Posted on 04/30/2015 8:18:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.
What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent immigration.
A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one’s view on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure.
Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice to continually increase water storage.
Environmentalists counter that existing dams and reservoirs have already tapped out the state’s potential to transfer water from the wet areas, where 75 percent of the snow and rain fall, to the dry regions, where 75 percent of the population prefers to reside.
But that analysis is incomplete.
After the initial phases of the federal Central Valley Project and state California Water Project were largely finished — and flooding was no longer considered a dire threat in Northern California — environmentalists in the last 40 years canceled most of the major second- and third-stage storage projects. To take a few examples, they stopped the raising of Shasta Dam, the construction of the Peripheral Canal, and gargantuan projects such as the Ah Pah and Dos Rios reservoirs.
Those were certainly massive, disruptive, and controversial projects with plenty of downsides — and once considered unnecessary in an earlier, much smaller California. But no one denies now that they would have added millions of acre-feet of water for 40 million people.
Lower foothill dams such as the proposed Sites, Los Banos, and Temperance Flat dams in wet years would have banked millions of acre-feet as insurance for dry years. All such reservoirs were also canceled.
Yet a single 1 million acre-foot reservoir can usually be built as cheaply as a desalinization plant. It requires a fraction of desalinization’s daily energy use, leaves a much smaller carbon footprint, and provides almost 20 times as much water. California could have built perhaps 40–50 such subsidiary reservoirs for the projected $68 billion cost of the proposed high-speed rail project.
No one knows the exact figures on how many million acre-feet of water have been sent to the ocean since the beginning of the drought. California’s dams and reservoirs were originally intended to meet four objectives: flood control, agricultural irrigation, recreation, and hydroelectric generation. The inevitable results of sustaining a large population and vibrant economy were dry summer rivers in the lowlands and far less water reaching the San Francisco Bay and delta regions.
Yet state planners once accepted those unfortunate tradeoffs. They would never have envisioned in a state of 40 million using the reservoirs in a drought to release water year-round for environmental objectives such as aiding the delta smelt or reintroducing salmon in the San Joaquin River watershed.
No one knows the exact figures on how many million acre-feet of water have been sent to the ocean since the beginning of the drought. Most agree that several million acre-feet slated for households or farming went out to sea.
There is more irony in opposing the construction of man-made and unnatural reservoirs, only to assume that such existing storage water should be tapped to ensure constant, year-round river flows. Before the age of reservoir construction, when rivers sometimes naturally dried up, such an environmental luxury may have impossible during dry years.
Agriculture is blamed for supposedly using 80 percent of California’s storage water and providing less than 5 percent of the state’s GDP in return. But farming actually uses only about 40 percent of the state’s currently available water. Agriculture’s contribution to the state’s GDP cannot be calibrated just by the sale value of its crops, but more accurately by thousands of subsidiary and spin-off industries such as fuel, machinery, food markets and restaurants that depend on the state’s safe, reliable and relatively inexpensive food.
The recent rise of Silicon Valley has brought in more billions of dollars in revenue than century-old farming, but so far, no one has discovered how to eat a Facebook page or drink a Google search.
Stanford University, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley do not sit on natural aquifers sufficient to support surrounding populations. Only privileged water claims on transfers from Yosemite National Park, the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains, Northern California, or the Colorado River allow these near-desert areas along the coastal corridor to support some 20 million residents. Much of their imported water is used only once, not recycled, and sent out to sea.
A final irony is that the beneficiaries of these man-made canals and dams neither allowed more water storage for others nor are willing to divert their own privileged water transfers to facilitate their own dreams of fish restoration. Nature may soon get back to normal — but will California?
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Democrats never let a crisis go to waste even if they created or allowed it to happen.
“Crises created or saved”, an important number for the opportunistic.
Misleading headline as far as I am concerned, the drought is the result of natural weather patterns affecting California, all man can do is mitigate the results. Yes, we could have been better prepared with more storage and better modern purifying and recycling technology. And yes moonbeam and demoncrats have always put gaia above man in California and they bear a great deal of responsibility for the current state of water resources.
thank you. I was about to make the same comment, but you probably said it better anyway.
truth!!!!
Thanks I'll mark it down in my calendar, it's such an infrequent event! : )
Need ballot initiative “wa wa no choo choo”
so far, no one has discovered how to eat a Facebook page or drink a Google search.
Very,very funny and 100% accurate.
liberals destroyed over 500+ dams and then let what little water was left go out to the ocean to save a stupid fish no one cares about.
Hep, completely preventable, by electing conservatives instead of loony global warming hucksters.
I was going to say the same thing.
I think a more appropriate title would have been: "Why California's water shortage was completely preventable".
We have the means and methods to create vast water storage capabilities, yet, environmentalists and politicians gainfully employed by them have sold the public down the river.
You see it written sometimes as "California has over a 1000 dams" and sometimes as "California has 1400 dams".
Either way, most of the best and better dam sites already have dams built, which means, any new water storage project will have higher costs for less water.
Sometimes people like to point water projects that were rejected decades ago, such as Ah Pah dam, or more dams on the Colorado, but these will not be built.
So please tell me, what are these "vast water storage projects".
The reality is to look at the projects the voters approved last Nov: Sites Reservoir, Temperance Flat Dam, and raising Shasta dam. All being expensive and not much capacity.
They scoffed at these projects 2 years into the drought, but 4 years into the drought, they seem more reasonable.
islamidemocommucrats
Uhm, tearing down dams that should have either remained in place or rebuilt...and for a state that is for all practical purposes, a desert, to not be looking at any and all means to store water regardless of size, is short sighted and stupid.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23508105/californias-biggest-dam-removal-project-history-begins-carmel
http://scc.ca.gov/2011/06/10/dam-removal-projects-funded-by-the-coastal-conservancy/
In addition to refilling aquifers and reservoirs that have been or are being bled dry by insane water usage. No mandatory desert landscaping, allowing golf courses to maintain their lush features, allowing more building permits for homes, etc. Pure insanity and then the brown eye promotes $10,000 fines on top of that...insanity.
We in the High Desert have been told we’re not going to be allowed to refill our aquifers to capacity in order to address our needs...the needs of the elitist LA Basin take priority.
I agree and I find it hard to believe that
Vic Davis Hanson would come up with that
title. In fact, if the article title was
provided by NR it would be a surprise.
Droughts happen. It is some of the EFFECTS
of droughts that man can control, at least
as far as California is concerned.
Those who would restrict water storage efforts
and those who favor lax policies on illegal
immigration may not be the exact same people
but they certainly support the exact same
political party. Also, if agricultural
represents only 5% of California’s GDP then
I would sure like to know what comprises the
other 95%.
That is the fate of all dams/lakes.
I’ll defer after this,
But the point is that the state has done little to nothing to mitigate the water situation.
If anything, they’ve exacerbated the problem in numerous ways.
FRegards,
SZ
“A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States”
Seems this is one of our biggest problem. We would have a lot more water for citizens without them.
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