California Department of Water Resources

Increased flood risk in the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta has people worried about the economic impact on the farmers and residents located there.

Here’s the bad news for Delta farmers: A new report concludes that the worst climate impacts on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta could affect a relatively small number of people — the farmers whose land is below sea level and protected by a vast system of levees. Maintaining and repairing those levees falls on local reclamation districts, which can’t necessarily count on state or federal bailouts in the event of catastrophic flooding in the future. It can be expensive if a levee breaks. The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) studied the economic impacts of changes to the fragile Delta ecosystem and has produced some recommendations that are not likely to warm the hearts of some Delta landowners.

The most flood-prone areas could see their local economy shrink by 15% over the next several decades as waters rise, reclaiming land and wiping out cropland. This area is called the “primary zone” in flood-manager lingo. It makes up almost two-thirds of the Delta’s area but accounts for only four percent of its economic activity. That’s because the population centers and accompanying services are mostly in the “secondary zone,” where the land is higher and development less limited.

The report takes a pragmatic approach: As flooding threatens more Delta land, it may not make sense to repair every levee, especially as state and federal funds for flood protection dwindle and local reclamation districts are left taking up the slack. On some islands, “The economic value of the assets on the island and the value of agricultural production is not high enough to cover the cost of fixing an island after the levees would break and the island would flood,” Ellen Hanak, an economist with PPIC and one of the authors of the report told me. She recounted the story of a  2004 levee break on the Jones Tract, one of the Delta’s islands, which cost $90 million to repair. “That was the state that paid it,” she said.

California Department of Water Resources

The Blacklock restoration area near Suisun City.

Hanak and her colleagues say state planners should think beyond resisting change in the area. They recommend a Delta levee policy that focuses resources to protect the most valuable land. They also recommend taking steps toward mitigating the economic impact on the people living in the primary zone. “There really is a need to think about softening the cost of adjustment that residents within the inner-Delta are likely to face as a result of changes in the landscape from flooding” she warned. The good news, she says, is that if the state is faced with compensating landowners, the bill should be relatively digestible for California taxpayers.

The Delta does not grow as many high value crops as the rest of the Central Valley. “A lot of times people describe Delta agriculture as high-value fruits and vegetable agriculture,” Hanak explained. “But in fact within the Delta there is actually much more land devoted to what people call ‘field crops’ — grain and hay — rather than fruits and vegetables and nuts.” That’s likely because farmers don’t want to risk tree crops in the flood-prone area. It also means that the value of the agricultural assets isn’t as high and thus repairing flooded islands may not be worth it when budgets at every level are stretched thin.

Tonight the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) kicks off the first of nine “Plan Bay Area” workshops, aimed at gathering public input on plans for sustainable growth in the region. The planning agency is seeking comment on the Initial Vision Scenario, which was released by MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) last month.  This scenario is the first draft of the Bay Area’s Sustainable Communities Strategy, a planning document required under the state law, SB 375, which was passed in 2008 and requires planning regions throughout California to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars by integrating land-use and transportation planning.

The Bay Area, Sacramento, and San Diego
have some of the most aggressive reductions targets: seven percent per capita by 2020 and 13-16% by 2035 (compared to 2005 levels).  The South Coast (by far the biggest region, including Los Angeles, San Bernadino, Ventura, and other counties) is shooting for an eight percent reduction by 2020, and 13% by 2035.

“The Initial Vision Scenario really does center on accommodating the growth that we expect over the next generation within the existing urban footprint of the Bay Area,” said MTC public information officer John Goodwin. “Ninety-seven percent of all the new households that would be formed in the Bay Area over the next 25 years would be accommodated in already existing urban areas, which is pretty impressive.”

He said the new plan looks at all the expected growth in the region over the next couple decades and accommodates for all the people working in the Bay Area to be able to live in the Bay Area, instead of relying on commuters from other regions such as the Central Valley.

“That’s a big change,” Goodwin said. “Realizing that vision is a big step, and we’re a long ways from it.”

Last fall when the state Air Resources Board issued the regional greenhouse gas reductions targets under SB 375, opponents voiced concerns that they were too aggressive and that they would stifle economic development, trigger increased transportation costs for families, and hurt an already suffering construction industry.

