Jun 17 2009
California’s water problems
I don’t pretend to be an expert on water politics, and I don’t think there is one out there. Water politics in California are very complicated. There are the farmers, conservationists, planners and developers. There are individuals, communities, towns and cities. There are places that need water in the desert, farms in what you wouldn’t be able to call farmland if it wasn’t for the aqueduct, and other problems. But there is one constant - Californian’s use more water than is available.
A large part of the blame rests on farmers. There are technologies out there to help them use less water, but those technologies are expensive. It costs more to implement water saving faming technology than it does to simply continue as is. Farmers have agrarian water rights - they can use the water that they have access to. Farmers think they can use it without restrictions, and there is some legal backing for that position.
Another problems is that peolpe have built in desert areas and depend on imported water. Southern California is one of the biggest abusers of this. Southern California is an area without a lot of rainfall locally. Instead they depend on huge imports of water from Northern California and the Colorado river. When those imports go down, there is a water shortage. Southern California has been built up way past the ability the area has to support humans, plants and animals with water.
Northern Californians are tired of sending their water to the south. Instead of hearing about water shortages here, they want to stop sending water to the south. Instead of having to conserve, they want to cut off water supplies to other locations - including the farms.
Then there is the issue with the Delta pumps. It turns out that the Delta pumps cannot run without endangering the Delta ecosystem. So the pumps have to be limited in use, which means water from the Delta isn’t flowing southward like it used to.
There is also issues about water storage. Regardless of what type of storage you want, water storage is important. Water storage allows the state to have stores of water to support the economy, and the lives of the residents, in months where there isn’t a lot, or any, rain. However, instead of acknowledging a need for storage, the Democrats in the Legislature bemoan the environmental impacts of building water storage. What about the impacts of not having enough water? Conserve, they say.
Conservation of water isn’t as easy as it sounds. People use water for everything. Companies use water to make everything. And then there are the farmers who use water for creating the food that feeds Californians.
Water is taking second place to the budget right now, which makes sense. However, with the summer season on us, and below average snow and rain fall this year, maybe it is time to think about water storage. Communities are getting increasingly less rain, which means there is some desertification going on (places are becoming drier). There needs to be some storage to help communities through these hard times and to save a precious resource. Collecting rain that falls into some sort of storage will be good for California.
As a bonus, think of the people who can be hired to build the water storage facilities.
