California’s Game of Thrones: Water

Tonight is the highly anticipated return of Game of Thrones, the Season 5 century’s old saga of warring factions laboring in a harsh environment of constrained resources and evolving political power. A tale of land grabs and government sieges, of plots, promises and betrayals.

The politics of warring factions that fill each episode of HBO’s “A Game of Thrones” may have now been revived in reality show fashion as California’s water war saga now unfolds — brought forth by the state’s fourth-driest winter on record, preceded by a nearly water-less 2014.

Water wars are not new for California. Overall, the state has experienced ten multi-year droughts of large-scale extent in the last one hundred years. However, none seem worse in magnitude then today’s present day drama which have brought the potential for intra-state war among interested economic players similar to Kingdom’s vying for power tonight on HBO.

Is this drought season truly unlike any other in California history? With more water falling on the state than past dry seasons, discussions of global warming have fueled predictions of a mega-drought far surpassing anything know in our lifetimes.

The second-driest period on record was 1976-77 with 19.0 inches of precipitation. Storage in major reservoirs at that time was 37 percent of historic average in 1977. The government driven allocation that year was announced as a 25 percent federal and 40 percent allocation of water for farmers and urban users.

This year, the late rains brought 26.6 inches by early April. YES MORE RAIN. Storage in major reservoirs was 68 percent of historic average as of March 31. YES MORE IN STORAGE.

The difference? Getting it down to two-thirds of the state’s population requiring its application and sustenance has been curtailed by environmental constraints not present in the last drought.

As an emergency response to the drought, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the State Water Control Board to “impose restrictions to achieve a 25 percent reduction in potable urban water usage through February 28, 2016.

What preceded the Governor’s announcement was a decision months before by federal and state authorities who provide water allocations south of the Delta. That announcement not on the front page of any urban paper was a Zero allocation for federal water and a 5 percent water allocation for water exchange contractors (people who move our water) which equated to little more than 200,000 acre-feet available. That’s 200,000 acre feet of water for 29 public agencies serving more than 25 million Californians and irrigation for nearly a million acres of farmland.

The Iron Throne: Water

How has all our water been divided in the past? Who wins its allocation? Who will be cut? That is the core of the battleground drawn.

Three kingdoms all seek the water throne by keeping as much of their share as possible. The noble houses: environmentalists and their cousins (the wildlife groups, sportsmen); the cities and their water districts brothers and a family feud between the house of Agriculture (northern farmers and their below the Delta farmer brethren).

Rationing announcements have hardened the battle lines between the noble houses in a civil war not for the Iron Throne, but for the fair allocation of life sustaining water.

With California entering its fourth year of drought, the question takes on new urgency: Where does all of the State’s water go now?

According to the California Department of Water Resources, the biggest users are three: (1) the environment; (2) agriculture and (3) urban consumers.

Taking all that into account, data from the state show that 50.2% is used by the environment, 40.9% for agriculture and 8.9% by urban residents and businesses.

The battlefields on which the 3 Kingdom’s are fighting, like most battlefields, are messy and confusing. But let’s be clear on it’s origin. It’s about squandered river water allowed to reach the Pacific Ocean through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — a perennial California argument as the Fresno Bee’s Mark Grossi has labeled it “filled with suspicion, lawsuits and politics.”

These are territories to defend. Environmentalist blame farmers and agricultural groups for planting to many permanent crops and drilling deep unregulated water wells underneath their properties. Farmers in California’s multi-billion dollar agriculture industry focus on the amount of water being allowed in times of severe shortage to flow into the ocean and blame their northern farmer brothers for hoarding what could be sent south for more productive crops. Sport fishery groups point to constructed damns that restrict the rivers they depend upon and thus expose the fishing industry to catastrophic losses. Cities growing to support their populations, make deals with water districts who seek to trade with anybody able to produce another drop of water. Wildlife groups worry about the destroying the natural habit of fish, birds and other wildlife dependent upon a balanced water system.

Why watch Game of Thrones at all when you can simply watch this reality show play out on the front pages of our daily newspapers?

War of Words, Swords of Facts

Like most political warfare, the battlefield starts with who can convince the masses they are right and just.

The most common claim printed in nearly every newspaper this year states that agriculture consumes about 80% of the “developed” water supply. This repetitive echo chamber mantra conveniently continues to exclude the reality that over half of all water in the State is swiped off the top for environmental purposes.

Farmers typically consume about 80% of the remainder, which means only 40% of the total. Urban users get the rest. It’s important to note that both state and federal water projects, which export water from the Delta, slashed contractual allocations for agriculture much earlier and significantly deeper in percentage cuts than urban users. Not making the front pages is the fact that water rationing for farmer’s occurred well before Governor Jerry Brown’s earth shattering pronouncement of a 25% mandatory usage cut for California’s urban citizen.

