Bill curbing abuses of “policing for profit” clears major hurdle

Good morning! It’s only Tuesday, but the week is rolling right along. And in fact, yesterday was a landmark day for civil libertarians in the state.

The California Assembly on Monday approved one of the most significant civil-liberties reforms of the legislative session. Remarkably, the bill – to put limits on the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture by police agencies – had no major opposition after legislators and law-enforcement groups pieced together a compromise that seems to genuinely satisfy both sides. It passed by a 67-7 vote.

Asset forfeiture is the practice by which police agencies grab assets – cash, cars, boats, homes – of suspected criminals. Designed originally to fight drug kingpins, asset forfeiture has morphed into a means by which agencies bolster their budgets. The overwhelming percentage of forfeiture cases involve people who have not been convicted or even accused of a crime. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The Department of Water Resources has been drilling for weeks in Yolo County without permits required by state law designed to protect against ground water contamination, under the belief its activities are exempt. Like other counties’ battles with Caltrans over the same issue, Yolo County believes even government agencies need to obtain permits and conform to the state’s Water Code and subsequent regulations, which clearly express that state agencies are not exempt,” CalWatchdog has more.

• Amid concerns of a tainted water supply, authorities in Fresno have brought in outside experts to take a close look while overhauling city water practices. First residents complained about discolored water. Then city officials reviewed the city’s response and whether it had complied with laws requiring water issues be reported to state regulators. Then it was discovered that a former city water official kept hidden several hundred complaints from about 2004 to 2011, raising the prospect that thousands of young Fresno residents among the city’s half-million population may have been exposed to lead poisoning growing up, which can cause cognitive problems that persist for a lifetime, reports CalWatchdog.

• “Donald Trump will be presented to California voters on Nov. 8 as the nominee of two different political parties, after leaders of the ultra-conservative American Independent Party voted to select the New York real estate developer as its standard bearer,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
• “In a bid to preserve California’s cap-and-trade program beyond 2020, Gov. Jerry Brown has quietly proposed amending major environmental legislation to expressly authorize the regulation’s extension,” writes The Sacramento Bee.

Assembly:

• Next floor session is Thursday. 

Senate:

• Next floor session is Thursday.

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

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New follower: @IvanLevingston

Like other counties’ battles with Caltrans over the same issue, Yolo County believes even government agencies need to obtain permits and conform to the state’s Water Code and subsequent regulations, which clearly express that state agencies are not exempt.

DWR, however, maintains it is exempt from the rules when engaging in “sovereign activities,” according to DWR spokeswoman Lauren Bisnett, who noted there are too many local regulations throughout the state for DWR to be expected to follow.

“We couldn’t follow local ordinances for every county,” Bisnett said. 

A Yolo County official confirmed on Friday that there were “active discussions” with DWR on the permitting issue and said the county is waiting for DWR to provide a legal opinion justifying its actions.

Sounds familiar

Avid CalWatchdog readers will remember a recent investigation uncovering a similar and widespread issue with Caltrans, where a fight with Sacramento County became ground zero in a statewide battle between counties and Caltrans. 

For around 25 years, Caltrans performed similar drilling — which essentially checks the structural soundness of the ground prior to building on top of it — under a similar belief it was exempt from state law.

In 2014, Caltrans brass decided to conform with the law going forward, spending millions of dollars to travel into the past to locate and seal thousands of holes. Caltrans estimates the effort could cost between $17 million and $37.2 million over the next five years, in addition to the $5.2 million that’s been spent already — with future budget requests dependent on whether counties will agree to let them off the hook for unfound holes.

Sacramento County issued a notice of violation to Caltrans late last year, threatening as much as $5.23 million per day until the borehole mitigation plan was complete. While the compliance date was January 4, an extension was granted. Since then, the matter has not been resolved and Sacramento County has been unable to provide an update. 

Bisnett told CalWatchdog that DWR had no opinion on Caltrans’ change of heart and its expensive efforts to retroactively comply with that law, and pointed to a difference of opinion between the two agencies.

The law

In 1986, the Legislature amended the California Water Code to include in its definition of regulated wells many of those drilled by DWR and Caltrans.

The measure and subsequent regulations did several things, including listing the state as an entity regulated by the law and empowering local agencies to meet or exceed state standards for drilling in their individual jurisdictions — Yolo County’s standards require permits.

Even as California at long last eased up on drought restrictions, Gov. Brown helped ensure that policies remaining in place will continue indefinitely. 

