Delta smelt, a few miles westerly within the Delta-Bay.

At the lower figure, this would be enough water to supply the city of San Diego for one year; or at the higher number enough for the entire city of Los Angeles for one year.

Alternatively, it would irrigate 300,000 to 670,000 acres of farmland. It would at minimum lock up water storage equivalent to Lake Castaic or Clear Lake, or at maximum Lake Havasu on the Colorado River, to hypothetically preserve a fictional brackish mixing zone for a few minnow.

Court Decision

The Fish and Wildlife Service has contended in federal court that their selection of the location for the X2 line was based on “science.”  But Judge Oliver Wanger didn’t buy their so-called science.  Instead, upon cross-examination of the federal expert biologist, it was revealed that smelt exist at varying salinity levels in the Delta.  The smelt habitat ranges over 24 miles of the Delta, not just in only a single mixing zone.  What came out in the court proceedings is that the Fish and Wildlife service omitted 60 percent of the smelt that are outside the proposed mixing zone.

In his 140-page decision on where the Delta X-2 line should be located, Judge Wanger gave a stern rebuke to the federal agencies testifying in the case:

“The scientific evidence in support of imposing any Fall X2 action is manifestly equivocal. There is essentially no biological evidence to support the necessity of the specific 74 km requirement set to be triggered in this ‘wet’ water year. The agencies still ‘don’t get it.’ They continue to believe their ‘right to be mistaken’ excuses precise and competent scientific analysis for actions they know will wreak havoc on California’s water supply.” 

Judge Wanger went further and found that the “credibility” of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation scientist who testified in the case was in “question” and “his scientific objectivity is compromised by inconsistency.”  Wanger also called out the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency’s “intransigence,” and said “the agency’s ‘lack of data’ apologetic is the premise for the agency to do what it chooses without addressing Plaintiff’s objections.”

Science Not on Anyone’s Side

In making decisions on Delta water policy, “science” is used like those who say, “God is on our side.”  But science is on nobody’s side because nature is not even on the side of the environmentalists’ vision of a restored Delta. If it were not for mankind, the Delta will one day be destroyed by nature, just as it was created by nature.  The Sacramento Delta is an inland sea and one of the few landforms at the mouth of a river in the world that flows inland as well as to the sea.

Science is not on anyone’s side in the debate about the Delta.  And the so-called “science” about the Delta does not replace cultural judgments about what mix of ecosystems we collectively value most:

Δ  — A cold water Delta with salmon

Δ  — A warmer-water Delta with catfish, bass

Δ  — An entirely ocean-water Delta with halibut, striper, perch or shellfish

The Delta will work as an ecosystem any of the above ways. What makes salmon superior to catfish?  Or smelt superior to bass or fish that feed on waste matter on the river bottom?

What proportionate mix of ecosystems do we value? Science can’t make that decision.  That decision can only be made culturally and politically.

As the Delta X2 Line court decision indicates, the huge number of bureaucratic natural resource agencies at both the federal and state levels are not neutral technocrats as much as they are stakeholders whose jobs, livelihoods, careers and political turf are dependent on enlarging the freshwater ecosystem of the Delta along with recreational fishing and tourism interests.

Government has reached a state in California, both at the federal and state levels, where it is Master, not a tool or servant.  To politicians of the Party of the Government, there is a politically created constituency of environmentalists, university scientists, green advocacy organizations and green lawyers whose only goal is to be an obstruction to the agricultural and commercial sectors of society to enrich themselves for specious benefits to the environment or society.

The Delta X2 Line case indicates that government agencies can no longer be trusted to serve as disinterested parties in contested environmental issues. And liberal politicians have too many votes to lose if they can’t deliver jobs and benefits to their green constituency.

That bureaucratic technocrats and their consultant scientists held the entire Southern half of the state and farmers hostage by an adjudicated drought from 2007 to 2010 indicates there is something drastically wrong with California’s environmental laws. But don’t expect deregulation because politicians depend on those laws for votes and political power.

What the Delta X2 line represents is not how many Delta smelt are threatened with extinction, but how many bureaucrats and their sycophants are endangered.

Environmental bureaucracies create and evolve themselves and then want us to write an insurance policy against their extinction.

How do we rescue the Delta, our farms and our economy from the bureaucrats and environmentalists?

Continued Bureaucratic Belligerence and Obstruction

Both the California and federal governments are replete with scientifically unjustifiable environmental regulations and bureaucracies. The Delta X2 case helps us get a window into self-serving bureaucracies that are imbued with an ideology of moral superiority for their missions.  It is time to say “game over” to the bureaucracies that are drying up our farms and our economy in California. But to do this we first must see them for what they are.

The following first appeared in City Journal California.

AUG. 25, 2011

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

California’s water wars aren’t about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation’s most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past generations of Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state’s inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs, and canals. Only that way can California’s rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta year-round. Only that way, environmentalists say, can a three-inch delta fish be saved and salmon runs from the Pacific to the interior restored.

