April 22, 2015
At least once during an average week, someone asks me where the Club stands on a particular water-related issue.
Are we for or against the Delta tunnels? (We’re opposed to the tunnels.) Do we think farmers are doing their part to respond to the drought? (Not entirely.) Why is the oil industry allowed to pollute water and then inject it into drinking water aquifers? (Good question, and it’s one we keep asking the Governor and regulatory agencies. So far, we haven’t heard a smart, logical, transparent answer.)
The questions just keep rolling in.
The one I like the most, is about the drought: What would Sierra Club California do that the governor isn’t doing to help California deal with the drought?
You—or someone like you—asked, so here’s the answer.
First, let’s give credit where credit is due: the governor and the State Water Resources Control Board have taken some smart steps recently to address the drought in ways we support. For instance, the administration is forcing urban water agencies to impose new mandatory conservation measures.
Given that around half of the water used in urban and suburban areas is devoted to landscaping—which typically means lawns—it is possible to make substantial cutbacks without affecting human health in cities and suburbs. We especially like that as the water board set its most recent conservation targets, the board took into account whether a water agency had already successfully reduced water demand. Whiners beware (and there were quite a few water agencies whining to the press): Arguing that you should be excused from conserving more because your neighborhood has really big lawns isn’t a winning argument.
But there are more things that policymakers, including the governor, should do in response to the drought that they haven’t yet. Here are a few of them:
- Get the data now. This is more than a wonky request. Water agencies and other water users often hide behind the lack of real, hard numbers about how much water is available, water use or well capacity to stop them from having to change their ways. Water is a shared resource that serves all the public and the environment. We all have a right to know how much there is and how much is being used. There ought to be real-time reporting by all users to help manage the water system better. The legislature has a chance to start fixing the data gap by passing legislation to make well log data public.
- Set a water allocation level for agriculture that reflects sustainability and includes surface and groundwater. Farmers are operating under substantial surface water allocation cuts this year. But that just means that many have simply transferred their water draw to groundwater, and in some rural areas, the aquifers are draining faster than you can say water buffalo. We don’t want to get into fights about crop choice, but we do want farmers to use water sustainably and more efficiently, and the best way to do that is to be clear about water allocations and include all water in the calculation, not just surface water.
- Accelerate deadlines for implementing the groundwater reform package passed last year. This would require new legislation or just a good show of civic and social responsibility by groundwater basin agencies, particularly in the troubled basins in the San Joaquin Valley. And in the course of accelerating the deadlines, establish some real consequences for overdrawing aquifers.
- Stop allowing water use for unconventional oil and gas extraction. That is, stop allowing water to be used for fracking, acid stimulation and other forms of well stimulation. The average fracking job in California uses about 140,000 gallons of water. Some recent well stimulation permits show expectations of using a million gallons. That water is highly polluted with chemicals and acids and essentially unusable ever again. If the state must have oil drilling—and we are not conceding it does—stick with conventional oil drilling methods, from which about 80 percent of the California-produced oil is derived. A drought is no time to frack. Governor Brown could—and should—do this with an executive order today.
- Protect nature instead of destroying it. If only the water engineers of the mid- and late-20th century had been smart about the environment, we probably wouldn’t be in as bad a fix as we’re in today. For instance, had they focused on recharge areas to allow water to percolate into aquifers, not a single river would have been channelized and slathered with concrete. Additionally, there would be no more waiving of endangered species protection requirements, and the stupidity of allowing more water than healthy to be exported from the San Francisco Bay Delta would be universally appreciated.
Every event creates an opportunity for learning and improving. This drought is one of the events that can teach us to use our natural resources more carefully. We see hints that policymakers are starting to learn.
Sincerely,
Kathryn Phillips
Director
Sierra Club California is the Sacramento-based legislative and regulatory advocacy arm of the 13 California chapters of the Sierra Club.
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