“In a major shift, the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown announced [last week] plans to drop all statewide mandatory water conservation targets it had imposed on urban areas last June,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “The new rules, which are expected to be approved May 18 by the State Water Resources Control Board, would instead allow more than 400 cities, water districts and private companies to each set their own water conservation targets, as long as they report them to state officials.”

But, by executive order, Gov. Brown also made clear that the pre-drought days of profligate water use were not about to return. “Brown’s order requires that cities submit monthly water use, conservation and enforcement reports to state officials,” Wired noted. “The order also promises updates to both urban and rural drought preparedness guidelines, and bans wasteful things like washing your car without a shut-off nozzle, or hosing down sidewalks.”

Strict regulations

Specifically, Californians did not regain the option of watering their lawns “within 48 hours of rain” or “using ornamental fountains unless the water is recirculated,” the Mercury News explained. Not just constraints on private individuals were left in place. The rules, first instituted in July 2014, also “ban cities and local governments from irrigating ornamental turf on public street medians,” the paper added. 

In a statement, Brown put the matter bluntly. “Now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence and water conservation must be a part of our everyday life,” he said. “To ensure compliance with these new targets and water management plan requirements, DWR, the State Water Board and the California Public Utilities Commission will work together to develop methods which could include technical and financial assistance, regulatory oversight and enforcement mechanisms,” the statement added. 

Itching for normal

The moves quickly triggered a similar response from some water districts. “The metropolitan water district of southern California says it will ease up on some water restrictions, but the state is doubling down on others,” as NPR observed. Although the state’s situation has improved thanks to a significant rainy season, the future remains unclear. “Thanks to El Niño, parts of Northern California saw above average rains and some reservoirs refilled to historical average,” Southern California Public Radio recalled. “Even the snowpack was close to average.”

But the rebound, suggested Discovery News, was limited: “In most of the state it’s half of what’s normal — or less, especially in the southern part of the state, according to California’s Department of Water Resources.” Mark Cowin, the agency’s director, sought to limit expectations. “We are trying to recognize that conditions have changed this year and while we are in a statewide drought, conditions have eased for some parts of the state,” he said, according to the Mercury News. 96 percent of the state has remained drier than average, the National Weather Service’s Mark Jackson told SCPR. 

Rebellion brewing

Not all Californians have embraced the prospect of indefinite water strictures. Homeowners associations have labored to endure yard and neighborhood conditions that would never have been tolerated before water rationing and regulation began in earnest.

The wealthy East Bay community of Blackhawk, for instance, raised eyebrows last month by threatening to fine residents who failed to keep their lawns green. “Starting on June 1, any of Blackhawk’s 2,000 homeowners who fail to maintain green lawns or install drought-tolerant landscaping will now risk fines or litigation, the Los Angeles Times reported. “Though local water officials say Blackhawk’s move is premature, and possibly violates a governor-backed emergency declaration to not penalize residents for failing to maintain a lush, green lawn, it is nonetheless something officials anticipated would eventually happen.”

The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.

TULARE, CA (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

California’s struggling infrastructure faced the daunting prospect of too little water underground and too much falling from the sky.

“Four years of drought and heavy reliance on pumping of groundwater have made the land sink faster than ever up and down the Central Valley, requiring repairs to infrastructure that experts say are costing billions of dollars,” the Associated Press reported, citing punishing conditions affecting everything from canals to well casings to “stretches of a riverbed undergoing historic restoration.”

The problem has been ongoing for months. “The sinking is buckling the walls of irrigation canals, damaging pipes, creating giant sink holes and cracking homes,” CBS News noted in August. “California’s farmers are pumping groundwater as fast as they can in order to keep their crops alive during a drought that has left them high and very dry. But when this much water is pumped out of the aquifer below ground, the clay between the pockets of water collapses and the ground starts to deflate like a leaky air mattress.”

Despite an unusually heavy El Niño, years of historically meager snowy seasons led farmers and others to turn to groundwater in lieu of high-altitude runoff. “Years of low snow packs in the Sierra Nevada mountains have forced California to pump water from underground reserves to meet residential and agricultural demand,” The Hill noted, adding that drought conditions push groundwater consumption up from 40 percent of total statewide usage to roughly two thirds during a drought.

