Governor Newsom: Time to enforce the law

It's the wild west out there. It feels like no one is protecting the health, safety, and welfare of Californians.

Governor Newsom's administration is holding "listening sessions" about how to improve California water management. How about starting by simply enforcing our laws?

If the governor suddenly started enforcing the speed limit, you can imagine the outcry from speeders. But there would be a cultural shift. Not to mention a safer, more organized transportation system. People would get used to it. Obeying the law would get easier, especially when people see the decline in accidents and deaths. Take away driver's licenses from dangerous drivers and beef up public transit.

California's water and environmental laws are enforced just about as effectively as the speed limit. So which laws should we start enforcing?

Rime Ice Rivers: How many ways can water flow down a mountain?

Two years ago, I joined a couple of friends on a climbing trip to Mount Shasta. We failed to summit due to high early morning winds, and turned around at sunrise when we noticed no climbers above us were advancing to the windblown ridge. On the way down, we encountered incredibly beautiful rime ice rivers, coursing down the steepest part of the route, pushed by the incessant downslope wind.

Rime ice coating the rocks the day before.

125 years ago L.A.'s first outfall sewer system was completed

125 years ago, on March 9, 1894, the City of Los Angeles opened its "great drain," according to the March 10, 1894 Los Angeles Herald. This historical event is interesting to look back upon due to the current news that L.A. is on track to recycle 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035--141 years after the outfall sewer came online. The required improvements at Hyperion will cost $2 billion over the next 16 years.

Los Angeles Herald, March 10, 1894

We don't need a Green New Deal. What we need is World War III on carbon.

The term "Green New Deal" invokes images of a U.S.-only social welfare and jobs program. Entitlements to those who didn't get a fair shake. That isn't going to engender bipartisan support, and it isn't exactly what we need right now.

What we need is World War III.

World War II transformed our nation and the world, and united everyone against a common global enemy. We mobilized, fought, and won World War II in far less than ten years.

I know, "The War on..." (fill-in-the-blank: drugs, poverty, crime, etc.) is cliche. That overused term--implying a U.S.-only national mobilization--is not what we need. But the imagery and momentum of a war is useful. Look at all the Senators who couldn't keep themselves from voting for the War in Iraq. Spineless sheep who care only about money and power--many of whom are currently holding up humanity's efforts to stop Global Warming and save our only home--will go along with a just war that has popular support. And if those in power continue to thwart the will of the people, then our federal government would continue to be the global bad actor that an allied world along with a local resistance would continue to mobilize against to save humanity from a horrible future. Californias of the world vs. the Trumps of the world. Kids of the world vs. the Feinsteins of the world.

What tactics will win this war? We need to focus on shutting off the supply of carbon-based fuels, not just the demand or the pollution they cause. As we know in California, you can't force water conservation in a wet year--you need a drought to motivate the masses. Steadily shutting down the world's carbon mining on a well-publicized schedule (i.e. cap and trade with a slowly decreasing cap), starting with the largest and dirtiest operations, would give businesses certainty and let market prices do the work of shifting demand to alternative fuels and sparking innovation. Carbon taxes would work in tandem to decrease demand and could be used to ameliorate the pain of transition. Then focus enforcement efforts on the black market, as well as maintaining a well-respected accounting system for the small amount of carbon mining, use, and sequestration that is sustainable and permissible.

This war can be won and ended quickly, unlike the war in Afghanistan. Maybe we would need joint strike teams to continue to shut down rogue oil and gas drilling and coal mining operations. But the "war" would happen quickly and be over in less than a decade.

January 6th and 16th storms compared

The weekend of January 5-6, 2019 was a very wet one, and San Geronimo Creek reached 1,000 cfs for the first time since February 2017. 2018's peak flow was 753 cfs in March.

About a week and a half later, on January 16, 2019, there was another big storm--more well-advertised than the first, and windier, but not necessarily wetter. The storms were similar in many ways, but San Geronimo Creek peaked higher during the second storm, at 1,304 cfs.

Jan 6th storm, with day.hour on the x-axis.

Jan 16th storm, using the same day.hour as the Jan 6th storm, lining up
both peak flows between hours 17 and 18 on day 2. The Jan 6th peak was
at 5:30 pm and the Jan 16th peak was at 9:15 pm.

The graphs show the different patterns of rainfall and creek flow. The January 6th peak was broader, with a longer duration at high flows (over 400 cfs), however the January 16th peak had a longer duration at about 200 cfs. The antecedent conditions were wetter on the 16th--36 cfs 16 hours before the peak, vs. only 7 cfs 16 hours before the Jan 6th peak.

How do the total volumes compare? The typical pattern in San Geronimo Valley is for the Woodacre precipitation station (to the east) to be wetter than Mt. Barnabe (to the west), and that pattern held on the 6th. It was reversed on the 16th--Barnabe was wetter than Woodacre. Although the volume of runoff during the 16 hours prior to the peak was only 3% higher on the 16th, the magnitude of the peak flow on the 16th was 23% higher than on the 6th. The table below shows well how similar the storms were. Note the 6th was wetter in Woodacre, and the 16th was wetter on Mt. Barnabe.

Shadows of Rain

We have all heard of "rain shadows," where precipitation declines "precipitously" in the lee of a mountain range. California has many examples--you'll see the phenomenon eastward of any major mountain range.

The Mono Basin has a classic rain shadow--over forty inches of annual precipitation at Tioga Pass, on the crest of the Sierra, and about seven inches on the east side of Mono Lake. Those two locations are separated by an elevation difference of 3,500 vertical feet and a distance of 15 miles.

Isohyetal map of the Mono Basin from Vorster, 1985. Red line depicts the
precipitation gradient discussed in this blog.

Cannibal Water, Part 3

So how do we wean water users off cheap, addictive Cannibal Water?

Cannibal Fork, brought back from the South Pacific by a friend, Mike Klapp.

For urban users, it is not a problem. Urban water use has been declining for decades. Continue investing in efficiency, water recycling, stormwater capture, and groundwater recharge. Don't invest in expensive, carbon-intensive, fish-killing, polluting desalination unless you are a small isolated coastal community with no other options. Brackish groundwater desalination is okay. Avoid growth, which makes every problem worse, and eats up any water savings you achieve. But if you do plan to grow forever, then you need to make sure your long-term water strategy continues to cut water use to the point where kids will grow up not knowing what a water fight is. Not just squirt guns, I mean a really good one, with hoses and buckets. And growing forever would also require suspending some physical laws of nature, so we might as well stop growth now, while some parts of California are still nice places to live.