Such green dreams are not new to California politics. But their consequences, in this case, have been particularly dire: rich farmland idled, workers laid off, and massive tax revenues forfeited. Worse still, they coincide with a $25 billion annual state deficit, an overtaxed and fleeing elite populace, unsustainable pension obligations for public employees, a growing population of illegal aliens—and a world food shortage. This insolvent state is in far too much trouble to predicate its agricultural future on fish.

You can learn an important fact about the water wars simply by driving the width of California’s vast Central Valley, where most of the battles erupt. True, there is a rich agricultural economy of dairy, wine, row crops, and rice elsewhere in the state, both to the north and to the south. But the farming engine that drives California’s $14 billion export industry is centered in the hot flatlands of the 450-mile-long Central Valley, bounded by the mountains of the Sierra Nevada to the east and those of the Coast Range to the west.

I make that drive sometimes, starting from a cabin high in the snowy Sierra Nevada, near Huntington Lake. After descending the pass into the Central Valley, I reach my small raisin farm, homesteaded by my great-grandmother in 1875: 40 acres of Thompson seedless vines, part of what was once my family’s 135-acre property within the small-farming patchwork of Fresno County, full of lush orchards and vineyards. As I continue across the state toward the Pacific, I pass through the valley’s very different, sparsely settled western region, with its vast corporate latifundia. Finally, I reach the Coast Range and descend into the Bay Area sprawl, where much of contemporary California’s environmental policy gets made.

No Single Agriculture

What the drive teaches you is that there is no single Central Valley agriculture. Rather, the state is divided longitudinally, right down its middle, into two farming landscapes. These regions—the East Side and the West Side of the Central Valley—differ not only in the nature of the crops grown there but also in the relative availability of water and, more specifically, in the origins of the water that their farms so desperately need. Start with the East Side, which looks like a verdant, well-tended park from the air, thanks to the Sierra Nevada watershed—a freakish development of nature. On their steeper western slopes, the mountains rise precipitously to jagged peaks ranging from 9,000 feet high to more than 14,000. The towering wall collects massive snowfalls from Pacific winter storms that often pass over the valley without producing much rain. In the spring, the snow melts and flows into such rivers as the Kings, Kaweah, and San Joaquin, which then descend into the Central Valley.

Proximity to this guaranteed runoff from the Sierra prompted early homesteaders to prefer the Central Valley’s East Side to its West. It explains why the area’s small towns thrived on permanent orchards and vineyards, which represented more than a single year’s investment, rather than on annual row crops, beef, and dairy. Originally, the East Side’s grape and tree-fruit growers dug their own ditches to tap river water. I grew up on water stories from my grandfather, who would tell me how the combination of hot, sunny weather, rich soil, and plentiful Sierra water created prosperous vineyards and orchards from the scrub and desert of his youth.

In the early twentieth century, power companies and the state improved on what nature had bestowed, tapping the massive snow runoff with an ingenious system of dams. Engineers built vast lakes that stored millions of acre-feet (a unit of volume measuring one acre wide by one foot deep) of snowmelt. In the most ambitious systems of exploitation—for example, Henry Huntington’s brilliant Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, begun in earnest in 1912—huge penstocks connected several reservoirs to produce abundant electricity, the water spinning turbines as it rushed down, step-fashion, from lake to lake. For farmers, though, the chief benefit was irrigation. The engineers linked the reservoirs and rivers with an intricate system of gravity-fed canals that channeled the stored water into millions of acres of farmland below. In July, the water that pours out of the ditch and into my vineyard remains ice-cold, despite the scorching outdoor temperatures. Mere hours earlier, it was roaring down from mountain canyons.

To this day, gravity-fed irrigation usually supplies the East Side with enough summer runoff for its crops. But in rare drought seasons, farmers have a second resource: an enormous, centuries-old aquifer, originally perhaps as large as a billion acre-feet, with a water table just 100 feet below the ground or even less. The water is good and the cost of pumping cheap. In some years, like the last two, the Sierra runoff is so massive that when it reaches the valley floor, it is channeled into a system of on-farm storage ponds that recharges this aquifer. The result is a bountiful underground reserve water bank from which farmers can make withdrawals during drier years.

East Side Water

There isn’t much controversy over water on the East Side. That’s partly because of proximity to the generous Sierra, of course. Snowfalls and rainfalls during the last two seasons—2009 to 2011—were among the heaviest on record. This May, there were still eight feet of snow outside the front door of my mountain cabin, the irrigation ponds and ditches around my farm far below were still brimming, and the local ditch-tenders were begging farmers to draw on the surplus water so that the ditches wouldn’t overflow and back up the system. These wet years are about as unusual as drought years, the norm being something in between.

