Governor Brown Issues Executive Order to Save Water

Our governor, Jerry Brown, has issued an executive order directing our State Water Resources Control Board to impose on all of California’s local water supply agencies a 25 percent reduction in their water use.

 

Drought stricken Oroville Lake, which is north of Sacramento. Now how you gonna float your boat? photo: Rich Pedrocelli Associated Press

Snowpack in the Sierras, which gives California about 30 percent of our water supply, is right now only about five percent of average. Yes, that’s right, five percent. That’s the lowest recorded level going back to 1950. Locally, here in San Diego, we’ve received about six and a half inches of precipitation for the year. Normal rainfall ranges from 10 to 12 inches a year, which usually falls from November through March.

The executive order leaves it to the individual agencies as to the manner in which they might achieve their water savings. Certainly most agencies will target gardens and lawns, which consume about 30 percent of residential water use. The New York Times says that water conservation measures may even have us skipping showers.

The order directs the state to work with local agencies to replace grass with drought tolerant landscaping. Left out of the executive order are large farms, which use a lot of water, although the owners of large farms will be required to give detailed water use reports to state regulators. A number of large farms have already seen their water allocations reduced.

So what do you think? Is this too drastic? Too little too late? Or has the governor done the right thing?

California's Own Climate Change Feedback Loop

We don’t often talk about the feedback loops that make a warming world even warmer. But as the thermostat on the planet goes up and up, there will be more and more of them. Feedback is when an effect of an input further amplifies the effects of that input. One feedback loop that is sometimes cited in climate change is snowfall. A warmer climate leads to less snow falling on the Earth and the snow that does fall melts more readily in the warmer climate. With less snow on the ground, which reflects sunlight back out into space, the planet warms a bit more than it otherwise would. So the world gets even warmer, which means even less snow, which means further warming, less snow and further warming.

            See where this is going.

Jimi Hendryx: feedback you want

Here in California we are providing an additional feedback loop to our globe warming. In our case, climate change has been a factor in the drought that we are enduring here. The warmer atmosphere means that things evaporate more quickly, so what might have been a fairly normal downturn in the precipitation we receive has turned into a years-long and extremely severe drought.

California's drought: feedback you don't want

Less water in our rivers and streams means that there is less water flowing behind the dams that generate hydroelectric power. So our hydroelectric power stations cannot generate as much electricity as they used to, which means that our electric lights, televisions, and computers are powered by other sources. While much of this power gap is made up by renewable sources, some of that electricity is generated by burning natural gas, which puts carbon into the atmosphere. Less water = less hydroelectric power = more natural gas burned = more CO2 in the air = global warming = less water = less hydroelectric power... OK, you see where this is going.

During Our Drought, Rancho Santa Fe Uses Water Like There's No Tomorrow

First off, apologies for the dearth of blogs from Environment in Context. Weekly, sometimes almost daily blog posts became infrequent, then nonexistent. Sorry. I imagine that I could give a number of excuses. What it boils down to mostly, if you ask anyone who blogs, is that blogging takes up way more time than what it might seem, and I just was feeling that I did not have enough time to write up good blogs. Sorry about the hiatus. I’ll try my best to send out at least a couple blogs a week. Now on to some serious blogging.

            Using data from 400 urban water agencies, State Water Resources Control Board issued a report on per capita water use for us folks here in California, as well as a conservation report. Both of these reports are requirements of the Emergency Water Conservation Regulation. The emergency regulation was adopted by the State Water Board in response to the severe drought that we are enduring here throughout the entire state.

            What emerges from the data on per capita water use is the incredible disparity in the amount of water that Californian’s use. At the lower end of per capita use are areas like East Los Angeles, where folks get by on about 48 gallons a day. This past May the municipality of Santa Cruz called for a 25 percent reduction in water use—or a limit of 60 gallons of water per person, per day. Santa Cruzans have been exceeding the limit, with each person using only 44.9 gallons per day.

            At the other extreme are the folks who live in the northern reaches of San Diego County, the Santa Fe Irrigation District, where folks use up 584.35 gallons of water a day, more than ten times the amount used by East Los Angelinos, Santa Cruzans, as well as the water use of people who live in Daly City, Palo Alto, Hayward, and a few other municipalities.