But advocates say the targets won’t stop growth.  In some cases, they’ll just encourage a different kind of growth. Denser communities closer to public transit – rather than sprawling new suburbs – could have a positive effect on the environment, air quality, and public health by reducing the number of miles people drive.

“The beauty of SB 375 is that it’s a performance standard,” said Amanda Eaken, deputy director for Sustainable Communities at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.  “It gives each region all the flexibility they need to choose the policies and programs that are most appropriate for their region.”

Tonight’s public meeting on the Initial Vision Scenario for Plan Bay Area is in Mountain View. Next week’s forums will be in San Francisco and at the San Mateo Public Library.  There is a calendar of the public workshops and their locations on the One Bay Area website.  The final draft of the plan is not expected until 2013.

You can see more coverage of how the Bay Area, and the rest of California, is grappling with the opportunities and challenges of sustainable growth, on our Miles to Go series page.

(Photo: Lorie Shelley, CA. State Senate Photographer)

California’s utilities now have their marching orders: to provide one third of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Now that the “33-by-20″ target is a mandate backed by state law, supporters say it will lure more renewable energy investments to California. There’s evidence that it already is.

Calling it a “breakthrough,” Governor Brown signed the bill into law at the dedication of a new SunPower Corp. manufacturing plant in Milpitas, near San Jose. And he laid down a challenge:

“Last year six thousand megawatts of solar installations were produced by China and one thousand by the United States. Now, are we up for changing that? I think we are.”

Supporters say the 33% requirement provides a stable market for renewable energy, while critics fear it will mean higher electric bills. A statement from the California Republican Party said:

“Governor Brown is pressing ahead as if the pieces of papers he signs magically and automatically result in higher revenues or a better standard of living. The laws of economics, however, overrule Brown’s political laws.

Magical or not, the law has appeared to conjure up federal dollars for the state. Energy Secretary Steven Chu seized the occasion to announce $50 million in federal funding for renewables in California, and nearly $3 billion in loan guarantees for two big projects.

“Thanks to forward looking policies and forward-looking businesses, California will be the center of the action in helping the United States in building a bright energy future,” said Chu at the signing.

Part of that bright energy future includes SunPower’s brand new plant in Milpitas, which is expected to employ about 100 people.

President Obama has pledged to double the nation’s renewable power output by 2035.

After two failed attempts, California is moving ahead with the most aggressive renewable energy goal in the country. Today the State Assembly passed SB 2x, a bill that requires utilities to get 33% of their electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind, by 2020.

By all accounts, utilities will need to add an unprecedented amount of renewable energy to meet the goal. Peter Miller of the Natural Resources Defense Council says that will spur new technology and green job opportunities. “There’s worldwide competition to lead this industry, which is the growth industry of the 21st century,” said Miller. “And this moves us, I believe, to the front of the pack.”

If the 33% renewable portfolio standard (RPS) doesn’t sound new, that’s because it isn’t. The goal was originally set by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2008 executive order. Supporters knew that an executive order could be overturned by a future governor, but two previous bills aiming at cementing the goal failed to make it into law.

Miller says that’s why today’s passage is such big news for the renewable energy industry. “Businesses need that stable foundation to be confident that these investments are in line with the long term direction of the state,” he said. The State Senate has already passed the bill and Governor Jerry Brown is widely expected to sign it into law.

Critics of the bill cited cost as a major concern, since renewable energy still comes with a higher price tag than its fossil counterparts. Under the bill, the California Public Utilities Commission must devise a cost containment strategy, something that isn’t in place under the executive order. Concerns over the cost of renewable energy emerged recently in this report from the Division of Ratepayers Advocates.

Notably, the bill puts the RPS back into the hands of the CPUC. Before leaving office, Schwarzenegger had directed the California Air Resources Board to adopt a 33% mandate as part of his climate change goals.

California’s three largest utilities have yet to meet the 2010 RPS of 20%, though they are expected to in the next year or so. Both solar and wind projects have faced delays due to lawsuits and permitting challenges, which has led many to conclude that the 33% goal may be out of reach (there’s more on the specific challenges in our 33×20 series).

NRDC’s Miller says he sees the permitting process getting better. “I think we’ve learned a lot about the siting process,” he said. It took some real work among all the stakeholders and we need to continue that effort to ensure that we can achieve these goals, because they are ambitious.”

