WaterWired

Sharon B. Megdal's Reflections: 'Relevance Today of Comments on Arizona’s Future from 1987'

Sharon B. Megdal, a friend, colleague and one of the smartest ones in the room, runs the Arizona Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. She has started a series of Reflections that I have found fascinating. Today's is: Reflections: Relevance Today of Comments on Arizona’s Future from 1987.

Here she is with Gov. Bruce Babbitt - 1987 and 2020 (click on the graphic to enlarge it):

Here goes:

I have lived in Arizona for close to 42 years. When I moved to Arizona from New Jersey, where I grew up and was educated, I had no idea I would become a water professional. I studied economics as an undergraduate at Rutgers University and as a graduate student at Princeton University. My fields of specialization were Public Sector Economics (the economics of government tax and expenditure policy), Econometrics (using statistical methods and models to characterize economic behavior), and International Economics. Note the absence of anything sounding like water, agricultural, or environmental economics.

Some interesting twists and turns in my professional career led me, since the early 1990s, to focus almost exclusively on water. The most pivotal event occurred in September 1985, when Governor Bruce Babbitt appointed me to fill a vacancy on the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), the body responsible for regulating privately owned utilities. I was therefore especially pleased to publicly thank Mr. Babbitt at the WRRC’s June 2020 annual conference for profoundly influencing my career. 

Recently, when scanning some publications from the 1980s, I came across a document I had totally forgotten: the proceedings of the October 27-28, 1987 Arizona Futures Symposium. My speaking assignment at the symposium was to react to Robert Theobald’s comments, entitled “A Framework for Thinking About Transportation Issues.” I was asked to focus on economic issues and Arizona’s future carrying capacity. Robert Theobald (June 11, 1929 – November 27, 1999) was a distinguished consulting economist and futurist author. In October 1987, I had the experience of ACC service and my economics training to draw upon. I was a self-employed consultant and part-time Visiting Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University, teaching economics for NAU’s MBA program. 

As I reviewed the transcript of my commentary, I found portions pertinent to our situation today and our quest to address wicked water problems. To acknowledge the 35th anniversary of my appointment to the ACC, I would like to reflect upon observations from that time, specifically my 1987 symposium commentary. Perhaps you will find my comments relevant to some of our current-day water policy challenges and efforts to identify pathways to solutions and conclude, as I did, that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

In late 1987, we were in the transition from the industrial era to the communications era, just a few years after the break-up of AT&T, the monopoly that provided most of the country with telephone service. These were uncertain times for the telecommunications industry. Judge Harold Greene, who presided over the breakup, wielded a lot of power. I asked the question: “Can we rely on the Judge, the state and federal regulatory bodies, the companies involved, and the market to coordinate so that the communications network develops in an appropriate fashion? There are some who are quite pessimistic about the answer to this question. The infrastructure we will have in place to handle our transportation and communications needs will depend on many parties and many actions, and is not likely to be ‘optimal’.”

I pointed out that communications and transportation systems can be substitutes, something we are so keenly aware of now that COVID-19 has upended our work, educational, and personal lives. Then, teleconferencing and facsimile transmission were two examples of how the communications network could be used instead of the transportation network. Who would have imagined that we’d have the virtual meeting platforms we now have?!

When looking toward the future, I asked: “What will make things change so that a farsighted public policy replaces the crisis management spirit that pervades so much of government’s – and the private sector’s – operations? We are talking about things that require a long lead time. Shorter run problems require more immediate attention and resources. How can a community that cannot determine its carrying capacity in the short run (or does so only by default) ever find the resources to devote to longer term problem solving?” I noted the need to “formulate the questions now and educate the public – including decision makers – on the questions and also on the future implications of current decisions. Too often we search for answers when the questions have not even been properly articulated.”