And the Sierra watershed isn’t going anywhere. Yes, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, shortly before his appointment, pontificated that he could envision global warming’s reducing the Sierra snowpack to just 10 percent of its current size. But Chu was drawing on politically correct supposition, not the evidence. Recent studies of the central Sierra by climatologist John Christy show that levels of snowfall have been almost unchanged over some 100 years of record-keeping.

There is another reason why water wars won’t break out on the East Side: suburbanization. Suburbanites enjoy living not on the arid West Side, even though it’s closer to the booming coastal economy, but on the picturesque, well-watered East. Over the last four decades, the region’s farming towns have metamorphosed into a 400-mile, multimillion-person sprawl, clustering along the lines of the 99 freeway and the Southern Pacific railroad, from south of Bakersfield to north of Sacramento. In just the last 20 years, more than 100,000 acres of the nation’s best farmland have been torn out to create housing developments with names like Vineyard Estates and Orchard Knolls. But the destruction of an acre of irrigated agriculture, along with its replacement by four to six suburban homes, means not less but more available water for the remaining—and often next-to-be-targeted—farms. A family of four or five often consumes less water per year than the irrigated peaches or grapes that once grew on their property.

Perpetually postmodern California is ambivalent about its legacy of development. But the East Side depends on the wealth created by the engineering marvels of the past—and not just agriculturally. Hydroelectricity supplies millions of homes between Bakersfield and Sacramento. Man-made alpine lakes are popular recreation spots. We may chide our ancestors for their audacity in altering nature and may dream of returning the Sierra to its pristine state, but we do not dare—not when millions below can live well where they otherwise would struggle to survive. So for now, the East Side has plenty of water and few political fights over irrigation.

The far larger, far more fragile West Side is a different story. It is too distant from the Sierra to tap easily much of the snow runoff through gravity-fed canals. In most years, moreover, the Sierra-sprung rivers run dry long before they near the Coast Range. And the water table can be more than 1,000 feet underground. On my East Side farm, the water table is reached at only 55 feet—and is rising; I can run a 15-horsepower electric pump for less than $3 per hour and get well over 1,000 gallons of pure water per minute. On the West Side, a mere 40 miles away, a 200-horsepower pump, struggling to bring up brackish water from deep below, might consume $30 per hour of electricity to deliver a fifth of the water per minute. In other words, pumping from the aquifer is as cheap and easy on the East Side as it is difficult—indeed, nearly prohibitive—on the arid West.

Once a Desert

No wonder, then, that this vast interior land was once a desert outback—sparsely populated, mostly unfarmed, and owned by large ranching concerns. I remember driving out to the West Side with my father in the early 1960s to shoot squirrels and jackrabbits. There were desolate, seemingly limitless, tracts of range land, dotted by a few ramshackle hamlets, such as San Joaquin and Five Points, a world away from the East Side’s settled agrarian towns.

The government changed all that in the 1960s. California, though hot and dry in its interior, is wet and cool in its northern and eastern mountain ranges. So the federal and state governments, in a series of complex partnerships, built the Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project—sprawling networks of dams, pumping stations, and canals that tapped water from the water-rich north and sent it more than 400 miles south, including to the water-short West Side of the Central Valley. Once West Side farmland was brought into irrigated production, it proved to be some of the world’s most fertile and productive acreage, and a multibillion-dollar farming industry was born from desert.

That industry, however, was dominated by often expansive corporate and family-held operations, the largest between 20,000 and 40,000 acres in extent. The farms’ owners, with imagination and audacity, found ways to produce an ever-greater variety of crops. But in the process, they seemed to alienate almost everyone. The Left harped that taxpayers were subsidizing corporate farming—that the $130 and more that the federal government and irrigation districts charged farmers per acre-foot of water represented far less than it cost to build and maintain the irrigation system. Farmers on the East Side originally resented the fact that lateral components of the system diverted some of their precious Sierra water to the west and south; they worried, too, about the competition posed by millions of new acres of subsidized farmland. Millions of thirsty northern California suburbanites eyed the long supply lines and began dreaming about stopping the water as it flowed past them or sending it over the mountains for sale to Los Angeles. Most recently, environmentalists argued that the diversion of the northern rivers degraded the ecology of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta—a picturesque area near affluent, environmentally sensitive San Francisco.

It didn’t help the West Side’s cause that its lightly populated society was pyramidal. Unlike their counterparts on the more prosperous East Side, West Side towns were composed mostly of farm laborers and lacked an agrarian middle class. In the 1960s, a series of university studies and critical books noted that the per-capita income of some of these communities was lower than the average in Mexico. It was hard to contemplate the poor workers and the vast corporate holdings where they labored without thinking of medieval peasants and barons. The consequence was that most Californians didn’t like what they heard about the West Side’s economy, despite the collective wealth and inexpensive food that the region produced. So it became easier for the Bay Area environmental lobby—which, by the start of the new century, had begun to dominate California politics—to fight an easily caricatured corporate agribusiness in the west than to meddle with the romantic notion of small family farmers in the east.

