What Then Must We Do?

Peter Gleick ‏@PeterGleick  10h

Yes, California's drought is bad. But the worst thing we can do is take hasty actions we'll regret later. "No

regrets" actions only please.

Patrick Vowell ‏@pvowell  8h

@PeterGleick I'm more worriedthere will be no actions, period.

Peter Gleick ‏@PeterGleick  7h

@pvowell what are your top recommendations?

This is a recent Twitter exchange between Peter Gleick and myself. Sorry, Peter, but I just couldn't answer in 140 characters or less.  And my apologies to Leo Tolstoy for my rip off of his book title. But here, in a great deal more characters than allowed by Twitter, is what I would like to see done to deal with this drought, and California’s water supply moving forward.  I know some of this you’ll agree with, Peter, and some you won’t; others reading this will have opinions different from either of us. But the first and one of the best actions we can take is this sort of dialogue.

As much as people seem to think Californian’s are environmentally conscience and all practice conservation already, it’s my experience that a great many people still have a long way to go in doing meaningful water conservation.  I’ve been to so many rate case meetings were people testify how they have just two people at home and only use 25 CCF of water a month (that’s  18,700 gallons, or more than 300 gallons per person per day). Or they complain that rates are so high, instead of the acre of turf they used to enjoy, they have to suffer with only a quarter of an acre now.  The issue of whether clean safe water is a human right has been in the news a good deal in the past year, but my experience is all too often people take that to mean they have the God given right to use as much water as they bloody well want at little to no cost.  That has to stop.  Mandatory rationing during the drought and steeply increasing block rate structures all the time should be used to force serious conservation.

I think the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) has got to move forward. The Delta is in precarious shape, physically and environmentally.  Its ability to continue to provide water to Southern California is in serious jeopardy.  Talk about hasty actions: If we continue to do little or nothing to deal with this issue, the Delta will collapse and water deliveries to Southern California will be seriously limited or even halted all together.  If that happens, you’ll see hasty decisions made to quickly provide new water supplies that will wreak environmental, social justice, and budgetary havoc.  The BDCP isn’t perfect, but it’s a controlled plan that we can move forward with, and that needs to be done.

Desalination has got to become much more prevalent in California.  The Coastal Commission should never have killed the Huntington Beach project posed by Poseidon; that project should be resurrected, and more of the desal projects planned up and down the coast moved forward as well.  Is there an environmental cost to these projects?  Absolutely, but those costs can be minimized without killing the projects.  But no project is without any environmental cost, just as for each of us to get out of bed every morning and live our normal lives there is an environmental cost.  If we want to continue to live our lives here in California, then desalination will have to play a bigger part in providing us with water.  The energy use and associated expense of desal continues to fall, and funding for research into lowering those costs even further should be a priority.

There you go, Peter.  My top three recommendations for moving forward with California’s water supply problems. Thanks for asking!