Drawing upon the fiscal federalism framework that has shaped my thinking about a multitude of public policy matters, I spoke about jurisdictional responsibility. “What level of government should have the responsibility of dealing with these issues? We live in a federal system of states, counties, cities, school districts, improvement districts, etc. Arizona is made up of many different regions, each with its own character and problems and, therefore, solutions. Most observers of demographic and economic trends point to the disappearance of the bell-shaped income distribution. Instead we see a bimodal distribution – lots of poor and lots of well-to-do, with little in between…How will such an income distribution affect social and physical infrastructure requirements?”

Whether transportation, water, or other governmental responsibilities, I have long been interested in the diversity of situations. I suggest to you that these 1987 observations could be made today and in the context of water: “Economic conditions vary not only within counties, but also between counties. There is already a feeling within the state of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Fiscal constraints are going to be no less important [in the future] than they are today. In fact, they may become more severe.” I further observed that “the challenges of developing appropriate policy for the future will necessitate cooperation among many levels of government and between the private and public sectors. I think this is a reality that must be recognized.”

I ended my remarks with some statements that I again suggest have relevance to today’s water policy dialogues. “What can be done so that we have a chance of choosing a policy vector that leads us to a desirable future? We must recognize that we are borrowing from future generations so that we may have today. We are borrowing for things we should not be [borrowing for] and not borrowing for things (such as building of infrastructure) that we should be. There are no easy solutions. We have difficulty solving today’s problems. Management is rewarded on quarterly profits. Elected public officials are judged on what they did while in office, not on the basis of what they might have done for the very long run.”

I am going to end this essay as I ended my commentary. I have been consistent in my call for education at all levels and in acknowledging that both the private and public sectors have important roles to play in resolving our thorny public policy challenges. “I am convinced that more resources have to go into public education on issues related to our future. There needs to be a continual effort to formulate questions and discuss issues and potential solutions…The commitment of resources will have to come from the government and the private sector, as both have a stake in our future.”

We both came to Arizona from the Northeast: she from New Jersey, me from New York.

In 1987 I was long gone from the UofA and Tucson; I was there from August 1970 to June 1976. I still have fond memories of Tucson (although the metro area is about 3X larger than in 1970 and it is hotter in the summer as well. 

Enjoy!

“You know you’re an Arizona native when you hug a cactus only once in your lifetime.” - Nancy Dedera

UC-Davis Report: 'Sustainable for Whom? The Impact of Groundwater Sustainability Plans on Domestic Wells'

Very relevant work on domestic wells released on 2 September 2020.

The full report and its Executive Summary are from the UC-Davis Center for Regional Change. 

Download Sustainable-for-Whom_UC-Davis_Sept-2020

Download Sustainable-for-Whom_Exec_Summary_UC-Davis_Sept-2020

From the website:

Sustainable for Whom? The Impact of Groundwater Sustainability Plans on Domestic Wells

Authors: Darcy Bostic, Kristin Dobbin, Rich Pauloo, Jessica Mendoza, Michael Kuo, Jonathan London.

Studies estimate that 1.5 – 2.5 million Californians rely on domestic wells to meet their household water needs (Johnson and Belitz 2015; Dieter et al. 2018; Pace et al. 2020). But because domestic wells are often shallow, they are also often sensitive to changes in groundwater levels. As such, sustainable groundwater management has an important role to play in safeguarding the health and safety of residents and the achievement of California’s recognized Human Right to Water. 

This report analyzes 41 Groundwater Sustainability Plans in 19 critical priority subbasins in California (in the San Joaquin Valley, Central California, and the Central Coast) to assess monitoring network coverage and the vulnerability of domestic wells to minimum thresholds (MTs), or the lowest groundwater level considered sustainable. We find that GSPs range in lateral spatial coverage (33 - 100 %) and coverage of domestic wells (43 - 100%) within their boundaries. Overall, estimated domestic well failure rates are on par with a management regime of “business as usual” or status quo groundwater extraction (Pauloo et al. 2020). Results suggest that 1,000 - 6,000 wells are at risk of failure in critical priority basins under proposed MTs. In what follows we present the research methodology, key results, and a set of policy recommendations to assist the achievement of sustainable groundwater management in California that is compatible with the state's efforts to achieve the human right to water.

