I’ve been addled by influenza for the better part of a week, tortured by feverish dreams of men in dark robes (were there robed women too?) in a great white-fronted building holding solemn rituals to try determine whether I might be healed. But it was like Plato’s cave – you couldn’t see the robed tribal elders directly, only hear attempts by other mostly white men on television, divining and interpreting their meaning like so many shadows on the cave wall. But one of the people on TV was a nice lady named Rachel, I think. I liked her the best because she told me what I wanted to hear.

It was only fever dreams, I think.

I emerged from the fog today with enough energy to begin perusing the new National Research Council Bay-Delta report. Michael Campana’s posted the whole thing over at his blog, (update: also available straight from the NAS) and it’s worth a few days’ digestion, but the report makes it bang-you-over-the-head obvious even on quick first reading the panel thinks current efforts to wrestle with California’s central water problems are unserious in their unwillingness to get into the hard stuff.

I’ll cite two central reasons from the report. The first is a widespread reluctance in California to acknowledge the central fact of scarcity:

The challenges of managing water and achieving ecological rehabilitation in the Delta are numerous, including the reluctance of many participants to confront the reality that water is scarce.

The second problem flows from this first. The central underpinning of current efforts to deal with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water policy and politics mess is the principal, ensconced in California law, of “co-equal goals” – water supply reliability alongside environmental protection for the Delta ecosystem.

[I]n practice, it is not clear what co-equal means. Does it mean that any additional water will be allocated half and half to support each goal? Or does co-equal imply some proportional allocation? Or does it mean that water for support of one goal should not be available at the expense of water to support attainment of the other? Yet if the attainment of either or both goals requires more water than is currently available, and additional water is unavailable because of scarcity, then the co-equal goals cannot be attained.

The idea of the co-equal goals, as the panel notes, had some political merit. Any solution that prejudged the answers in favor of one or the other would never have gotten out of the starting gate. Yet the planners have not taken the room the legislature left them and done anything with it, the NRC panel concluded:

By positing the co-equal goals without specifically defining them, the legislature has given planners the opportunity to create the necessary balance. Yet, this has not been the focus of planning so far.

“So far.” Such optimistic language.

It appears to be assumed that additional water will have to be found to serve the co-equal goals. When water is scarce, it is not possible to allocate water to support one without reducing the allocation for the other. Of course additional water can always be found by reallocating water from some other use that is independent of the uses envisioned by the co-equal goals, but in California, that simply moves the problem of scarcity to another locus.

And so far, as the Panel’s report notes, the planning documents have just kicked this can down the road. Here’s the money quote:

[T]he future will require planning and management that specifically acknowledge and take into account that there is not enough water to meet all desired uses in California with the required degree of reliability everywhere and all the time.

Thank goodness it looks like it’ll snow this weekend in the Sierra Nevada. Maybe they can get some extra water from there.

In my continuing effort to milk the not-Twain quote for all it’s worth, there is this – in the mountains north of the well fields of the proposed Cadiz California groundwater project is Whiskey Spring. And of course, one of the big areas of fightin’ in Cadiz is the question of whether the project’s groundwater pumping will reduce natural spring flows. (see Figure 3-4 in this pdf)

Pulled up from the comments on yesterday’s Cadiz post, the Aquafornia Maven shares a marvelous metaphor regarding the costs of coastal desal:

I was on a tour through the Lower Colorado River last week, and we stopped at the Gene Pumping Plant and were being briefed on SoCal water issues. Some one asked Bill Hasencamp (MWD’s Colorado River guy) about desal.

Hasencamp said that besides the problems with getting desal plants permitted along the coast which is proving very difficult and several (at least) would be needed, Met’s system delivers by gravity to the service area, with the pipes getting progressively smaller as they deliver water to the inland areas and approach the coast. To input a large amount of desalinated water from the coastal areas would be akin to getting an entire blood transfusion through your little toe.

Interesting analogy.

Colorado River Aqueduct, looking north into the Cadiz Valley in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, March 2012 photo by John Fleck

I have a prediction: clarifying the science will not settle the political argument over the proposed Cadiz water project in the deserts of California.

Chris Clarke wrote this today about Cadiz, a proposal to pump water from beneath the Mojave Desert and pipe it to coastal Southern California cities:

According to an independent hydrologists’ evaluation of the proposed Cadiz Valley water project, project backers used flawed models and incomplete data to forecast the amount of water they could pump out of a desiccated valley in the Mojave Desert.

To which public relations consultant Laer Pearce, who has been flacking for the project, had this to say (scroll down to the comments on Chris’s post):

It is incorrect and misleading to your readers to refer to this new study’s authors as “independent.” They were hired and paid by the National Parks Conservation Association, a longtime opponent of the Cadiz water project and an advocacy group dedicated to resisting commercial enterprises in and around national parks. It is based in Washington, D.C. and has annual revenues of $61 million.

In contrast to the modeling done by the Association’s hydrologists, the studies undertaken by Cadiz are more comprehensive and, most importantly, have been peer reviewed by some of the nation’s leading hydrology experts who serve on the Groundwater Stewardship Committee. This committee will continue to monitor the aquifer as the project progresses to ensure that there are no impacts to the environment.

Which is richly ironic – to accuse project opponents’ scientists of having a lack of independence while citing the work of scientists hired by the project’s supporters. No doubt Pearce is paid to say things like that with a straight face.

Full disclosure: I’ve avoided writing about Cadiz because I haven’t had the time to do the necessary journalistic due diligence on the technical questions involved. If I had time, I would, but I’m not sure it matters, because it’s clear that this is shaping up as a case study in what John Bass recently called “design and the problem of ‘contradictory uncertainties’“. John invokes the work of political scientist Dan Sarewitz (which in meta fashion I pushed on him) regarding the way science does not settle political controversies. John here is writing about the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but his argument applies, I think, with a few tweaks, to Cadiz:

My money is on a stalemated, status quo Groundhog Day future, until there is a shift in consciousness and consensus (either rightward or leftward) similar to the one that led to the great environmental movement of the late 1960’s. If that consciousness shifts right, then property rights and Randian selfishness ideology will have won out. If the shift is to the left, toward environmental justice and a willing footing of the bill for remediative machines and regimens, then our evolution will have continued.

The “stalemate” part may apply more effectively to the Delta than Cadiz. But it’s clear that, like in the Delta, science won’t settle this. Values will.

The water model in the western United States has generally involved Party A getting a bunch of water via a dam, canal, pipe, etc., while Party B (usually some broad group of taxpayers, either state or federal) pays for it. Economists will tell you that this tends to lead for building more giant concrete thingies than would otherwise be found to be economically optimal. But whatever, I like living here.

The current discussions over California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan have a new sort of earnestness of late, as a realization among water users sinks in – OMG, we’re going to have to pay for our water ourselves? Wyatt Buchanan did a great job with this theme yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle:

[W]hile urban users may be able to afford the yet to be determined price increases, agricultural water users may not. The price of water could more than double for farmers, though it is too soon to know how high the increase would go, said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District, which covers 600,000 acres serving about 600 farms.

“There is a breaking point at which the project is no longer feasible,” Birmingham said. “It’s a significant concern,” though he said officials can’t evaluate the cost effectiveness until the outstanding questions are resolved.