More than 100 organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife, signed on to a letter sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Monday, arguing that the proposal “fails to provide critical, concrete protections for the most precious resources of our forests — water and wildlife,” and that it “weakens the strong standards for safeguarding water quality and wildlife viability first issued in 1982 by the Reagan Administration and currently still in place.”

In a February press release announcing the new proposed rules, the USDA (which manages the Forest Service) touted the new proposal as creating increased protections for water resources and an “improved ability to respond to climate change and other stressors through provisions to restore and maintain healthy and resilient ecosystems.”

Last week a New York Times editorial explained the apparent discrepancy this way:

The Obama administration’s proposed rules… are full of high-minded promises about maintaining “viable” animal populations. But they are disappointingly vague on the question of how — and how often — the biological diversity of any particular forest is to be measured and what actions are to be taken to ensure its survival.

The net result is to give too much discretion to individual forest managers and not nearly enough say to scientists. This is dangerous because, over the years, forest managers have been easily influenced by timber companies and local politicians whose main interest is to increase the timber harvest.

Neil Lawrence, the director for the NRDC’s forest project, says one of the most vital pieces missing from the proposed rules is strong guidance for forest managers.

“These rules contain a lot of fine phrases, but where the rubber meets the road, they really don’t do the job,” said Lawrence. “They open up far too many opportunities for misuse of discretion, or simply bad mistakes made in haste, or ignorance, or lack of resources at the local level.”

California has 18 national forests which together encompass about 20 million acres.  The letter to Vilsack points out that most of the state’s snowpack lies within national forests, providing about 50 percent of the state’s drinking water. It also highlights the value of California’s national forests in terms of tourism dollars, endangered species habitat, and carbon sequestration.

The environmental organizations worry that without strong guidance from above, managers at the local level may not value these benefits as highly as they should.

From the Times editorial:

The rules, mandated by 1976 National Forest Management Act, are supposed to guide forest managers as they decide which parts can be logged and which should be fully protected. The act’s bedrock principle is that the health of the forests and their wildlife is to be valued at least as much as the interests of the timber companies.

“I think some at the Forest Service are really pushing hard to get more discretion to do as they see fit, and I think many of these are well-intentioned people,” said Lawrence.  “But they forget the many problems we have in national forests – the damage to the forests, to streams and wildlife, to recreational value, to scenic beauty – most of that damage has been due to the well-intentioned exercise of discretion. They’re forgetting how easy it is to get in trouble when you manage these lands.”

The public comment period on the rules is open until May 16th.

Grand illusion? Water rushes over the spillway at Nicasio Reservoir in Marin County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

A high-profile team of experts is calling for a major overhaul of the way California manages its water. In a 500-page report from the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, the authors say decades of well-intended water policies simply haven’t worked, leaving the state vulnerable to major crises, including water shortages, catastrophic floods, decline & extinction of native species, deteriorating water quality, and further decline of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“Our system has been dying a death by a thousand cuts,” says co-author Ellen Hanak, an economist and policy analyst at the PPIC. Hanak says that the state’s water management efforts have been “incremental” and “piecemeal,” with little success to show for it.

Among many other conclusions, the report says water management in the state is too fragmented among hundreds of local agencies and the funding for future improvements should shift from bond issues to a system of fees paid by water users.

“It’s not gonna be easy. It’s not gonna be popular. It’s probably cheaper than the alternatives,” said Jay Lund of UC Davis, one of the co-authors. “There’s not much state money and there’s not much federal money, so if you want to accomplish things for the environment and for water supply and flood control, it’s gonna have to be financed largely locally,” Lund told reporters during a Wednesday conference call.

The report also echoes other recent warnings that Californians are dangerously overdrawn on the state’s underground aquifers.

But there were some notes of optimism. The team of authors, drawn from the PPIC, U-C system and Stanford, say that if cities can cut back water use by 30% from 2000 levels, it would remove a huge strain on the crippled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The map below, featured in the report, shows areas where Californians are “overdrawn” in their water use.

Waves slosh on to San Francisco's Embarcadero during Thursday's "king tide" (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

Take naturally-occurring extremely high tides, and add to them high winds and torrential rain, and you get some pretty big seas.

At least, that’s what I got out on the San Francisco Bay today.  How big exactly, is hard to say (our uneducated guessed ran the gamut), but they were big enough to wash over the bow of our 26-foot boat on more than one occasion and to keep most of us aboard holding on for dear life for much of the three-hour voyage.   What I can say for sure is that as I type this blog post, four hours later, my body still feels like I’m rolling up and down and back and forth on some stormy seas.

