No Water Out There
Lake Mead’s rapid disappearance. Courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory
After a water expert resigned in protest, will California get serious about aridification?
This article originally appeard in the Red Canary Collective on August 29, 2022.
By Nicholas Schou
California’s years-in-the-making water management crisis finally produced its first high-profile professional casualty. Max Gomberg, an environmental program manager with the California State Water Resources Control Board, resigned from the agency this summer, saying that he could no longer countenance what he saw as the state’s long-standing failure to stop the destruction of California’s environment.
In his scathing July 15 resignation letter, Gomberg — a ten-year agency vet who ran the climate and conservation unit at the Office of Research, Planning and Performance — had a stark warning for his former colleagues still working inside state agencies charged with helping to save the environment: you are part of the problem, not the solution.
“Sadly, this state is not on a path towards steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, massive construction to alleviate the housing crisis, quickly and permanently reducing agriculture to manage the loss of water to aridification,” Gomberg wrote in a public letter addressed to his colleagues. “I think at some level many of you know this, yet you convince yourselves that inhabiting the middle ground between advocates and industry (and other status quo defenders) makes you reasonable,” he argued. “But it does not. It makes you complicit.”
Since then, Gomberg has elaborated on his reasons for resigning, specifically citing the state’s agricultural water policy as one of his biggest frustrations. (More on that later). In a response to his resignation, State Water Board Chair E. Joaquin Esquivel issued a public statement reaffirming his agency’s commitment to protecting California’s water resources.
“He’s an insider acknowledging what everybody knows and saying what nobody wants to say.”
“Every day, the State Water Board makes tough decisions to protect and manage California’s limited water resources by listening to the perspectives and needs of the state’s diverse stakeholder communities,” Esquivel stated. “I stand by the incredible dedication and progress that our staff bring to work every day because they care deeply about protecting our environment in service to Californians, even amid the many challenges the state faces, including climate change and drought.”
Among water activists, Gomberg’s resignation represented a historic moment wherein someone inside the proverbial system was finally confirming their deepest criticisms of California’s water policies. “When there’s a crisis, things start to change,” said Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. “He’s an insider acknowledging what everybody knows and saying what nobody wants to say.”
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While this may sound like just the latest squabble in California’s long-running battle over who gets limited water supplies, the stakes are higher than when William Mullholland built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and turned on the spigots that built a boomtown. The state is drying up and water districts across California are facing a grim new reality. In the past decade or so, scientists who study weather patterns and climate change have begun to conclude that much of the American Southwest, which is already experiencing its driest spell in the past 1,200 years, is turning into a desert.
In the near future, unless something is done to change the cause of this changing climate, conditions will eventually be similar or worse than those of the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s — massive dust storms clouding the air as temperatures soar in ever-longer heatwaves and crops fail amid a Mars-like landscape that will make today’s Phoenix, Arizona or Riverside, California look Mediterranean in comparison.
This aridification is being sped up by hot air created by global warming, which literally sucks the moisture off the surface of the planet. This process, known as evapotranspiration, is causing “an unprecedented and still ongoing megadrought,” that has already reduced the Colorado River’s flow by 13 percent, according to a May 2020 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at Michigan University Jonathan T. Overpeck, and Bradley Udall of the Colorado River Research Group at Colorado State University.
Overpeck and Udall’s report predicts that unless carbon emissions are reduced, the air will continue to heat up and desert areas within the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico will continue to expand, with “dire” implications for water security and ecosystems. “More severe extreme heatwaves and dust storms are also already occurring,” the report reads. “These and other impacts of aridity will only increase until the cause is halted.”
The Drought Monitor map identifies areas of drought and labels them by intensity. D1 is the least intense level and D4 the most intense. Drought is defined as a moisture deficit bad enough to have social, environmental or economic effects. Courtesy of National Drought Mitigation Center
Another aridification expert, Matthew Lachniet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, studied geochemical data hidden in the dusty floor of the so-called Leviathan Cave in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. In a June 2020 report for the Journal of Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, he described evidence of a prehistoric drought there that lasted 4,000 years — a “worst-case scenario” with alarming implications for an already parched region that is now home to roughly 15 million people.
According to Climate Central, an independent group of climate change researchers, irrigation is the largest user of water in the 17 states west of the Mississippi and amounts to 81 percent of the country’s overall irrigation. And while it may represent only a small percentage of the state’s economy, California’s agriculture industry alone employs an estimated 420,000 people and generates more than $50 billion per year. Dominated by large-scale growers whose most profitable specialty crops include alfalfa and almonds, the farms rely heavily on irrigated water. Thanks to a complex system of water rights that goes back more than a century, agriculture receives the lion’s share of the water produced by the state water project, although the ongoing drought has severely limited the allocation of that water.
Allocated limits have forced many farms to chronically over-pump local groundwater basins, so much so that in 2014, Governor Jerry Brown enacted legislation forcing water districts to better preserve their local groundwater supply. Governor Newsom’s current plan for conserving agricultural water usage mostly continues that policy.
“California irrigated agricultural acreage declined by 1 million acres between 2002 and 2017,” reads the August 11 update to Newsom’s Water Resilience Portfolio, the state’s master plan for water conservation. “The approximately 8 million acres of irrigated farm and ranchland will shrink by at least an estimated additional 500,000 acres to one million acres between now and 2040 as local agencies transition to groundwater use that is sustainable over coming decades. The conserved water should support a more drought-resilient agricultural economy that retains its vitality.”
