Green Busting Our Water Social Contract

Pasadena Sub Rosa ^ | February 25, 2009 | Wayne Lusvardi

[WayneLusvardi]

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert and Tim Brick, head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (*Use Less and Pay More,* LATimes, Feb. 24) state that *we can't afford our wasteful ways any longer* when it comes to water. Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brick24-2009feb24,0,3291692.story

Contrary to Patzert and Brick, our present water situation is not a drought caused by household waste or even population growth. Conservation and agricultural efficiencies have brought about roughly the same level of water use over the last ten years. Drought is a misnomer. Even water activist Dorothy Green recently stated there is no *drought.*

Drought is the natural condition of Southern California . Enough water flows to the sea even in Southern California in a typical rainy winter week to supply the population for a year. So what we experience as *drought* is the lack of water capture and storage (i.e., slippage). What we conventionally call a drought in California is the unpredictable skipping of a peak rainfall year which typically supplies enough water to fill reservoirs to last for a few years.

The crisis water policy paradigm that Patzert and Brick embrace is that it is water waste at the homeowner level that is the cause of our impending water shortage (e.g., swimming pools, azalea and rose gardens, etc.). Now they want Californians to cut out dependence on imported water usage cold turkey and almost overnight or they will jerk up water rates. They fail to mention that farmers north of the Sacramento Delta have surplus water they want to sell to thirsty Southern California this year but can not do so due to an environmental lawsuit over the decline of the Delta Smelt fish population resulting in a court-ordered 85% reduction of imported water shipments.

Patzert and Brick crisis approach to water policy busts California 's historical water social contract. Instead of depending solely on local groundwater supplies Californians historically agreed to pay for huge water and hydroelectric infrastructure projects in return for being able to create garden and pool homes in former semi-arid coastal areas. These large water infrastructure projects were built during the last Great Depression, and the recession of the 1970’s caused by an oil crisis, as the stimulus projects of their eras. What got taxpayers to buy in to paying for such public works and jobs projects was the reciprocating benefits to their home values. This formed California's water social contract.

What large regional water projects did was shift water resources from one ecology to create another ecology elsewhere. So the Delta Smelt fish may have nearly disappeared in the Sacramento Delta (possibly due to environmental water quality improvements), while recreational fishing reservoirs, Koi ponds, and fish aquariums thrive in Southern California. Thus the calculus of environmental impacts and mitigations is a social fiction. Given the current court-ordered shut off of 85% of Northern California water, which environmental impact should be mitigated: the small upstream impact to the Delta Smelt; or the larger downstream impact to recreational fishing lakes, Koi ponds, gardens, and aquariums?

Californians have paid mega-billions of dollars for water projects and related environmental mitigations for what essentially is a shift of ecologies. Now to dissolve the social contract to all those water ratepayers who have paid for our gigantic water infrastructure system and all the accompanying environmental mitigations would be tantamount to judicial double capture, or a taking, by environmentalists.

By continuing to propagate the social fictions that our drought is a crisis caused by wasteful homeowners or farmers or by permanent climate change diverts attention away from the busting of the water social contract. But as the White House Chief of Staff recently said with respect to our national financial meltdown, *you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.*

Wayne Lusvardi, Pasadena, formerly Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, has written about water policy for Aquafornia.com and Privatization Watch (Reason Public Policy Institute) and the Los Angeles Business Journal. The views expressed are his own.

[pikachu]

Many years ago when I lived in San Diego, we had a drought and the Metropolitan Water Board asked us to conserve. We Did. Then the Metropolitan Water Board announced it had not sold enough water to cover this bills and HAD to raise rates. The bastards!

[GeronL]

instead of rationing water to swimming pools they cut out the farms? Do they have any idea of the economic impact of that??

Californistan is full of idjits