A California conspiracy?

Familiar pleasures of air travel: crying baby, neighbor with stanky feet, and person in the window seat with the bladder of a small woodland animal. On my way back from Seattle I was enjoying another: blowhard in the seat behind you.

“Oh yeah, me and Ronnie Lott are good buddies. Yeah, Ronnie always comes over to my place to watch the games. Y’know, I used to take Ronnie fishing in the delta all the time…” As interesting as it was to hear that one of my favorite childhood football players is apparently a really nice guy, I cranked up my This American Life in an effort to escape.

What aspect of sound is it that transcends all barriers to dance right on your eardrum no matter what you do? Is it timbre? Pitch? Whatever it is, this guy had it, but at least he moved on from name-dropping.

Click to enlarge

Transcribing blowhard-speak hurts my fingers, so I’ll summarize: California Governor Jerry

Brown is pushing hard to build two giant tunnels to augment the existing system that carries a buttload of water from the Sacramento River Delta to Southern California. California’s water problems are obvious, as is the fact that Southern California is a desert filled with 22 million people (twice the population of Greece), so I wasn’t surprised that the governor is focused on some response.

The fella behind me denounced a slew of environmental degradation, corporate influence, and violation of democracy, but those themes are the perfect blend of incredibly serious and tragically commonplace that make them kind of impossible to listen to. I turned up my podcast.

But this morning I saw a story about the tunnels, so looked into it over breakfast. I figure the future of my state can have the length of time it takes me to eat a bagel.

-Jerry Brown pushed hard for a similar plan in his first stint as governor, but it was defeated in a statewide referendum in 1982. Now he’s apparently going for it without the pesky interference of democracy.

-Despite Brown’s claims of environmental benefit (water currents for salmon navigation), I am skeptical that draining the delta and increasing its salinity will protect its fish, and the habitat restoration element has already been reduced by 90%, plus is a completely separate project now anyway, so I’m gonna call greenwashing bullshivers on that one.

So, pulling from dark (dried blood) red
to send to lighter (still bleeding) red?

-Taking the water would mess up and contaminate the already devastated ecosystems and water supplies of everything downriver, including the East Bay where I live.

-The governor’s office estimates it would cost $15 billion. Holy crapcakes! Critics say that’s a low estimate for just construction, and the real cost to build, operate, and maintain would be more like 50 billion dollars. $50,000,000,000

-Taxpayers and water customers would pay most of it, though their bills have already been raised since drought measures have succeeded in reducing water usage.

Lots of info, but focus on the blue line

-The Water Districts (Kern County, Westlands, Metropolitan) that are pushing for the project already receive the majority of the water pumped down there, which is publicly subsidized for farming, but often sold for private profit. How is that legal?

-LA uses less water today than it did 30 years ago, and the Metropolitan WD’s sales have already declined by 30% plus a number of their customer cities are planning on buying even less/none in the future, yet the WD wants these tunnels. Why?

-The Municipal Water District includes a number of water-intensive big agribusiness companies, growing the nation’s almonds, cotton, alfalfa, that sort of thing. But there’s another client batch that piqued my attention:

-Big Oil companies down there need billions of gallons of water for their intended fracking operations.

I took this in Sonora with my lady, the water used to hit the underside of that
bridge. Now, a crashed car below it was hard to see. It's further than it looks.

And here is where the blowhard’s story outcompeted Ira Glass. “I called (some reporter) at (news network) and told her all this. She was stoked! Really into it, said she’d look into it more and give me a call back. Days went by, then weeks, I sent her a couple emails asking ‘What’s up?’ but she wouldn’t get back to me. Finally after, like, three weeks, she calls me back and says ‘I can’t report this story. We’re talking about Halliburton, Chevron, those guys. Big money. These people own my network. I can’t report it. I’m sorry.’ They don’t want this water for people, man, the people are already using less and there are better sources. They need this water for fracking. That’s what it’s all about.”

A name-dropping blowhard on a plane is easy to ignore, but what if some of what he says checks out? Plus, as far as I can tell, Ronnie Lott really is a great guy.

California is not in a drought.

It would have been the most benevolent vandalism ever. (Unless you count this, which you should.) On the bathroom wall was an earnest entreaty to my fellow rock climbers to save water, because “California is in a drought.” The statement was followed by some facts and figures, and some of those ubiquitous and alarming photos of dried-up reservoirs.

I agree with the sentiment, but I have a problem with the wording. Because I have bad news: California is not in a drought. At least, not in the sense in which we understand the term.

A drought is something you hunker down and wait out. You install low-flow toilets and let your lawn die, then two years later you replace the grass (in the meantime you've realized that NOT having low-flow toilets just doesn't make sense). But this? This isn't that kind of drought.

Should I list data? Talk about the mega drought? Would that be too depressing? The most important datum is that our definition of “normal” is based on the 20th century, which was the wettest in the previous millenium. Our “normal” was highly abnormal.

Hence my vandal urges (vandalbond urges?) in the bathroom: to change “California is in a drought” to “California is a desert.” The advice/plea for saving water is the same, but the mindset is crucially different. This is not something we just outwait for a couple years, this is the reality for the rest of the century.

When Lydia and I were in Sonora for the solstice, we found
this bridge over a nearly empty reservoir. A car crashed
at the bottom on the other side looked tiny.

Also, while the poster’s recommendations (like turning the water off while you soap up in the shower etc) are important, they’re not very well prioritized. Better is to skip beef and nuts. For that matter, call someone in government and point out how ridiculous it is that Jerry Brown's new water conservation rules say nothing about agriculture, which uses 80% of California's water. (All residential use combined accounts for 14%. Almond production alone guzzles 10% of CA's water. That's ridiculous. Time to find somewhere else to grow almonds.)

On the plus side, I'm going to get some epic desert photos in my home state. I wonder if we'll riot when the water runs out gets expensive?