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An argument in favor of creating a more cohesive federal policies: A Water Strategy for the United States, an article by Jim Thebaut and Erik Webb. It’s formatted like a journal article, but it’s not clear to me whether it was accepted for publication anywhere or just appears on various blogs.

The United States faces water stress and potential water disasters.

The only hope we have of establishing effective and to the degree possible unified water policies is to develop a set of goals and principles for water management to which we progressively conform our policies and actions.  The U.S. statement of goals and principles that underpin our international policies are more coherent than are the principles underpinning our domestic policies.
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Presently, at the federal level alone, 20 agencies and bureaus, under six cabinet departments, directed by 13 congressional committees with 23 subcommittees and five appropriations subcommittees are responsible for water-resource management.

Jim Thebaut is the writer, director and executive producer of public television’s “The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry?” and “Running Dry,” a documentary about the global water crisis, and director of the Southern California-based nonprofit The Chronicles Group. Erik Webb is a PhD hydrologist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and a former Congressional Fellow with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Via Aquadoc Prof. Michael Campana

I just found out about this Saturday’s concert at Ashkenaz in Berkeley.

Symphony of Koras Featuring Ousseynou Kouyate, Karamo Susso, & More
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Doors at 8:30 pm; Show at 9:00 pm
$12 / $10 students (w/valid ID)

Crazy. The kora is my favorite instrument, but I’m used to hearing it played solo or in a band with other instruments. This should be really interesting.

If you’ve never seen Oussenou Kouyaté, he is pretty much our unofficial griot for the Bay Area, an incredibly charismatic and energetic singer, dancer, and performer. Karamo Susso is an incredibly talented young musician from The Gambia, who learned his art in Bamako, Mali from some of the best kora players in the world.

San Francisco Chronicle editor Lois Kazakoff blogged yesterday on a lawsuit by the Kern County Water Agency, which represents some of the state’s biggest agribusinesses to eliminate striped bass from California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. As usual, great coverage of this issue comes from Mike Taugher at the Contra Costa Times, in a June 15 article, Striped Bass: Delta Villains?

Of course, big Ag water interests would like to shift attention away from the role of pumping and exports on the collapse of the Delta’s aquatic ecosystem. Time and again, they’ve tried to pin the blame for dwindling salmon runs on non-native species and inadequately treated sewage.

The truth is, there are multiple stressors: upstream diversions, pumping, pollution, and habitat destruction are ALL important. To preserve the health of the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, we need to address each one. A list of the fish that are threatened or endangered:

• Green Sturgeon
• Longfin Smelt
• Delta Smelt
• Splittail
• Fall-run Chinook Salmon

Eliminating pressure from exotic species may be among the things that we can get started on immediately. Installing proper fish screens at the outtakes and upgrading decades-old sewage plants will also help.

A National Research Council science committee, in its preliminary report, essentially said that there are a lot of different problems, and no one knows which is the most important, so we should probably try everything. Peter Moyle, a fisheries biologist at UC Davis, places the blame for the decline of native fish species on changes to the hydrology of the Delta. From the CC Times article:

The growing volume of water shipped out of the Delta changed its character. It became less of an estuary that could support salmon, smelt and striped bass and more of a freshwater system that favors largemouth bass, toxic blue-green algae, Brazilian water weed and exotic clams.

The change is largely due, indirectly, to the pumps that divert water to Kern County and elsewhere, Moyle said.

“The whole system has had a major shift,” Moyle said. “The ones that depend on the estuary — none of them are doing well.”

But none of these solve the problem until we begin to restore more of the natural volume and patterns of flow to the Delta. This graph shows how much freshwater flows into the Delta (from a presentation by the Bay Institute). In 2009, only 32% of runoff made its way to the Delta. The remainder was captured upstream for export to cities and farms around the state.

A brilliant bit of activism from the US environmental group Friends of the Earth.

The “BP Ten” are wanted for taking more campaign contributions from BP than any of their peers in the last two campaign cycles.

FOE is circulating a petition encouraging each of them to donate all the dirty oil dollars they received in the past two election cycles to the Gulf Coast Fund. I think it’s more symbolic than anything else. The largest sum is about $37,000 to John McCain. Is that all it costs to buy a vote these days?

