The Abundance Choice

Our Fight for More Water in California

By: Edward Ring

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

California needs more water. Periodic droughts, worsening in duration and severity, make that plain. But the failure of California’s policymakers to invest in water supply infrastructure, at the same time as they enact escalating restrictions on how much water can be withdrawn from rivers or extracted from the ground, have made a manageable situation intolerable.

The conventional wisdom is both biased and narrow. Lawns are “Eurocentric,” so instead of just limiting how much pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer gets dumped onto them, they must be eliminated entirely despite their utility. Farms are unsustainable because “we are living in a desert,” so instead of harvesting the massive storm runoff that still reliably falls at least a few times every year, they must be reduced to a fraction of their current capacity, despite a looming global food crisis.

Explaining what’s really stopping California’s ruling elites and influential opinion makers from supporting more water supply projects requires more than just pointing a finger at the environmentalist lobby, even though it has morphed into something so extreme that John Muir himself wouldn’t recognize it. There’s money in scarcity, and when environmentalist indignation is backed up by millions in contributions from oligarchs who stand to collect billions in profits if things stay just the way they are, things stay just the way they are.

It’s counterintuitive to think that corporate and financial special interests might actually want to limit California’s water supply, but that’s one of the fundamental premises of this book. It is a great irony that Leftist activists who have reflexively denounced capitalism for generations are now doing the bidding of one of the most deplorable variants of capitalism, monopoly capitalism. With captive markets and controlled supplies, profits soar. That’s basic economics.

Californians are already very good at conserving water, and further rationing will not yield meaningful savings. The ongoing cost of further conservation is greater than the cost of building new water supply infrastructure, and when the state subsidizes some of the cost to construct water projects, savings ripple through the economy in the form of more affordable food and housing, lower utility bills, and lower costs of doing business.

For each category of water supply projects, this book attempts to quantify the construction cost and the energy cost to operate. How much electricity does it take to transport a million acre feet of water over a 1,000 foot grade? How much electricity does it take to desalinate a million acre feet of water from the ocean, or convert from treated effluent to recycled water suitable for direct potable reuse?

Putting these questions into context is another goal of this book. If Californians desalinated a million acre feet of water per year, what percent of California’s total water consumption would that represent? What percent of California’s total electricity generation would that consume?

California’s policymakers are about to impose absolute limits on how much water urban water agencies can sell. This is a horrible approach, because it takes away the incentive for these water agencies to participate in any investments in new water supply projects. What must be understood, urgently, is that surplus water is not merely wasted water, it is resiliency. We need a diverse assortment of water producing infrastructure so that we are safe not merely from drought, but other catastrophic disruptions.

This book is offered in hopes that people reading it will be inspired to support another attempt, successful next time, to force the state legislature to make massive investments in new water supply infrastructure and streamline the process so results are felt in years instead of decades. With the initiative process, that is absolutely possible.