Does new irrigation report make case for land fallowing?

California ag is only .5 percent inefficient, according to a just-released study by the Center for Irrigation Technology (CIT) at California State University, Fresno.

I have no reason to doubt the findings of the eighty-page report, which seem to carefully made, at least to a layperson like me.

The findings are based on a thorough review of published research and technical data as well as state of California publications to assess the overall potential for agricultural water-use efficiency to provide new water supplies. The report found that little potential exists for new water unless large swaths of agricultural land are taken out of production, which technically is not water-use efficiency.

“Unless large swaths are taken out of production.” That’s really the issue that the study implicitly directs our attention to. Or mine, anyway.

As a way of freeing up water supply, fallowing is one option. That would of course be contentious, especially so for one of the underwriters of the CIT report, the California Farm Water Coalition. Cheap food, after all, is a persuasive argument.

There are more and less likely regions of the Central Valley that might be taken out of production. Many if not all of them are in the San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Basin.

Speaking of which, Patricia McBroom at the California Spigot recently argued for restoring Tulare Lake:

If the lake were recovered - representing about 200,000 acres of farmland - it could hold the liquid equivalent of about three new reservoirs, and could charge the depleted underlying aquifer as well.  It’s a grand idea, supported not only by Zuckerman, but by the 200 organizations that make up the Environmental Water Caucus.

Even the CIT report identifies the unsustainable scale of overdrafting on the aquifer as a major issue, if not one within the scope of their study. It is not their obligation to draw conclusions about that fact. But it should be a major concern for someone, shouldn’t it? McBroom’s piece at least synthesizes into a solution several interests - including groundwater repletion - that bring into greater balance available water supply with demand.

Not that that is likely to happen anytime soon. It seems that the CIT/CFWC argument is that “we are doing nearly everything we can to conserve water and we are still forced to overdraw groundwater because we don’t have enough available supply to meet our needs so that we can supply cheap food with cheap water and cheap labor.”

Clearly, one must conclude from the CIT report one of two things:

1/ Ag land must be taken out of production

2/ Additional water supply must be found to support existing ag demand.

Since current “alternative conveyance” studies are based not on increasing export of water but only ensuring its dependability (see this NRDC piece on the so-called “co-equal goals” principle for a refresher), we know where the hard line of pro-ag reasoning must eventually lead: to the unrestrained export of Delta water south, and a destroyed Delta ecosystem.

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Sewer analogy > Heuristic fail

It’s not possible to comment directly at the CA WaterBlog, so I’ll do it here, always happy to trot out the blind men touching the elephant image.

Professor Jay Lund’s recent post there is titled “Multiple stressors - funding the Delta like a public sewer”. The title and imagery in itself is interesting—more in-your-face rhetorically than usual for the people who write at CWB - but as analogies go, it doesn’t test so well against a few key measures.

Professor Lund’s thoughts are related to “stressor fees” suggested in the Delta Stewardship Council’s draft EIR. On the one hand, his thoughts as usual are founded on knowledgeable contextual assessments that lead to reasonable conclusions—but on the other, are politically tone-deaf and culturally reductive - even if these conclusions are only about funding, not valuing, change in the Delta.

Consider any normal well-run urban wastewater system.  Thousands of communities, large and small, build and pay for urban wastewater systems, including many miles of sewers and pumping plants to collect wastewater, regional wastewater treatment plants, and treated wastewater discharges.

Leaving aside his view that the “multiple stressors” ambiguities are opportunistically played by the various Delta interests, which seems to me to be an accurate assessment, “stressors” don’t account for significant qualitative factors of the Delta as a landscape. I don’t think it’s trite to say that landscapes are cultural things, not (simply) natural things, not (simply) technical, engineering things. This makes his sewer analogy a heuristic fail.

1/ Generations of families haven’t lived in and on urban wastewater systems.

2/ Urban wastewater systems do not contain historical landmarks. Though I’ve long thought that the American Society of Civil Engineers should pursue making the Delta a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

3/ Urban wastewater systems are not beautiful.

Contentiousness exists on the quantitative front as well:

4/ Urban wastewater systems are not the habitat of endangered species whose future is dependent on the health of complex, stressed ecosystems that are poorly understood by scientists.

5/ Since the USACE cannot produce inarguable evidence that vegetation on levees increases flood risk, people who enjoy the scenic aspects of flood-prone landscapes will resist. So will the DFG.

None of the above five aspects of the Delta can be accounted for by Prof. Lund’s analogy. They are slippery but persistent facts that frustrate those who seek strategies for straight-line thinking. They are all intrinsic parts of a more complete picture of a Delta’s ecosystem that cannot be reduced to numbers.

Nevertheless, Prof. Lund’s proposals, if not his analogy, seem to be headed in a plausible direction that will help define future policy. Hopefully, he and others who have influence will be able to expand their definition of the Delta’s ecology, finding a way to value (and game) its qualitative elements, too.

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SCOTUS friends Delta smelt, unfollows Ayn Rand

Surprising but good news that the Supremes chose not to take on the Endangered Species Act.

From Bloomberg:

The rebuff marks the sixth time the nation’s highest court has refused to question the Endangered Species Act. The latest challenge to the law had the backing of property-rights advocates, a group of California water districts and trade organizations representing farms and small businesses.

On the other hand, the property-rights folks are undeterred. From the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Brandon Middleton:

“The Delta smelt regulations are far from the only example of federal officials issuing regulations for local species without constitutional authority. We will litigate this issue until the Supreme Court ultimately agrees to take it up. This is a long-term battle to stop federal intrusion that robs people of their livelihoods and liberties, and undermines the basic framework of the Constitution.”