This research was supported through a generous grant from the Water Foundation.

Enjoy!

“If surface water can be compared with interest income, and non-renewable groundwater with capital...California was milking interest and capital in about equal proportion." - Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, p. 457 (1986)

V.B. Price Column: 'Nuke War, Nuke Accidents - the Forgotten Menace'

I spent almost 30 years of my life living in the USA's two 'most nuclear' states: Nevada (12+) years and New Mexico (17 years). Both states are idiosyncratic (see today's quote), something that can be said about each state, but these two arguably set the bar high. 

I mention the above because my time in those states inured me to the nuclear industry: weapons, waste, power, disposal sites - the whole nine yards. With that in mind, here is Mr. Price's (Vincent Price's son, BTW) latest Mercury Messenger column. Enjoy!

                      Nuke War, Nuke Accidents — the Forgotten Menace

                                                V.B. Price 

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

That’s the Reagan-Gorbachev Principle from the summit the two leaders held in 1985. That same sentence is what Jessica T. Mathews, long time president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, would like to see endorsed today by the five original five nuclear powers — U.S., Russia, the U.K., France and China.

The virtual impossibility of keeping a “limited” nuclear exchange truly limited, and the radioactive contamination that would ensue even from a highly restrained use of so-called low-yield “clean” weapons, not to mention the physical destruction, makes the endorsement of the 1985 principle a necessary counterbalance to what many worry will become a new arms race as the major powers seek to update their still vast, world-destroying nuclear arsenals.

We’ve heard these last weeks, especially from speakers at the Democratic Convention, a hearteningly intensified awareness of the “existential crises” of pandemics, climate change, a global economic depression, GOP voting suppression and most recently super hurricanes. But the old dread monster in the closet, the one that those of us who grew up in the1950s and 1960s were taught to dread above all — nuclear Armageddon — has become the forgotten odds-on looming catastrophe that literally no one, not even Democrats, really wants to even mention anymore.

And now, New Mexico will become the major manufacturing site for this potential new arms race to Armageddon, building plutonium pits (the explosive core of thermonuclear weapons) at a new facility in Los Alamos at the National Laboratory there, perhaps hundreds of them for many years to come. LANL’s history of hazardous waste management and pollution control since the 1940s is a well-documented mess of befouling, with radioactive emissions not only in the water of the Rio Grande but also the air up and down the Española Valley, not to mention the 2,100 rather casually overseen nuclear waste storage sites at LANL itself. Despite a state ordered clean up, LANL’s waste management remains largely beyond public scrutiny.

And to top that off, despite our governor’s courageous and right-minded opposition to a proposal by Holtec Corp., it seems that southeastern New Mexico could well become the dump site for all 90,000 metric tons of America’s used commercial nuclear fuel rods, stored now at some 34 sites around the country. Along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, which stores thousands of barrels of plutonium-touched waste, and the Urenco National Enrichment Facility near Eunice, which generates weapons and commercial-grade Uranium 235, the Holtec Consolidated Interim Storage Facility near Carlsbad would turn southeast New Mexico into something of a nuclear no man’s land. The highly dangerous toxic spent fuel rods would be shipped to the Holtec facility by rail, potentially endangering every train-served town and city along the way.

Whether generated by the military or by commercial uses, radioactive waste is the lethal price New Mexicans have been forced to pay since the first atomic bomb test at Trinity in 1945. Many of us have opposed for decades our state being used as a nuclear latrine. Many of us in the southern part of the state think it’s good business. And business is winning out, as usual, over public safety.

I urge you to read Jessica T. Mathew’s essay in the August 20, 2020 New York Review of Books, entitled “The New Nuclear Threat.” She develops calmly and logically, but with horrifying detail, why updating nuclear weapons — weapons that must never be used — is a hair-trigger folly as catastrophic as climate change and the pandemics they spawn.

