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.”

Despite limiting water use, residents in lower-income areas have complained that they have faced substantial fines, while some of the Golden State’s most conspicuous consumers have escaped penalty. In Apple Valley, “where the median household income is below $50,000 a year,” some have struggled to keep their consumption below the limit, while one “home under construction in Bel Air has been issued permits for five pools,” the New York Times reported:

“Los Angeles officials hope to start imposing fines so steep that even the wealthy who populate Bel Air will notice. Elsewhere, though, fines have already piled up on middle-class Californians. The Central Valley city of Clovis, faced with an order to cut back 36 percent, has meted out more than 23,000 fines since the mandatory water reductions began in June. In Santa Cruz, where water supplies have run dangerously low, the city has assessed more than $1.6 million in penalties for using too much water.”

Mid-month, Gov. Jerry Brown issued a fresh order expanding and strengthening his strict water policies. “The order gives state water officials greater authority to deal with drought conditions and to cope with potential winter storms from El Nino, a periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures,” as Reuters reported, extending emergency conservation “through October if California still faces a drought in January. The order also extends the suspension of some environmental rules, lets some state residents capture more water and expedites rebuilding permits for power plants damaged by wildfires.”

Localities have braced for the new, unprecedented groundwater regulations as officials have been dispatched to implement and enforce them. “They are under orders to begin actively managing underground aquifers that for generations have been treated as a private resource, with property owners empowered to dig wells and extract as much water as they wanted without particular regard for their neighbors or government agencies,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

“But even amid the sobering accounts of dried-up wells, salt-tainted groundwater and collapsing aquifers in California farm country, no one expects regulation will be easy to set up or sell. Instead, the entire process — starting with just who gets to decide how much water can be ‘sustainably’ pumped in a region — is expected to spark lengthy debate and complicated lawsuits. This is particularly true in farm-rich regions such as Kings County, where the groundwater basins are critically overdrawn.”

Some farmers face the prospect of having to simply cease operations after a relatively brief period of time. “Land retirement is coming to California agriculture. The drought will end someday, maybe even this winter, but farmers will still face long-term shortages of water,” the Bee observed separately. “The relentless groundwater pumping that has kept hundreds of farms going the past four years is coming to an end.”

Meanwhile, other parts of the state have wound up with a large surplus of water, thanks to the uniformity of conservation regulations. “Unlike other parts of California, San Diego has 99 percent of the water needed for normal usage. But statewide conservation mandates have applied equally to areas that have plenty of water and those that don’t, so the result here has been water piling up unused while local water agencies raise rates to make up for lost sales,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “The new supply is just one more reason local water officials are advocating for the state to ease conservation mandates for areas where supplies are ample, which would lessen the oversupply.”

In an interview on Meet the Press, Brown cautioned that he did not “rule by decree,” working “through the Legislature,” but promised to move regulations further ahead than current law provides. “California now has groundwater management for the first time in its entire history, so we are much more aggressive” than in years past, he said. But, citing a new study claiming the state’s drought is connected to climate change, Brown warned “we’re not aggressive enough. And we will be stepping it up year by year.”

As the plight of California’s Central Valley residents has grown, political dividing lines familiar to voters and residents have begun to blur. Traditionally the Republican-leaning part of the state, with interests broadly opposed to the wealthy deep-blue elite concentrated on the coast, the poorer Valley has become a growing source of dismay for liberals as well as conservatives upset with Democrat-led water policy. Better-off towns and cities have weathered the Valley’s water cutbacks. “For less wealthy communities, however, the inconveniences quickly turn into catastrophes,” the Nation recently reported.

“In hundreds of poor rural spots — places too small to qualify as towns, too isolated to be incorporated into larger cities, and oftentimes condemned as “nonviable” by their county’s General Plan — the drought has literally meant the end of water. These settlements have long been at the mercy of ramshackle delivery systems, which pump unsafe water laced with arsenic, uranium, nitrates, and pesticides into family homes; now those wells are dry, too. And despite the passage of the state’s largely aspirational Human Right to Water Act in 2012, the large-scale investments needed to link these communities into the water systems of bigger towns, or to dig wells deep enough to allow them to survive off their own water supplies, haven’t materialized.”

