The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if
President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed
it on man-made climate change.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California
dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more
likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in
atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.
What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a
drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in
the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent
immigration.
A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United
States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of
California. Whatever one’s view on immigration, it is ironic to
encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first
making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and
infrastructure.
Those were certainly massive, disruptive, and controversial
projects with plenty of downsides — and once considered unnecessary in
an earlier, much smaller California. But no one denies now that they
would have added millions of acre-feet of water for 40 million people.
Lower foothill dams such as the proposed Sites, Los Banos, and
Temperance Flat dams in wet years would have banked millions of
acre-feet as insurance for dry years. All such reservoirs were also
canceled.
Yet a single 1 million acre-foot reservoir can usually be built as
cheaply as a desalinization plant. It requires a fraction of
desalinization’s daily energy use, leaves a much smaller carbon
footprint, and provides almost 20 times as much water. California could
have built perhaps 40–50 such subsidiary reservoirs for the projected
$68 billion cost of the proposed high-speed rail project.
No comments:
Post a Comment