She writes of the dangerous mixed messages swirling around the ideas of fighting a “limited nuclear war” and the “deterrence” effect created by the idea that “mutually assured destruction,” MAD, would be the inevitable consequence of an all-out nuclear exchange. She makes it clear that the idea of a limited nuclear war is preposterous.

“Many plans for limited nuclear war have been created on paper,” she writes, “but they immediately raise yet another critical question: Can there really be such a thing? To assert the answer is yes, one has to believe that intentions can be clearly signaled (‘I’m attacking you but with much less firepower than I might have otherwise used.’), accurately interpreted by the other side, and responded to not in rage or fear but in calm reasonableness (‘I’m retaliating but much more lightly than I might have.’). There are all kinds of technical reasons to doubt that this is more than a fantasy.”

And here we are in the Land of Enchantment, once again about to be the place where nuclear winter is manufactured and stored in grapefruit-sized spheres of plutonium, stuff that’s so radioactive, so hot, and so volatile that you can’t get the spheres too close to each other for fear of setting off highly toxic nuclear fires.

And there is already enough of them all over the world in what’s known as the nuclear triad — in planes, in submarines and in silos — to put an end to everything resembling life in our little corner of the solar system.

It’s truly time right now to at least try somehow to think our way out of this madness. As Mathews writes, “Of the three legs of the triad, ground-based ICBMs are both the most threatening weapons to the enemy, because of their number and huge megatonnage, and the most vulnerable, because they sit in fixed, easily targeted silos. They are therefore ‘use them or lose them’ weapons that must be fired on warning of an attack.” And there is nothing “limited” about them.

Our current president wants to rebuild our arsenal back up to more than 30,000 warheads, from the current world-destroying 3,500 usable ones we now possess. And if we reload, so will the Russians, the Chinese and anybody else who can.

More nuclear warheads will not make “America great again” or Russia or China or anywhere else. For most of the world’s people, nuclear weapons are nothing more or less than devices for involuntary, planetary suicide. And for the people of New Mexico, manufacturing such warheads and bearing the insidious burden of storing the radioactive waste that manufacturing produces, is not only an insult to our way of life but a grave and ever-present danger to our collective health and well being.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

You can read this online and leave a comment here.

By the way, a local company is marketing 'mini-nuclear' reactors. Stay tuned!

Enjoy!

"Every calculation, based on experience elsewhere, fails in New Mexico." -- former Territorial Governor Lew Wallace, in a letter to his wife,  1878

Thursday Twofer! The GGG Opines: Groundwater Visibility, Invisibility and More!

So who should email me about yesterday's post? One of my favorites - friend and colleague Sharon B. Megdal, Director of the Arizona Water Resources Research Center. We get along unlike most New Jerseyites (she) and New Yorkers (me) do. 

But GGG? What? Groundwater Governance Goddess/Guru - that's the moniker I gave her a few years ago. We've got two papers from her today.

 

1) Here is a one-pager article she wrote in 2016, The Invisible Water:

Download The Invisible Water

The first two paragraphs:

Water policy discussions around the globe are focusing on groundwater and how to improve its governance and management. Growing water demands and changing climate’s influence on temperature and precipitation patterns have underscored the importance of groundwater – the invisible water.

Groundwater meets about 40 percent of Arizona’s annual water uses. While the Colorado River, which also satisfies about 40 percent of Arizona’s annual needs, is receiving a lot of attention, with the Central Arizona Project’s “Protect Lake Mead” campaign and other efforts to raise awareness of work being done to forestall and maybe even avoid shortage, efforts to manage our groundwater resources wisely deserve at least equal attention. Those of us who work in the water sector in Arizona know how important groundwater is to communities and economic activities throughout the state. We regularly cite the centrality of Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which implemented a strong regulatory framework for groundwater utilization in designated Active Management Areas. But because these provisions do not apply statewide, even here in Arizona, where groundwater management seems second nature, groundwater overdraft continues to be a challenge.

