Ensconced in my office in Albuquerque, I’ve been popping in and out of the webcast of today’s California State Water Resources Control Board workshop on the future of the Salton Sea, and I’ve noticed a very interesting subtext to the discussion that I think is important. It’s about the importance of Salton Sea environmental management to the broader goals of integrated water management in California and the western United States.

If we’re going to get this right elsewhere, we’ve got to get the Salton Sea question right now.

As a broad matter of policy, folks around the West are trying to figure out how to negotiate the process of ag-to-urban water transfers while managing what economists call “externalities” – the third party impacts that we’re going to have to manage as we adjust the system to changing hydrologic and societal realities.

Kevin Kelley of the Imperial Irrigation District told the board’s members this morning that more some 50,000 acres of Imperial farmland was fallowed last year as part of a program by which the metro area of coastal Southern California pays for water conserved. In the midst of a horrific California drought, that water has become critical, making up 60 percent of the municipal supplies shipped down the Colorado River Aqueduct last year, according to Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District. That’s huge. We talk about the importance of conservation. This is agricultural water conservation on an enormous scale.

courtesy Kevin Kelley, Imperial Irrigation District

But when agricultural activity in Imperial decreases, that means less ag runoff to feed the Salton Sea, and the sea shrinks. Kelly showed the slide to the right and told the board, “This area was covered in water ten years ago.”

The problem, as the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen documented in a report last year, is that drying up the sea comes with enormous costs, as  a result of the hazardous dust clouds left behind. Health impacts are likely to be subsantial. Importantly, as several people testified today, that risk falls disproportionately on the poor. Imperial is a very poor place.

That’s bad as a general matter of equity and justice. It’s a moral issue. But it also could be a huge water management problem. The concern, as expressed repeatedly during today’s board meeting, is that as part of the Byzantine water transfer deal that kept Met’s aqueduct full last year with transferred ag water, the state of California promised to deal with “restoration” efforts to mitigate the worst of the sort of consequences Cohen described in his report. That largely has not happened. So LA got its water, Imperial ag got the money in exchange for the transferred water, and the externality remains unaddressed.

Failure here would be a serious setback to other innovated water management efforts, Cohen and his colleagues said in written testimony to the board (pdf):

The State’s failure to provide assurance that it will meet its mitigation obligations – either through a clear, transparent funding plan or through leadership on the development of a vision for Salton Sea restoration/mitigation – will have a chilling effect on future water transfer agreements that require state involvement. In effect, the State’s inaction not only jeopardizes the current QSA, but also diminishes the likelihood that other large-scale water transfers will occur to improve the State’s overall water reliability.

Emily Green has written a great primer for Southern Californians on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the distant geography from which a big chunk of their water emerges:

[W]hat makes the Delta the Delta is water. After winter rain and snow, roughly half of California’s fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place. Twenty five million Californians depend to some degree or another on freshwater from the Delta. Roughly a third of Southern California’s supplies originate here.

Emily is sneaky good. This is great geography and hydrology, but as she notes in the introduction, this is at heart about sharing water.

David Zetland:

[W]e see a total lack of vision or action to address the REAL drivers of scarcity — retail prices too low to notice, permissive overuse of groundwater, failing water-as-charity policies, and the blinders of a historic pretension that water rights are properly allocated (nope) in the correct volumes (NOPE).

Taken together, the excess of demand over supply and failure to address that fact means that California is heading the way of Sao Paolo, with twice the population at risk.

Much more, worth clicking and reading in full.

UC Davis’s Jay Lund responding to the flurry of news coverage surrounding Jay Famiglietti’s Los Angeles Times op ed:

While the drought is serious, a UC Davis scientist is casting doubt on Famiglietti’s dire prediction.

“It’s not the right impression that one more year of this and we’re toast,” UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences Director Jay Lund said.

Lund studies the short and long term impacts of the drought on California’s water supply. He said Famiglietti’s forecast is the wrong one.

“There’s quite a bit more left in groundwater,” Lund said. “A little bit less every year because we’re pumping, trying to make up for the drought.”

L.A. Times headline

Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click?

1. “California has about one year of water left.”
2. “California has about one year of reservoir storage and then we must rely even more on groundwater”

The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last Friday. It was a scary as hell, a click-generating machine. OMG, California’s gonna run out of water! Why aren’t we talking more about this?

Kinda feel like this whole "California only has one year of water left" thing was a tad underreported today: http://t.co/KHGle2diLu

— Matt Ford (@fordm) March 14, 2015

Sunday evening, Jay seems to have grasped the misunderstanding the headline had caused. The body of the piece has a bit more nuance, noting that it’s talking about surface storage, and that this as a result placing growing pressure on groundwater, and Jay’s rightly concerned that overpumping of groundwater is a thing we ought to worry about:

Thx 4 supporting my @LATimesOpinion op-ed. Be careful: it's 'about 1 yr of reservoir storage' and then we must rely even more on groundwater

— Jay Famiglietti (@JayFamiglietti) March 16, 2015

That’s an OMG too, but the first version – “OMG, California’s about to run out!” is the one that has run amok, clickbait style, and it’s terribly misleading.

Not blaming Jay here. Many’s the time I’ve been bitten by a headline written by someone else atop my work. But it’s a reminder that communicating about water policy is hard.

In a twitter discussion this morning, Brian Jordan shared a telling graphic that exposes the problems with Victor Davis Hanson’s recent City Journal essay about California’s water problems. Hanson’s argument is that California abandoned a dam-building program that, had it been pursued, would have provided the necessary storage to meet needs in this year of drought:

Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition.

Hanson’s reflexive culture wars rhetoric makes him painful to read (“All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico that would help double the state’s population in just four decades”, capitalization in the original), but if you peel back what he’s saying, he’s really making an unexamined argument for the use of what David Zetland (pdf) calls “other people’s money” in providing water for his beloved agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley.

What he doesn’t say (and he really can’t, given the free market values that are central to his world) is that the dams whose lack he bemoans would have to have been built with “other people’s money” – the taxpayers of the state of California or the federal government. This is really expensive capacity, far beyond the financial reach of the farmers who would be using the water. And once you ask for other people’s money, their values come into play. (This would be the point, if I were adopting Hanson’s culture wars rhetoric, for the obligatory “welfare farmer” reference, but I don’t think that’s right, and I think neither that nor his “Green” and nativism frame are useful or correct – better to assume good faith on all sides.)

Jordan’s graphic of expanding storage capacity in Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District exposes the hole in Hanson’s argument:

Another nice chart MWD has added 5.5MAF in surface+groundwater storage for So Calif since the drought of the late 70s pic.twitter.com/LFPRkmZnpv

— Brian Jordan (@jordanbrianl) June 19, 2014

Hanson notes Southern California’s substantial water storage reserves, but is blind to the reason they exist.

Met recognized the need for storage to provide, in drought, a more reliable supply of water for Southern California. Met spent its own money – billions over the years, according to Jordan, including hundreds of millions per year recently – to built the storage buffer that has enabled it to weather the current drought.

There are two important points here.

First, it wasn’t “other people’s money”. Metropolitan Southern California largely ponied up the cash to meet its own water security needs. This goes back to the construction of the Colorado River Aqueduct, which L.A. paid for itself.

Second, municipal users can afford to pay a lot more for water security. This is very expensive stuff, and I don’t think we’ll every see ag communities able to afford that level of reliability on their own. To get it, they need other people’s money, and at that point other people’s values come into play.