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
Strong Partisanship, Weak Parties
by Julia Azari
May 13, 2020
Julia Azari is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, and author of “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate.” This interview was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | America today is thought of as extremely partisan, has it always been this way?
No it hasn’t always been the case. In fact, there was this period, from about the 1950s through the 1980s, in American politics and party scholarship, where parties were regarded as weak and highly varied internally. The thinking was that parties were decentralized organizationally, weak nationally and strong at the state and local level. In the middle of the 20th century, the American Political Science Association came out with this report that said, the American political parties don't have clearly differentiated platforms. Even up to the 1970s and 1980s, people were predicting the end of partisanship and a rise in independent candidates.
Then, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the thinking quickly shifts to, “okay the end of partisanship doesn't seem to be happening anymore.” Because as it turns out, we are extremely partisan. Parties are actually quite well differentiated and national in their ideological scope. If you were to talk to a Republican in Maine and then to talk to a Republican in Oklahoma, there would be a lot of similarity – and the same thing goes for Democrats.
Party scholarship shifted from "American parties are weak and poorly differentiated and not ideological" to "American parties are very ideological and partisan divide is very stark." But that actually leaves a lot of questions open about parties as entities and organizations, which is where my research comes in.
Right, so how do parties fare in a partisan environment? Because one line of thought is – the more partisan a country, the stronger people’s ties are to their party – therefore the party itself is strong. But that doesn’t hold.
Yes exactly, and that is what a lot of my research is around at present.
The biggest part of my research is what I call the ambient societal conversation around political parties. Which basically asks, "What is it the people think political parties are, and why do people feel so skeptical and ambivalent about them, even as we're so deeply partisan?"
One thing I have found to be quite interesting while looking at public opinion polls, are the differences in opinion by gender and race within a party. For example, overall, men tend to rate their own party less favorably. Within the Democrats specifically, there is a large difference in favorability towards the party between white men and everyone else. We know that race and gender are hugely important in polarization between parties, but it seems that they have also driven some division within parties.
I’m also working, with another writer from Mischiefs of Faction, Seth Masket, on a piece of research that is asking what are the indicators of a weak party? What does it mean for a party to be weak?
That is so interesting. How does a party’s strength influence its ability to govern?
I wrote a piece for Mischief of Faction in 2017 about Republicans titled, The Party That Couldn't Coordinate in the Primary, Can't Coordinate to Govern.
In Congress, there's a lot of what political scientists call veto points – there's a lot of places where political change goes to die. So to deal with that and actually get things done, you have to build a coalition. With the amount of partisanship that we see today, doing that over party lines becomes near impossible. So instead, you have to have a very unified caucus.
What we saw with Republicans in 2017 was, even though they controlled the whole federal government, they couldn’t really get anything done. We saw a similar dynamic with Democrats in the summer of 2018 in regards to the way different factions within the party were talking about Abolish ICE. A lot of Democrats can agree broadly on where they stand on immigration. But then when it turns into actually making that into a policy, you need some kind of process to define your priorities and get everybody on the same page. Things break down very quickly when you go from a very broad position, like we don't like the Affordable Care Act or, we want to open up our policy toward immigration, to the actual details of a policy.
So that's kind of where party weakness comes in for me.
What do you think the 2020 nomination process so far has shown us about the strength of the Democratic party?
Meaning that while the Republican party can have a coordination failure, like with the nomination of Trump in 2016, they can then go on to coordinate a minimum coalition around their messaging and then win in the electoral college.
The Democratic coalition does not work like that. There's a lot of complexity in bringing all the different groups that make up the party together. We saw this in the 2016 election. In the case of the 2020 election, you've had a lot of candidates and a lot of discourse about other approaches that Biden doesn't seem like he's very interested in pursuing.
Bringing that whole coalition together is difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to the Democratic coalition. Democrats have historically been a party of process, and our system does not afford parties a good process.
What is a good process?
I think a good process would do a better job of aggregating different interests within political parties. It sounds weird to say, but I think it would actually do better if they had a more organized factions within the parties.
For example, having clear leaders that represent your geographic interest, demographic interests, ideological interests, who can come together and bargain. That happens to some degree at a convention, but not a lot. Will Sander’s people, for example, have serious influence over who Biden’s VP is? Probably not. The party is all about the nominee and once someone becomes a presumptive nominee, it's their party and it’s their convention. That may have some advantages. I'm pretty skeptical of it, because it doesn't leave a lot of room for considering the factions and the ideas of the candidates who did not win the nomination, but nevertheless make up the party.
