Earlier this month a letter was sent to Governor Newsom from the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 water agencies that together deliver water to nearly 30 million Californians and irrigate nearly one million acres of farmland. This letter is a document of extraordinary importance to the future of California’s water supply. It summarizes several significant reasons...
Of all the possible ways to increase California’s water supply, nothing compares to the potential of the so-called “big gulp,” that is, the ability of new and improved water infrastructure to safely divert millions of acre feet from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during high winter flows. How much water? A study published by the...
A few months ago I had the privilege of speaking directly with some of the top executives at one of California’s largest water agencies. Their primary question for me was explicit, and my attempts to answer were inadequate. They contend, accurately, that during the last century there were periods when massive federal funding to pay...
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...
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...
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...
One of the most controversial water issues in California is the proposed Delta Conveyance. The 45-mile-long tunnel will have the capacity to move up to 4 million acre feet per year from the Sacramento River safely under the fragile delta ecosystem, delivering water to southbound aqueducts. That’s not bad. But the reservoir storage necessary to allow the...
The concept of deep water desalination has been around for decades, but only in recent years has the enabling technology been available. Innovations pioneered by the oil and gas industry to better service offshore drilling platforms have matured. These include better ways to protect against corrosion of underwater equipment, and replacing hydraulic with electrical systems....
Despite its status as an agricultural superpower, eclipsing every other U.S. state in farm output, California’s farming sector wields relatively little influence in Sacramento. When you evaluate the state’s GDP components, the sectors that dominate are financial, IT, and services, at around a half-trillion each, followed by manufacturing and government at around $400 billion and $300...
There is a good chance that a Californian is going to be nominated to become the new Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. One source of opposition to his confirmation could be senators representing states that share with California the waters of the Colorado River, concerned that a Californian will not sufficiently take into account...
Governor Newsom’s priority constituency is now located outside of California and shaded purple, and a new team occupies the White House that is as red as red can be. So it is probably safe to say that even here in deep blue California, many of the policies governing energy and water are about to be...
A March 5 “Perspective” in the Manteca Bulletin highlights a chronically underemphasized problem impacting every Californian. Bass, as editor Dennis Wyatt succinctly explains, are a “destructive, invasive species, that are a serious threat to the sustainability of the ecosystem.” Wyatt proposes a solution that has been implemented in Oregon, a bounty system. As he puts it, “The state would...
On May 22, 2022, the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously to deny final approval for a desalination plant in Huntington Beach. It would have produced 56,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, and would have been privately financed. To describe in detail the 20 year and roughly $100 million ordeal that federal, state, regional,...