Local controls

As legislators faced the prospect of more protracted water negotiations, some localities began taking matters into their own hands. In San Luis Obispo, the Tribune reported, county supervisors recently voted in favor of a parcel tax that would net $1 million for a water management district covering the Paso Robles basin, where aquifer levels have been falling.

An unprecedented offer

The latest cascade of cuts underscored fears that current rationing rules just weren’t enough to put residents on a viable path to resource security. “This week, a group of farmers who enjoyed a so-called riparian right to as much water as they needed from the San Joaquin River sought to strike a bargain with state officials,” the Washington Post reported. “They would voluntarily cut the amount they use by 25 percent in exchange for keeping the remaining 75 percent for irrigation, even as the drought continues.”

That put the ball in the hands of the head of the State Water Resources Control Board, who has final say over whether the deal goes through.

Pre-existing conservation efforts were surpassed recently by municipal decreases mandated by Gov. Jerry Brown. But Brown had opted against extending similarly harsh measures to California’s big agricultural operations, responsible for producing the overwhelming national and worldwide majority of key crops like pistachios, avocados and other popular produce. That led to calls of favoritism — not just toward farming corporations, but toward the venerable water rights that Golden State farms have held tight to for generations.

A new ‘water war’

The combination of political pressure and drought conditions appeared to have an effect on regulators. As the Associated Press reported, a second group of riparian rights-holders has found itself in the conservation crosshairs:

“State officials said Wednesday that they would start mandatory cuts this week to the state’s oldest rights holders, who are historically spared from water restrictions.

“Regulators said the first orders Friday will affect those holding century-old water rights in the watershed of the San Joaquin River, which runs from the Sierra Nevada mountains to San Francisco Bay and is one of the main water sources for farms and communities.”

The farmers volunteering their cuts, with land stretched along the waterways of the Bay’s Delta region, likely saw the move as an indication that time was running out to negotiate an agreement of their own.

But the farmers facing mandated cuts, handed down by the Water Resources Control Board, announced their intention to fight the decision. Although chairwoman Felicia Marcus lamented she had to “make terrible choices in the most fair and equitable way possible,” Slate observed, the farmers “have already vowed to challenge the decision in court, saying any restriction of senior rights amounts to a ‘water war.'”

“More cuts could still be on the way, too,” added Slate. “The Water Resources Control Board says that essentially all water rights statewide are up for review this year, regardless of seniority” — and that climate change, as Marcus claimed recently, makes such sweeping changes inevitable anyway.

When the wells run dry

Howls of protest have also accompanied the latest crackdown on groundwater, which includes residential users. Under the reforms recently enacted by Gov. Brown, individuals needn’t document their use of groundwater. But, as CNBC reported, “the regional guidelines mean communities at least collectively have to account for how much groundwater they’re extracting. And that likely means more well metering on the horizon.”

At the same time, a separate controversy has swirled around just how distressed California’s well water really is. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The Department of Water Resources estimates that there are between 1 million and 2 million wells — either in use or idle — scattered throughout the state. On average, between 10,000 and 15,000 wells are added each year. Some are dug by hand, others are drilled to significant depths.” By that measure, the 1,900 wells that have gone dry amount to less than 1 percent of the total.

But the story has grown more complicated. As the Times noted, “the data show decreases of more than 10 feet in more than 15 percent of measured wells and some severe decreases of more than 25 feet in some central California wells. And state officials say several groundwater basins in the Central Coast and Southern California also show ‘significant to severe’ levels of decline.” Given the dramatic expansion of new conservation rules over the past several months, further action on groundwater would only fit the pattern.

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.”

Was it necessary to pass three new bills that increase the California government’s control over groundwater? The numbers tell the story.