Judge Wanger

In late summer 2007, a federal judge in Fresno, Oliver Wanger, finally ruled in favor of an environmentalist lawsuit demanding that the federal government curtail its water deliveries to the West Side by 80 percent and more. The suit involved salmon and especially the three-inch delta smelt, a fragile, short-lived fish. The number of smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta had plummeted over the years, the environmentalists claimed, because the California water projects had diverted far too much northern freshwater away from the delta, leading to lower oxygen levels there and ruining the ecosystem; in addition, the huge pumps that sent the water around the delta supposedly destroyed young smelt populations. The solution was to shut down the irrigation pumps, allowing California rivers to flow year-round—not just in the wet season—to the delta and the sea.

So in 2008 and 2009, water deliveries to farmers were reduced to a fraction of their prior levels. Chaos followed. Thousands of acres of irrigated crops were idled. Farmworkers were laid off. Adding to the scarcity was that 2007 and 2008 proved drier than usual. In some cases, newly developed orchards and vineyards on the West Side died without summer irrigation—often near the frequently traveled north-south I-5 freeway, where thousands of passing motorists daily saw both dead trees and signs erected by angry landowners proclaiming MAN-MADE DUST BOWL. Yet despite the cutoffs, the delta smelt did not rebound much.

Exact figures for the economic damage were difficult to obtain, but the two most reliable studies were performed by the University of California at Davis and the University of the Pacific in Stockton. While differing in details, both analyses suggested figures of about 250,000 acres idled, 5,000 to 7,000 farmworkers laid off, and $350 million in annual agricultural revenue lost. Of course, those were only the more direct results of the cutoffs. One reason that Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield are currently suffering 18 percent unemployment rates is that West Side farms have been forced to cut back on the many purchases that help support those commercial centers, from equipment, material, and fuel to insurance, real estate, trucking, shipping, and consulting contracts.

Farmers are resourceful people. Some were able to switch to drought-resistant crops; others had cash reserves to pay the exorbitant costs of pumping some scarce groundwater. Still others purchased irrigation supplements from East Side canals. Also, the cutoffs came at a time of spiraling agricultural prices, meaning greater profits per acre and sometimes, counterintuitively, greater profitability on less land farmed. Another lucky break for the farmers came from China and India, where a newly affluent consumer class started importing California nuts, cotton, raisins, beef, and vegetables. But luckiest of all was that, by the winter of 2009, California entered the current wet cycle. The result is that, though the state certainly lost hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural revenue, California will probably still export a record $14 billion in farm commodities in 2011.

The politics of the water cutoffs became bizarre. East Side farmers, worried about the shape of the state’s green politics to come—and also fearful that the well-connected corporate farming interests at the south of the valley might, at some date, make up some of their water losses with larger draws on the Sierra supply—mostly rallied to the side of their West Side rivals.

Conservative northern California farmers, by contrast, were happy that less of their water was being diverted south; many fishermen, too, backed court decisions and legislative compromises that seemed to increase the number of salmon in the rivers. Both joined their usual enemies, the environmentalists, in praising the shutting down of the pumps.

Weirder still, corporate farms charged liberal environmentalists with destroying the jobs of downtrodden Mexican workers—citizens, green-card holders, and illegal aliens alike. The Latino Water Coalition demanded that the government restore water to their employers—their old foes during nearly constant labor litigation. And liberal activists, portrayed as opposed to both “family farmers” and “illegal aliens,” sometimes confirmed that illiberal portrayal. After a contentious debate over water, a Fresno environmental icon, Lloyd Carter, blurted out to a local news reporter that Mexican farm laborers bring a lot of social problems with them, the next generation. On any given day in Fresno, there’s 3,500 people in jail; 1,500 of those people are gang members, and a lot of those people are second-generation farm workers. . . . What parent raises their child to become a farm worker? These kids, they are the least educated people in America or in the southwest corner of this valley. They turn to lives of crime. They go on welfare. They get into drug trafficking, and they join gangs.

Jobs Endangered

Some West Side farmers were also East Side farmers and had sizable operations not solely dependent on federal water from the far north. What is clear in this confused mess is that concerns for salmon and smelt now endanger a vast California agribusiness sector that provides thousands of jobs, earns the state billions in revenue, and ships produce worldwide at a time of global food crisis.

At the end of my frequent drives across the state, I descend into the environmentalists’ stronghold, the San Francisco Bay Area. Here—particularly at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley—is where much of the environmental research and ideological advocacy took place that privileged the salmon and the smelt over the giants of agribusiness.

