On the California Water Front

On the California Water Front

 

How green politics has exacerbated the state's growing shortages.

From the Wall Street Journal

Governor Jerry Brown in his state of California speech last week recalled Joseph's advice from scripture to "Put away your surplus during the years of great plenty so you will be ready for the lean years which are sure to follow." If only government water regulators were as wise as Joseph.

Mr. Brown has declared the state's severe drought an emergency. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the state's primary water source, is 20% of normal for this time of year, and reservoirs that capture the melted runoff are fast being depleted. While urging conservation, he says the government's ability to provide relief is limited since "we can't make it rain." That's refreshing modesty for Democrats these days. But the water shortage like so many other crises in California has been exacerbated by government. Californians are getting another first-hand lesson in the high costs of green regulation.

Local water districts that supply southern California, the Bay Area and the southern San Joaquin Valley may receive only 5% of their contractual allocations this year while growers in the heart of the valley might be cut off completely. Supplies for residents north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could be sharply restricted for the first time.

Districts in the south report they can weather the drought through 2015 without rationing water since they've invested in underground storage, desalination, wastewater reclamation and water metering. Yet the normally flush north, which likes to blame southern Californians for wasting the state's most precious resource, has been slow to adopt such technologies and is now feeling the pinch.

The green paradise of Santa Cruz has barred restaurants from serving water with meals except on diners' request. Sacramento residents have been ordered to scale back their water consumption by 20% and forbidden from using sprinklers on weekdays or washing cars with a hose. City workers and neighborhood watch groups are patrolling the streets for scofflaws.

Suffering the most are farmers south of the delta whose water allocations have plunged over the last two decades due to endangered-species protections. According to the Western Growers Association, up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water is diverted annually to environmental uses like wildlife refuges and salmon restoration. That's enough to sustain 4.4 million families, irrigate 1.1 million acres of land and grow more than 100 million tons of grapes.

Farmers are having to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres and pump groundwater, which depletes aquifers and can cause land subsidence. One irony here is that environmentalists are destroying one of FDR's great public-works programs—irrigating the naturally arid San Joaquin Valley.

California's biggest water hog is the three-inch smelt, which can divert up to one million acre-feet in a wet year. In 2008, federal regulators at the prodding of green groups restricted water exports south to protect the smelt, which have a suicidal tendency to swim into the delta's pumps. While wildlife refuges have continued to receive all 400,000 acre-feet of water they're entitled to under environmental regulations, farmers haven't gotten 100% of their water allocations since 2006. Even during years of heavy precipitation, federal regulators have supplied growers with 45% to 80% of their contractual deliveries.

After a deluge late in 2012, 800,000 acre-feet of melted snowpack was flushed into the San Francisco Bay. Regulators worried that reservoirs could overflow if the heavy precipitation continued. Yet they didn't want to harm the smelt by pumping more water south. All that flushed-out water would come in handy now.

California also has limited surface water storage because green groups oppose building new reservoirs or expanding existing ones like the Shasta Dam. Construction could disturb species's habitats. Reservoirs also encourage population growth, which is one reason many northern California communities rely heavily on groundwater.

Senator Dianne Feinstein noted last year that "expanding and improving California's water storage capacity is long overdue" since the last significant government investments in water storage and delivery were in the 1960s—not incidentally before the California Environmental Quality Act and National Environmental Policy Act were enacted in 1970. Those laws make it easier for environmentalists to block public works.

Ms. Feinstein and her fellow Democrats are now rushing to dodge the political storm brewing in the San Joaquin Valley. Earlier this month, she and her fellow California Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Jim Costa of Fresno urged federal agencies to "exercise their discretion in regulatory decision-making within the confines of the law to deliver more water to those whose health and livelihoods depend on it."

That sounds nice, but both Senators left farmers out to dry in 2012 when they opposed House legislation that would have redirected more water to humans and helped mitigate the present shortage. The Senators claimed the bill would "eviscerate state and federal environmental laws and water rights" and "seriously set back California's ability to resolve its water challenges." President Obama threatened a veto.

Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes and David Valadao plan to introduce similar legislation that would temporarily suspend some environmental regulations and put humans at the front of the water line once it starts raining. This is a modest step toward reforming the absurd government status quo that puts green indulgences above human welfare.