U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced in a press release that the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation “will invest nearly $50 million to improve water efficiency and conservation in California and 11 other western states.”

“In a time of exceptional drought, it is absolutely critical that states and the federal government leverage our funding resources so that we can make each drop count,” said Secretary Jewell. “Being ‘water smart’ means working together to fund sustainable water initiatives that use the best available science to improve water conservation and help water resource managers identify strategies to narrow the gap between supply and demand.”

Secretary Jewell made the announcement Wednesday at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, joined by Nancy Sutley, chief sustainability and economic development officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Estevan López, commissioner of the DOI Bureau of Reclamation. Her remarks included a push for more federal-state partnerships in the area of water conservancy.

“Through the WaterSMART Program, Reclamation is providing funding for water conservation improvements and water reuse projects across the West,” Reclamation Commissioner Estevan López said. “We commend the state of California for all the steps they have already taken to alleviate the impacts of the drought. We hope this federal funding for water reuse and efficiency will help us leverage scarce resources between the state and federal governments to bring much-needed relief for the people and environment of California.”

WaterSMART, according to its website, is a “program of the Department of the Interior that focuses on improving water conservation and helping water-resource managers make sound decisions about water use.”

According to the release, Reclamation is investing “more than $24 million in grants for 50 water and energy efficiency projects in 12 western states, more than $23 million for seven water reclamation and reuse projects in California, and nearly $2 million for seven water reclamation and reuse feasibility studies in California and Texas.”

At the protests, in Los Angeles and Sacramento, activists delivered more than 500,000 signatures from people in California and around the country who signed onto a series of urgent petitions to Nestlé executives, Governor Brown, the California State Water Resources Control Board,  and the U.S. Forest Service urging an immediate shutdown of Nestlé’s bottling operations across the state.

“With people across California doing their part to conserve water — it’s time that Nestlé did the right thing and put people over profits — by immediately halting their water bottling operations across the State,” wrote Tim Molina in a press release. He is the strategic campaign organizer for the California-based Courage Campaign. “If Nestlé won’t do what’s right to protect California’s precious water supply, it is up to Governor Brown and the California Water Resource Control Boards to step in and stop this blatant misuse of water during our state’s epic drought.”

The Desert Sun conducted an investigation on bottling practices in March and found that Nestlé has been operating on a permit that expired back in 1988. The findings continue as follows:

[blockquote style=”3″]

• “No state agency is tracking exactly how much water is used by all of the bottled water plants in California, or monitoring the effects on water supplies and ecosystems statewide. The California Department of Public Health regulates 108 bottled water plants in the state, collecting information on water quality and the sources tapped. But the agency says it does not require companies to report how much water they use.
• “That information, when collected piecemeal by state or local agencies, often isn’t easily accessible to the public. In some cases, the amounts of water used are considered confidential and not publicly released.
• “Even as Nestle Waters has been submitting required reports on its water use, the Forest Service has not been closely tracking the amounts of water leaving the San Bernardino National Forest and has not assessed the impacts on the environment.
• “While the Forest Service has allowed Nestle to keep using an expired permit for nearly three decades, the agency has cracked down on other water users in the national forest. Several years ago, for instance, dozens of cabin owners were required to stop drawing water from a creek when their permits came up for renewal. Nestle has faced no such restrictions.
• “Only this year, after a group of critics raised concerns in letters and after The Desert Sun inquired about the expired permit, did Forest Service officials announce plans to take up the issue and carry out an environmental analysis.”[/blockquote]

A recent poll by Forbes noted that 65 percent of Americans believe that Nestlé “should stop using California water to create bottled water.”

But Bruce Maiman from the Sacramento Bee reported Nestlé uses 80 million gallons per year, in comparison to the 65 trillion gallons of water that the state normally receives. He noted Nestlé’s bottling operations are “troubling” but halting them will likely solve nothing.

Nestlé has responded to harsh criticism in a variety of statements and outlined the impact of their operations in California, stating that the water they source from the state is “used efficiently and effectively, and bottled so that it can be drunk as part of a healthy diet.” The amount of water that Nestlé withdraws is “[l]ess than 0.008 percent of the total.”

“Nearly 50 billion cubic metres (13 trillion gallons) of water is used in California each year. Nestlé uses less than 4 million cubic metres (1 billion gallons) in all its operations. We operate five bottled water plants (out of 108 in the state) and four food plants. Our bottled water plants use around 2.75 million cubic metres (725 million gallons) of water a year.”