I am sure that it is making the Strict Constructionalist crowd crazy that the conservative, Roberts-led court agreed with the 9th circuit that the “Endangered Species Act ‘bears a substantial relation’ to interstate commerce and therefore fit within the constitutionally granted authority of Congress.”

Stopping federal intrusion may a long-term battle, but so is getting people to understand that Ayn Rand is a teenager’s treatise. Even Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito get that.

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Be careful what you wish for

Is the Delta Protection Commission trying draw an analogy between the Endangered Species Act and the Canal/Tunnel? I support the conclusions of their recent work, but I’m not sure that’s an analogy they should be making.

Via Aquafornia, I read the piece in the Manteca Bulletin about the Delta Protection Commission’s recently released draft Economic Sustainability Plan.

Cited in the Bulletin’s article is a quote from page 269*, from which one might infer that people in the Delta don’t give a damn about Delta smelt:

Just as a species by species approach is an inefficient and ineffective way to protect ecosystems, a system by system approach is an inefficient and ineffective way to protect the state’s infrastructure.

I don’t get it. As I commented at John Fleck’s blog, it is surprising to me that the DPC folks chose to emphasize the problems of a piecemeal ESA process. And as an analogy no less!

It is arguable that the Endangered Species Act’s processes, wrong or right, have aligned quite nicely with Delta interests more than pretty much any other CA water constituency. Right or wrong, effective or not, the provisions of the ESA have provided a way to legally limit the amount of water exported from the Delta. **

So, this strikes me as being just a bit of untidy language. The argument here cannot be that nature was created for men’s purposes, as many extremists believe. It’s difficult to imagine the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Delta Protection Commission finding common ground, but stranger bedfellows have been found.

What I think the authors of the ESP are trying to say here is that the Fortress Delta solution will oblige the state to think about the entirety of the Delta as an ecology. An ecology that includes economic and cultural processes. I couldn’t agree more with them.

Unfortunately, the ESA is about the best tool that science has for making what in the end are legal arguments. And fortunately, the DSC report makes another argument that is likely to have legs, the one about the cost-effectiveness of spending many billions of dollars. And we await a well-deserved reply to this argument.

* Updated 10/31
** Updated 11/1

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Managing the Delta’s necessary implosion

The threat of a catastrophic earthquake event turning the Delta into an inland brackish sea is one of the top rationales of the “isolated conveyance” position.

In a recent post University of the Pacific economist Dr. Jeffrey Michael raised an interesting question regarding some of the numbers behind this rationale:

Wouldn’t any rational person staring at these numbers wonder why that risk reduction strategies are so focused on 20% of the cost, and virtually ignore the other 80%.  If it makes sense to spend $13 billion protecting 1/5 of the cost, doesn’t it make sense to at least consider what benefit might result from spending $13 billion (or even $2-4 billion) on seismically-resistant levee upgrades that would protect 100% of the costs, not to mention all the potential loss of lives from the big earthquake flood scenario.

What Dr Michael does here is clever. He first accepts the premise that a Delta earthquake of catastrophic effect is inevitable. And that enormous sums of money must be invested to minimize the disruptions to water supply of that event.

In a nutshell, okay - earthquake, stipulated, $13B, stipulated - but why would you spend that money only to see 80% of it washed away in the earthquake it was supposed to protect the state against?

I hope Dr Michael receives his answer. His question raised another:

- Can someone fill me in on the logic of why this presumed earthquake, so catastrophic in scale, somehow not does not wreak havoc on the system of canals/tunnels and siphons it spawned?

I also would like to contribute my own rather long-winded answer to Dr Michael’s question. the short answer is that the numbers forecast the larger strategic uses of a future Delta.

That future is one Delta’s residents (who are even today resisting the state’s latest efforts to do soils testing on their land via eminent domain-like access procedures) fear, and do not like too much. Nothing could bring out that community’s libertarian streak faster. And judging from the comments below SacBee journalist Matt Weiser’s article, nothing has.

People and their communities are not an intrinsic component of the future technocratically managed Delta.

Anyway, in a future that doesn’t repair Delta-based things or worry too much about “potential loss of lives,” you see, the Delta’s implosion is necessary.  How else is it to be reinvented as a resource-rich agricultural geography where agriculture is no longer the primary export? The PPIC’s interactive map scenarios for the future Delta provide some insight into that larger strategic future. One such map is called “A Multi-Purpose, Eco-Friendly Delta.”

Compare the land uses in the PPIC map to those in the Delta today. (I especially like the term “wildlife-friendly” agriculture.) I believe even Delta residents would agree that all land uses exist in both the actual and PPIC-imagined Delta. The difference is in the proportional mix of the uses.

So my answer to Dr Michael’s question is that In the future the Delta will be reprogrammed as a habitat mitigation land bank. The Delta’s highly malleable landscape is the perfect geography for providing a necessary resource for developers everywhere.

Just look at what the Delta Wetlands Project has been spending tens of millions of dollars trying to create on four Delta islands.

The Delta is evolving into an engineered and managed supermarket of habitat types, traded up and down the state, mitigating lost habitat in places wherever exported Delta water underpins new development. That water may emerge out of a hydrant or a sprinkler in Palmdale, a fountain adorning a gateway interchange or high-rise plaza in Orange County, or a faucet slaking the thirst of a farmworker in Mendota as he works in the shadow of a new state prison.

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