It's war. And it's about water

Clausewitz famously said war was “politics by other means.” In California and Santa Clara County, politics is water wars by other means. Although it isn’t always above the surface, below the surface everything in the state involves water one way or another. John Seller, editorial writer for the Orange County Register, examines the issues in foxes and hounds daily. 

The more populous Southern California needs most of its water to flow down from Northern California. Two-thirds of Californians live in the South, while 75 percent of the water is in the North.

The California State Water Project was built mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, a period when Southern California was a vast industrial powerhouse, especially the aerospace and defense industries. And two presidents hailed from there, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

But recent years have seen the rise of Northern California because of the vast wealth created by Silicon Valley and San Francisco due to the tech sector, even as state regulations have choked off Southern California “dirty” industries. National politicians include Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, all from Fog City. Not surprisingly, the state has been unable to resolve such issues as what to do with the Sacramento-Joaquin River Delta and the potential Twin Tunnels project, possibly downsized to One Tunnel, as Newsom proposed in 2019.

Along comes a book that explains the history, present and future of California water: “Winning the Water Wars: California can meet its water needs by promoting abundance rather than managing scarcity.” It’s by Steven Greenhut, Western Regional Director of the R-Street Institute and longtime columnist for the Orange County Register, among many other writing gigs. It’s published by the Pacific Research Institute.

As the title indicates, California actually has an abundance of water. As with so much in the state, the problem is policies that limit production, drive up costs and centralize distribution. Most of us notice the centrality of water only when there’s a drought, and the government fines people for watering their lawns.

But as Greenhut notes, “Total urban water (residential, commercial, governmental) uses comprise around 10 percent of the state’s total water supplies, so taking a conservation-heavy approach only creates diminishing returns—and has a de minimis or insignificant effect on water supplies. If the state’s water wars were about numbers—how to store enough water to meet the needs of a specific population—rather than ideology, then California would have met its future needs long ago and water shortages would largely be a non-issue even during droughts.”

What happened during the 2014-16 and 2017-18 droughts was ideologues used the crises to push their own constrictive environmental agenda. Instead of pushing for more water supplies, as well as better storage, they obsessed over severe rationing and giving the state government more power over local water districts and private water supplies.

“They didn’t acknowledge that half of the state’s water flows out unimpeded to the sea, but typically blamed agricultural and urban users (and Mother Nature) for the shortages,” he writes. “They view water storage, which remains one of the most effective means to plan for future drought years, as a blight.”

Steve gives a 3-minute YouTube summary here.

Read the whole thing here.

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Photo taken by Ken Lund.