Should California Spend 4B Gallons of Water on Six Endangered Fish?
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I am not a big fish lover. I don't personally care about the Delta Smelt. But it's going extinct because farmers took up so much of the freshwater supply for so long and then screamed whenever any water was diverted. You know, California also has a multi-billion dollar freshwater fish industry. The Delta Smelt is important not because it's such an amazing fish but because it's a good proxy for the viability of our salmon fisheries and others like trout.
This sort of zero-sum thinking is at the root of our environmental and political problems. We're playing beggar-my-neighbor with increasingly scarce resources instead of saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a variety of economic interests, and ultimately we are all in this together.' It's very depressing >:-(
But that's what they saying! The guy said the 6 fish weren't worth the water they were loosing.
The bigger problem is that if we start doing the math in terms of finances we would invariably loose many of our national treasures as the value of natural resources are hard to tabulate, whereas the potential gains from their use can be easily portrayed as `capital` and enabling of further production. More troubling we might opt for short-term technologies with sub-optimal long-term payoffs like fossil fuels.
Indeed, the people who aggressively portray themselves as `stakeholders` are often whose who want to act against the interests of the community.
What we need here are principles.
Also, it's not meaningful to look at the water allocation on a water-per-individual-fish basis. What's the point of diverting this water at all? To ensure that there's a flow on a particular river tributary to allow fish to swim upstream to spawn. How much does it need? That's very much a function of the geography of the river - its length, composition, elevation and so on, and the length of time that you need to ensure water flow for successful spawning. Any number of fish, whether it's 6 or 6 million, need to ave water flowing along the whole length of the river if they're to swim upstream to spawn.
So look, if these are in fact the last 6 delta smelt in existence that's sad but I'm not going to lose sleep if they die. Maybe we can put their DNA in cryogenic storage and reintroduce it someday or something. But if we decide to cut off that water, then we have to accept that probably nothing spawns in this tributary of the Sacramento river at all and that whole branch of the river dies, potentially affecting many other species.
If it helps, think of the river like part of the interstate highway system. You can try to save money on maintenance or so, but if a major bridge goes out then whole large sections of freeway become useless.
BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.
PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!
On market solutions, they can work in many cases but they're not a panacea. For example, it may be economical for golf course owners to keep using a lot of water because they can make fat money from charging expensive green fees, but that doesn't mean that watering golf courses is more economically efficient over the long run.
Remember "do things that don't scale" - you save 6 fish so in a couple decades you'll be at 60,000.
Or instead of idiotic regulations that will be gamed and filled with loopholes, just make the farmers pay the market rate for water. That will drive up the cost of the farm output enough that it won't be competitive and farmers won't need so much water.
So we're talking $7.5 million dollars, which, in the big scheme of things, doesn't sound like a lot of money when you are thinking about endangered fish, and, more importantly, a healthy ecosystem for the other fish that are in that environment. In fact, it sounds kind of minuscule to me.
Note -to those that would argue you can't take desalinated water from the ocean, and deliver it to the appropriate places for the fish @ $0.50/m^3, you are right. But what you can do, is deliver that water to residential homes and industries on the coastal area, and offset it by diverting the water that feeds into those coastal reservoirs at the source, so everything balances out.
Did you know that, before they were all dead, migratory fish were an important method of nutrient transport from oceans to inland ecosystems?
Did you know that fishing is an industry that employs plenty of people, when the fish haven't been driven to the brink of extinction?
All true facts.
The typical M.O. of American business and industry is to drive a species right to the edge of extinction and then let some minor weather event finish the job. That's what's happening here.
Brilliantly put.
>All true facts.
I still eat fish, therefore the fact is not true. Your post is nothing more than claptrap not backed up by evidence.
This sort of thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/business/economy/the-price...
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...
[2] http://gizmodo.com/seriously-stop-demonizing-almonds-1696065...
In this time of drought, this seems like a no-brainer, but I would rather spend water on fish in an actual river (where tens of millions of other creatures live) than for cattle or almonds.
I can think of much greater wastes of water than trying to save an endangered species. If nothing else it allows one river to continue being an actual river for another year. Come what may, the farmers will still be physically alive next year.
Stop over-simplifying complex issues. It doesn't help anyone.
I'm personally not a fan of the 1.1 trillion gallons used for almonds while they pull water off restaurant tables (yeah, that'll work), but I didn't think that had any place here either.
The fish need 12,000 acre feet so 0.03% of that. Or a 245m cube.
Or leaving your shower running for 4,756 years.
edit:
Ah, it looks like water there is around $1000, per acre foot. 12,000 acre feet, so 1.2 million. 200k per fish sounds pretty steep, but it looks like there are other benefits.
edit 2:
looks like Nestle pays about 30 bucks per acre foot. So that's only 60k per fish.
But if it's only $60K per fish and this is some particularly great way of preserving them or rekindling an ecosystem, maybe that's a great deal. Or maybe it's off by an order is magnitude, in either direction.
"Socio-economic measures such as lot size and income – Areas with higher incomes generally use more water than areas with low incomes. Larger landscaped residential lots that require more water are often associated with more affluent communities. Additionally, higher income households may be less sensitive to the cost of water, since it represents a smaller portion of household income."
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/progr...
Seems to suggest the exact opposite of what you're talking about re: immigrants and golf courses. Also, no one is being silenced or hushed here, so the persecution complex seems a bit misplaced.