            Now it’s not that folks in East Los Angeles or Daly City don’t bath less frequently or that they aren’t as thirsty as other folks. Those differences are almost entirely from the differences in how much individuals water their landscaping. And the State Water Resources Control Board on its website where the data of this report can be found let us know that the use of water for landscaping will vary a lot because of things like climate and population density. People who live in places that are hot and dry will use more water for landscaping than people who live where it is cooler and rains more. High-density communities, where residents live in apartments or where real estate lot sizes are small, will use less water per person than where there are large estates. Water rates are a factor as well.

            But 584.35 gallons a day? That’s, well, a lot of water! Multiplying that out by the number of residents in the district, 19,386, that comes out to well over eleven million gallons of water a day. That’s enough to fill 17 Olympic swimming pools every day. These are folks who don’t live in a Palm Springs desert. Though dry, the climate of San Diego is mild. These folks just have large lots that they water a lot! Compare the bird’s eye view of Daly City and that of Rancho Santa Fe.

 

Daly City

Rancho Santa Fe, where they use lots and lots of water 

The houses in Daly City are tightly situated on streets, while the estates of Rancho Santa Fe sprawl over the landscape. And note how green those estates are. The Santa Fe Irrigation district also includes Solana Beach, a beach community of middle class houses and apartments. These residents, with their more modest water use, bring down the average of the Santa Fe Irrigation District. There must be some residents of Rancho Santa Fe who use A LOT more than 580 gallons a day.

            While this just seems so obviously wrong to me, the way this has been covered in the press also intrigues me. The story in the Los Angeles Times is pretty straightforward, giving readers the notable extremes of use, the factors involved in that water use, and overall water use trends. Two days ago, our local paper, the San Diego UT, had this to say about the disparity of usage, “The statistics ranged from a low of 85 gallons for the San Francisco Bay area to a high of 252 gallons for the Colorado River region.” This gives the reader the impression that the highest use was that of 252 gallons a day in the eastern part of our county. The article mentions that per capita use in parts of the county, Carlsbad and Olivenhain, ranged from 185 to 305 gallons a day, which is confusing when the reader has just read that the highest use was 252 gallons a day.  And nowhere in the article did it say that the folks here in Rancho Santa Fe district used about twice that amount of water.

            Now, two days later, the UT comes out with the rest of the story and the prodigal water use going on in our north county. I don’t know why it took them a couple extra days to get around to mentioning this. It’s important information. But having the two different articles could be confusing,  and before we go spending millions of dollars on projects to recycle water or on desalination plants, we need to know all the facts.

Nothing against the folks who live in Rancho Santa Fe, but perhaps the most affordable and easiest solution to our present problems presented to us by this long-standing drought is simply using water more equitably.

Environmentalists Deliver Climate Change Denier Award To Darrell Issa

Environmentalists Deliver Climate Change Denier Award To Congressman Issa | KPBS.org

It seems, more and more, that Darrell Issa lives in an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world.

It’s a fantasy world in which he saw himself as governor of California after he engineered the recall election of Grey Davis. Issa believed that he would replace Davis in the recall. In true Alice in Wonderland fashion, Issa cried when Arnold Schwarzenegger dashed the hopes of the car alarm mogul when he entered the recall race.

It’s a fantasy world in which the tragedy of last year’s attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Egypt equals or surpasses the Nixon administration’s secret war waged in Laos and Cambodia or the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration. Unfortunately for Issa’s fantasy, as more and more reality seeped into the investigation that he spearheaded in Congress, the charges of scandal and cover up lost more and more credibility.
              And now, as shown in the link at the top of this post, a group of California environmental organizations honored Congressman Issa for his Alice in Wonderland stance on global warming, delivering a climate change denier award to his office. According to Jenesse Miller, Communications Director for the California League of Conservation Voters, Issa’s non-reality based worldview pretty much excludes almost all of the environment, saying, “That includes everything from ocean protection, to climate change, to species protection, to wilderness protection. You name the environmental issue, and Darrel Issa is usually on the wrong side of it.”
              Not that Issa is alone in his world of Big Crazy. Despite the scientific consensus that formed around the issue of human generated climate change, Miller says that 55 percent of Issa’s Congressional GOP colleagues deny the existence of global warming. 

