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
A Vicious Loop
by Josh McCrain
June 23, 2021
This interview with Josh McCrain, assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | We want to talk about the nationalization of news and politics – which came first?
Josh | This is something that academics have thought a lot about. The idea that politics have become more nationalized is well studied and well established.
What this means is that when we are looking at races on a local and state level, there is an element of the national political climate applied to the race. So, for example, we start asking state elected officials or state legislators questions about their views on who is on the Supreme Court.
This has been something that's been going on for a while. The conventional wisdom is it started after the Reagan years in the nineties — Newt Gingrich catalyzed a lot of that — and then it really picked up into the two-thousands.
It is hard to figure out if the nationalization of local news is a product of what people want out of their news broadcast or if it is a product of local news producers figuring out that it's cheaper to centralize and produce national news instead of doing costly local investigative reporting. It's not really possible to separate what's causing what here because they are occurring at the same time.
You can imagine that the nationalization of politics is feeding into the local news nationalization, and then people become more attuned to national politics. They care less about local news, which drives local news producers to produce less local content.
Obviously one of the large complaints is readership is down, viewership is down. I think it's low-hanging fruit to have bigger, more nationalized conversations, but maybe that is also a reflection that people don't really care.
This is something that I personally am fascinated by. It is an open question as to whether or not there even is an audience for local news anymore. I think the answer is that there is an audience, but it is not clear that people want to pay money for local news.
Newspapers were sort of propped up by advertising money for years. They were never really sustaining themselves off of subscribers, so when the advertising money shifted to the internet, there was no viable business model for the papers.
There have to be other ways we can conceptualize local news, where it is not necessarily a money-making enterprise.
I try that pitch to investors all the time and they're like, huh?
One idea is to turn things into a non-profit so that there is no profit-making incentive. Even if it is a nonprofit, it still has to make money to sustain itself. I don’t think that is the solution. I don’t think there is enough money for these newspapers to sustain themselves. To make it a sustainable business model, you have to have investment by people who see the paper as a public good not a business. Realistically we need government support or philanthropic support.
The internet, I think, has changed people's idea of community too. Somebody said to me, you know, there's a difference between people who identify their community as bound by geography and people, probably like you and I, who have friends all over, broadened by our work, and the internet, and the ability to travel.
I think that is an interesting point. There is a vacuum created when local outlets go away. People turn to Nextdoor or neighborhood Facebook groups or whatever. That's not news. I used to live in Midtown Atlanta and the Nextdoor was not a good representation of the reality of living in Atlanta. That is a super pernicious problem; local news disappears, people still want to get updates, so now they get it without the context or investigation by reporters. Instead, they get the potentially fear-mongering and racist version that comes from whoever is willing to post stuff on social media outlets.
Right. Could you talk about Sinclair?
Sure. Sinclair is a major owner of television news stations across the country. They own a lot of local news stations. They are what we call conglomerate owners. Nexstar is a big one. Tribune is a big one. But Sinclair is an interesting case because of two things. One is they started expanding like crazy. They realized an opportunity to just buy up a bunch of local stations. They weren’t necessarily strategic -- they bought what was available, cheap, and on sale. They took advantage of rule changes under Trump that made it easier for the conglomerates to buy stations across the country. They are not the only group to take advantage of those rules -- we saw a lot of mergers and consolidation of media ownership in the local television market.
But, the other thing interesting about Sinclair is they're unabashedly conservative. They are big time Republican donors with very straightforward Republican viewpoints. They hired commentators who had positions in the Trump administration. They are a Republican-owned company and they don't really try to hide that. So what has been really interesting about their expansion is the degree to which they inject their politics into the content of their broadcasts.
What were some of the rules that they took advantage of?
There are a few. One is called the home studio rule, which says that if you are going to have a broadcast station in a media market, then you have to have a physical television station in that market. The Trump administration got rid of that rule. Two things happen because of this. One is that it makes it a lot cheaper for an ownership group that owns stations all across the country to expand, and it lessens the ties to the community and the place where they own the station.
What effect does that have on national politics?
Gregory Martin and I wrote a paper a few years ago called Local News National Politics. We studied the effect of Sinclair acquisition on the content of the stations that it buys.
The question we started with is: When Sinclair buys a station, do they change the kind of content of that station? This is actually a really interesting question because it's sort of hard to get at. You don't want to compare a station that was bought by Sinclair in Iowa or Wyoming to one that was bought by Sinclair in Washington, DC. Those are just fundamentally different media markets.
So what Greg and I were able to do is we were able to compare the content of stations in the same media market, where the only difference is whether a station is bought by Sinclair or not. We collected seven and a half million transcripts broadcast from across the country for a seven-month period from every station in the country. And we do some machine learning stuff to get the content of the transcripts.
What we find is that when Sinclair buys the station, the station spends less time on local politics and more time on national politics relative to the other stations in the same media market. Then we look at the content of the media coverage.
This is a pretty common thing to do in media research — looking at the slant of the content.
What we find is that also the political content of Sinclair broadcasts became more conservative relative to the stations in the same media market.
This is interesting because if you take a very conservative, very red-leaning area, with a station bought by Sinclair, that station still becomes more conservative, even with a very high baseline conversative market. We also find that they become more like Fox News in the way that they talk about politics, we actually scale it to Fox News’ content.
If you ask Sinclair what that means, they would say, “Well, we think that there is a latent demand for this kind of content in these areas. We bought the stations in these areas and we changed the content because this is what the consumers want.”
That's a possibility for sure. If Sinclair's explanation for why they did this is correct, we would see viewership increase in the stations that they bought.
