Can Anybody Save California?

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.