[env-trinity] Chronicle: Water crisis not on presidential candidates’ radar

[Tom Stokely]

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Water-crisis-not-on-presidential-candidates-7952495.php?t=eadf8addf5


Water crisis not on presidential candidates’ radar
By Carolyn LochheadMay 29, 2016 Updated: May 29, 2016 8:00pmWASHINGTON — The 20th century dams and canals that gave birth to modern California — to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to the San Joaquin Valley farms that feed the nation — are near the end of their engineered lives. The rivers and aquifers they tap are, simply, tapped out.The state’s record drought, only dented by last winter’s rains, comes amid a 16-year dry spell in the Colorado River basin, which provides 16 percent of California’s water. The basin’s giant reservoirs are dwindling and may never fill again, even as the nation’s population continues to shift relentlessly into the arid West.So far, the three major presidential candidates have hardly noticed these problems as they barnstorm the state heading into the June 7 primary.“One of every three Americans now lives in the West,” said Stanford University historian David Kennedy, a scholar at the university’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. “One out of every eight Americans lives in California.”Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam serving 25 million people, is at 37 percent of its capacity, he noted.“If that isn’t an alarm bell going off, I don’t know what would be,” Kennedy said. “Whoever is elected next — the next several presidents actually — will be sorely lacking in guts if they don’t take this issue on.”California has allocated five times more water to human uses than exist in the state’s rivers. The federal government operates a big chunk of the state’s plumbing through the Central Valley Project, and has the big pockets that could help the state deal with the slow-motion disasters that droughts are.Photo: Michael Macor, The ChronicleThe San Clemente Dam in Carmel Valley is demolished in 2015.Building new reservoirsA basic question facing policymakers is whether to try to squeeze more water out of rivers. That would mean building new dams and reservoirs, and potentially overriding protections for several endangered fish, including native salmon and delta smelt, that now are on the brink of extinction.New dams and reservoirs would cost billions of dollars but produce scant new water, because the river systems are already over-exploited. The most promising ideas for new reservoirs entail recharging natural aquifers, a cheap alternative to dams with enormous environmental benefits.Another option is to find new sources of water through such things as recycling wastewater, capturing urban storm water runoff, conservation, efficiency and desalination. All of these efforts are under way in the state, but could be accelerated with federal help.“There’s a big role for the federal government to play on a variety of fronts,” said Leon Szeptycki, executive director of Stanford’s Water in the West program. “The West’s water infrastructure is old, and it needs not just to be renewed, but it needs to be renewed with an eye to what the future of water management is.” Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump drew thousands to a rally in Fresno on Friday, where he also met privately with officials of the Westlands Water District, a deep-pocketed farming colossus that is lobbying Congress to squeeze more water for its farmers from California rivers by overriding the Endangered Species Act.“We’re going to open up the water, very simple,” Trump told a crowd. “There is no drought,” he added, dismissing the delta smelt as “a 3-inch fish.”The Bernie Sanders campaign did not respond to repeated requests for the candidate’s position on California water issues. Photo: Leah Millis, The ChronicleA dead tree sits on the edge of a recently harvested field just off of the San Luis Canal near Huron (Fresno County).Role for cities, farmersThe Clinton campaign offered a response Hillary Clinton made to a Southern California television reporter asking whether she thinks more water should be sent from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to farms and cities in the south.Clinton said she has received briefings on the California drought. “I have followed it from afar,” she said.“What I do believe is that we have got to seriously address the California water situation, because I know how difficult it has been,” Clinton said.“I’m not going to prejudge anything,” she said. “There has to be a role for cities, there has to be a role for agriculture, of course, but let’s figure out what are the best ways of doing that. And I can’t, standing here today, tell you what it is other than to say I am going to support as strongly as I can a process of Californians to reach (those) conclusions. And if there is a role for the federal government to expedite that, to support that, I certainly will be open to it.”Both Sanders and Clinton have proposed hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending that could update the West’s water systems, as well as aggressive plans to battle climate change, which intensifies Western droughts.Sanders, D-Vermont, is a big backer of dairy subsidies. Dairy farms are far and away one of the largest users of water in California. Sanders has also expressed support for fixing aging dams, but little else in the form of solutions.Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a water think tank in Oakland, said the candidates should acknowledge the need to protect both human and environmental water uses.“We can’t ignore the environment anymore,” Gleick said. “That’s what we did in the 20th century, and it led to a lot of the problems we have today.” Gleick wrote an open letter to the candidates offering 16 recommendations on water that start with developing “a 21st century national water policy.” 
CALIFORNIA DROUGHT
   
   - Editorial: How do we share California water?
   - State loosens the water spigot — for now
   - California’s still in a drought, so don’t roll back
Delays with new damsDan Beard, former head of the Bureau of Reclamation during the Bill Clinton administration, said one of the most important numbers to come out of the drought is the 1.2 million acre-feet of water that Californians conserved last year, many times more than the 125,000 acre-feet of water that some dam proposals offer.Any new dam would “take 25 years before you got the first drop of water,” Beard said. “In the meantime, the citizens of cities and towns have put into the system 1.2 million acre-feet and done it at virtually no cost.”Last year, he proposed tearing down Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River, a radical idea that is catching on in the media. Its reservoir at Lake Powell is emptying, and evaporation losses could be reduced if the water were sent downstream to bolster Lake Mead, the linchpin of the basin’s water supply. Beard said a test for how far presidential candidates in California might go would be to see whether they would support tearing down O’Shaughnessy Dam and the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite that supplies San Francisco’s water. “That’s the one dam removal that has not received the serious attention that it needs” from public officials, Beard said. The idea has won past Republican support from the San Joaquin Valley, mainly because it takes aim at San Francisco, the source of much criticism of agriculture’s water use.Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead at sfchronicle.com Twitter: carolynlochhead
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