Governor Newsom’s water plan also calls for major infrastructure investments in both desalination technology and water-collection basins (such as reservoirs) so that when California does experience heavy rains — for example, the possible month-long superstorms that new climate data predicts will likely impact California — the state will be better able to catch and preserve that rainwater.
Additionally, Newsom has ramped up calls for conservation and prohibited the watering of lawns with drinkable water in public areas, such as surrounding office buildings. In late March, the governor warned local water agencies that the state’s water system was only capable of making five percent of its annual water deliveries. In response, the Metropolitan Water District, which provides water to 26 cities and 19 million people in Southern California, announced severe water restrictions for roughly one-third of its customers.
Newsom is also seeking to revive former-governor Brown’s plan to build a pipeline project under the Sacramento River Delta that would more directly connect the Sierra Nevada’s watershed with Southern California. Under pressure from environmentalists who fear the impact on the local ecosystem, Newsom has shrunk the project from two pipelines to one. The proposed tunnel, which would cost $16 billion, is still in the early environmental review process.
While the state water project traditionally relies on a diminishing Sierra Nevada snowpacks to fill its reservoirs, Southern California largely depends on water from the Colorado River, receiving more than a third of the river’s overall annual flow. But the largest river in the United States west of the Mississippi is literally drying up. Its two major reservoirs, which are also the largest in the U.S., Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are both at roughly one-quarter of their total storage capacity. They are in serious danger of reaching “deadpool” status, meaning that the water behind the dams will no longer be high enough to flow downstream.
In response to this crisis, on August 16, President Biden’s Bureau of Reclamation announced severe cuts in annual water allocation for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, which will respectively receive 21 percent, eight percent and seven percent less river water per year. Because California’s claim to the Colorado River predates those states, its water allocation has yet to be affected.
Again, the lion’s share of the water that flows into Southern California from the Colorado River goes to agriculture. According to a recent report by CalMatters, the Imperial Irrigation District — representing nearly 475,000 acres of farmland east of San Diego and south of the Salton Sea — gets as much as 3.1 million-acre-feet of the total 4.4-million-acre-feet per year that is allocated to the region from the river.
Critics argue that none of the state’s water-conservation plans will amount to much until the elephant in the room — California’s agricultural practices — is addressed. “Agriculture contributes two percent to the state’s gross domestic product,” said Krieger, when reached in the wake of Gomberg’s resignation. “It is not feeding the world or contributing that much to California’s economy. That’s a myth, and it’s a myth that agriculture needs to keep alive while using 80 percent of the developed water in California.”
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“It was clear that this was an administration that didn’t want to really take on the challenge of agricultural water use in the context of a rapidly changing climate and major water stress.”
Reached by phone at his home in Northern California, Gomberg said that he is now working as an independent consultant for two national coalitions — the Water Equity and Climate Resilience Caucus, where he’s supporting their work to design and promote water affordability policies at the national level, and the Water Agency Leaders Alliance, a coalition of large water systems across the country seeking to advance equity within their workforce and operations. “My broad goals are to support a transformation of the water sector to be proactively focused on climate resilience and equity,” he said.
Gomberg also elaborated on his reasons for resigning from California’s water board. “There was no one nail-in-the-coffin event. It was just a series of things where I realized I wasn’t going to be effective internally any longer,” he said. “And it was clear that this was an administration that didn’t want to really take on the challenge of agricultural water use in the context of a rapidly changing climate and major water stress.”
According to Gomberg, the agriculture industry has been able to benefit from a public misperception that we’d all starve to death without it, and therefore, it can’t be criticized. “We need food to survive but think about the other industries that produce critical products for individual and collective health, like the pharmaceutical industry,” he said. “They do produce life-saving drugs, yet we are willing to rein in some of the political power that industry wields. But with agriculture, they get off scot-free.”
It’s important to recognize that California’s agriculture industry isn’t monolithic. There are more than 80,000 farms in California, but a small group of powerful agribusiness interests do wield an outsize amount of political power in Sacramento when it comes to water policy. According to a 2015 investigation by the New York Times, several of these businesses, represented by the Westlands Water District, annually siphon up to one and a half times as much water from the Sacramento River Basin as is used by all of LA. That water, the Times noted, “fuels a prodigious harvest, reported to be more than $1.5 billion [in 2014]: almonds for export; tomatoes for paste and sauce; wine grapes; cotton; produce sold under labels like Heinz and Dole.”
The Times also reported that the Westlands water utility itself “is a financier and leading force” for 29 other water districts and whose “nine directors and their relatives gave at least $430,000 to federal candidates and the Republican Party in the last two election cycles” with the group’s political action committee also doling out more than $315,000 during that period.
“That is the type of wishful thinking approach to climate change that our economy as it is currently run produces even from people that should know better. It’s a pipe dream.”
Unless state leaders like Governor Newsom are willing to address the massive amount of water being sucked up by the agriculture industry, Gomberg fears that nothing — not building more or better reservoirs, desalination plants or water recycling or conservation programs — can be done to keep California, much less the rest of the American Southwest, from turning into a vast desert.
“This idea that we can store more or get more water into groundwater aquifers, do more desal, recycle more water: none of that is going to solve the problem that aridification creates, which is that there is simply less water available and the amount of water being used, which is mostly for agricultural production, is not sustainable,” Gomberg says. “That is the type of wishful thinking approach to climate change that our economy as it is currently run produces even from people that should know better. It’s a pipe dream.”
In other words, aridification cannot be managed through supply-side investments. “It’s hotter and drier on average than it was in the state’s recorded history when there has been a large population,” he argues. “And we already have a system that utilizes all the water, we have built major dams on every river system, and we have pumping technology to get water from deep underground. There is just no more water that is out there.”