{"id":9014,"date":"2016-02-05T12:18:04","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T20:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9014"},"modified":"2016-02-05T12:18:04","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T20:18:04","slug":"lessons-from-californias-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lessons-from-californias-drought\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons From California\u2019s Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\u00a0By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Image credit: Barbara Kelley<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

By the end of 2015, it had begun raining and snowing throughout California after fifty months of\u00a0drought.<\/p>\n

Meteorologists had long forecasted that the cyclical return of the so-called El Ni\u00f1o Southern Oscillation\u2014the episodic rise in temperature of\u00a0a band of ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial\u00a0Pacific<\/a>\u2014would end the\u00a0drought.<\/p>\n

The warmer Pacific alters winds, air temperature, and atmospheric pressures and thus tends to reroute northern storms to their proper course over the Western United States. If the current storm track persists\u00a0through March, California\u2019s\u00a0drought\u00a0may well come to an end.<\/p>\n

Was California changed by the catastrophic\u00a0drought\u2014and did the country at large learn any lessons from it?
\n<\/p>\n

A recently released documentary,\u00a0Dead Harvest<\/em>, by filmmaker and writer Ray McNally chronicles the human side of the four-year\u00a0drought. McNally shows how a natural challenge turned into a human calamity\u2014not by the mere indifference of government officials, but rather by their ideological policies that deliberately ensured water shortages throughout the state and that were often targeted at agriculture of the Central Valley.<\/p>\n

Indeed, anyone who has driven across the southwestern Central Valley in the last four years would have noticed hundreds of boarded-up rural homes and vast tracts of unfarmed and now feral\u2014but otherwise once rich\u2014farmland. Since 2011, the cutoff of surface irrigation water deliveries and the subsequent efforts to make up those losses by unprecedented pumping of groundwater to save irrigated farmlands have depleted the aquifer in drastic fashion.<\/p>\n

The Central California water table has fallen in depth anywhere from 50 to 500 feet\u2014the severity predicated on the distance from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That decline has prompted the drilling of thousands of new private wells, but at costs often quadruple the pre-drought\u00a0rate. The huge demand for limited drilling rigs, the need to drill to unprecedented levels to find water, the soaring power bills to pump from greater depths, and the increase in permanent orchard and vineyard acreage all conspired to spike agricultural expenses. In sum, the\u00a0drought\u00a0has warped agriculture in paradoxical ways.<\/p>\n

Small rural homes with dry wells, especially along the western corridors of the valley, are now often abandoned. If they had been rented out, several years of rental income would not have paid for the exorbitant cost of new replacement domestic wells. Most valley residents, especially those retired, could not afford the $60- to $100-a-foot expense to drill down hundreds of feet to tap falling water.\u00a0Droughts\u00a0in the future will probably continue to thin out rural living in the central part of the state.<\/p>\n

Another irony is that the\u00a0drought\u00a0has spiked the radical transition away from open row-crop ground and deciduous tree-fruit to the planting of nut orchards, almonds especially. On the West Side of the valley, water deliveries were all but ended. The water table in some places has fallen below 1,000 feet. Wells and new pumps often cost $250,000 and more. Only the record net profits from almonds (between $5,000 and $9,000 per acre) allow new wells to be drilled. The larger the farm, the more frequently profitable almonds are planted, the more reasonably an operation can afford the cost of buying scarce surface water or drilling deeper\u2014and the more likely smaller farmers sell or lease out their ground to those with the capital to make the costly transition to almond and other nut orchards.<\/p>\n

The paradoxes continue. Almonds and other nut crops\u2014as well as pistachios and walnuts\u2014are the most mechanized of all California crops. By the time they reach production, they require no hand-pruning, thinning, or harvesting\u2014vastly reducing the soaring expenses for manual farm labor at a time when perhaps a million acres have already gone out of production along with the loss of thousands of farm jobs.<\/p>\n

