interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Ignoring Reality
by Gernot Wagner
April 29, 2020
Gernot Wagner is a professor at New York University and the author of the book Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet. This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Would you tell me about your work and how you see it particularly relating to this moment.
I'm a climate economist. I have focused on climate risk my entire life.
To begin with, the pandemic itself was not unforeseen. We've all seen the 2015 Bill Gates TedTalk where he describes precisely what we are going through. Then there was a peer reviewed paper published in 2007 that previews the current Coronavirus, one originating in a wet market in central China. What we are going through was eminently foreseeable.
The biggest lesson to take away from this is that risks and uncertainties, as surprising as events may sometimes seem, ought to be at the front and center of what policy makers and policy analysts focus on and act on.
Political leaders, elected by us, and accountable to us, should take the steps that we, as individuals, wouldn't ordinarily do. That is the definition of government.
Some level of functioning and trusted government during a moment of crisis is imperative. What does the U.S. response tell us?
Even those who favor the most limited government form imaginable, hold the view that government should only be in the business of "catastrophic insurance" and that everything else should be up to us. Well, at the very least the government should be in the business of catastrophic insurance, and it is failing at even that right now, both on the public health front with COVID-19, and of course, on the climate change front.
On the federal level there is a deep misunderstanding of the core function of government. There is a role and a function of government that ought to go well above the role the government has right now. We are now living through the consequences of 40 years of demonizing government, and rhetoric like "starving the beast."
It is easy to make fun of the White House right now. The idea that Jared Kushner is taking care of things is laughable. But COVID has shown us that even rational leaders can be surprised by an event like this. Even Emmanuel Macron, who is not a Boris Johnson or Donald Trump figure, who is someone who listens to science and seems to be a rational leader, was downplaying the threat of Coronavirus. On March 6th, a Friday, he went to the theater with his wife demonstrating normalcy and encouraging us to do the same. On Sunday of that same week, he is seen strolling around Paris and encouraging everyone to support local business. On Tuesday, two days later, his culture minister contracts COVID-19, and by Thursday the country is shut down. That is exponential growth right there. That is what 33% daily growth rates will do.
Right.
Of course it is hard to make these decisions. Usually it takes a week for the government to even organize the meeting to figure out how to respond. Well, in this case, waiting a week or even two or three days doubles the cases in your jurisdiction. We have 200,000 cases in New York. One in every 800 New Yorkers in New York City died because of Coronavirus. Reacting even a week earlier would have made a big difference.
It was a failure to prepare, a failure to invest in excess ICU capacities, in facemasks. That preparation is costly both in time and money, and it is certainly not something that private individuals or private businesses can be expected to do on their own. They simply won't. It is the role of the government to have that kind of foresight and to act on it.
And yes, there are real debates to be had about how to go about doing this. Let's have those debates. It is doubtful there is a single right response to these things, but what we do need to agree on, is that there ought to be a response that goes well beyond basically saying that the government cannot possibly be the answer. With something like this – with enormous externalities – government, by definition, has to be the answer.
Do you feel like this perception of the government, as an important actor in crisis, is becoming more accepted by the public?
There is a common understanding that we need policy to get us out of this. Individual action just isn't going to cut it. If we rely on individual action, we get Rand Paul using the Senate swimming pool while he has COVID. That's not to say that there is no room for that particular libertarian viewpoint in the policy debate, but dude, there are limits. There are market failures, there are externalities.
You touched on this a little bit here and also in a piece for Bloomberg – you're saying, we can't make economic considerations without considering the impact that public health has on the economy.
Let me bring this back to climate. On the extreme end there is climate denial, to which I say, you've got to be kidding me. We've known about this since the 19th century. This is not debatable. There are parallels with COVID. There are people on Twitter saying that this is just as bad as the seasonal flu (one of those people being an elected leader of a state). In both cases, we see an abject denial of facts. One of the good things coming out of this crisis, hopefully, is a realization among a majority of the electorate that facts matter.
Once we realize that facts matter and have a common understanding of the problem we are facing, we have to turn to the experts. I am not an epidemiologist, even though we all play them now on Twitter. We were all constitutional scholars in January and February of this year, and suddenly we are all epidemiologists. That is not how the world works, and that is not how government works. What the government should be expected to do is to listen to those who have studied this topic.
To be clear, that does not mean there is only going to be one answer. In Sweden, the Chief Epidemiologist happens to believe that the economy should remain open and the typically socially distant Swedes can go on with their lives. If you are the Swedish prime minister you are under enormous pressure to take that particular point of view seriously, because your version of Dr. Fauci is saying one thing while other countries' versions of Dr. Fauci are saying another. At the end of the day, it takes political leadership to take scientific advice into consideration when making hard decisions. And those are very hard decisions that apply to COVID, it applies to public health more broadly, and it clearly applies to climate change.
There is no one answer. But what we do know is that the Don Rumsfeldian known knowns say we need to act. The known unknowns point to one and only one direction. The big question is the unknown unknowns. And frankly for something like COVID and for something like climate change, it seems pretty darn clear that these entirely unknowns and unknowables point is in one and only one direction, and that is of more action.
One important realization that comes out of all this, is that delayed action doesn't just lead to more cost, delayed action leads to a completely different pathway to begin with. Take the epidemiological simulation. It shows that shutting down New York city two weeks earlier would not just have only cost less in terms of lives and livelihoods, it would have meant a completely different path. Projected deaths go down by an order of magnitude of difference, and the projected future path becomes very very different.
Austria right now is talking about reopening its economy next week because they just followed a very different path. They also have completely different leadership. The president happens to be an economist – the only world leader with a publication in Econometrica – one of the top journals in our discipline. Let’s just say he has an easier time standing up in front of a national audience and explaining exponential growth to everyone. Angela Merkel of Germany did so. It’s amazing to watch, a case where the government is using science to respond to a crisis, and to communicate clearly. I remember my parents, in Austria, explaining exponential growth to me on one of our calls. They heard it from the Vice Chancellor. All that’s crucial for topics like this that are quite difficult to understand. Few have an intituitive grasp of the way exponential growth works, how it dwarfs everything else. It also increases the burden on politicians to explain these things...exponentially.
I am stifling a laugh thinking about the resume of American political leadership right now in comparison to the resumes you just paraphrased.
For a long time in this country we have made fun of experts and expertise. Of course, I'm biased here, because I like to think I’m one of the experts on a couple of these topics. But on the other hand, it is blatantly a frightening reality.
Yes we should have debates on lots of things, but let's trynot to argue with scientific truths themselves.