I love the New York Times for many reasons. This line from their editorial about Hetch Hetchy, the Yosemite reservoir serving Sacramento, is one of them:
Ninety-nine years ago, this newspaper argued against the construction of the dam. We lost, but the much bigger loss was nature’s.
That’s owning your heritage.
There are three interlocking fundamental federal water policy/politics principles that are important to understanding current discussions over California congressman Devin Nunes’ legislation aimed at reshaping the distribution of water flowing through his state’s Central Valley.
First, federal subsidy has long been necessary for the big water projects that make the West as we know it work. Second, the money available for federal subsidy is limited, and there are always other competing demands, especially from other places. That leads to the third principle, which is the longstanding tradition of states settling their differences internally, then approaching Congress united.
Now comes Rep. Devin Nunes, with legislation that passed yesterday out of the House Natural Resources Committee that seems intent on ignoring these principles. McClatchy’s Michael Doyle does a nice job on the bill’s specifics, and I’ll entrust you to his care for those details. I’d like to point you in particular to this bit in Doyle’s story:
Senate rules and traditions give Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Senate’s author of the original San Joaquin River restoration plan, considerable clout in blocking home-state bills. In a joint letter delivered Thursday, Feinstein and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer reiterated their “strong opposition” to the House bill, which they called “troubling.”
“Unless we’re willing to work with (Feinstein), the measure will never become law,” stressed Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, who voted for the bill even as he complained about a “disappointing” lack of bipartisan collaboration.
Adding to the political impediments, the Brown administration’s top resources officer warned that the overall House bill “wreaks havoc” with ongoing efforts to balance water use.
In other words, this bill is dead. It’s not real. It’s theater. Nunes seems to be intentionally blowing up the necessary preconditions for California to work with the federal government on arranging the necessary water subsidies for his constituents who, frankly, really need subsidized water.
What’s the point of the theater? Devin Nunes is not a stupid guy, so he obviously knows his bill goes nowhere. What’s his end game?
Over at On the Public Record, I suggest one hypothesis – that Nunes is trying to move the “Overton window”, laying out an extreme position that, while untenable, moves the framework of what counts as acceptable over in his direction. OtPR entertains another possibility, taking the legislation on its face as an effort to rewrite California’s internal water distribution hierarchy.
Dunno what’s right here. Other ideas?
Best Pork Bun in Town!
Just when you thought the clown car that is California water politics was empty, out pops a San Francisco ballot initiative to drain Hetch Hetchy:
The measure, which would be submitted to the San Francisco city attorney next week, would require the city to embark on a process to put itself “on a path toward reforming San Francisco’s 19th century water system … and reversing the damage done to the environment over the last 100 years,” said Mike Marshall, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy.
The bar for placing a measure on the San Francisco ballot is ridiculously low, 9,500 valid signatures. Marshall figures the campaign would cost $500,000, tops. They already have a bona fide celebrity, who narrates a campaign-style video that opens with a majestic shot of Yosemite.
“How would you feel if someone suggested building a dam in Yosemite Valley, flooding a priceless treasure under a giant lake? Well, that’s exactly what happened to the Hetch Hetchy Valley. …
“This is Harrison Ford inviting you to join in the historic campaign to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Help us return this national treasure to the American people.”
One of the problems I have with the persistence of the not-Twain quote is a long history in the West of not fighting over water. Faced with potential conflicts among states over the rivers they share, for example, we developed a series of “compacts” — essentially treaties governing how to distribute scarce water. To say that water is primarily for fighting over is wrong. In many of the largest conflicts, disagreement over scarcity has led to sometimes tense, often suspicious but ultimately successful cooperation. There’s been fighting along the way, but ultimately the compacts and the state water rights doctrines built around them have created cooperative frameworks for resolving our conflicts over water.
I’ve long been suspicious of ski area snow reports, preferring to go with Snotel data when writing about storms. It turns out my skepticism was warranted. From Zinman and Zitzewitz (pdf):
Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall on weekends. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more.
I am not a visual person. I’m a word guy. But I’ve lived essentially my entire life with visual artists. My dad’s a painter. My wife, Lissa, has worked in an enormous range of media in the nearly three decades I’ve known her.
This has given me a life spent watching art happen. Art as process, rather than object. Art as a verb, if that makes any sense.
Lissa has always been interested in textures. It was an absolute delight to go out wandering with her Saturday afternoon while she experimented with her new macro lens, seeing things up close. Here’s her favorite from the outing:
Cactus, February 2012, L. Heineman
Check out the full slideshow to get a feel for what my “art as a verb” afternoon was like.
As a journalist, I learned early to pay attention to the budget. It’s where we take all our policy ideas, goals and plans and make them real. Which makes tomorrow my journalistically favorite day of the year – the day the President’s annual budget proposal starts the process of deciding how our nation’s government will spend its money.
Here’s a setup in the Sunday newspaper on the largest single-ticket item for New Mexico:
Budget reality could come crashing down Monday on Los Alamos National Laboratory and the most expensive construction project in New Mexico history.
Faced with risings costs for two proposed multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons-related projects, one in Tennessee and the second at Los Alamos, the National Nuclear Security Administration may be forced to choose. President Obama’s administration, set to release its proposed fiscal year 2013 budget Monday, is widely expected to send the money to Tennessee.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the inability to play billiards on cruise ships to be one of society’s great technological dilemmas.
Problem solved:
Next up: poor people who have to cook with dung.
Jennifer Pitt sounds an optimistic note about the possibility that the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study could reclaim some priority for the retention of water in the rivers of the Colorado River Basin:
The future of this region promises to be more crowded, and likely hotter and drier, but that doesn’t have to spell the death of the Colorado River. Reclamation and the states are facing the need to make decisions of great consequence about how to supply and manage water use in every sector. Let’s hope their new commitment to look at impacts on the river gives them the wisdom to forge a path forward that meets our legitimate water needs and protects and restores healthy flows.
magic sock
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I purchased three pairs of socks at the old Gil’s Runnershoe World on Carlisle and Lomas. The store’s long gone, its building torn down and replaced by a Walgreens. But the socks remain. In 1997, I was wearing a pair of them when I was caught in a storm while hiking in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon. For a long time, two of the six socks carried the reddish-pink tint of the running gullies we had to cross that day. Given the memorable nature of that trip, this allows me to date the socks at, conservatively, 15-plus years old.
In the mix-and-match that is my sock drawer, the number of socks has dropped from six to the current two, but it is safe to say that I have worn these socks once a week for that entire 15-plus years. They were my favorite running socks, because they were so comfy, and now that the knee’s shot and I don’t run any more, they remain my favorite socks. As I said, they’re so comfy.
I do not understand the sock technology involved, what has allowed them to endure while other socks fall by the wayside, but it is indistinguishable from magic.