The NRA's Hunt For Truth Campaign Gets Shot Down By Knowledge and Science

UPDATES BELOW

Although I have my thoughts and opinions about guns, I don’t share them here on this blog. This is an environmental blog, and getting off topic into the gun debate would just, well, get me off topic. But guns are one thing and ammunition is another, and that is just what I want to talk about today.
            The National Rifle Association has a campaign called Hunt For Truth—www.huntfortruth.org—with the goal of keeping lead bullets and other ammunition that contains lead on the market.
            Because of the problems that lead based ammunition causes wildlife there are efforts to replace lead in ammunition with less toxic substances. The legislature of California, which tends to lead the nation when it comes to consumer protection, workplace safety, and environmental issues, is considering the Assembly Bill 711. Citing the California condor specifically in the legislation, the bill would require the replacement of lead in game ammunition.
            Through their Hunt For Truth campaign the NRA is attacking A.B. 711. Like the tobacco companies before them who spread doubt and obfuscation about cancer and other health risks associated with smoking, and like the fossil fuel companies and their “think tanks” that continue to attack the science and scientists who study global warming, the National Rifle Association is trying to attack the science that indicates that lead ammo poisons carnivores, birds of prey, and scavengers.
            Going back more than 3000 years ago, lead has been recognized as a toxic substance. Around the time of Socrates the Greeks knew of lead’s poisonous qualities, and there are historians who believe that the fall of the Roman Empire was due, at least in part, to the ubiquitous use of lead by the Romans, particularly those among the upper classes. Due to this long history and its widespread use in industry—remember, we used to put lead in paint and gasoline—lead is one of the most well studied poisonous substances. We know more about lead and what it can do to people’s hearts, kidneys, bones, intestines, and nervous systems than just about any other toxin.

            And as well, lead and its effects on wildlife is also well-studied.[i][ii][iii][iv][v][vi][vii][viii] It’s been known for some time that carnivores and scavengers ingest lead when they eat carrion that has been shot and killed with ammunition made from lead. Over time, as these birds, cats, and bears eat more and more lead tainted carrion the toxin builds up in their bodies and affects their health and ability to reproduce. The near extinction of the California condor is believed to be due in part to this bird suffering from lead toxicity.

            With Hunt For Truth the NRA uses all the rhetorical devices that have been used for decades by tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The conclusions of scientific research they call “opinions” and frame their position, that lead based ammunition is benign, and that of the scientific conclusions that lead poisons wildlife as a “debate.”

            Now I can understand that there are folks in the NRA who feel that lead makes better bullets. I won’t argue that point. Maybe a bullet made of lead flies truer and can kill its intended victim far better than a bullet made of copper or steel. But don’t try to make an ad campaign that runs counter to thousands of years of knowledge and some of the best recent scientific research. Lead poisoning condors is not an opinion. It’s what the science concludes.

UPDATE 8/9/13: Apparently, knowledge and science proved to be even more powerful than the NRA. According to Media Matters, the Hunt For Truth website has been pulled by the National Rifle Association. If you go to the url www.huntfortruth.org you get a message that the site is down for scheduled maintenance.  I guess Media Matters is right. I don't know that other sites go down for a long time for "scheduled maintenance."

UPDATE: 8/19/13 Apparently there was some wishful thinking over at Media Matters, who claimed that the NRA had pulled this Hunt For Truth campaign. The Hunt For Truth website is back up and seems not to have changed at all. They still want lead in their bullets. 