Almonds also are moving eastward, as West-Side corporate concerns hedge their bets by buying and renting Valley ground closer to the water-rich Sierra Nevada Mountains\u2014and ripping out vineyards and deciduous fruit orchards to plant new almond orchards.<\/p>\n

Almonds require about three acre-feet of irrigated water per year, comparable to tree-fruit and vineyards. But only almonds, which have grown from about 100,000 acres in the 1970s to nearly a million acres today\u2014and in the last forty years have increased average production from about 1,000 lbs. per acre to nearly 3,000 lbs.\u2014guarantee enough profits to pay for the vastly increased costs of purchasing scarce surface water, or of pumping from increased depths.<\/p>\n

In sum, the\u00a0drought\u00a0and the state\u2019s poor response to it, accelerated the trend to ever-larger corporate farms, ever more mechanized farming, and ever greater mono-cropped agriculture\u2014amid an increasingly emptying countryside.<\/p>\n

In the midst of the\u00a0drought, several million acre-feet of precious stored water was nevertheless released to San Francisco Bay, due to environmentalists\u2019 lawsuits and state bureaucratic partisanship. The green hope was to return the San Joaquin River to its mythical nineteenth-century past, through massive water releases that upstream would allow reintroduction of migrating salmon, while downstream saving the three-inch delta smelt.<\/p>\n

Yet both opponents and supporters of these controversial diversions of irrigation water can now agree that the efforts failed miserably. For all the draining of reservoirs and the multimillion-dollar efforts to truck fish up and down the river, there are not now viable salmon runs from the Pacific to the Sierra Nevada. Smelt populations also continue to decline\u2014largely due to factors that had little to do with agriculture water use, but much to do with Bay Area communities\u2019 treated wastewater releases into the bay and to invasive predatory fish species.<\/p>\n

Government failure was not just due to acts of commission, but of omission as well. In four years, not a single new reservoir was begun, despite warnings that the state\u2019s reservoir capacity long ago was fossilized\u2014designed for a state of 20 million people, not the present 40 million.<\/p>\n

Had the state begun work on a few of the long-planned tertiary reservoirs of the now neglected California Water Project\u2014the Sites, Los Banos Grandes, and Temperance Flat projects\u2014the reservoirs would now be nearing completion and ready to capture nearly four-million acre-feet of additional water runoff, should 2016 prove to be a \u201cwet\u201d year.<\/p>\n

If Californians have learned anything, it is that\u00a0droughts\u00a0are survivable only to the degree that the state\u2019s reservoirs have water, that water projects must follow their original and contracted purposes (irrigation, flood control, hydroelectric power, and recreation), and that finite aquifers are replenished only by surface irrigation water deliveries that both recharge the water table and preclude the need for subterranean pumping. Because of the state\u2019s failure to initiate a new reservoir, the next\u00a0drought\u00a0will hit 50 or 60 million state residents\u2014with the ability to survive only a year or two, not four years, of reduced rain and snowfall.<\/p>\n

The environmental movement helped to intensify rather than alleviate the\u00a0drought. Both Governor Brown and President Obama\u2014contrary to the exegeses of reputable climatologists and meteorologists\u2014ignored the demonstrable and historical role of the El Ni\u00f1o effect. Instead they quickly politicized the\u00a0drought\u00a0by blaming generic global warming as the culprit, and then suggested that the cure was a reduction in carbon emissions. There is some irony in the fact that what seems to cause California\u2019s frequent droughts\u00a0is not the supposed man-caused global warming of recent years, but a natural and slight\u00a0cooling<\/em>\u00a0of the Pacific Ocean that, as its centuries-long wont, helps to alter storm pathways over Western North America.<\/p>\n

But building a $100 billion-plus high-speed rail or mandating that California public utilities over the next four years meet targets of 33% renewable energy use will not prevent a periodic\u00a0drought. Such boondoggles will only ensure less funding for proven drought\u00a0solutions, such as building more reservoirs, pipelines, and canal transfer systems.<\/p>\n