By now most Californians have heard the shockingly huge number: The state has lost 63 trillion gallons of water due to the drought that has hit since 2013. That is 193.3 million acre-feet of water, or almost one year’s average rainfall in California of 194 million acre-feet of water.

But there’s another number Golden Staters need to know: California has about 850 million acre-feet of water in its 450 groundwater basins. About half of that, 0r 425 million acre-feet, is usable due to natural and man-made contamination.

Of the 425 million acre-feet of water stored underground, farmers are estimated to have drawn down only by about 2.3 percent during the water year of 2014. (See calculations below.)

In fact, half of California’s groundwater basins are already managed or adjudicated.  The other half are unmanaged but mostly are unconnected to the state water conveyance system.

Thus, groundwater regulation likely will offer little drought relief now or in the future and would not likely add any water for drought parched farms and cities.

Yet the small loss has been enough to justify the state Legislature passing, and Gov. Jerry Brown signing into law, three bills that will greatly increase centralized state control of groundwater:

‘Sustainability’

Senate Bill 1168 is by state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills. It mandates:

“[G]roundwater resources be managed sustainably for long-term reliability and multiple economic, social, and environmental benefits for current and future beneficial uses. This bill would state that sustainable groundwater management is best achieved locally through the development, implementation, and updating of plans and programs based on the best available science.”

Although the bill seems to stress local control, it actually greatly will increase centralized state control:

“This bill would require all groundwater basins designated as high- or medium-priority basins by the Department of Water Resources that are designated as basins subject to critical conditions of overdraft to be managed under a groundwater sustainability plan or coordinated groundwater sustainability plans by January 31, 2020, and would require all other groundwater basins designated as high- or medium-priority basins to be managed under a groundwater sustainability plan or coordinated groundwater sustainability plans by January 31, 2022…”

Fees

Assembly Bill 1739 is by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento. It increases “certain fees” for water, which means the higher costs likely will be passed on to ratepayers:

“This bill would provide specific authority to a groundwater sustainability agency, as defined in SB 1168 of the 2013-14 Regular Session, to impose certain fees. The bill would authorize the department or a groundwater sustainability agency to provide technical assistance to entities that extract or use groundwater to promote water conservation and protect groundwater resources.”

It also would increase state control in other ways:

“This bill would require the [Department of Water Resources], by January 1, 2017, to publish on its Internet Web site best management practices for the sustainable management of groundwater, and would require the department to prepare and release a report by December 31, 2016, on the department’s best estimate of water available for replenishment of groundwater in the state.”

‘Designate’

SB1319 also is by Pavley. It involves what could be called “state regulation by designation.” It stipulates:

“This bill would additionally authorize the state board to designate certain high- and medium-priority basins as a probationary basin if, after January 31, 2025, prescribed criteria are met, including that the state board determines that the basin is in a condition where groundwater extractions result in significant depletions of interconnected surface waters.”

The subversion of local control by state control is emphasized:

“This bill would remove the authority of the local agencies to continue to implement parts of the plan or program that the board determines to be adequate and instead require the state board to include in its interim plan a groundwater sustainability plan, or any element of a plan, that the board finds either complies with the sustainability goal for that portion of the basin or would help meet the sustainability goal for the basin.”

Groundwater drought calculations:

1. 850 Million Acre Feet total groundwater in California x 50% = 425 MAF usable groundwater;
2. California uses 82.7 MAF/year on average, of which 10% is groundwater, or 8.27 MAF;
3. In a drought year, California uses about 50% more groundwater, or 12.4 MAF (8.27 x 1.50 = 12.4 MAF);
4. Agriculture uses about 80% of the 12.4 MAF, or 9.92 MAF;
5. Thus, the percentage of 850 MAF total groundwater used by agriculture in a drought year would be 2.3% (9.92 MAF/425 MAF usable groundwater).

Even though I had been writing about California since 1987 and had a general idea of state water policy, until I worked for Susan I had no idea how complex, developed and even rational water policy is.