I think the more important goal is stated by their director Eric Pica in an article on Huffington Post, ending unlimited campaign contributions by corporations

Restore a democracy of, by and for people. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens’ United vs. Federal Election Commission gives corporate behemoths like BP, ExxonMobil, Monsanto and Goldman Sachs the right to pour unlimited cash into influencing elections. All under the guise that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people. Congress can and should pass legislation to reverse this disaster for democracy, even if it requires a constitutional amendment.

Related: The Dirty Dozen: Who to Blame for the Oil Spill, at Time Magazine. Unsurprisingly, Bush and Cheney are partly to blame for the disaster in the Gulf, with their years of giveaways to oil companies and lax regulation.

I’m intrigued by the use of “social marketing” to promote water conservation. Much of our water use in the western United States is staggeringly wasteful (lawns in Arizona?) or just inefficient (6 gallon toilets when low-flow models have been available for over a decade). How do you convince people to mend their wasteful ways?

An article in today’s NY Times, Finding the ‘Weapons’ of Persuasion to Save Energy, discusses electrical energy, but it directly applies to water as well. The article profiles the work of Robert Cialdini: “formerly of Arizona State University’s psychology department, he wrote one of the best-selling books on persuasion of all time. ‘Influence’ came out in 1984, and it’s reached five editions since.”

According to some researchers, the things people do every day — driving, showering, mowing the lawn — cause 33 to 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Experts say these actions are packed with cheap ways to cut waste, but mysteriously, people just aren’t doing them.

Cialdini thinks this is because the campaign has focused on money and moral appeals — things that motivate less than the weapons of influence.

It’s disconcerting how much blatant trickery is out there in the financial world, particularly in the area of home loans. It seems there’s an entire industry around trying to fool people into signing contracts or buying services that are against their own interest, and could ruinous to their finances. I think it’s time for Congress to create the long-awaited Consumer Financial Protection Agency…

The other day, our household received a letter from the so-called “Loan Payment Administration” in Murrysville, Pennsylvania with just such a lure. The letter looks official, and sounds like its from some federal agency.

But a cursory read through made me realize you would have to be a fool to even consider doing business with them. There is no value to their service whatsoever. They just take your money, hold it for a few weeks earning interest, then pass it on to your bank. And I bet they charge you a fee for the privilege of borrowing your money, under the guise of providing a service.

The letter says that their service can pay off your loan sooner and pay less interest. Wrong! The only way to do that is to increase the amount you pay the bank each month. And you can do this without an intermediary. Just write a check for more the minimum due, and write a note, “Please apply additional payment toward principal.”

How can they get away with a lie like this? Isn’t that “wire fraud” or “violation of interstate commerce laws” or something?

You’d be better off keeping your money than doing business with them. Even in a regular checking account, you can earn a few percent interest. And any bank worth its salt has a “bill pay” program these days, so you don’t need these con-men to do it for you.

I think a lot of people will be fooled by this, which made me wonder if this is even legal. How is this not a form of “predatory lending”? They’re trying to sell people a service they don’t want and don’t need.

Here is the complaint that I submitted to the California Attorney General:

We received an extremely deceptive mailing from this company, touting the benefits of using them as an intermediary to help pay our mortgage. They take an automatic debit from your bank account every two weeks, and then send a mortgage payment for you once a month.

Their official-sounding name might fool a lot of people into thinking they are a branch of the federal government. The way the letter is printed, with our bank’s name above our address, it seems they want it to look like they are approved by or affiliated with our bank.

It seems that their business model is to collect your money and hold it for two weeks, then simply pass it on to your bank. There is no mention of the fees or charges for this. Consumers wishing to set up an automatic debit or bill pay to their mortgage company can do that through nearly any bank these days.

This worthless service appears designed to bilk naive consumers. The Attorney General’s office should investigate the legality of this service in order to protect California consumers.

A friend emailed this to me:

You are responsible for spills

Energy expert Peter Asmus is among the many who have concluded that Prop 16 is bad and contrary to our interests. He also cites it as example of the of direct democracy gone awry.

LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik agrees, writing that the state’s iniative process has become “a plaything of powerful interests using deception and misdirection to line their pockets.”

I’ve read a tiny bit of history by Kevin Starr, and it’s convinced me that the reformers in the early 20th century had good intentions. Despite being a dyed-in-the wool liberal today, if I’d been alive 100 years ago, I just might have been an anti-monopolist Republican.