California’s continuing dry spell, however, has pushed the imbalance even further, inflicting harm on the state’s sprawling but already derelict waterways. “Overpumping during the current drought has led to damaged water infrastructure around the state,” according to The Hill. “Replacing a bridge in one California irrigation district could cost $2.5 million, and building a new canal elsewhere recently cost $4.5 million.”

Too much too soon

But the collapse, and its attendant costs, have taken on an added urgency as the state faces a powerful new rainy season. In fact, El Niño rains were expected to push those costs even higher, as mudslides and flooding hit weakened structures. “Heavy rains often bring mudflows. But experts warn that the deluges expected this winter with El Niño are likely to be exacerbated by the dry conditions in countless hillside and canyon communities,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Even a little rain can set off a fast-moving debris flow, sweeping up anything in its way — loose boulders, tree limbs, cars, even homes.”

Officials faced tough tradeoffs between focusing on infrastructure repair and pivoting to emergency construction that would ameliorate the effects of El Niño. “From Ventura County to San Diego County, officials are racing to clean out debris basins, install protective barriers and develop evacuation plans for communities most at risk from an El Niño forecast to be one of the strongest ever recorded,” noted the Times.

Paying for less

Although experts have not calculated the final tab for the state’s subsidence, as the lowering of the ground level is called, estimates run as high as the billions over the long term. “Putting a grand total on damage from subsidence in California is tricky because irrigation districts don’t often single out repairs required by subsidence from general upkeep,” according to the AP. Department of Water Resources spokesman Ted Thomas told the wire service that the sinking of the California Aqueduct alone, which has reached over a foot, cost the state “tens of millions of dollars” over the past 40 years, with officials bracing for a similar expenditure going forward.

In the long run, however, new groundwater legislation has ensured that California farmland will simply be retired. “Groundwater pumping has kept hundreds of farms operating the past four years but continuous groundwater pumping won’t be allowed under the new California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which is set to take effect in 2020,” according to Ag Professional. “It will limit how much groundwater can be extracted over the long haul.”

The “dismal” snowpack means that when it melts, water will only trickle down the slopes, causing severe shortages in lowland areas.

She spoke at the Feb. 25-26 Drought Response Workshop, which CalWatchdog.com attended. It was sponsored by the DWR, the Southern California Water Committee and the National Water Resource Institute. It was held at the Atrium Hotel in Irvine for about 180 high-level water managers and consultants.

Jones put the current drought into perspective by showing a slide illustrating that 2014 was the fourth driest year of the last 114:

California is entering its fourth consecutive year of drought with all of its surface reservoirs at less than the historical average capacity, except for Folsom Lake.

California experienced drier years during the 1930’s Dust Bowl era. But Jones said California’s population at that time was only 6 million people, one sixth what it is today.

Driest three years

California also has had drier single years than 2014. But the 2012-14 years have been the driest three consecutive years based on statewide precipitation in recorded California history, slightly exceeding even the 1922-24 drought.

Despite the “abysmal” outlook, California water managers are planning on a 15 percent allocation of water to California’s Central Valley and Southern California cities for the 2015 water year, up from the 5 percent allocation last year.

However, this allocation is subject to revision depending on snowpack and water runoff conditions.

According to Jones, barring a miracle, the communities most likely to experience water reliability problems will be the 700 small water systems in California outside the major groundwater basins of the Central Valley.

Most of these are clustered along the northern California coastline and the eastern Sierra Nevada (see map at the bottom of the article).

Jones’ summary of the current drought situation is that “it is not looking good for our water supplies for this summer.”

She said the only hope is for another “March Miracle,” as the four weeks of rain were called in 1991 after five years of drought.

Other speakers

Grace Chan, Resource and Planning Manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, reported it had 1.2 million acre-feet of water in storage. That’s is enough for about 7 million people in wet years and about 10 million people during dry years.

Chan said 136 football fields of water one foot high had been conserved in Southern California due to MWD’s commercial turf removal program.  Although this represented only 0.003 percent of MWD’s 4 million acre-feet average water demand, Chan said the program was mainly for a “market transformation” for long-term change.

She concurred that only a 1991-style “March Miracle” could alleviate the drought adequately.

Eric Oppenheimer, Division Chief of the Office of Research, Planning and Performance for the State Water Resources Control Board, said it was likely it would renew emergency drought regulations that expire in April. Oppenheimer said the strongest comments received by the SCRCB to the current drought emergency regulations were:

• Non-drinkable, recycled water should be used for urban landscaping irrigation, construction and dust control.
• Food service and hospital sectors should be restricted from excess water use.
• Operation of all ornamental fountains in the state should be banned.
• All overhead irrigation should be prohibited during winter or rain events.