Ironies abound in the Bay Area. Few, for example, appreciate the fact that the region owes much of its enormous wealth to sophisticated waterworks. San Francisco gets 30 to 50 percent of its drinking water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, whose water is transported from the distant Sierra. The city houses a wide variety of firms dependent on Central Valley irrigation—everything from Pacific Gas and Electric, which runs sizable hydroelectric projects, to legal offices for the largest corporate farms, to tour companies offering Sierra lake excursions. And San Francisco, of course, consumes much of the produce grown cheaply on the West Side.

Another irony: while biologists are mostly sure that there are fewer smelt in the estuaries and argue that at least one cause is the diversion of freshwater inflows, they don’t know whether that’s the only reason that the smelt are disappearing. According to many analyses sponsored by advocacy groups and confirmed by disinterested scientific studies, the hundreds of Bay Area municipalities that dump their treated wastewater into the delta and bay contaminate the estuaries, raise nitrogen levels, and also endanger the smelt. It may be that the reason a few thousand conservative southern farmers are being asked to surrender their precious freshwater is to neutralize the wastewater that millions of affluent and environmentally correct residents are dumping into their own bay.

Environmentalists are unsurprisingly reluctant to concede that the riches of California, which have allowed their own movement to flourish, are derived from the entrepreneurialism and vision that created the West Side out of desert. They likewise dispute the claim that their own communities contribute to rising nitrogen levels in the bay and estuaries. They do not appreciate that West Side corporate barons export produce to feed an increasingly hungry planet. They tend, too, to ignore a final fact: that back in the unspoiled nineteenth century, many of the tributary rivers that they now want to flow year-round to the sea sometimes didn’t, because in the absence of today’s vast system of mountain reservoirs, yesteryear’s snowmelt was largely gone by midsummer.

California lakes and canals are a testament to our fathers’ using nature to bring water, power, and prosperity to the Central Valley—often under the tutelage of a past generation of scientists, engineers, and researchers from the coastal universities. These visionaries saw the massive federal West Side irrigation projects as the logical twentieth-century successors to the smaller state and local enterprises that had irrigated the East Side in the nineteenth century. But today, coastal scientists have tired of such visions. They consider them destroyers of nature, not catalysts of wealth, and so they use their academic expertise to thwart them.

The smelt and the salmon are now back in court, thanks to the hypothesis that Bay Area wastewater, not just river diversions and massive delta pumps, is to blame for their still-diminished numbers. Judge Wanger has approved a temporary compromise that tries—in wet years like this one, when there is more than enough water for everyone—to grant farmers 80 to 85 percent of their contracted water deliveries. The deal has made environmentalists happy, since the rivers are still flowing into the delta and out to sea; indeed, if not for the diversions to farmers, the rivers would overflow their banks. The farmers are less happy, reasoning that if they’re getting little more than three-quarters of their deliveries during one of the wettest seasons on record, they’ll surely receive even less in drier years—and someday, they may not be able to count on supplementing their lost water through near-prohibitive pumping, purchases of East Side Sierra water, crop diversions, or more efficient irrigation technology.

In the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, some local Democratic congressmen, such as Jim Costa and Dennis Cardoza, are bucking their party leadership and the environmental lobby and joining with conservative representatives to try to exempt the Central Valley Project and elements of the California State Water Project from federal environmental law. If they succeed, the issue could, in the future, be decided by state and federal legislators rather than trial lawyers and federal judges.

But in today’s California—with vast Democratic majorities in the state legislature, statewide officeholders mostly Democratic, and a delegation to Congress that’s also mostly Democratic—there is almost no chance of restoration of the original 100 percent delivery contracts, no matter what weather the future brings. When the wet cycle passes, thousands of acres on the West Side of the Central Valley will once again become idle—until Californians accept that unused farmland is a luxury that a still growing but now bankrupt state can no longer afford.

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, The End of Sparta.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

If a Catch-22 is a choice between two equally undesirable alternatives, California’s mandate to purchase green power must be one more than a Catch-22 – it must be a Catch-23.

This is because California’s new green-power law, mandating 33 percent renewable electricity generation by 2020, will soon present a situation of a choice between three undesirable alternatives:

1) Having to buy more expensive wind power as required by law;

2) Having to give away cheap and clean hydropower from overflowing reservoirs this year;

3) Having to avoid spilling water from overcapacity dams in order not to harm fish by putting too much dissolved gas into downstream rivers.

Willis Eschenbach, a climate law-watcher, calls this situation being “between wind and water,” a variation of the phrase, “between a rock and a hard place.”

But in reality the choices being presented to hydropower managers and California’s Independent System Operator, which runs the power grid, are threefold: among wind, water and fish.

The irony is that hydropower is as clean, and green, as wind or solar power. But in California, hydropower does not count as renewable power under the new green-power law that begins in 2012.

Bonneville May Cut Switch on Wind Power

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal government agency in the Pacific Northwest, apparently doesn’t have California’s Catch-23 dilemma.  Because the BPA is a federal entity, it is immune to the policies of state green-power laws. Unlike California, the BPA has told wind-farm operators that they may have to shut down periodically to free up capacity in the electrical grid for hydropower generated by the large snowpack and full reservoirs this year.