Starr’s Inventing the Dream is great reading, accessible to a non-historian. Also, you would never guess from its title, but historian Robert Kelley’s 1998 Battling the Inland Sea is a surprisingly engaging account of how state water policy questions were shaped by party politics and the “big ideas” of the time.

Progressive Era reforms–the initiative, referendum, and recall–designed to wrest control from monopolists and railroad barons, have not fared well in the age of mass media. PG&E is spending millions in ratepayer money to reinforce a virtual monopoly. Paradoxically, the initiative process is serving those interests it was originally designed to protect us against.

Add to the mix our conservative Supreme Court’s notion of “corporate personhood” and unlimited campaign spending by corporations, and we have a system that no longer serves the interests “we the people.”

There are several thing that gall me about PG&E’s monopoly-protecting Prop 16. But the worst is their phony front groups.

The so-called “Coalition for Green Jobs” led by electrician Hunter Stern, and touted in the “Yes on 16″ ads is not a legitimate organization. It’s called Astroturf. Try finding any information about this so-called coalition. A blogger in Nevada County did a little research and uncovered how phony they are.

I want to ask PG&E, “Is this the best you could do with $46 million?” If you’re going to create a fake group, at least rent a small office and a phone line.

It angers me that they are trying to capitalize on the good image and good reputation established by legitimate organizations like Oakland’s Ella Baker Center, which runs a “Green Collar Jobs” campaign, and helps organize the California Green Stimulus Coalition.

Privatization is an issue in water policy that I follow with some interest, and occasional amusement at the overheated rhetoric on both sides. Prop 16on California’s June 8 ballot, has made me wonder at the way we talk about and think about water and energy  so differently. The fact is that today, most Americans pay government utilities for water, but buy power from private, for-profit companies.

Today, 89 percent of Americans have water delivered to our homes by a public water utility, essentially a branch of local or regional government. The other 11 percent of us buy water from a private company. With gas and electric, it’s the other way around: only 15 percent of us buy energy from public utilities, while the other 85 percent pay private, for-profit companies.

In the water world, there is strident opposition to privatization, from activists like Maude Barlow and organizations like Food & Water Watch. The argument goes like this: private companies value profit over all else, and can’t be trusted with something so essential to our life and well-being.

But water and power are both essential to life in America. You realize this very quickly if you live in a cold climate and forget to pay your heating bill. Yet we seem comfortable with private ownership and operation of our power grid and gas pipelines? Why the disparity in the way we think about water and energy?

I am agnostic on the issue of public vs. private utilities. Like most people, I want clean water, reliable energy, and reasonable rates. The management and administration of the pipes, power lines, and billing systems can be handled by government or companies. If government screws up, we vote the bums out of office. Likewise, private utilities are accountable to regulators at state Public Utilities Commissions.

This debate over public vs. private energy has taken center stage with Pacific Gas &Electric’s ill-advised California ballot initiative Prop 16. So far, PG&E has funneled $46 million into the June 8 ballot “New Two-Thirds Requirement for Local Public Electricity Providers Act.” I think Prop 16 is a terrible idea, hope it fails, and wonder why allowing this on the ballot was actually legal.

Why on earth should local government need a 2/3 vote to engage in the business of providing services to its citizens? Imagine if local governments had to hold a special election for every decision. Want to build a new municipal pool? Sorry, have to put it to the voters first.

It shouldn’t require the same super-majority as amending the state constitution. We’ve seen what a 2/3 voter requirement did with 1978’s Prop 13: among the 50 states, California has the highest per-capita GDP, but the third-lowest spending per person.

I called the ballot initiative ill-advised above, because it stands to seriously tarnish PG&E’s otherwise good reputation. I would advise them to consider the backlash from this brazen attempt to perpetuate its monopoly.

I generally had a good impression of the company before this. As a customer, I’ve never had any troubles; the power stays on 24 hours a day, and my bills are really cheap compared to other places I’ve lived. The company has a good recent record on the environment, having invested in renewables like wind and solar, and supported California’s climate legislation.

But their spending on Prop 16 has caused me to completely change my view. Before, I may have been hesitant to support my local government getting into the power business. After all, it is a complicated, capital-intensive, and risky. But that’s all changed. When a corporation wastes ratepayer money and manipulates public opinion to further its own interests, you have to conclude that they have become a “bad actor” and are no longer serving your interests.