In California, water rights and use mostly are “adjudicted.” The rights are mostly private, as are the lawyers involved; but the state courts system referees disputes. Other than the courts, the state is involved only if the state itself has water rights. Even the federal government, because of federal law, follows state adjudication decisions. The ultimate adjudicator is the California Supreme Court.

The adjudications sometimes can take decades. Yet somehow, it works. Along with federal bankruptcy court, California water adjudication is one of the few areas of government that actually works fairly well.

This system, which is more than 100 years old, now is endangered because state legislators are using the drought as an excuse to increase their control over private water. The Los Angeles Times reported:

California continues to endure a calamitous lack of water from the sky, the state could, for the first time, start to regulate water drawn from the ground.

Groundwater regulation has been politically poisonous since the state’s founding. But lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration are hoping to capitalize on the current parched conditions, and cautious cooperation from once-resistant interest groups, to pass a plan for a groundwater management system by the end of the month.

“This falls under the category of: Never let a crisis go to waste,” said Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento), an author of the legislation.

That last quote was a paraphrase of Rahm Emanuel when he was President Clinton’s first chief of staff, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Perspective

My colleague Wayne Lusvardi has been writing about this here on CalWatchDog.com. From my political perspective, here are a couple of things:

1. Given that the current system is old, well established and works fairly well, anything else will be more expensive. That means we’ll all end up paying more for water.

2. Much of the higher water expense will go to lawyers. Usually when government uses eminent domain to grab property, it goes after Jose’s Muffler Shop or Anita’s small home. This time they would be going up against some of the sharpest lawyers in the state.

3. The U.S. Supreme Court strongly has established “takings” law, in which any property taken from citizens through eminent domain must be compensated. Here’s a summary from Public CEO of the Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District decision just last year:

In a potentially groundbreaking land-use decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in a sharply divided decision that the denial of a permit to develop wetlands property in Florida could be a taking of property under the Fifth Amendment. What this decision means to local government agencies that issue development permits remains to be sorted out. The justices who dissented warned that the majority opinion places a dark cloud of uncertainty over land use permit fees relied upon by local governments throughout the United States. The majority opinion, on the other hand, suggests that the dissent’s fears are exaggerated, if not entirely off the mark. In California, it would not be surprising if some developers attempt to use the decision to challenge land use decisions and permit fees. But existing California law already lines up to some extent with the decision rendered by the nation’s highest court.

You can bet the Koontz  decision would be cited in any lawsuits against the state insisting that any state legislation taking groundwater, or reducing groundwater rights, be compensated out of the state treasury. That could cost billions.

And where is the Legislature going to get those billions? The only way would be to add a fee to your water bill.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2014/08/11/groundwater-takeover-would-prove-costly/feed/ 8 66736 https://calwatchdog.com/2014/07/22/will-ca-groundwater-regulation-bring-shortages/ https://calwatchdog.com/2014/07/22/will-ca-groundwater-regulation-bring-shortages/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2014 20:57:57 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=66067  

One area of California that largely has remained free of regulation is groundwater. Although state courts “adjudicate” groundwater rights and disputes, this longstanding system largely respects the private ownership of the water. Even the federal government mostly works within this state system.

By Wayne Lusvardi

More scientific evidence is mounting against California Assembly Bill 296, which would fund pilot projects to eventually mandate Cal-Trans paint roads a lighter color to reduce the so-called “urban heat island effect.”

A new study indicates “cool roads,” combined with the inevitably mandated “cool roofs” of buildings, would severely reduce groundwater supplies in urban areas on a cumulative basis.

The “urban heat island effect” is defined as a “higher-temperature ‘dome’ of heat created over an urban or industrial area by hot layers forming at building top or chimney level.” The “heat island effect” disappears by midday when temperatures rise so it technically should be called the “nighttime urban heat island effect.”