Most of the wind power being generated in other states is shipped to California to meet its new increased 33 percent energy portfolio standard for renewable power.  So if Bonneville has to cut off wind power from the grid in the Pacific Northwest from being transmitted to California, will taxpayers be stuck with the bill anyway?

In other words, will California electricity ratepayers end up having to pay more than double the price for electricity from both hydroelectric plants and wind farms?  If so, look for another energy crisis, as a pricing bubble may appear seemingly out of nowhere in California as a result of the state’s green power policies. Only this time, there won’t be an Enron around to blame.

Has CA’s Drought Been Wind Driven?

Environmentalists lost their effort to get a federal court to block water shipments through the State Water Project and Federal Central Valley Project purportedly to protect the smelt fish. After that, is it any wonder that the Obama Administration, operating through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWLS), has proposed to list the longfin smelt fish as endangered?

Strangely, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied federal protection for the longfin smelt in April 2009. Have all the efforts to block water shipments to farms and cities in California, creating an “adjudicated drought,” been motivated by trying to curtail hydropower from competing with wind and solar power?

California now has a perverse incentive system to embargo the cheapest, cleanest source of energy — hydropower — so that wind developers can reap “windfalls” in over-market priced wind power.

California’s energy system is getting so Byzantine that it may be creating unintended opportunities to game the system dressed up as a Hollywood environmental lawsuit, a la Erin Brockovich.

Will Southern California sell its maximum annual entitlement of 2 million acre feet of water from the State Water Project for a bundle of small water projects of uncertain yield, plus $2 billion of political pork barrel projects, if voters approve the proposed $11.1 billion Comprehensive Water Package, a bond proposal known as the “Safe, Clean, Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010”?

That is a key question for statewide voters to answer by the November 2010 election. And to do this they need to understand the package of water bills (SB1, SB 2, SB6, SB7 and SB8 from 2009) that have been cobbled together before they vote out of panic given the dire curtailment of water to Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities.

Forgetting for the moment that the state is broke, the entire approach of the $11.1 billion package of legislation is to first allocate money and then find projects to fit its major co-equal goals of Delta restoration and water supply reliability. This process is backwards from that of the Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown era where alternative water projects were first evaluated by engineers for physical and economic feasibility, quantified for water yield, and then the best project was specifically selected and the public was asked to fund it with a bond issue.

‘Ready, shoot, aim’

We have no idea today how many, if any, of the myriad of proposed statewide water projects in the Comprehensive Water Package have any physical or economic feasibility. Rather, they are like former Gov. Jerry Brown’s failed geothermal “ghost” plants built in the mid-1980s, where the funding and political approvals preceded any idea of whether they were feasible in the first place. “Ready, shoot, aim” seems to be the panicky approach of the Comprehensive Water Package.

For example, the notion that urban Southern California wastes water by letting rainfall flow out to the ocean sounds good, but proposals to capture this water are misguided. Sure, large amounts of urban rainwater flow to the ocean. The drainage plans of most coastal cities in California were originally designed to divert rainwater to the ocean via flood control channels mostly built as jobs programs during the crisis of the Great Depression. Water and power during that era were to be supplied from far away by huge Works Progress Administration dam and hydro-power projects – not from local reservoirs and canals to capture urban runoff.

But urban runoff can’t be physically and economically captured. Where would one build the reservoirs – where houses exist today? There no longer is land available in urban cities to build another Santa Fe Dam such as currently exists in Irwindale or Prado Dam near the Corona in Southern California. Neither are there any new foothill dams that could be built like Morris Dam that is upstream from the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles County.

These are pipe dream projects that can’t possibly meet the needs of a growing population state. But such projects are apparently being considered for funding by the Comprehensive Water Package under the line-item designated for “Coastal Counties and Watersheds,” as well as other line items.

The Delta Master Veto Agency

A triangular-shaped island at the ocean mouth of many rivers is named after a similar shaped letter from the Greek alphabet – “delta.” Incremental sedimentary river deposits create a delta island or alluvial fan. The word “delta” also means the amount of change from deposits of a financial investment. But the new Comprehensive Water Package will not be incremental or gradual with respect to the change it will bring to the structure of California’s water system.

The Comprehensive Water Package creates a Delta Stewardship Council that will effectively abrogate Southern California’s existing maximum annual entitlement of two million acre feet of water from the State Water Project. It would have veto powers over the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), the State Department of Water Resources (DWR), Westland Water District, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and other water districts as to building any future reservoirs and canals. All future water infrastructure projects statewide would have to be vetted through the Delta Stewardship Council and its tentacle entities.

