Sustainable Growth in California?

Tags

California drought, California energy policy, California's future, David Roland-Holst, Global warming in California

David Roland-Holst gave a lecture titled: Energy Efficiency, Climate Action and Sustainable Growth in California. He was representing the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, http://are.berkeley.edu/~dwrh/

It was an excellent and fact filled lecture given to an audience of Cal graduate students who asked excellent questions after the lecture. But I had problems with it from the beginning.

On his opening slide there was a quote form Charles Darwin, which would seem safe enough, but the quote was instantly recognizable as incorrect. Darwin should have paid closer attention to his mentor, Alfred Russel Wallace. The quote,

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor even the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

I don’t know were this quote comes from but the word responsive is clearly wrong and at a bare minimum it should be changed to adaptive to change, after all the most common individual response to significant change by an organism is that it dies. Darwin does talk about that and groans often about how vicious Mother Nature is to her children, (over anthropomorphizing nature’s willfulness a bit). We as a species must somehow adapt to and change with our environment and not merely respond to it. We can not help but respond to it but we can and we must somehow adapt to it, or die.

One of the points Roland-Holst made was that energy efficiency laws enacted here in California over the last 40 years had flattened the usage of electricity by Californians while other Americans’ usage had gone way up. But, he said, individual Californians had spent their money saved on their electric bills here in California. He averred that the money saved and spent locally actually created more local jobs here and improved our local economy. However, he cautioned, this improvement will be soon challenged by global warming because of the increased use of air conditioning.

He mentioned most all of the usual ongoing environmental catastrophes but several times said it wasn’t going to be a meteoric impact type of instant problem but one which we could, with concerted human effort, avoid. He said he had a great belief in the creative potential of humans and of their science. As he was saying these things I was thinking about his audience of twenty year olds and how if they live another fifty years they will see all of these things come to pass and how for them at that future time it will seem to have been instantaneous.

There were the usual future projected maps of California’s snow packs and the fact that without melting snow, fifty hears hence, we would have far less water in the summer when we need more water. The ground water reserves were mentioned as a back up for shortfalls but in fifty years those will be gone and unrestorable because the porous sands, from where the water is now being taken, will have compressed into near solid rock. He then mentioned the fact that current laws gave the water to those people who owned the land above the ground-water and the public has no rights to it. That is like the state of Nevada claiming they aren’t going to impact California’s water supply because they are only going to take water out of their side of Lake Tahoe. The ground water under California’s central valley is needed by everyone but only those people directly above it have legal access to it. In the fifty year hence time we will be forced to depend on flowing water from whatever recent storms there happen to be and those are obviously intermittent. At that time California’s population will plummet to whatever that spasmodic water supply will permit. This kind of problem is going to occur all over the world and there is little doubt that water wars will ensue. Here in California those water wars will probably be fought in courts and with emigration but elsewhere, especially between national states, it will be armed conflict.

There is very occasionally some talk of converting the San Francisco Bay into a fresh water reservoir but that is politically unfeasible before a drought driven catastrophe actually occurs. By that time the ground water will be all tapped out and the snow pack a quick melting flood.

The San Francisco Chronicle was just delivered, the head line …

FORECAST: WORST DROUGHT EVER

A better title for this lecture, if we look at fifty years into the future, would be:

California’s future—unsustainable growth and certain catastrophe!