The state's drought is the worst since 1580. And no, Barack Obama can't stop it.
February 14, 2014
By DAVID DAYEN
In a journey befitting
our increasingly biblical climate, President Obama traveled on Friday from
storm-wracked Washington to bone-dry Fresno, California, a city torched by
three years of drought. The lack of rainfall has emptied the Sierra Mountain
snowpack responsible for a majority of the state’s water, and the dire
consequences demand high-profile attention. But someone might want to tell the
president what they told the last guy
who snooped around water politics in California.
Forget it Jake. It’s…
well, it’s not Chinatown, but it’s just as complicated.
The mega-drought is
pitting farmers against fishermen, north against south and, of course,
Democrats against Republicans. But that’s frequently the case in California,
which has battled for more than a century over how to allocate too little water
for too many people. The dry landscape adds another layer of rancor, and with
the planet heating up and fueling bigger, longer and more severe droughts, that’s
likely to be a permanent fixture. How state and federal lawmakers respond to
the crisis could offer a window into how the United States writ large will
react to climate events in real time—and so far, the politics appear too small
for the task.
The immediate impacts
of this drought herald a disaster. The past year has been the driest
in California’s recorded history, perhaps the
worst since 1580, hearkening back to the mega-droughts
of an earlier age. A series of recent
storms in the northern part of the state
doubled the available snowpack, but with three straight years of drought, that
snowpack remains around one-fourth of the normal amount (you would need rain or
snow every other day until May to catch up). The California Drought
Monitor shows “severe drought” conditions in
90 percent of the state, particularly in the agriculturally rich Central
Valley, sometimes nicknamed the nation’s salad bowl.
The conditions have
created impossible, Sophie’s Choice-type dilemmas. The State Water Project,
which supplies water to agencies serving 25 million residents, announced they
would make
no deliveries this month for the first time in
history. Seventeen California communities and water districts, primarily in the
Central Valley, may
not have drinking water in the next 60-90
days. Residents in these cities are being asked to cut their water usage by as
much as 30 percent. Farmers may have to leave half a million acres fallow this
planting season, a record loss that could cost more than $2 billion. They must
choose between watering perennially thirsty almond and cherry trees and
planting annual crops like tomatoes and lettuce. Any choice will result in
lower yields and increased food prices across the country. Migrant workers won’t
get hired to cultivate crops, leading to
unemployment that could top 50 percent in some Central Valley towns. The state
has banned
fishing in several rivers to protect thinning
populations. The dry conditions create breeding grounds for wildfires, which
started this year as early as January. Ranchers have been forced to sell
off their calves at half their usual sale weight
because of a lack of grass, a predicament that has even faced rancher and Congressman
John Garamendi, who has sold one-third of his
herd. “It’s going to affect everything that goes on in the state,” Garamendi
said.
The crisis has
belatedly caught the attention of Washington. House Republicans, led by Central
Valley congressmen like Devin Nunes, David Valadao and Kevin McCarthy, have
labeled the drought man-made,
arguing that too much water gets diverted to protect the endangered Delta
smelt, depriving farmers of needed resources. Demanding to “put
families before fish,” House Republicans passed
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, which would
effectively countermand the Endangered Species Act and the California
Constitution, halt restoration of the San Joaquin River and transfer the water
south to Central Valley farmers. Rep. Garamendi, a Democrat, described it
on the House floor as “essentially a theft of water from someone to give to
somebody else,” arguing that moving water from fisheries to farms would also
damage the state’s sizable salmon industry. The White House has promised a
veto, and Governor Jerry Brown called
it “unwelcome and divisive.”
Senate Democrats
responded with their own
bill, which would allocate $300 million to
drought relief projects and provide more flexibility to move water around the
state without waiving state or federal laws. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
announced a number of band-aid remedies on Thursday, including sped-up
assistance for livestock producers and $60 million to stock food banks in
economically depressed parts of the state. Further to the left, activists have
taken this opportunity to try to stop the development
of fracking, which uses massive
amounts of water that then gets polluted through
mixing with chemicals.
The political
battle over the drought ignores some basic
data: Under current conditions, there is no way to satisfy normal demand with
scarce water resources. Large regions of the state exist in semiarid
areas, and the huge agricultural demands strain creaky systems. “California’s
current water situation is not sustainable,” says Peter Gleick, a water expert
and President of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research and analysis
organization. “We don’t use water well, we don’t manage it well and demand
exceeds supply.”
The scramble for water
in California leads competing interests to maneuver to capture as much of the
stuff as possible. Groundwater is almost entirely unregulated—“anyone who wants
water can pump it,” Gleick says—which disrupts supply and reduces more
efficient underground storage. Agriculture needs are so intense—farming
comprises 3 percent of the state’s economy but uses 80 percent of the
water—that short-term power grabs abound, like the “Monterey
Amendments,” which ensure permanent supply to
Paramount Farms, the largest grower of pistachios and almonds in the world.