And that's frustrating. I think parties need to bring back the representative nature of their internal democracy and improve it. But that does entail some delegation of power from voters to accountable party leaders, which people are very suspicious of right now. I don't have a lot of hope for that solution being viable, but thinking of the parties more as representative and less as direct democracies, would, I think, actually help more people's interests and values be better expressed.
That would be a return to how conventions used to work, right?
Old conventions were problematic in all sorts of ways, but I think there should be more robust representative relationships between people’s local delegates. There's local delegates from each congressional district. Even if you could write or call that delegate and explain things that were important to you, like healthcare, and encourage that it is part of the discussion. Primaries afford some of that, but I don't know they're the best intro instrument because they become so centered around a candidate.
It seems complicated to change – maybe not structurally, but in terms of getting public support, it seems really complicated. You wrote recently, “before we let in nostalgia for compromise go too far, we might consider that finding common ground politically has sometimes made things worse.” Could you talk about this idea of compromise and bipartisanship historically?
I think specifically what I was writing about in this instance was the ways in which bipartisanship and compromise have actually been harmful to discussions of race and immigration.
Bipartisanship has thrown African Americans under the bus repeatedly. Certainly until the passage of civil rights in the 60s, but generally a lot of the time. Highlighting the needs and concerns of African American citizens has been the last priority because it turns out it's fairly easy to build a coalition that doesn't address those needs or even a coalition that is outright oppressive.
The same thing with immigration. I was looking into some immigration bills in the late 19th century when a lot of really racist and restrictive things came out. Democrats and Republicans often disagreed about European immigrants, but there was bipartisan consensus that we should exclude people of Asian heritage and specifically, but not exclusively, people of Chinese heritage. And that's just really shitty.
Do you view the Coronavirus bill as bipartisan?
I wouldn't place that in the same category as some of the covertly racist issues that I was speaking about earlier. I think this another animal, the sort of clunky legislation that comes as a result of living in a big and complicated country. Because there have to be compromises, it doesn't go as far as it could.
People always speak about the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s idea, the idea that after 9/11 there was great unity. You started to see this poke through in the discourse in the last couple of weeks after the Coronavirus crisis. It’s great for people to feel part of something larger and for that sentiment to be part of the crisis response, but that usually does have some exclusion and that exclusion is often racial.
After 9/11, we may have felt more unity, but we saw hate crimes and discrimination against people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage sky-rocket at that time too. Often in these moments of unity, there is a target, and that is a concern for me.
I wouldn’t say the Coronavirus response legislation is dangerous in the way that the immigration and race compromises were, but as we think about bringing the nation together around this crisis, I would be concerned about ensuring that we are doing that in a way that's inclusive and not racist, and doesn't scapegoat or target people.
I keep hearing about Coronavirus as a great equalizer but I feel like it’s highlighting inequities not hiding them. And that again, seems to be missing from legislation.
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
In terms of legislation that could address that, I think there could always be more and it could be more systemic.
I do want to note that where I was talking about bringing people together and not scapegoating, I have seen from left leaning people on social media, essentially, arguing that the exception to that would be directing the blame and punishment toward corporations, and the wrath towards the people who have powered this highly inequitable economic situation.
I'm not really sure what the right solution is as far as targeting or punishing those interests. This was a conversation after the financial crash as well. And the answer was pretty much like, we're going to veer away from any serious kind of populist ideology driving these decisions and anything that's truly punitive. Instead, we will prop up these major economic interests and try to give everybody else a little bit as well. The conversation now, in part because of that response, has changed a lot. I have an intrinsic dislike of blame politics, and scapegoat politics, and skepticism about populism, yet I think objectively it is very hard to deny that the economy is extremely unequal and extremely unfair. And that didn't just happen.
I think where we go from here very much remains to be seen. I was having a conversation about this with some of my colleagues, with a very wide range of political perspectives, yesterday. And some of us were trying to make the point that this situation really does highlight structural economic issues, and other people were saying, look, this is a crisis, and people are going to want to return to normalcy, not restructure the economy. And I just don't know.
It’s interesting to frame the conversation about what people want. Of course we all want to go back to normal. But should we? And, by the way, this might be our new normal, not abnormal, as things like this will continue to happen.
Andrew Yang was talking about UBI six weeks ago and maybe you could suspend your belief system and say, okay, yeah, I see how that would work, but that will never happen. Now, out of necessity, it is happening. Our capacity to imagine new things happening, politically, seems to have been cracked open somewhat.
That's a really interesting point. I think you are exactly right – imagination is very hard to get your head around in politics.
I guess the depressing addendum I have to that though, is that the thing you need to follow imagination up with is a process. And a process where the people with the ideas can envision a way in which they can manipulate those procedures that is simultaneously innovative and legitimate to build coalitions.
The weight of partisanship makes politics very stagnant and makes it very hard to reform things.