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
The Givers
by David Callahan
May 10, 2021
This interview with David Callahan, author of The Givers and founder of Inside Philanthropy, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
David | I got a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton. I spent 20 years in the think tank world. I co-founded the Demos Foundation, a national progressive public policy organization based in New York City. In 2014, I started Inside Philanthropy, a digital media site covering the world of foundations and major donors. We look at what they're funding and what their strategies are and offer up some critiques of philanthropy. And in 2017, I published a book called The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. I looked at the new billionaire donors coming on the scene and the implications for democracy as they wield more power in public life.
Frank | When does philanthropy, as we know it, begin?
During the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, a number of industrial titans accumulated vast amounts of wealth. It was so much wealth that they had to figure out something to do with it.
Photograph of a Christmas parade entry by the local Brownie troop. Taylor Public Library.
They created some of the first philanthropic foundations ever in the United States. Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, and a few others created foundations that exist to this day. That first wave of vast wealth got the ball rolling on this era of modern philanthropy in the United States. Fast forward to the eighties and nineties, you start to see another vast accumulation of wealth, highly concentrated in the hands of the richest people in sectors like tech, finance, and retail.
This second wave of big philanthropy really started getting going in the late 1990s when Ted Turner committed to giving a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1998. Then, in 2000, Bill Gates created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet got together and created the Giving Pledge, a pledge made by billionaires to give away at least half of their wealth to philanthropy. Warren Buffet, like Bill Gates, has been a huge donor and is committed to giving away pretty much all of his wealth accumulated through Berkshire Hathaway. And, ever since, a growing number of other billionaires have joined this trend of giving their wealth at very high levels.
How has the perception of the wealthy changed over time? And how has philanthropy affected our perception of the mega-wealthy?
I think that there's always been a lot of ambivalence about the super-wealthy in American society. At times there has been hostility and certainly intense antipathy toward John D. Rockefeller and the other robber-barons of the era. When Rockefeller turned to large-scale philanthropy, he was seen as having ulterior motives. He was seen as wanting to rehabilitate a reputation that had been sullied by his years of monopolistic practices. Andrew Carnegie also had a very checkered reputation. A lot of critics of the first wave of big philanthropy were very mistrustful of these mega-donors and spoke out against their foundations. Of course, that was a time when there was a very labor movement and both Carnegie and Rockefeller had a history of anti-labor strike breaking and violence.
Nelson Rockefeller. UNT Libraries Special Collection.
Andrew Carnegie, (seated, fourth from left), his daughter, Margaret, and wife, Louise, at the Corporation's first board meeting, November 10, 1911. Carnegie Foundation.
That said, it is far from clear that the motives of those first robber-baron philanthropists were really to rehabilitate their reputation. Rockefeller, long before he had a terrible reputation, was a committed philanthropist. Similarly, Carnegie, when he first started making money in the late 19th century, was clearly a man with humanitarian impulses. Often with these billionaire types, there's a mix of motives that can be pretty hard for outsiders to discern.
Fast forward to the second wave of big philanthropy. Up until just a few years ago, there's been much less antipathy than there was the first time around. We are living in a time when there's a lot of worship of billionaires. We are pretty uncritical in our view of the people at the top of the wealth distribution, even during a time of great inequality.
Only in the past four or five years has there been a backlash to this big philanthropy, and various articles and books, including my own, have kind of raised questions about how much influence these people have through their philanthropy. Again, it is sort of hard to know what the motives of these people are. Bill Gates, conveniently started his foundation right around the time he was on trial for antitrust practices by the U.S. Justice Department. Maybe that had something to do with it, but it is always hard to know.
You've spoken to a fair amount of these billionaire philanthropists for your book. What is your understanding of their motivations and priorities?
Well, there’s a couple of things going on.
One is that a lot of them feel incredibly fortunate. Most of them grew up in middle-class households or upper-middle-class households or lower-class households. Very few of them came from a huge wealth. They feel like they have these opportunities, and a lot of luck and they want to extend opportunities for others. That's one reason why education is such a big focus. A lot of people are incredibly thankful to their alumni institutions as the place where they got their start. A lot of billionaire philanthropists are very concerned about K-12 education because they see that as so essential for people to get ahead.
The second thing is these people have a high sense of self-efficacy. They made a lot of money by creating new products and services, and they think that they're very good at getting stuff done and having an impact. That confidence in their competence may be misplaced.
Philanthropy also is one way to achieve status and wealthy people are interested in that. For some philanthropists, status seems to be a key driver. They give very high-profile gifts, they put their names on buildings and that spending seems to be very centered around ego. You'll find them giving big money to performing arts institutions, to museums.
Do you think their priorities differ from what the general public wants to see progress on?
A growing number really are interested in a kind of social change agenda. The sad thing about big philanthropy is so much of it has so many of the wealthiest people give their money in very predictable ways. They give hundreds of millions of dollars to elite institutions like Harvard that already have plenty of money, and they don't give to community colleges.
Photograph of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas. Texas Historical Commission.
But I think that's starting to change. I think of people like Steve and Connie Balmer. Steve was the CEO of Microsoft. He retired, he and his wife turned to philanthropy in a big way. They focused on economic mobility and family security and issues of poverty. They have given hundreds of millions of dollars since they started.
Where did they give money to solve these bigger structural economic challenges?
They give money to local organizations in LA, Detroit, and the Pacific Northwest that are on the front lines of dealing with family economic struggles, workforce development, housing insecurity, food insecurity, that sort of thing. They also give donations nationally to leading nonprofits that work on poverty and on the nexus between poverty and K-12 education.
Do you think it's actually possible for these organizations to make the headway they claim they can make, or want to make, or we think they're making?
Well, I mean, the great contradiction here is that a lot of these philanthropists are giving to nonprofit organizations that are trying to clean up the mess created by this extreme version of capitalism we have. And in their day jobs, as business leaders, they're often not doing anything to address the dysfunctions or problems of capitalism, they may even be contributing to them. Jeff Bezos is an example that gets a lot of attention these days.
When you have wealthy business elites who are part of the problem and then turn around and give money to solve some of the problems they have created, without changing their own economic behavior, that draws a lot of cynicism and criticism.
And, a lot of these nonprofits don’t have anywhere near enough resources to clean up the problems created by extreme inequality where the rich have been fighting regulations and fighting the expansion of the social safety net and fighting the expansion of taxes. So, yeah, it’s a major contradiction.
Yeah, it seems like a diffused approach — which certainly inspires cynicism.
Nonprofits are very small compared to the government and they're very small compared to the problems they're up against. The amount of money they get from billionaire donors is small compared to the amount of money those billionaire donors are making every year.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are the founders of Giving Pledge, and both of them are nearly twice as wealthy as they were when they rolled out the giving pledge in 2010. If leading billionaires who are championing charity, are getting richer faster than they're giving away their money, it makes you wonder how committed they are to change.
Do you think that structural change can come from donations from these foundations?
Yeah, in some cases. I think that there are many non-profit advocacy groups that are indeed pushing for structural change that get money from wealthy donors and foundations. Those organizations would not exist at the scale they do without philanthropic backing. I'm not saying that having those kinds of organizations is as good as having a strong labor movement or having really well-organized grassroots groups with millions of members. Unfortunately, too much of the efforts to create structural change are coming from non-profit organizations, rather than large citizen-based organizations with real mass kind of power. But, it’s good to have nonprofits, with resources, that are pushing for change.