It’s important to put Governor Brown’s urban use pronouncement in perspective.

The call for a 25% reduction in potable urban water use will save approximately 1.4 million acre feet of water — this is roughly equivalent to the water supply that was lost this year from January to March 2015 of this year alone to the ocean due to environmental constraints or for environmental uses depending on your philosophy.

Alternatively, the Governors call for removing 50 million square feet of lawns (1150 Acres) will save approximately 5500 acre feet of water — this is could be avoided completely by less than 1 single day of pumping at the State Water Project diversion from the Delta.

Not reported, have been that mandatory use cutbacks to agriculture during the drought have been closer to 85% and farmers have adapted to this undeclared (and never quite said) water rationing in part by fallowing land.

Governor Brown said it best this week: “I talk to a lot of farmers. They’re under a lot of pressure,” Brown said. “It’s not just taking a quicker shower or flushing the toilet more than once. It’s maybe, they can’t pay their bank loan or something really serious like that.” For saying this, the Governor has been roundly attacked for just recognizing that between 1992 and 2012, about 900,000 acres of land was removed from production, according to the USDA. More than 500,000 acres have since been fallowed. One result is double-digit unemployment across the Central Valley — 11.8% in Tulare, 13.1% in Fresno, 13.2% in Merced and 14.4% in Porterville.

Interesting to note, because of the last major drought in 1977, most farmers shifted from high water guzzling crops like alfalfa and cotton to high-value crops like almonds. Since 1992 cotton acreage has fallen by about 80%. Roughly 100,000 acres of alfalfa have been torn out in the last four years — all to save water in the last big drought California experienced.

The result? Now almonds planted prior to the Delta’s pumping restrictions are the new sound bite culprit in the water footprint blame game as both both Slate and Mother Jones have reported with great fanfare that almonds are sucking California dry with each nut equal to an entire gallon of water.

But how about water consumption per unit of value created? Or gallons used per dollar of production? If we change to the right metric, we would be encouraging growers to plant almonds given the scarce value of water today.

If we don’t use high value as the metric for invaluable water, are we then ready to abandon milk production in California? That would seem to follow, given alfalfa, irrigated pastures, corn, and other water grown items are ultimately chopped into a cattle feed as necessary silage to fuel the milk industry. Interesting to note that these silage crops consume more water per acre than almonds, and they also cover nearly twice as much land. (if anything, we only talk about 1/2 of the almond and forget the “hull” that goes to reduce the amount of alfalfa grown and thus saves water).

Fish & Loaves: Creating the Environment of War

It seems the water war will turn on a tiniest animal in the kingdom: a tiny finger-sized fish called the delta smelt, which is an endangered species now and finds itself at the the center of the fight for water allocation among the kingdoms.

The environmental kingdom declares that the smelt is a barometer for the ecology of the delta (the gateway for water) and that the battle is not really about the health of the delta smelt but whether there is a commitment to restore the estuary back to its original form.

The urban and agricultural kingdoms continue to fight despite legal protections for the fish that continue as the Supreme Court recently left in place a lower-court ruling that allowed pumping protections aiding the smelt to stand despite the considerable economic impact. To help, the Obama administration increased the number of fish that could be accidentally killed at the pumps — but this was not enough for urban and agricultural users to allow for critical pumping of water at the right time of season to be sent into storage banks able to help during this drought period.

Has the protection of the smelt at all cost worked? Consider that the U.S. Interior Department’s decision to list the Delta smelt as threatened under the Endangered Species Act took effect 22 years when there were perhaps 200,000 Delta smelt in the wild, down from 2 million 20 years earlier.

As of this year, the smelt count has now dwindled to four females and two males because of breeding issues in the saltier-than-normal waters — -even as water over the past 4 years was reallocated by law to the environment to lower the saline ratio of the aquifer.

This in turn restricted water diversion to urban and agricultural users with over 76 percent of inflow from the Sierra Mountains ending up in the ocean. This water resource diversion has thus far wasted 4.4 million acre-feet of water per year in a mega-drought type environment.

The conflict is even more pronounced as a promise has turned to betrayal given that all 3 kingdom’s built water systems (the state and federal water projects) that were envisioned for many things — flood control, hydroelectric generation, irrigation, recreation, etc.) yet no one built these for fish restoration or to store water that would ensure year-round fish runs in the Kingdom’s rivers.

With Water: Always Pour Your Own Wine

California’s water world, like the Game of Thrones world, is all about power — showing it, hiding it, faking it, abusing it, and sometimes using it for the right reasons. As the Kingdom’s ascends into our own Season 5, it is clear that unless the Kingdom’s commonwealth come together to protect their most necessary resource, all would best be advised to heed one of the most memorable lessons learned from HBO’s award winning series: Always Pour Your Own Wine.