The package would create a seven-member Sacramento Delta Stewardship Council that would have quasi-judicial powers to balance the “co-equal” goals of “Delta restoration and water supply reliability.” The Delta Stewardship Council would consolidate the current patchwork of agencies and cities that have jurisdiction over the Delta.

A whole new state entity, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy would also be created under the Natural Resources Agency, to implement ecosystem restoration of the Delta. A Delta Independent Science Board would additionally be created to advise the Conservancy and Stewardship Council. And a Delta Watermaster’s office would be created and funded to assure water quality enforcement. All these new entities would be linked with a larger web of existing committees and state agencies.

The Water Package is no less than a new reorganization of state water politics and implementation with the Delta getting first dibs at water and everyone else queuing up afterward. The long-proposed Peripheral Canal to divert water around the Delta is expressly forbidden under the water bill package. Cities and farmers are hoping that by passing the water bill package that the roadblock of fixing the Delta will surmounted and the Peripheral Canal can ultimately be built. But when would that be – 2050, if ever?

And what about the problem of bait and switch? The last time Southern California got a bundle of state water projects in return for building levees in the Delta it made sure to enshrine the projects in the state Constitution so that they could not be unwound at the next session of the state Legislature. There is no such guarantee in the water bill package. The hope that the package is a prerequisite for the Peripheral Canal, Auburn Dam or other water projects is an exercise in faith.

Even if Southern California water leaders are appointed as members of the Delta Stewardship Council they effectively will end up representing the Delta, not their water ratepayers. Who would end up advocates for Southern California cities, Central Valley farmers or even the urban ecosystem? Presumably, everyone outside the Delta would end up being represented by state bureaucratic officials. The Legislature would only have authority over water projects outside the Delta that the Delta Stewardship Council did not veto.

The Stewardship Council would additionally delegate to the State Department of Fish and Game and the Water Quality Control Board the responsibility to “identify the water supply needs of the Delta Estuary.” The water supply needs of urban or agricultural users would not be on their radar screen.

Of likely concern to cities surrounding the Bay Delta is that each city would have to certify to the council that development and land use decisions are compatible with the Delta Plan, subject to an appeal process. This would usurp “home rule” for many Bay Area cities and counties. Imagine something like the Coastal Commission suddenly having jurisdiction over your city, leading many observers to believe that the package is a simple power grab.

Water officials contacted in the process of writing this article anonymously stated that their educated guess as to how much of its water entitlement might flow to Southern California after the Delta gets to trump all water needs in the state is about 25 percent (500,000 acre-feet, or enough for about 2.5 million people). On a wet year, Southern California typically draws down about 500,000 to 1 million acre-feet of water from the State Water Project. The last time the MWD drew close to its maximum entitlement was 2001, when it drew about 1.7 million acre feet of water during the California Electricity Crisis. However, Southern California’s cities could lose their potential entitlement to water for 7.5 million people overnight on the November 2010 election.

The Delta Stewardship Council would theoretically offer a fix to the political fragmentation and dysfunctional log jamming that characterizes about every issue in the state. But even though the council would have broad powers to fix the Delta, it would also have the power to veto other water projects statewide, leaving only the Delta immune from the political dysfunction that exists in California government.

The Comprehensive Water Package would not be incremental but revolutionary. In concept it would save the Delta, but it would be “every man for himself” for the rest of California, albeit with the aid of some subsidies for local water projects and $2 billion in pork barrel projects for key politicians.

20 by 2020

This package of bills calls for a 20 percent reduction in baseline daily per capita water use by the year 2020.  It also calls for the volume of agricultural water to be measured for the first time.

Perhaps of most interest to the average person, it establishes a target of 55 gallons per capita daily for residential indoor water use. Taking a shower can use 25 gallons alone.

The water bill package gives water agencies four options for complying with conservation goals: (1) 20 percent reduction in daily use; (2) 20 percent reduction in regional imports; (3) utilize performance standards for commercial, industrial and institutional users; and (4) a method to be developed by DWR by 2010.

Processed water from recycling would not be subject to conservation mandates. The problem with conservation is that it works on the state level by eliminating the need for new costly and environmentally damaging dams and canals. But on the local level conservation only depletes local groundwater basins resulting in more reliance on imported water supplies.

Delta Council as Climate Change Talisman

The rationales for saving the Delta from environmental crisis are often depicted in quasi-religious apocalyptic terms: rising sea levels that would flood the fresh water Delta with seawater; warming temperatures would mean more rain and less snow pack in the Sierras, resulting in more floods; catastrophic earthquakes could breach Delta levees resulting in seawater intrusion that would end shipments of imported water to Southern California; global warming and pollution are killing off salmon and smelt fish populations. Realistically, the water bill package would prevent none of these scenarios.

The Delta Stewardship Council would be empowered to review transportation and land- use plans for impacts on climate change. This would include compliance with California Senate Bill 375, the “anti-sprawl bill,” that diverts new growth and development away from suburbs and edge cities and toward coastal cities.

