Going through boxes in the garage, I came across this treasure:
Long Arm of law reaches for Meese – again. John Fleck, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 23, 1985
I was a young intern at the late, lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Meese, for those too young to remember, was Attorney General of the United States of America under Ronald Reagan.
Good times.
Upcoming discussions in my spring University of New Mexico Water Resources Program class about the importance of evidence in policy-making seem freshly relevant.
The class, co-taught with hydrologist Jesse Roach and economist Jingjing Wang, has a pretty nerdy focus on dynamic simulation modeling. Over the course of the semester, the students work through the problem of building a model (we use Powersim) of a river basin. They build in both the physical part – hydrology, climate, etc. – and the human part with Jingjing’s economics component. Alongside all of that, I help the students work through the question of how their technical work interfaces with the political and policy world – how to make their technical work relevant.
A big part of my piece is communication – how to write up what they’re finding for a non-technical audience, the hypothetical mayor or county commissioner who does not have the technical background of the college professor the students are used to writing for.
A big part of that task is understanding way evidence is received in political and policy processes.
In the sciency academic world, there’s a strong and understandable inclination to argue for the supremacy of technical evidence in decision-making. As a result, academics tend to get frustrated with the way things actually work. We are seeing that play out over the past week, as our new president pursues policies that seem to fly in the face of the evidence with respect to the impacts and risks associated with immigrants to the United States.
My core messages is that simply saying, “But evidence!” ever louder, as often is done in these cases, does not work.
Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling in the UK, had a timely post last week in this regard:
Too much ‘post-truth politics’ discussion is self-indulgent. Too many academics are quick to demonise the cynical world of politics and politicians and to romanticise their own causes or objectivity. They need to acknowledge that ideological and emotional thinking is a natural part of life, and a part of life to which they are not immune. ‘Experts’ are storytellers for their own cause, and they tell each other the same story about post-truth politics. What separates them from their competitors is that the latter are better at telling effective stories which manipulate the beliefs and emotions of their audience.
So, what can they do about it? Tell good, positive stories, combining scientific evidence with emotional hooks, to help people understand and care about important political issues.
You can see this in the response to our new president’s executive order regarding refugees and immigration. The evidence crowd offers a strong case that the people impacted by the order pose little risk. But the communication tool that proved successful in this first skirmish of a long battle over this policy was the human stories of the innocent people impacted by the measure.
Some timely lessons playing out here in real time, I recommend reading Cairney’s piece in full.
The task of imparting clarity about the understandings and misunderstandings of science is, I have come to realize, one of my important tasks in my new role as university educator. Our students are pursuing masters degrees in water resources (check us out, not too early to start thinking about applying for fall semester!). The curriculum gives them a solid foundation in the water sciences, alongside a strong does of policy stuff. But given my experience struggling to communicate science to non-science audiences, to make it clear and useful, I’m pushing the importance of the science communicator’s task.
This is not about “science communication” in its more obvious sense – the dinosaur museum or newspaper column. This is science communication as an integrated part of the technical work that our students will do in their careers – writing a policy memo for the city council, or a briefing paper for their non-scientist boss.
In that context, this piece by Anita Makri in Nature includes an incredibly important insight at the heart of non-scientists’ misunderstanding of what science is and does:
Much of the science that the public knows about and admires imparts a sense of wonder and fun about the world, or answers big existential questions. It’s in the popularization of physics through the television programmes of physicist Brian Cox and in articles about new fossils and quirky animal behaviour on the websites of newspapers. It is sellable and familiar science: rooted in hypothesis testing, experiments and discovery.
Although this science has its place, it leaves the public (not to mention policymakers) with a different, outdated view to that of scientists of what constitutes science. People expect science to offer authoritative conclusions that correspond to the deterministic model. When there’s incomplete information, imperfect knowledge or changing advice — all part and parcel of science — its authority seems to be undermined. We see this in the public debate over food and health: first, fat was bad and now it’s sugar. A popular conclusion of that shifting scientific ground is that experts don’t know what they’re talking about.
But the questions that people face in their lives typically rely on incremental science, a kind that accumulates evidence about complex systems with numerous variables and fuzzy social parameters. It feeds into policy and decisions about how to handle environmental pollution, vaccine safety, emerging infections, drug risks, food choices or the impacts of climate change.