We braved the weather today to check out the latest round of “king tides” and see how they affect low-lying shorelines in places like Crissy Field, Treasure Island, and SFO. The seas were so rough that we didn’t make it all the way to the airport, but we did see waves crashing over the sea wall along the Embarcadero  just south of the Ferry Building (see video below). At Crissy Field, the beach was nearly submerged and a small footbridge near the mouth of the estuary was almost awash.

“We think this is indicative of what a normal high tide will be as we start to see the effects of sea level rise in the coming decades,” said Jason Flanders, a staff attorney for San Francisco Baykeeper, the organization that supplied the boat for the white-knuckle outing.

Sea levels in the Bay Area have risen about eight inches over the last century, and officials are planning for an additional rise of 16 inches by 2050 and 55 inches by the end of the century.

“Our shorelines are constantly shifting, as a result of high tides and as a result of sea level rise, which we’re already experiencing,” said NOAA coastal fellow Heidi Nutters, who was also on the boat. “Coming out on day like today, you can get a sense of what our shorelines will look like in the future.”

Nutters is part of a new effort called the Bay Area King Tide Photo Initiative, which aims to encourage members of the public to document extreme high tides by taking photos and sharing them online.

“The more folks that go out and take pictures, the better record we have of how these high tides affect our different communities,” said Nutters. “The tides affect different places differently, and we need as much evidence as possible.”

There are other efforts to document king tides on the west coast, including one in San Diego.

I shot this video from the boat, just south of San Francisco’s Ferry Building. You can see the waves sloshing over the sea wall onto the Embarcadero (Warning, watching this just might make you a little sea sick.)

Report says driving needs to be more costly to get us out of our cars

By Marie C. Baca

Drivers now pay $6 to cross the San Francisco Bay Bridge during peak traffic hours. "Peak pricing" is one strategy to push commuters to alternative transit. (Photo: Craig Miller)

California faces significant obstacles in complying with a 2008 state law aimed at reducing passenger vehicle usage, according to a report by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The report points to unrealized rail transit investments and resistance to pricing tools like fuel taxes as factors that have slowed reduction in car usage.

The two-year-old SB 375 mandates that California’s major metropolitan areas reduce per capita emissions from driving by 7 percent by 2020 and by 15 percent in 2035. While the primary focus of the bill is a reduction in the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, the legislation places a special emphasis on addressing traffic and public health concerns by reducing the number of miles residents drive.

In a prepared statement, Ellen Hanak, a senior fellow at the institute, summarized the findings, which were based on interviews with government officials and city planners as well as data from the state:

The law encourages an integrated approach to reducing emissions – changing land use patterns to reduce the need to drive, investing in mass transit and other alternatives to driving, and increasing the cost of driving and parking to encourage the use of these alternatives. But it will be up to regional and local leaders to turn the vision into reality,

The report lauds California officials for encouraging public transportation ridership, but outlines several issues that must be addressed before the state can meet the 2020 and 2035 targets:

* The number of jobs per square mile in California is lower than the national average and declining, so local governments need to find ways to encourage the growth of jobs near public transit.
* SB 375 encourages residential instead of commercial development near transit; this should be amended.
* Local governments need to improve access to areas surrounding major transit hubs by providing feeder bus services.
* Officials should consider mileage fees, which are used in other countries and are extremely effective at reducing vehicle usage.

Read all posts and hear companion radio reports in our series, Miles to Go: Building a More Sustainable California.

An image from a joint NASA-NOAA satellite project. (Image: NASA-NOAA GOES Project)

S. Pete Worden, the director of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, expressed confidence that the agency’s 2012 budget would remain intact, despite a letter sent to committee heads from Congressmen from Florida and Utah, urging an end to climate science research at the agency.

Kate Sheppard has more about the letter at the Mother Jones Blue Marble blog.

“It’s more than just climate research — it’s understanding the Earth that we live on,” said Worden at a Monday press briefing at Ames. “We think once the Congress understands the details of what we do, that support will be strong.”

NASA’s $18.7 billion budget request for next year maintains Ames funding at about $755 million. Worden said that climate-related activities make up a small, but significant portion of Ames projects.