The California legislature has dealt with a number of issues since the beginning of the drought\u00a0in 2012\u2014mandating transgendered restrooms, outlawing the use of hunting dogs in the pursuit of bobcats and bears, and proposing a vast increase in the state gas tax in a state that currently suffers the continental United States\u2019 most expensive gasoline prices. Yet reservoir construction was not among such high priority considerations, despite voters\u2019 overwhelming passage in 2014 of a $7.4 billion water bond that included the building of one or two new reservoirs\u2014none of which are even close to being started.<\/p>\n

Forests suffered as well. Perhaps there are now 12 million dead trees in the Sierra Nevada and other state and national forests. Another 1 billion trees are stressed and vulnerable to parasitic bark beetles and diseases. They too may succumb if 2016 does not prove to be an unusually wet year. In a logical world, there would be emergency government efforts to harvest these dead trees, to eliminate the specter of future forest fires, to stop the spread of tree infestations and disease, and to capture hundreds of millions of dollars of precious timber.<\/p>\n

Yet in recent years California environmentalists have all but ruined the state\u2019s timber industry\u2014presently less than a third the size of what it was 60 years ago. Given the power of green activists, and given that California\u2019s appetite for new homes, wood decks, and fine woodwork has not diminished, the state, once an exporter of wood products, now imports 80% of its timber.<\/p>\n

Environmentalists now apply the same prohibitions to salvaging the logging of dead trees that they have so successfully applied to the harvesting of live ones. California forests look terrible, with large swaths of brown and dead evergreens. Trails are clogged with fallen branches and stumps. The worst forest fires in modern memory have been synonymous with four years of\u00a0drought.<\/p>\n

No matter. To the state environmentalists,\u00a0drought-stricken and now dead trees are natural phenomena that are part of larger biorhythms, providing food for insects and worms that in turn will fuel bird and rodent ecosystems. Better to let dead trees rot or burn than turn them into wood for California housing.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0drought\u00a0may end in 2016. But its injurious and man-caused effects will continue. To paraphrase the French diplomat,\u00a0Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-P\u00e9rigord, officials in Sacramento\u00a0\u201chave learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas Image credit: Barbara Kelley By the end of 2015, it had begun raining and snowing throughout California after fifty months of\u00a0drought. Meteorologists had long forecasted that the cyclical return of the so-called El Ni\u00f1o Southern Oscillation\u2014the episodic rise in temperature of\u00a0a band of ocean water that develops in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2lo","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11778,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":0},"title":"California Has Become America\u2019s Cannibal State","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 11, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax. The state\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8742,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-california-be-saved\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":1},"title":"Can California Be Saved?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Crime is back up in California. Los Angeles reported a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes over the first half of 2015 and nearly an 11 percent increase in property crimes. Last year, cash-strapped California taxpayers voted for Proposition 47, which so far\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"www.femtalks.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/bay-area-traffic-move-over-law.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10472,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-california-cracking-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":2},"title":"Is California Cracking Up?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 With poor education, a budget deficit, and crumbling infrastructure, Californians shouldn\u2019t be focused on idealistic social programs. \u00a0 Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and Google are hitting record highs. \u00a0 California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8915,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-leading-from-behind\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":3},"title":"California, Leading from Behind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse\u00a0state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/california-leading-from-behind.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11206,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-and-conservatism\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":4},"title":"California and Conservatism","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review I share some of the sentiments of Jay Nordlinger\u2019s Corner post expressing\u00a0confidence\u00a0that some day in the future there may be hope for California conservatism. That\u2019s why I continue to live in the house that I grew up in, despite vast changes in the nature\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ronald Reagan"","block_context":{"text":"Ronald Reagan","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/ronald-reagan\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":748,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-california-be-fixed\/","url_meta":{"origin":9014,"position":5},"title":"Can California Be Fixed?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's The Corner Recently, I was driving down pot-holed, two-lane, non-freeway 101 near Monterey (unchanged since the 1960s) when the radio blared that on a recent science test administered to public schools, California scored 47th in the nation. As I looked at the congested traffic on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9014"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9014"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9017,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9014\/revisions\/9017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}