“Cool Roads” a “Health Disaster in the Making”

Last week, Dr. Mark Jacobson, a climatologist at the Stanford Engineering School, said painting road surfaces a lighter color would be “a public health disaster waiting to happen.”  He explained that making the air cooler near the ground surface will worsen the dreaded inversion layer that traps pollution.  An inversion layer is created when a layer of hot air traps colder air below in an urban basin typically rimmed by mountains and the ocean.  All that painting roads white, grey or light green would apparently do is bring back the smog levels that Los Angeles experienced in the 1960s.

“Cool Roads” Would Reduce Urban Groundwater Supplies

Now, a new study from Arizona State University indicates that repainting roofs and roads lighter colors would likely lead to about a 25 percent reduction in urban rainfall over a five year cycle — or 5 percent per year.

The research is summarized in the Sept. 7 issue of Environmental Research Letters. The researchers included Alex Mahalov, the Wilhoit Foundation Dean’s Distinguished Professor or Mathematical and Statistical Sciences.  The research was conducted on what is called Arizona’s “Sun Corridor,” composed of four growing metropolitan areas: Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Nogales.

The researchers estimated that the expansion of urban development would reduce rainfall by 12 percent and that “cool roofs” would reduce rainfall another 4 percent per year.

The study concluded: “[T]ruly sustainable development will have to consider impacts extending beyond average temperature” to include impacts on rainfall and groundwater hydrology.  In other words, painting building roofs lighter colors would involve a tradeoff of slightly cooler average air temperature for less urban rainfall.

The amount of additional rainfall reduction from “cool road” surfaces was not specifically estimated by the Arizona State University study. But a guesstimate can be made.

Road surfaces are estimated to cover from 14 percent of the land area in Los Angeles and 26 percent in San Francisco.  So the combination of “cool roofs” and “cool roads” might be about a 5 percent reduction in urban annual rainfall.

For example, a 5 percent reduction in rainfall to the huge Main San Gabriel Water Basin in the suburbs of Los Angeles could rob it of its entire “safe yield” each year. Safe yield is “the annual amount of water that can be taken from a source of supply over a period of years without depleting that source beyond its ability to be replenished naturally in wet years.” The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to clean up local groundwater basins of contaminants may be jeopardized.

Groundwater supplies about one-third or more of urban water demand in a dry year and about half of that in a wet year in Southern California.

AB 296 Based on Junk Science from Wired Magazine

A podcast circulating widely on the Internet shows Adam Rogers, Senior Editor of Wired Magazine, advocating for “cool roofs” to reduce the impacts of “global warming.”  Rogers bases his advocacy for cool building roofs on unscientific observations from a jet flight over industrial areas around Burbank airports.  Such junk science about how to combat global warming has not only been bought by the public but by policymakers such as Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who is the sponsor of AB 296.

It is junk science to believe that cooling the air near the ground surface would reduce air pollution.  It might reduce temperatures, but it would create more air pollution and unhealthy air.  This is because nature has feedback effects.

For example, bring a microphone near a speaker and you get feedback noise. In a similar fashion, feedback effect happens when trying to reduce urban air temperatures. The feedback from cooler air is greater air pollution.

Hot air rises naturally.  By cooling the air at lower elevations, a relatively warmer layer of air traps the cooler air below creating an inversion layer.  And inversion layers trap pollutants resulting in greater smog.

It is difficult to separate cause and effect in climate and drought research. If AB 296 ends up mandating “white painted roads,” the resulting drop in urban groundwater basins would be falsely used as “proof” of global warming as its cause.   The “political feedback” effect would be to attribute any decline in groundwater on industry-caused global warming to justify Cap and Trade as a taxation mechanism.  AB 296 would likely result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that global warming causes urban droughts. And if one disputed this, one would likely be called a “denier.”

Jerry Brown: The Junk Science Governor?

Jerry Brown frequently portrays his opposition as “unscientific” whether it is on issues such as water and the Sacramento Delta or energy and global warming. But it is clear that AB 296 is based on junk science that reputable scientists say would jeopardize human health and urban groundwater supplies.

AB 296 is now on Brown’s desk for signature, having passed both houses of the state Legislature. The question even science can’t answer: Will Brown choose science or junk science?