Worden said that losing Ames’ $40 million budget for Earth sciences would mean having to deploy the 50-100 people who work on climate projects to different areas. “Since the budget is very tight, that’s going to be tough,” he said.

Worden said there are two critical research areas that could be under threat if NASA’s climate funding were cut.  One is airborne measurements.  Ames builds instruments that measure atmospheric pollutants, dust, and other environmental factors that have impacts on the Earth, he said.  The second is site-specific climate prediction.

“We’re now getting to the point where climate models are good enough that we can say not just [that] the global climate may get warmer 30 years from now, but some areas may get less warm, some may have more rainfall, some many have less,’” said Worden.

A lot of this sophisticated modeling, he said, is done on Ames’ supercomputer, Pleiades, which he counts as one of the top ten high-end computing systems in the world.

So, will climate scientists soon have to do without NASA’s help?

“I don’t anticipate that,” said Worden. “Traditionally we’ve had very strong support. I want to emphasize that [last year's NASA] authorization bill had broad bipartisan support, very strong with both Democrats and the Republicans, and it included a lot of Earth science research.”

Ames is one of two major NASA research facilities in California, the other being the larger Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, which recently announced a joint mission with NOAA to study the mechanics of severe winter storms that drench the West Coast.

Cattle and wind turbines dot the Solano County landscape. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Those who don’t see them on a daily basis might be surprised to learn that there is already something on the order of 13,000 commercial wind turbines operating in California. Ryan Wiser, who tracks wind energy trends at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, does a rough calculation that meeting that state-imposed threshold of 33% renewable energy could take 5,000 more, in order for wind to do its share. That’s based on an estimated 10,000 megawatts of new wind power, using the current standard two-megawatt turbine. While most of these will be concentrated in a few major “wind resource areas” (there are currently four big ones in the state), numbers like that almost ensure that wind turbines will become a more familiar feature of the California landscape.

If fulfilling the California dream for renewable energy takes thousands of turbines, a full-on decarbonization of the world’s energy production will take millions.

Those numbers don’t faze Mark Jacobson in the least. Recently when President Obama raised eyebrows with his goal of getting 80% of the nation’s electricity from “clean” energy sources by 2035, the Stanford engineer  was just about to publish a paper that upped the ante, writing in an email to Climate Watch that “the clean energy should not only apply to the electricity sector but also the transportation, residential heating/cooling, and commercial heating sectors.”

Jacobson’s vision is that all new energy needs around the globe could come from a combination of wind, solar, and water-driven energy…by 2030. Of course, we’d be talking about planting four million wind turbines around the world, as well as 90,000 solar plants. Jacobson then laid out a “path” to his vision It seems at odds with the President’s broad definition of “clean,” which includes nuclear power and coal power with carbon capture:

First, right now investment is focused on too many options, most of which (e.g., natural gas, coal with carbon capture, biofuels, nuclear) are either not beneficial or less beneficial than clean wind, water, and sun (WWS) technologies. The spending of money on the less-efficient technologies is an opportunity cost wasted given the limited amount of funds available. Wind results in 50 times less carbon emissions than coal with carbon capture (“clean coal”) and orders of magnitude less air pollution than “clean coal” (“clean coal” actually increases air pollution over current coal since 25% more coal is needed to run the carbon capture equipment, and the equipment doesn’t reduce other pollutants aside from carbon dioxide).

No prudent businessperson would spend money on an investment that yields 50 times less money, so why should policy makers favor a technology that results in 50 times more carbon and much more air pollution than that?

Second, policies need to be put in place to correct the distortion of the current market mechanism that provides subsidies to fossil fuel and biofuel energy sources even though these sources cause health, climate, and other environmental damage, increasing health insurance costs, health effects, and taxes for all of us. By first eliminating such subsidies and second, instituting a revenue-neutral carbon and air pollution tax or something similar (a tax on these industries to account for their externality costs to society, where the proceeds are used to subsidize clean-energy industries — this would shift incentives toward production of clean energy systems with no net individual taxpayer cost.)

The full paper, which Jacobson co-authored with UC Davis professor Mark Delucchi, is published in the journal Energy Policy.

Hear my two-part radio series on wind energy in California, on The California Report. It and all reports in our series, “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown” are archived on our special series page. “33 x20″ is a collaboration with KQED’s Quest science unit.