And this is important for their business model. So what is their business model if they're willing to make changes to the content of the station and lose viewers and lose eyeballs? There are a couple of options here. One is that since Sinclair has a major conglomerate owner, it's simply cheaper for them to nationalize the content, produce it, centrally, send it out to their affiliates, cut the costs of their affiliates, and reduce reporters. The economy of scale makes a lot of sense there, and that's not something that would be unique to Sinclair necessarily. However, how do you explain the political change of the slant?
Another explanation for their business model is that they're willing to lose some money and some viewers in exchange for the ability to convince people of their political views. They are willing to substitute some of the money they lost for the ability to sway people politically through this new conservative content. That is an option. We don't necessarily find that that's true, but that's certainly a compatible explanation with what we observe in Sinclair's business model.
We're actually working on another paper that's almost ready to be public on the fact that all of these media groups have consolidated. Instead of having lots of disparate or smaller regional groups, you now have five national media groups given these business model incentives. And if that is the case, there is just going to be less local news in areas where a station is bought by a major owner. The really important normative problem with the decrease in local news is that voters do not know what is going on in state and local politics.
We know that reporting is an accountability mechanism for elected officials; it makes them behave better. And if these sources are going away, what happens? What Greg and I are finding is that the competitiveness of local and state elections decreases, they become less competitive when stations in that area are bought by these major owners because voters don't know who the people are in government. If you don't know who the people are, you just vote for the incumbents or you don't vote. Elections are becoming less competitive, and that's sort of the downstream implications of what we found with Sinclair. But, this is broader than Sinclair because it has nothing to do with a political slant. This is just about these economic incentives, vis-a-vis national versus local politics and the centralization of the news that you then distributed to your affiliates.
The first question about my business when fundraising, for this small alt news outlet – was always, “what is your exit strategy”? New platforms will always be digital first because that's just the landscape – so the influence of tech and how they view capital is connected. It’s anecdotal, but I’m curious if you have any opinions on that?
Yeah, I mean, these venture capitalists are willing to buy these failing media companies or newspaper groups for cheap to try to turn it around after some brutal restructuring. I mean, that has nothing to do with the news business. That's just them trying to make money in these venture capital opportunities. The problem is that it is just decimating the economy for reporters. Reporters are pushed out of local news in massive numbers. I have a friend who's a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He's been there for a few decades.
If you have nine beats, you can’t do any of them well. That is part of the problem. There's a really cool paper by this political scientist at Texas A&M Erik Peterson that looks at what happens to newspapers when their resources are cut. And basically, he finds exactly that. Reporters take on a ton more beats without making more money.
How do local candidates find ways to be discovered and supported?
That's a really good question. I would suggest that it was always hard for them. Something we know about local elections is that these are what we call “low salience elections.” The only people who participate are hyper-partisan, high information people because you have to know a lot to vote in local elections. And now the problem is exacerbated because people have nowhere to go to figure out who these people are.
There's actually an interesting solution to this. Washington, Oregon, and some counties in California started sending mail ballots and where to get information on each of the candidates. That's one way you can get people to have the opportunity to pull them up.
There’s also the phenomenon of local voting guides on Instagram. Like a DSA infographic that gets circulated that is often endorsement without explanation.
There's a huge research area in political science on the effects of an election where you don’t have any major candidates on the ballot. This happens in a lot of states on off-year elections. And nonpartisan elections are actually the worst for this; in partisan elections, people have some sort of sense as to who they may agree with. Nonpartisan elections are a mess. Many judicial elections are nonpartisan. How do voters know how to vote on a judge? So there's a lot of cool research that shows the incentives for the judges running are terrible because they want to show that they like to align with a party, but how do you do that except by making opinions in certain directions?
Judicial elections – maybe that’s our next month.
Oh absolutely. Tom Clark at Emory University and his co-authors have a paper that looks at the effect of death penalty cases. And what's super messed up about that is you can literally put a number on how many people have died because of judges’ electoral incentives.
Wow. You touched on this briefly but I want to go back to what version of news you see moving forward. Do you have an opinion on government involvement in local news?
It is a great question and not obvious. I've talked to a number of journalists that have gotten emails from a number of journalists in both print and TV about this stuff. One journalist emailed me and was like, you know, we really do like good reporting, but we also want people to watch our stuff. If what people care about is not local TV, then what do we do?
I mean, I don't have a good solution to that. It is tricky. I think in TV, there is still an audience for local news, but it is hard because now people have different media diets. People now don't have cable subscriptions or any live TV subscriptions. So how do you watch this? I don’t know. There is not a good solution.
For print media, although the situation is more dire from an industry perspective, I think it's a little bit more solvable because it's not as expensive. It’s not as much overhead. It comes down to accepting the fact that it's not going to make money and finding a way to support it from a public good perspective. And, by the way, this is something that happens regularly.
We have some public broadcasting here. Other countries have public media that works right. This works because people are invested in it as a public good.
Research shows that when local newspapers go away, a city's credit rating gets worse because politicians behave worse. If we can start communicating things like that, then I think it becomes a little bit easier of a problem to at least talk about. We need to reframe what the discussion is.
The one thing that we can do, from a regulatory perspective, is change the rules. The FCC has changed rules many times. We make it less viable for these major conglomerate owners to centralize the production of news. That is a policy choice that we made that can be undone. There are regulatory steps in the right direction that can be taken.
There’s a lot of talk about the Fairness Doctrine.
Yeah. But that doesn't do anything. It affects over-the-air broadcasts, which is not what people are concerned about. The Fairness Doctrine is not going to change Fox. That is a private entity; they are not governed by the Fairness Doctrine.
Right. Well, thank you so much for your time.