The short answer is no. Never. What is happening with the Sites Reservoir is a case study in why, if the people running California today were in charge in the 1950s and 1960s, the California Water Project would never have been built. This reservoir, approved by voters in 2014, could have been built by now....
ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization and winner of multiple Pulitzer prizes, recently published a report “The Drying Planet.” They report that “Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the...
Those of us following water politics and the water industry have become familiar with the most common units of water volume and water flow. Professionals in the industry make constant use of terms, often reduced to acronyms, forgetting that the rest of us may have no idea what they’re talking about. When it comes to...
In the case Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate greenhouse gases because they qualify as air pollutants. And ever since, electric power plants using “thermal” fuels have faced escalating regulatory pressure. How this has played out for coal fired power plants in the Western United States is summarized...
There are at least two massive opportunities to engage in cost-effective carbon sequestration. Neither would require subsidies and both could be performed exclusively by the private sector. They are controversial, but for different reasons. This week, building on last week’s report on the topic, we focus on the opportunity to responsibly manage every degraded forest...
There are obvious benefits to logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning of California’s forests. When you suppress wildfires for what is now over a century, then overregulate and suppress any other means to thin the forest, you get overcrowded and unhealthy forests. California’s trees now have 5 to 10 times more than a historically normal...
Silicon Valley veterans view Sacramento’s obsession with renewables mandates with pragmatic detachment. Blessed with disposable income sufficient to make them indifferent to the price of gasoline or electricity, they view life on the bleeding edge as an opportunity for California to lead the world into the electric age. They’re not wrong. Heartless, perhaps. But not...
It’s well known by now that California’s refinery capacity is stretched to the limit. The state’s total crude oil consumption last year was 1.40 million barrels per day, with daily refinery capacity at 1.62 million barrels per day. When accounting for downtime for maintenance and accidents such as the fire in the PBF refinery in Martinez, that’s a thin...
We are told that water scarcity in the arid American West is inevitable and that the great water projects of the past century were the product of misguided hubris. Environmentalists call for Westerners to shrink their agricultural sector and ration their urban water use and, increasingly, demolish the dams and reservoirs that enabled a civilization...
If there is anything that might constitute an overwhelming institutional consensus in California, it’s that we are experiencing climate change, and that one of the consequences will be more rain, less snow, and more so-called whiplash between very wet years and very dry years. In an average year these days, 30 million acre feet of water...
When it comes to building water supply infrastructure, even if regulations are streamlined and litigation is contained, there are massive costs. Quantifying these variables is something we have focused on a great deal, most recently in WC#96, “The Economics of the Delta Tunnel.” In that and other reports we’ve offered a highly simplified cost/benefit equation: divide...
When we talk about EVs, it is reasonable to suggest that at their current level of price and performance, whoever wants to use one has already made the purchase. After a decade of rapid year-over-year growth, EV sales in California in 2024 were actually a bit lower than they were in 2023. There aren’t enough...