Oppenheimer indicated Southern California residents are more likely to see even further curtailments to the number of days that outdoor watering is permitted.

Finally, a new sort of water activist spoke during the comments period of the workshop, advocating greater water supplies rather than mere conservation.

Roger Butow, Executive Director of Clean Water Now and a former real estate developer, commented about the need for healthy ecosystems going with greater water supplies.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Dr. Jay R. Lund, Director of Watershed Sciences at U.C. Davis, posted the comment below at Calwatchdog.com on April 6 in response to my article, “Not A Shortage of Water Mythmakers”:

You can get roughly 75 percent of human water use in agriculture being agricultural in several ways, some from DWR [Department of Water Resources] and others from reading reports by local agencies and backing out water use from pretty well-understood fundamentals (like crop net water use rates, acres of crops, populations, and urban per-capita use rates). The numbers vary a bit with your assumptions, of course, but pretty much any reasonable estimate shows agriculture being the largest human use of water in California, by a fair bit. Many such estimates are a bit squishy, which is not surprising, but they provide some insights anyway.

So for further clarification to readers, I created the contingency table below from state data that breaks down the percentage of agricultural water used for a wet year, average year and dry year as a portion of:

• • * Total precipitation and imported water (total potential water);
  • * Total dedicated supply for urban, agriculture, and environment (total available water);
  • * Total urban and agricultural use only (total human water use).

Context of Discussion

The point of my April 5 article was to provide a counterpoint to the claim made by Dr. Peter Gleick, Ph.D., that there “isn’t enough water to satisfy demand” and that agriculture uses 80 percent of all water supplies.

When the public reads there isn’t enough water, I believe reasonable people would assume this to mean all water supplies from all sources — not just the amount of water available in California’s system of dams, canals, reservoirs and pipelines.

By analogy, how much water falls on all my property in a year, not just in the rain gutters that catch limited water runoff only from the roof?

What I think the public wants to know is how much total water is potentially available even if it is not “developed” or “captured.” When you’re making the Chicken Little claim that “we’re running out of water,” then the assumption is you’re talking about total potential water.  Otherwise you’re misleading the public that there is no more water available after agriculture uses 75 percent and cities use 25 percent.  But that isn’t the case in the real world.  There is much more water potentially available after agricultural use, especially in a wet year.

Agricultural Water Use Defined Narrowly — 8 percent to 19 percent

Using the above-defined terms as a basis of narrow comparison, agriculture uses 8 percent in a wet year, 14 percent in an average year, and 19 percent in a dry year, according to commonly used data from the California Department of Water Resources.

Agricultural Water Use Defined Broadly — 78 percent to 80 percent

But if you want to define the total amount of water broadly to be only the amount of “developed” water for urban and agricultural uses, then the percentages for agricultural use would be 78 percent in a wet year, 79 percent in an average year, and 80 percent in a dry year.

To arrive at a high percentage of agricultural water use of from 78 percent to 80 percent, you have to exclude that the environment gets 35 percent to 64 percent of all the dedicated water.  This might be construed as lying with statistics to puff up the number.

Agricultural Water Use Defined by the State

Agricultural use of all “developed” or “available” water supplies in California’s water system runs from 28 percent in a wet year, 41 percent in an average year and 52 percent in a dry year.  This is the range of percentages used by the California Department of Water Resources as reflecting the amount of water used by agriculture as a percentage of their closed water system, not the entire amount of water that falls in the state.

The DWR indicates that this number is projected to drop to 39 percent by 2020.

Measuring Assumptions, Not Numbers

What is revealed by this breakdown is that assumptions control the numerical outcome.  Pick a number. Any number will do, depending on your assumptions.

It is unethical for public officials and experts to use numbers without disclosing their assumptions.  But in water politics, water numbers are apparently what you can get away with.  And Dr. Gleick has apparently gotten away with not disclosing a “whopper” set of unrealistic assumptions for too long.

Who cares if agriculture uses 75 percent of a bucket of water, when there is a bathtub of water available — as well as a swimming pool of total water that could be potentially tapped?

If you are an environmentalist, you will use the number that says agriculture uses 80 percent of water supplies based on an assumption that every year is a dry year and that water that falls on the environment cannot be included in your conclusion.  Those are pretty misleading assumptions in the opinion of this writer.