Even if Nestlé were to shut down all of its bottling plants in California, “the resulting annual savings would be less than 0.3 percent of the total the governor says the state needs residential and public users to save.”

It wasn’t the intention of the Los Angeles Times, but the newspaper has provided historical drought data with implications for a U.S. Supreme Court case that was heard Monday, Feb. 24  — “U.S. Chamber of Commerce v. U.S. EPA.”

The case challenges whether the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can expand its mission from reducing air pollution to fighting global warming without going back to Congress for authorization to do so.  This has relevance for the California Air Resources Board and its similar shift from reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the vaguer task of fighting “climate change.”  Assembly Bill 32, the state’s far-reaching environmental law, was known as the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. But CARB changed the focus of AB32 with the release of its “Climate Change Scoping Plan” in 2008.

The Times’ story (“Severe Drought? California Has Been There Before,” Feb. 23) reconstructed 1,000 years of climate records from tree ring data.  Dendrochronology is the study of tree rings as an indicator of changes in climate; “dendro” means relating to trees.  Thick rings indicate wet climate and tree growth and narrow rings dryness and less growth.

Driest years in CA mostly predated Industrial Revolution

A chart showing the 1,000-year record of “wetter than average” and “drier than average” years indicates that 1580 was the driest year on record.  California had a severe dry spell from 1976 to 1977.  But the only years that were drier were prior to 1580.  This data can be read as refuting the assumption that industrialization has resulted in either significant global warming or vaguely defined climate change.

The Times’ climate chronology echoes a recent study of California climate conducted by biologist Jim Steele, formerly a supervisory biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.  In his 2013 book, “Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism,” Steele studied 100 years of climate data from Lake Tahoe.

What he found was that California wasn’t “getting hotter, just less cold.”  Steele says that studying average temperatures to find climate change is not as useful as studying maximum and minimum temperatures.

The California Air Resources Board has won two court challenges to the legality of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32).  However, former EPA attorney Jacob Hollinger of the McDermott, Will and Emery law firm in New York stated a ruling against the EPA in the U.S. Supreme Court case could be utilized to challenge every future step of its effort to manage climate change. Since the current case before the Supreme Court consolidated challenges to the EPA from the states of California, Virginia and Texas, and from industrial organizations, there would be implications for California if the case were decided broadly.

Air board facing legal challenges over change in goals

CARB’s shift from dealing with global warming to managing climate change could have implications in another case filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation alleging that its cap-and-trade air pollution permit auctions are a tax.  PLF’s case (“The Morning Star Packing Co. v. CARB,” filed in April 2013) resulted in a trial decision backing the air board in November, but it has been appealed.  The PLF complaint states:

“The California Air Resources Board (CARB) devised the auction plan as a means of raising billions of dollars in revenue, without any instruction or direction from the Legislature. CARB hatched the auction program purportedly to implement AB 32, the 2006 legislation that requires reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide in California by the year 2020. But nothing in AB 32 authorizes creation of an auction process to sell carbon dioxide emission allowances for billions of dollars. Nor does AB 32 authorize the creation of any kind of new tax.”

On Feb. 10, 2014, CARB released its first update to its Climate Change Scoping Plan of 2008, which stated:

“Climate change presents an unprecedented set of challenges for California.  We are already experiencing its impacts and know they will only increase. But it can also be a great unifier.”

Use of cap-and-trade auction proceeds targeted

However, what California’s Global Warming Solutions Act and the cap-and-trade program have yielded is a series of divisive court cases.  Gov. Brown’s recent transfer of $20 million of cap-and-trade revenues to water conservation projects to alleviate drought indicates that California doesn’t even have to invoke the need to reduce air pollution or carbon dioxide to find a justification to spend the money as it pleases.

Brown even wants to use $1 billion per year of cap-and-trade revenues to pay off bonds to build California’s high-speed rail project authorized under Proposition 1A in 2008.  That plan may depend not only on challenges to the legality of issuing bonds, but also on the lawsuit against the EPA now being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Beyond the governor’s fiscal maneuvering, the L.A. Times’ drought chronology story raises more basic questions about the broad claims used to justify both AB32 and federal regulations. If historical evidence doesn’t back up the assertions made about either global warming or climate change, that strengthens the arguments of skeptics who argue such laws and regulations are more power grabs than wise public policy. This in turn may strengthen the cases of those challenging the implementation and interpretations of these laws and regulations.