Best Pork Bun in Town! June 2011

In a comically disingenuous TV diatribe earlier this month, Congressman Devin Nunes, defender of San Joaquin Valley farmers’ federal water, suggested that perhaps if the effete liberals in San Francisco care so much about the Delta smelt, they should reduce their own consumption of Sierra Nevada water:

If the Delta ecosystem is collapsing, I would ask Nancy Pelosi, John Garamendi, Sen. Feinstein and Sen. Boxer to turn off San Francisco’s water. It comes from the Sierra Nevada mountain range too.

Ignoring for a moment the doctrine of prior appropriation (San Francisco’s water use long predates Nunes’ constituents’) or the sheer numbers involved (San Francisco’s consumption is far less than San Joaquin Valley farmers’), there are the very real needs of of this merchant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, whose economic interests in producing Best Pork Bun in Town! are clearly tied up in that sweet, sweet Hetch Hetchy water:

EASTERN BAKERY THE ONLY BAKERY IN THE WHOLE USA THAT COOKS OUR OWN MOON CAKE FILLING IN THE USA! Such sweet fillings like: Lotus, Black Bean, Winter Melon, Mung Bean, Yellow Soy Bean, ETC… The orient chemical water contaminated is no match to our San Franciscan water the cleanest water in the whole world! Water is the main ingredient for the sweet fillings. No Other Bakery cooks it own filling in the USA. It’s Expensive & Hard

One of the most interesting analyses of California’s water problems I read before last week’s trip was “California’s Sacramento San Joaquin Delta Conflict: from Cooperation to Chicken“, by Kaveh Madani and Jay Lund at UC Davis.

It looks at the struggle over the Delta’s future as a game theory problem, one in which an optimal solution is possible if each actor gives a little, but one in which no one has an incentive to give first, because they end up losing out:

Today’s Delta problem has characteristics of a Chicken game, where cooperation is in everyone’s interest, but is unlikely because parties deviating from the status quo are likely to bear more of the costs of a long-term solution. The state of California may become the victim (or chicken) of the Delta game, bearing the greatest costs, if it continues to rely on a policy of leaving parties to develop voluntary cooperative resolution without a sufficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation.

So we have a situation now where there’s a great sense of urgency around the Delta’s problems. At least I think there is. Everyone I talked to while I was in California had it.

Sacramento River Delta, June 2011

Big water users feel urgency because of the risk to reliability of their supply in the Delta earthquake disaster scenario. At least some of the big water users (and their benefactors) feel urgency because of a risk to reliability of their supply resulting from environmental regulations (and, we should not forget, the societal values embedded in those regulations). Environmentalists feel some urgency, partly because of the collapse of the Delta ecosystem and partly because of the actions of the water users’ congressional benefactors. People who think about and on behalf of the culture within the Delta have a particularly whipsawed sense of urgency because they’re in the middle of all of this, buffeted by powerful forces that seem to be hustling toward some sort of change that they’re being left out of.

While I was in Sacramento last week, the Delta Stewardship Council released its latest draft Delta Plan (pdf) and the Association of California Water Agencies made public its Alternative Delta Plan. The tension between the two, I think, highlights the issues Madani and Lund were poking at in their “Chicken game” paper. John Bass characterized the ACWA plan thus:

There are a lot of people who don’t like or believe in the usefulness of regulations. But we find that ACWA’s ADP proposal is a bit soft on accountability. Maybe some of their constituents would prefer not to have too much of it. Or maybe instead of legislation, which can only lead to laws and regulations, they’d like subsidies, tax breaks and other sorts of “incentives” for their complex partnerships?

The Delta Stewardship Council seems to be pushing to exploit the legislative mandate it believes it has to exert the “sufficient mechanism” sort of thing Madani and Lund were talking about. ACWA is pushing back.

SACRAMENTO – One of the things I’ve been struck by in my week talking to water people in Sacramento is a sense of urgency around the problems of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – a feeling that now is the time to do something. I’m also struck by the lack of consistent clarity of what that thing might be, but some themes are emerging. I happened to parachute down in the midst of the release of the Delta Stewardship Council’s latest iteration (pdf), and the Association of California Water Agencies’ alternative Delta Stewardship Plan – a fun compare and contrast exercise.

Consider this contingent – lots more people to talk to, and my ideas shift after every conversation. But there seems to be a general momentum behind some sort of trans-delta conveyance, a Peripheral Thingie of some sort. A resulting return to a more natural hydrograph – moving water down through the remaining ecosystem in a way that’s timed to meet the old natural flow regimes – seems part of the environmental solution. And south-of-delta storage to allow the above to work seems high on everyone’s list. But how big and how much water the Peripheral Thingie might carry, and the critical question of how much south delta pumping it might enable, is murky. And I remain profoundly skeptical about paying for a lot of new infrastructure, as I read the daily litany of coverage of California’s budget problems (along with a clear “we won’t be paying for it” message from the Feds). Which leaves me thinking maybe none of this is possible and wondering about what the failure modes are.

But despite that lack of clarity around the solutions, the urgency piece got an airing from Berkeley’s Raymond Seed on the op-ed page of today’s Sacramento Bee:

The state’s water challenges cannot be solved overnight, but there is now an increasingly clear and defined path forward. The Delta Vision Strategic Plan should be implemented without further delay. If it is not, the Delta will continue to be at risk of either a weather-related or earthquake-related disaster – an entirely foreseeable, preventable and unacceptable disaster, and one just waiting to happen.

In answer to my question over the weekend about whether the big California snowpack might have “bought Californians nothing other than a new set of facts on the ground to fight over”, there is this possible answer from Mike Taugher:

Delta water users have sued to block a temporary decrease in pumping meant to save thousands of salmon, a move that seems destined to raise the stakes in an escalating water war.

After a drought-busting winter that was good news for fishers and farmers, tens of thousands of salmon have been caught or killed at the powerful Delta pumps in the past few months. In addition, more than 6 million Sacramento splittail, a large minnow that environmentalists say should be protected by endangered species laws, were also collected or killed at the pumps.