Water is a mirror pool that reflects what ever number you may want it to.  But the definition of reality is something I can’t wish away.  And it is difficult to wish away that in a dry year 145 million acre feet of water fall on California, and in a wet year 335 million acre feet of water.  The percentage of agricultural water used is estimated unrealistically high.

PICK A NUMBER – PERCENT AGRICULTURAL USE OF WATER

California Water Balance Summary

For Water Years 1998, 2000 and 2001

Distribution of Dedicated Supply to Various Applied Water Uses

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By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Does California have enough water?

Peter H. Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Oakland thinks not. He wrote yesterday in “Myths of California water shortfalls” that it is a myth there is enough water to meet 100 percent of the demands in California. But is Gleick exposing myths, or is he subtly posing his own counter-myths?

Dr. Gleick, PhD, is co-founder of the Pacific Institute (not same as the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent institute).

Gleick’s group is a think tank for “water, sustainability and justice, and globalization” that is funded by a wide array of corporate, government and foundation sponsors, but whose board of directors is all green.

Mythical “Not Enough Water”

The curtain should be pulled back, says Dr. Gleick, on “one of the most common myths of California’s water situation — that there is enough water to satisfy 100 percent demand.”

Gleick asserts that it isn’t “some terrible person, agency, or water policy, or fish” that is “depriving humans of desperately needed water, even in time or record snowpack.” The real fault is in over-subscribed commitments to deliver “all the water they want all the time…resulting in eight times as many water rights given away as there is water available in an average year.”

Let’s take a look at Gleick’s claim.

California hasn’t built any resource reservoirs in decades, so his contention of lack of supply is superficially true.

But Gleick avoids focusing on the more important issue of the total supply of precipitation and imported water.

For example, California is considered a state in perpetual drought. But in 1998 — a wet year — rainfall and imports totaled 335 million acre-feet (MAF) of water, or enough water for 670 million urban households. That also would be enough water for about 1.675 billion people. Or 335 million acres of farming — more than ten times the current farming acreage of about 25 million acres.

And 64 percent of that water went to the environment, not farms, not industry, not cities and not suburbs.

Moreover, agriculture and industry, not urban cities, conserved 6.65 million acre-feet of water. That’s enough for 13.3 million urban households or 6.65 million acres of farming.

In a dry year in California such as 2001, there was “only” 145 million acre-feet of rainfall and imports. What was enough for 290 million urban households or 145 million acres of farming.

The problem is capture, storage and treatment — not drought, lack of conservation, the amount of water used by agriculture, global warming, unsustainability or population growth.

Mythical Eight Fold Water Rights

Writes Mike Wade of the California Farm Water Coalition, one of Gleick’s online adversaries:

He [Gleick] claims that the State Water Resources Control Board has acknowledged that there are eight times as many water rights given away as there is water available in an average year. The truth is that water rights permits are issued for time and place of use, not simply gross quantity.

A prime example is for power generation. A user may have a water right permit to generate power on a specific river. But such is not a consumptive use of that water. Multiple permits for the same water only mean that we are efficiently using it over and over again.

You would think Gleick would herald that as water-use efficiency, something he claims to support. But he doesn’t do that because it would pull the curtain back a little too far.

Mythical 75 percent of water goes to agriculture

Or let’s look at the widespread “fact” propagated by Dr. Gleick among many others that agriculture uses 75 percent to 80 percent of all “human” or “developable” water in California. Farmers say they use only 41 percent of water, while Gleick says the real number is 80 percent.

I contacted David Baryohay at the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), who said:

It is estimated that about 75 percent of California’s “Developed Water,” such as State Water Project and CVP (Central Valley Project), is delivered for agricultural purposes. However, the total ag use is about 43 percent (1995), reducing to 39 percent (by 2020). The data can be found in California Water Plans (1998, 2004, etc. — no operable link provided).

Mr. Barohay clarified that:

Developed water means water that is being captured by SWP (State Water Project) and CVP (Central Valley Project) projects. This water is runoff from precipitation and snowmelt that is being captured behind State and Federal dams and reservoirs. Groundwater and locally owned and operated water systems are not part of developed water. Water for agriculture is raw water (untreated). For use by humans (as potable), it must be treated before consumption.

In other words, agricultural water is raw water fit for irrigating crops but not for drinking water for humans. So Gleick’s contention that agriculture uses 80 percent of “human” water is like comparing apples with oranges — raw water with treated water.

