Crackpot water doctrine guides California's latest desal strategy update
Fairytale water war between the guardians of abundance and the lords of scarcity lurks behind the State's latest desalination report-News Streams #2
Like Daedalus’s perpetual motion machine, the age-old “infinite abundance” doctrine of water management defies the laws of nature and lingers on.
Edward Ring, California’s best known preacher of infinite abundance, wants you to believe in it and help prevent the imposition of infinite-water-rationing by the “Lords of Scarcity” (i.e., conservationists and their oligarchic cohorts) who he says will take over the world.
The Lords of Scarcity will rule the world, coopting their counterparts in other nations, and a new era of feudalism will descend on humanity.
Ring, Edward. The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (p. 141). Kindle Edition.
The Ringers would defeat that conspiracy by creating a water-supply portfolio that deemphasizes conservation in deference to costly and massive infrastructure projects.
“We can’t conserve our way out of this drought, so we need to use all the available tools in the toolbox,” they say.
The Ringers share that epistle with liberals like Gov. Gavin Newsom (“We need more damn tools in the toolbox”), Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein and the majority of state legislators.
Both factions religiously supported Poseidon Water’s $1.4 billion Huntington Beach ocean desalination project, which the Coastal Commission unanimously aborted late-term in May, 2022.
They also joined with Poseidon to promote its Carlsbad plant (operational since 2015) as an essential tool to prevent a water-reliability crisis.
"There is a sense of urgency at play here," Poseidon Vice President Peter MacLaggan told the North County Times back in 2007. "The water supply situation in Southern California has deteriorated significantly in the 10 months since we submitted this application."
Since Poseidon’s HB defeat, the toolbox epistle has been artfully reimagined to publically favor smaller desal projects, like the proposed Doheny plant in south Orange County.
But a draft “Desalination Resource Management Strategy (RMS)” update by the Department of Water Resources seems to crack the door open to a Poseidon redux.
Looking at all types of desalination facilities, the RMS concludes that if properly designed they would “provide unique [water] reliability” during a time of climate-change impacts.
The cost of inaction for California, the RMS warns, is potential water-supply and economic insecurity by 2040.
It notes, for example, that the city of San Diego gets 10 percent of its water from the Carlsbad plant, commissioned by the San Diego County Water Authority (CWA).
But it ignores the budget crisis for CWA and its member agencies caused by the plant’s high rates (now close to $4,000/AF) and the risk of it becoming a stranded asset as some agencies, including San Diego, offset imported water by building their own wastewater treatment plants.
The RMS optimistically presents caveats for desalination about costs, equity, environmental justice, marine life mortality, and project need—issues that it hints will sort out with research and mitigation—and, hooray for permit streamlining.
Other studies said the same things over the past 23 years. But little changed since then except that we’re closer than ever to streamlining a business model for water management—a fantasy—that otherwise hasn’t changed in over a century.
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