At its most important, science in the policy realm tackles areas filled with uncertainty that cannot be reduced. This insight is crucial to communicating about it well.
I’m increasing the emphasis on communication in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program core curriculum. I want our graduates to not only do solid technical water management work, but to develop the tools to communicate it to the people who need it.
With that in mind, I’m giving them this as one of next week’s reading assignments. It’s short:
Churchill on brevity
In a 1932 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court famously opined that…
a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
From that line comes the idea that the U.S. states can function as “laboratories of democracy”.
With the change in U.S. national government that we formalized Friday, there has been much talk among my colleagues working in water – faculty and students at the UNM Water Resources Program where I teach and with friends out in the water management community – about where the locus of action will be in the next few years.
I’ve argued that much authority, especially over water quantity, is already vested with the states rather than the national government. An interesting story out of New York suggests that state’s willingness to go full-on “laboratory of democracy” in the area of water quality as well:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he wants to address problems … with a $2 billion proposal to improve water quality in the Buffalo Niagara region and the rest of New York State.
Part of the money would be spent on projects beyond gray infrastructure – like replacing water and sewer lines and expanding wastewater plants – and instead pay for ways to prevent water pollution in the first place, proponents said.
The spending Cuomo called for in his State of the State speech last week shocked environmental activists.
“This was an amazing proposal,” said Jessica Ottney Mahar, policy director for the Nature Conservancy. “The level of funding is exciting, and frankly, it surprised me.”
At this critical time of year for Colorado River snowpack, things are looking very good. For the first time this year, the April-July runoff forecast has climbed above 10 million acre feet.
Snowpack above Lake Powell, courtesy CBRFC
The snowpack among the sites above Lake Powell where the federal government maintains real-time monitoring equipment is 57 percent above the long term median for this point in the year.
The amount of snow does not translate directly into river water because of a number of mediating factors – dry soils going into the season can soak up some of that, and warmer temperatures mean greater evaporation. That said, however, the latest model runs by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center put April-July runoff at 40 percent above average. That’s the 10maf runoff forecast.
But since a key thing in water management is to enjoy the best but be ready for the worst, the most important thing in the CBRFC forecast is the forecasters’ bad news scenario. They calculate not only the most probable runoff, but also a sort of “worst case”, something you would expect in the driest 10 percent of years. That worst case right now is for above average runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
Here’s how this translates to policy, and why this is especially good news for those in the Lower Colorado River Basin trying to cope with the decline of Lake Mead. The nominal required release (shut up lawyers, I know that’s a contested characterization, let’s just go with it) from Lake Powell to Lake Mead each year is 8.23 million acre feet per year. When there’s more water in Powell, we move “bonus water” downstream, and lately there’s enough for 9 million acre foot releases. The current snowpack pretty greatly increases the probability of 9maf releases for the next couple of years, which makes it much easier to keep Mead from slipping into shortage.
The 1-in-10 best case scenario is nearly 13maf. Under Mead-Powell operating rules, a year like that would mean far more than 9 million acre feet for Lake Mead, which combined with current conservation efforts would buy the Lower Basin years of cushion before shortage.
update: here’s a link to the full text of the Secretarial order
The Obama administration’s senior western water leadership this afternoon announced a Colorado River water management package that appears intended to signal a bridge for the administration transition, to continue work on nearly-completed deals to reduce the draining of the river’s big reservoirs.
The package falls short of two major deals some had hoped to be completed before the current team left – a deal with Mexico over future Colorado River water sharing, and a set of agreements among US states and the federal government to reduce water use in the Colorado River Basin, protecting the river’s beleaguered reservoirs. But it suggests that those deals are now the subject of widespread and bipartisan agreement, and appears to create a framework for continuity as the deals’ final details are worked out, rather than a risk of a sudden change in direction as the new administration takes office Jan. 20.
Lake Mead, December 2016
The package is embodied in a “secretarial order” signed this afternoon by Sally Jewell that includes new data suggesting that, without action, the risk to Colorado River water supplies is growing. Absent action, according to the new Bureau of Reclamation modeling runs, there is a one in three chance of Lake Mead dropping below the critical elevation of 1,025 feet above sea level by 2026. At that level, drastic water supply cuts to be needed to keep the reservoir from dropping to dead pool.