However, his contention that it uses 80 percent of all “developable” water would render his claim in error. That’s because DWR indicates that agriculture uses 28 percent of dedicated supply in a wet year or at most 52 percent in a dry year.

According to DWR statistics, agriculture uses a mere 8.2 percent (27.7 MAF/335.5 MAF) of all precipitation and imports in a wet year. And only 23.4 percent in a typical dry year (34.1 MAF/145.5 MAF). I could not find third-party validation for Gleick’s 80 percent figure.

Mythical claim that drought was good for agriculture

The agricultural industry did not suffer during the recent past drought, claims Gleick, as “the total value of California’s agricultural products broke all records.”

Gleick conveniently ignores that farmers in one California valley undeniably did have their water cut off; and that farmers just shifted to use of groundwater supplies and alternative crops that use less water.

But Gleick is also opposed to farmers having the right to use groundwater given to them by the courts, federal laws or common law. He wants to undo the rule of the law and replace it with “groundwater management authorities,” presumably controlled by environmentalists rather than courts or a jury of common persons.

Southern California has had a long record of decentralized, self-governing — but adjudicated in state courts — water basin management without the need for some politicized, bureaucratic groundwater management agency.

Mythical No More Money for Large Water Projects

Another one of Gleick’s online adversaries, identified as “valuequestor,” refutes his statement, “There is no money for huge new projects to capture more” (water):

Really, Mr. Gleick? But we have money for bullet trains… yet “no more politically or environmentally acceptable places to build” dams. Acceptable to whom? I can’t think of a better public works project and can think of quite a few acceptable locations.

Gleick conveniently avoids discussing California’s five water bonds totaling $18.7 billion. That money mainly has gone for greenbelts and open space in wealthy northern California enclaves, without developing one new dam or reservoir. (See “New Year’s Water Bond Resolutions,” Calwatchdog.com, Dec. 27, 2010).

Mythical species extinction

“Taking as much water as we already do is driving fish, plants and other wildlife to extinction” is another one of Gleick’s mythical statements.

California decided long ago to value the downstream habitats of rose gardens, lawns and warm water fish such as bass and catfish in water canals, over upstream coldwater fish such as salmon or smelt. The “environment” can work either way — either as a warm water or cold water ecosystem. The choice is cultural and political, not environmental or scientific. If you get Channel Catfish instead of Coho Salmon it is called pollution; the same with “native” and “invasive” species.

To go back to an entirely primitive cold water ecosystem, as Gleick seems to want, would mean repealing civilization and modernity itself. It would mean going back to a time when the sea periodically flooded the Sacramento Delta and split California in two in near-tsunami fashion, wiping out nearly all human and animal habitats.

But there probably was abundant salmon fishing in Sacramento after the Delta flooded. And there probably were plenty of fish for baking sasa-kamaboko, a fish cake, in Sendai, Japan after the Tsunami of 2011; just no restaurants or homes to eat it in.

Dr. Gleick is a formidable green-water advocate. And being green and from the Bay Area in California typically serves as a cover for northern California water, including semiconductor manufacturing plants that consume as much water as a small city of 50,000, according to some environmentalists.

Mythmaker

As far as can be determined, Gleick is the primary source of the widespread myth that agriculture uses 75 percent to 80 percent of all “human” or “available” water in California, depending on whether Gleick wants to define total water supplies narrowly or broadly. This pernicious myth has been repeated so widely that even water officials believe it to be a fact (even this writer once did).

It is easy to proclaim all your opponent’s positions on water policy as myths when you assume a quasi-religious role as a mythmaker. Gleick is like a religious apocalyptic prophet of doom, only dressed up as a scientist. And like religious false prophets, his prophecies are typically inflated.

Declinist

In short, Gleick is what is called a “declinist,” who always portrays California’s water situation as declining due to farming and cities. While one of Gleick’s major rhetorical strategies is to call his opponents’ positions all myths, his declinist paradigm is mostly a myth that doesn’t hold water.

Gleick’s typical rhetorical device is to narrowly define his terms, then assert that the use of water by farms and cities is oversubscribed, overused and unsustainable.

This is somewhat comical when:

* Water is cyclical or recycled by nature;
* The same amount of water is on the earth now as millennia ago;
* As cited above, the amount of water precipitation in California could support a population of 100 million and a huge agricultural economy, while lessening the decimating impacts of flooding on wildlife as well as human habitats and life.

As they say in any contest, “know your opponent” and his methods.