Cutting to the chase...

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the important work on groundwater assessment being carried out along the US-Mexico border. The binational Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program has produced a report on the San Pedro Aquifer in English and Spanish and is completing a similar report for the binational Santa Cruz Aquifer.

Groundwater is a critically important resource for Arizona and much of the world. People are coming together to emphasize the need to understand this resource and manage it better. At the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center, we endeavor to contribute to efforts to share best practices for groundwater assessment, governance, and management. Please visit http://wrrc.arizona.edu/programs-research to find out more.

2) She also sent me this excellent open-access paper: Invisible Water: The Importance of Good Groundwater Governance and Management, npj Clean Water, Volume 1, Article number: 15 (2018). It was published in the online journal npj Clean Water. I posted it about 2 years ago. Click on the graphics to enlarge them.

Download Megdal FINAL Invisible Water npj Clean Water

Abstract
This paper summarizes the results of efforts to bring attention to the importance of understanding and improving groundwater governance and management. Discussion of survey work in the United States and global case studies highlights the importance of focusing attention on this invisible water resource before pollution or depletion of it causes severe economic, environmental, and social dislocations. Better governance and management of groundwater are required to move toward sustainable groundwater use.

Introduction
The growing population’s increasing demand for water for food, energy, and other human uses and changing climate’s impacts to both water supplies and demands are resulting in increasing reliance on groundwater. In many places groundwater is being depleted faster than nature replenishes it, and its quality is being compromised. Groundwater “mining” can have negative implications for meeting long-term water needs of people and natural systems. At the same time that groundwater from deeper and saltier aquifers is eyed for meeting future drinking water needs, aquifers are being identified as repositories for waste streams from desalination and energy processes as well as carbon sequestration sites. As dependence on groundwater increases, water managers and policy makers must pay careful attention to both groundwater quality and quantity. This paper focuses on efforts to bring attention to the importance of understanding and improving the governance and management of this invisible and increasingly relied-upon resource. It is essential that water users focus attention on this invisible water resource before pollution or depletion of it causes severe economic, environmental, and social dislocations. Better governance and management of groundwater are required to move toward sustainable groundwater use.

Cutting to the chase...

Concluding Remarks
Groundwater, the invisible water supply, is becoming more visible in dialogues on the challenges of meeting the world’s food, energy and water needs. The governance and management of this resource will often be at the scale of the source aquifers. Many across the globe are working hard to bring greater attention to the importance of good governance and management of this oftentimes non-renewable resource. As the state-level survey work demonstrates, quality considerations are paramount to those responsible for regulating groundwater. Along with other factors, quality considerations will determine groundwater’s usability. The case studies discussed underscore that groundwater is largely a local resource, with its governance and management vital to the livability and productivity of regions around the globe. Water policymakers, users, researchers, and citizens must focus attention on this invisible water resource before pollution or depletion of it results in severe economic, environmental, and social dislocations.

I jokingly refer to Sharon as the Groundwater Governance Goddess (or Guru). But it's no joke; she is! Read more of her work here and here and here. 

Enjoy!

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. " - Carl Sagan

V.B. Price Column: 'Nuclear Poison at Los Alamos National Lab'

Lest you think this is one of those 'the sky is falling' articles about the hazards of the nuclear weapons industry, you'd be right. It's downright scary.  

New Mexico is no stranger to the nuclear weapons industry. Looks like it will get another facility.   

Nuclear Poison at Los Alamos National Lab

V.B. Price

Ten years from now, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) could be making as many as 80 to 100 plutonium warhead “pits” a year to upgrade America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The construction of a massive $13 billion “pit” manufacturing complex at LANL has already started, but, unbelievable as it sounds, without benefit of a formal environmental impact statement (EIS), according to a report from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

To make a proper EIS, analysts would have to revisit LANL’s dismal history of hazardous waste management, a history that makes LANL and America’s nuclear regulatory agencies seem callous, lackadaisical and at times absurdly incompetent, treating radioactive waste more as a tedious pest than a public health menace. Not to study the potential impact of a colossal plutonium manufacturing project is, on the face of it, preposterous, and leaves New Mexico vulnerable to the accident-prone arrogance of the nuclear bomb industry.