An obvious problem with all this anti-global-warming and anti-sprawl legislation is that the most abundant groundwater resources in California are located inland and not toward the coast. So reducing auto pollution by shortening auto commutes or shifting to light rail would in turn result in more dependence on imported water supplies. Life is full of trade-offs and ironies never acknowledged by environmentalists or politicians. It is nonetheless strange that such a highly touted package of water bills would result in more dependence on imported water all in the name of combating global warming.

Another problem is that during a prolonged drought existing environmental laws make urban, agricultural and recreational users curtail water usage to great hardship. But the sacrosanct natural environment cannot even be stressed or have any species of fish decline in population due to natural causes without some lawsuit alleging harm from cities or farms.

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Center for Rivers and Deltas, flush with a $100,000 blind donation in 2007 from Meg Whitman, won a court injunction against transporting water through the California Aqueduct alleging that pumps at the Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant on the California Aqueduct were the cause of the disappearance of the Smelt. But the Smelt don’t find their habitat only near the pumps, nor do they affect them. Today, Whitman ironically is probably the only candidate for governor likely to veto the water bill package if it came across her desk on her watch.

There are other plausible reasons for the smelt’s decline, including pollution and invasive species. Prior water quality improvements in the Delta have increased the population of natural smelt predators. The Smelt, like the famous Spine Stickleback fish, could have gone into hiding to protect themselves. Cleaner Delta water could also have reduced food sources the Smelt forage on such as Krill.

The courts have never addressed the favorable treatment under California environmental laws of the natural environment to the detriment of the urban eco-system. When a dam and reservoir is built, the natural eco-system that once depended on that water is transferred downstream to an environment of urban forests, gardens and wildlife. Urban lawns, rose bushes, tree squirrels and Koi fish ponds are not valued in our culture or laws as is the Delta smelt fish, coastal sage brush and kangaroo rats. “Save the Delta” – to hell with the cities and farms seems to be the mantra.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), measures gross, not net, impacts on the environment. For example, CEQA only measures upstream gross impacts of a dam without considering any offset for the downstream transfer of vegetation and wildlife from the wilderness to cities and farms. Are commercial poppy fields or urban arboretums any less of the environment? The poppies don’t know the difference whether grown in the wild or on a horticultural operation. Once commercialized, poppies (the official state flower) will be sustainable and protected forever.

The Delta Scientific “Certainty Wallahs”

The presumption for the creation of the Delta Stewardship Council and Delta Independent Science Board is that it knows or will know what is best for the Delta environment. This is a dubious presumption, even from a scientific standpoint. No one knows, nor can they know, what the ramifications of tinkering with the Delta ecosystem would be. Moreover, scientists are being asked to make cultural and political values judgments not dispassionate science

For example, say that sending more water to cities in the southern half of the state results in more seawater intrusion to the Delta. So instead of fresh water fish and plant species we get saltwater fish and vegetation. The freshwater species don’t necessarily die off as much as their population is reduced. They are merely replaced by a different type of ecosystem. Scientists can’t tell us which ecosystem is preferable; only cultural and commercial values enshrined in law can. The public can be sold on aesthetic values of species based on visualized depictions of their plight. But what about ugly species or vegetation that sucks up too much water from its “neighbors?” Those are often dubiously labeled “invasive” or “non-native” species.

After spending billions of dollars under the water bill package on cleaning up the Delta purportedly to make it a natural aquarium we can’t be assured that the unintended consequences of the cleanup won’t alter the ecosystem deleteriously. Sociologically speaking, the ideology behind saving the Delta is more anti-business and anti-urban than it is truly scientific.

In any case there is no new cheap water.

According to water officials this writer spoke with, the water bill package and Delta Stewardship Council and Delta Plan won’t make much of a difference because there is no new cheap water that can be created, at least quickly, without a return of the monsoons that periodically fill our statewide reservoirs. If so, California might do just as well or better if it just waited for rain relief rather than rush the water bill package.

Many contend that more water has been over committed from the Bay Delta. Southern California is entitled to a maximum of 2 million of the 4 million acre-feet annually of the State Water Project (WSP) that is routed through the Delta. Four million acre-feet of water sounds like an over-commitment during a drought. But in a drought the state has the right to reduce a water agency’s allocation.  So the argument of over committal of water is specious and often used for propaganda.

As radical as the water bill package is, it cannot change our meteorological fortune or misfortune. The ancients believed that gods controlled the world. In modern-day society we believe we can magically control nature with legislation, with the same result.

A three-year drought is normal by conventional water planning standards. However, if the drought persists to, say, an eight-year cycle as it has in the past, California will be in even more of a crisis.

Fixing the Bay Delta at the cost of farms and cities may ring a death knell for California. The solution lies not in affluence removal or perhaps not even in effluence removal. The environment has always improved with affluence, not the other way around.