With the proposed actions discussed in Jewell’s order, that risk drops to about a one in 16 risk, according to the new USBR analysis.
From Jewell’s order:
Given the significant progress that has already occurred, and the commitment of the Seven Basin States and other key leaders to finalize the drought response actions, there is a very high probability that this work will be completed in the first half of 2017.
As with much in Washington right now, what happens next is shrouded in uncertainty. But the deal appears to reflect quiet diplomacy between the Obama team and the incoming Trump administration to create a bridge toward solving these problems as the government changes hands later this week. I didn’t have time to catch Interior nominee Ryan Zinke’s testimony yesterday, but I’m told that in response to questioning from Catherine Cortez Masto, Zinke testified favorably about the nearly completed “Drought Contingency Plan” described in Jewell’s secretarial order. If true (anybody who watched, feel free to jump into the comments and elaborate) that would provide evidence for my hypothesis that the bridge is being built to try to ensure continuity in the final steps of working out these deals, and that the incoming administration may look favorably on this stuff.
Jewell’s announcement includes concrete steps toward a near term reduction in Colorado River water use, including an agreement to pay the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona $6 million this year to forebear water use, leaving the unused apportionment in Lake Mead. That’s a critical piece of Arizona’s part of the complex water saving deals now being negotiated. While the amount of water is relatively small, it fills a critical political and policy niche by demonstrating a new path to reduced water use in Arizona.
The deal also adds an addendum to an agreement between the federal government and the Salton Sea. Dealing with the Salton Sea is critical (see my Sacramento Bee piece from last month for details on why). Jewell’s move here is an effort to bolster efforts to deal with the Salton Sea problems, which is critical to winning support in return from the giant Imperial Irrigation District for the water use deals.
Jewell’s order also sets out an interesting set of steps to be implemented should further negotiations to finalize the water-saving agreements among the states fizzle, including this: “undertaking a review of the Secretary’s authorities under the Law of the River to implement policies that will reduce depletions in the Lower Basin”. Of course any order by the old Secretary of the Interior can be un-order by the new one, but this provides a threat in the background – if the states don’t work out the final details of a deal, the federal government should at least consider stepping in and ordering action to protect Lake Mead.
This is a big deal:
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which gathers water for 19 million people in the region, expects it can now begin storing water for future years. In recent years, it had been using up its water reserves.
It’s just one bit of a thoroughly excellent piece on the state of California’s drought by Ry Rivard at Voice of San Diego.
If Met can store this year because of surplus in local and Northern California supplies, that buys the big water agency breathing room in current negotiations over water use reductions on the Colorado River. Which means those of out here in the rest of the West, the ones nervously eyeing California because of their importance to our shared water supplies, can breathe more easily.
I’ll be doing an American Water Resources Association Webinar Wednesday, Jan. 18, at 1 pm EST, talking about my book.
The question of the headline, which was the title for the talks I gave last week in Phoenix was, I admit, a little cheeky. I’m just some schlub from New Mexico with an academic title and a book. That doesn’t mean I know the answer to the question. But to the extent I have an answer, it is this – Arizona (and lots of other places) probably don’t need as much water as they think.
Citrus groves, Mesa Arizona
Arizona gets some criticism in my book – for some holes in its groundwater management laws, and for its sometimes pugilistic approach to water management with its neighbors. But one of the things I very much like about Arizona is that both of those things arose out of a very deep and serious ongoing community conversation about water. I’ve seen this before, but I was really struck again on this visit by the passion and thoughtful conversations about water in Arizona.
My “probably not as much water as you think” argument is based on data on “decoupling” in Arizona and elsewhere – the way populations and economies have been growing in recent decades while water use has not. This is true across most geographies and water use categories in the United States, and for my talks I pulled together a few Arizona datasets that illustrates the phenomenon there:
As I argued in this piece I wrote last year, decoupling of water use from economic activity and population growth is a critical feature of the contemporary water policy landscape. If we can incorporate it in our policy discussions, it will provide crucial breathing room for the kind of collaborative arrangements I argue for in my book.
Part of my answer to our cheeky talk title question is that it’s for Arizonans to decide how much water they need. But successful decoupling means they have a lot more space to do it than some of the conflict-ridden discussions within the state might suggest.