Plutonium is “the most toxic substance known,” according to FAS. A plutonium “pit” is the explosive source in a thermonuclear weapon. It’s so radioactively charged and dangerous that tools and materials that have merely been exposed to it have to be stored half a mile underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

When plutonium pit production and nuclear experiments were carried out at LANL during the Cold War, many millions of gallons of plutonium-laced wastewater were washed down Jemez Mountain canyons that empty into the Rio Grande, with heavy plutonium residue settling to the bottom of Cochiti Lake. Eventually some plutonium ended up in northern wells that partially supply Santa Fe with drinking water.

In 2002, nuclear waste mismanagement at LANL was so calamitous and threatening that the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) issued an administrative order demanding a full clean-up of the lab’s hazardous waste. NMED characterized LANL’s radioactive waste disposal practices at over 2100 hazardous waste sites as being “of imminent and substantial endangerment” to the people of northern New Mexico.

LANL has always underplayed the danger of plutonium and its waste products. A 2009 document from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), known as the Los Alamos Historic Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) report, shows the true magnitude of plutonium hazard at LANL. It describes massive “airborne plutonium releases” from LANL from 1948 to 1978 that could “easily exceed the independently reconstructed airborne plutonium release totals from the production plants of Hanford (Washington), Rocky Flats (Colorado), and Savannah River (South Carolina) combined, even without the other sources and other years at LANL included.”

The report went on to say that “because facilities of the nuclear weapons complex used a wide variety of toxic materials and operated for decades behind a ‘cloak of secrecy,’ public concern about potential health risks from their operations grew as more was learned about past activities and events. And in New Mexico, suspicions would have undermined public confidence even more if it had been known that between 1979 and 1992, each of the Atomic Energy Commission sites around the country had undergone ‘retrospective evaluations of historical releases and potential health effects … except Las Alamos (emphasis mine).”

Not to perform a full and public EIS on the new plutonium pit manufacturing site at LANL is not only an insult to the intelligence of New Mexicans, but a continuation of decades of secrecy that has hidden from the public what amounts to a unimaginable indifference to health and safety downwind and downstream of LANL’s plutonium works.

How will all that new hazardous waste be managed? Will plutonium-heavy wastewater be dumped down canyons again? How much waste will be produced, of what kinds and what dangers? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of us in New Mexico are potential “downwinders” from LANL. Something goes wrong up there, and it’s likely to have consequences for all of us. But if those consequences are unforeseen because no public planning, or public thinking, has been done, or allowed to have been done — the kind that arises from doing an EIS — then we’ll all be caught flatfooted when something does go wrong, as it surely will.

From the perspective of the military industrial complex, worrying about such eventualities turns you into a “crank.” Or if you are like the Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, who advocates eloquently for nuclear disarmament, you become the object of ridicule in local editorials that make it seem that you’re a naïve idealist.

Still, worry we must. There’s not a single shred of evidence, that I can tell, that points to LANL and the National Nuclear Security Administration suddenly acquiring an environmental conscience, not to mention a will to preserve public health. This is especially true in the Trumpian era of wholesale environmental deregulation. Will we see the NMED policing the project and analyzing its hazardous waste disposal systems? Will the governor and attorney general put together a joint task force to keep an eye on the whole operation? Or will we get blindsided like we did six years ago at WIPP, when a canister of low-level plutonium waste exploded underground and sent radioactive exhaust into the atmosphere around its site and down to Carlsbad some 35 miles away?

It is not naïve to be concerned.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

You can read this online and leave a comment here.

Enjoy! 

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” - Isaac Asimov