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[i] Juan Manuel Blanco, et al. "Assessment Of Lead Exposure In Spanish Imperial Eagle ( Aquila Adalberti) From Spent Ammunition In Central Spain." Ecotoxicology 20.4 (2011): 670-681. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[ii] Donald R. Smith, et al. "Health Risks from Lead-Based Ammunition in the Environment." Environmental Health Perspectives June 2013: A178+. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[iii] Kerry R. Foresman, et al. "Lead Exposure In Large Carnivores In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem." Journal Of Wildlife Management 76.3 (2012): 575-582. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[iv] A. Bignert, et al. "Ingestion Of Lead From Ammunition And Lead Concentrations In White-Tailed Sea Eagles (Haliaeetus Albicilla) In Sweden." Science Of The Total Environment 407.21 (2009): 5555-5563. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[v] Colin Gillin, et al. "Acute Lead Toxicosis Via Ingestion Of Spent Ammunition In A Free-Ranging Cougar (Puma Concolor)." Journal Of Wildlife Diseases 48.1 (2012): 216-219. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[vi] Cade, Tom J. "Exposure Of California Condors To Lead From Spent Ammunition." Journal Of Wildlife Management 71.7 (2007): 2125-2133. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[vii] Fernando Hiraldo, et al. "Widening The Problem Of Lead Poisoning To A South-American Top Scavenger: Lead Concentrations In Feathers Of Wild Andean Condors." Biological Conservation 144.5 (2011): 1464-1471. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

[viii] José Antonio Donázar, et al. "Long-Term Effects Of Lead Poisoning On Bone Mineralization In Vultures Exposed To Ammunition Sources." Environmental Pollution 157.2 (2009): 569-574. Environment Complete. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

Big Business Wants to Have their Cake and Eat It, Too, and They Want to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too, Too

One of the mantras of management that I heard throughout my years of working in manufacturing was the complaint of regulations. Whether they be for worker safety or environmental concerns management considers all law and regulations to be an impediment to their ability to do business. These news stories are therefore unsurprising. What is curious is the manner in which business is trying to play it both ways to get what they want.

In West Virginia, politicians from both parties rail against the federal government, particularly the restrictions that the EPA places on them to ensure that there is a modicum of clean water for the wildlife in the streams and for the people to drink.

            In this latest move, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act of 2013 (H.R. 2218). The bill, which was introduced by Republican and King Coal friendly West Virginia representative David B McKinley, would allow states to set their own standards for the management and disposal of coal ash, the waste product that is left over when coal is burned. Coal ash has a number of uses, such as the production of concrete. But much coal ash from coal-fired power plants is dumped into landfills. According to the EPA, an average coal-fired power plant, one producing 500 to 1,000 megawatts, would create a landfill of between 74 to 148 acres of coal ash refuse. The National Mall in Washington D.C. is about 148 acres, just to give you some perspective on the size of these landfills. The coal ash is also toxic, containing arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. Theses large dumps of coal ash can therefore pollute runoff and groundwater.

            The dumping of coal ash is unregulated right now, but in the last few years the EPA has proposed rules that would govern the dumping of this industrial byproduct. The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act would essentially negate any coal ash rules from the EPA, leaving it up to the states to set standards for its disposal. Essentially, if H.R. 2218 passes, it would maintain the status quo of unregulated coal ash disposal. State regulation is weak to nonexistent.

            OK, so we have industry wanting to keep federal regulation at bay and maintain state regulation of the byproducts of their business. But business can’t merely keep things going on a one-way street. According to the L.A. Times, lobbyists in Washington want the federal government to step in and keep states from enforcing laws that have higher standards than the federal standards. In the crosshairs of industry is California, which has some higher standards for consumer protection, workplace safety, and environmental protection than the rest of the country.

            States can set higher standards than federal regulations, but the fly in the ointment here is the federal ability to regulate interstate commerce. GOP member of Congress say that they want to curb the progressive regulation of California to protect the rights of states whose industries don’t want to be faced with complying with California’s standards or to be cut off from the Golden State’s market, the largest in the country.

            Targeted by industry lobbyists are California laws to restrict toxic chemicals, a law that mandates that chickens on industrial farms have enough room to spread their wings, a ban on cutting fins off sharks to make soup, and a state law protecting an endangered fish. This sort of maneuver takes one of the bedrocks of conservative thinking, that the states can serve as individual laboratories to test new ideas before they might be adopted by the greater Union, and defenestrates it down a legislative and philosophical window in the service of big business. Everybody knows we can't have California making laws that enable sharks to hold onto their fins. What if the good state of Vermont wants to make a whole bunch of shark fin soup?

            So there you have it. Big business likes the federal government when the states get in their way, and big business likes the states when the federal government threatens to be too strict. Are there any principles here? I didn't think so.