Water districts constantly bicker over water rights, and lawsuits to overturn
deals proliferate. A slew of mandates, allocations and promises make shortages
almost impossible to contend with, let alone years-long droughts.
And that’s where the
great unmentionable aspect of 21st-century water wars comes in: climate change.
Scientists have basically predicted this
type of extreme weather shift for the past two decades. “Weather practically
everywhere is being influenced by climate change,” said White House science
advisor Dr. John Holdren on a conference call Thursday. While droughts in
California are commonplace, their frequency, length and severity have increased
with a warming planet, Holdren explained, noting that higher temperatures lead
to more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow, running off into rivers
more quickly and evaporating faster. “The whole water season shifts earlier,
and for communities relying on snowpack, in late summer you really find
yourself in a bind,” adds Steve Fleischli, director of the Natural Resources
Defense Council’s water program. Studies from the journal Nature and surveys
of leading climatologists reinforce these
fears.
It was hard enough to
achieve an uneasy balance on water without climate change. Now that the
consequences of a warmer planet are here, our politics simply haven’t caught
up, experts say. “Politicians are still looking at the drought as a political
issue and not as the environmental and economic nightmare that it could be,”
says Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California. “The
ultimate question is, how do you get water into the state for the next 500
years?”
Some are heartened by
the rare sight of President Obama connecting the drought conditions in
California to climate change in his Friday speech in Fresno. But when it comes
to a policy response, it’s all about the here and now. “During early phases of
a drought, everyone walks around talking about short-term responses,” says Gleick.
“Democrats, Republicans, everyone. They have different priorities, but they
always look at the immediate crisis. It would be nice if we looked at long-term
solutions to our problems.” The Obama administration does plan to include a $1
billion “climate resilience fund” in the next budget, to fund that kind of
long-term planning. But the fund has about as much chance of making it past
House Republicans as a run on snow-chains in Palm Springs.
The irony is that
California has actually led on fighting global warming, with a statewide
cap-and-trade system that is
succeeding in bringing 2020 carbon emissions
down to 1990 levels. But one state cannot do it alone. In fact, the drought
shows that even the most responsible steward of the environment will suffer
without a global effort. So while continuing to demand climate solutions,
Californians of all stripes will have to figure out how to manage with less
water, perhaps forever.
Paradoxically,
Southern California, traditionally a villain in the state’s water wars (Los
Angeles infamously grabbed
water from the Owens Valley 100 years
ago) offers a
model for how to adapt to drought
conditions over the long term. Twenty years ago, the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California built new reservoirs to capture precious rain
and increased water recycling programs. It also aggressively promoted
conservation, both through changes to building codes and $333 million in
rebates for water-efficient products.
Ninety percent of Southern California residents now use low-flow toilets and shower
heads, keeping demand steady since 1990, despite 14 million additional
residents. The region will not need mandated rationing this year, because of
available reserves. Governor Brown, taking his cues from the Southland, has
called for a voluntary statewide 20 percent cutback in water usage, and experts
like the NRDC’s Fleischli say Californians can probably squeeze out another few
percentage points of conservation, as parched Australians and Israelis have.
Political debates over
the drought, however, appear stuck in the past. In this election year,
California Republicans believe they can score
points essentially blaming incumbent
Democrats for the weather. Governor Brown’s re-election opponents argue
that the state does not have the infrastructure in place to deal with prolonged
drought, urging construction of additional dams, canals and reservoirs. Holdren,
the White House science adviser, rejects this, saying “the problem isn’t that
we don’t have enough reservoirs, the problem is there isn’t enough water in
them.”
The $24.7 billion Bay
Delta tunnel project, which would funnel water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta to public water agencies more efficiently, could prove part of a
long-term solution. But state lawmakers have savaged
the idea, pointing to potential cost overruns.
Water agencies that supply farmers have doubted whether enough benefits would
emerge to justify the funding. A water bond measure readied for the 2014 ballot
could offset costs, but it would have to survive skeptical voters.
The next few weeks
will determine the scope of the crisis—as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration notes, California gets more
than half of its annual rainfall between
December and February. A continued dry spell would make the water wars even
more desperate over the summer, but also may offer the only opportunity to
change the paradigm. Gleick sighs: “If the drought ends next month we’ll go
back to doing the things we’ve always done.”
If all else fails,
California can bring out the big gun. Lady Gaga, as payment for an upcoming
video shoot at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, will donate $275,000 to repair the
castle pool and support water projects in the surrounding area, and is shooting
a public
service announcement asking residents to
conserve water. A celebrity-donation model of drought survival seems hopelessly
inadequate to the scale of the task, but compared with the political class, Gaga’s
being the constructive one.
David
Dayen is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and a contributor to Salon.
