Should California Spend 4B Gallons of Water on Six Endangered Fish?

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/california-spend-4-billion-gallons-water-fish/

by chriskanan • 11 years ago

33 54 11 years ago

jfeighery2• 11 years ago

The headline sensationalizes a bit. It's not the 6 fish that are at issue, it's the balance between human activities and ecosystem degradation that we as a society are willing to accept. The Endangered Species Act has saved dozens of beaches and wetlands in Texas from being overrun by oil and gas development. Often a few fish or frogs were the only thing standing in their way!

MBlume• 11 years ago

Wait, how is that a useful way to think about this at all? Right now we are talking about six fish. In what way are they not at issue?

lr• 11 years ago

I don't know, they might hold the cure to cancer... We destroy our ecosystem at our own peril.

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.

imh• 11 years ago

Thinking about these actions in aggregate, it can be about losing X gazillion gallons of water to save a species, instead of 4B for 6 fish. I think the point is that these actions add up.

thrownaway24242• 11 years ago

Think of it as the cost of these six and all future fish of this species.

jfeighery2• 11 years ago

In addition to the difficulty of measuring the cost of losing an entire species forever, as others have pointed out, the question is really do we want this to be an actual functioning river? The more sensitive species are indicators that something has been fundamental changed in the ecosystem.

dmritard96• 11 years ago

Thank you. Its not a matter of do we spend 4 Billion gallons of water to save 6 fish. The point is a deeper question about the human race's resource consumption in the larger picture of things. Another facet of this is 'flushing' as if flushing in it of itself is some natural phenomena. In reality, its also a compromise between our need for reliable water and a natural watershed. Given how much water is going into animal based agriculture in California (not Almonds like so many people like to scape goat), it will be interesting to see if there is any real change in behavior from humans. For instance, there is this big push to reduce lawn watering and car washing, both things that are wasteful in a desert - but if we eat beef at every sitting, it might be just as much water consumption. There needs to be a comprehensive breakdown of individual/household water consumption where you can put in what you do/eat/where you live etc. This should be compared to top down approaches that are more common and then there should be a campaign/effort to dessiminate statistically based information that suggests where and why you should cut down on your resource consumption. It needs to be data driven.

bjwbell• 11 years ago

It's not six endangered fish species, it's six actual fish... of a species where the vast majority are in the Sacramento not the Stanislaus.

briandear6• 11 years ago

Exactly. This entire argument is just absurd. Should be bulldoze San Francisco in order to save 4 spiders? There are people who would. Yet some starving kid and nobody cares.

JohnTHaller3• 11 years ago

Doing the conversions, they want to flush 651,702,863 gallons of water per fish. That's nearly 4 billion gallons of water for 6 fish.

anigbrowl6• 11 years ago

This is bullshit. We've been diverting some water flow each year to safeguard a population of what used to be thousands of spawning fish. But as the fish population has come under greater and greater pressure, the population of the fish species in question has fallen to 6, so for all practical purposes it has now gone instincts EDIT extinct (sorry) while people have been arguing over how little water it can get by with.

Stop over-simplifying complex issues. It doesn't help anyone.

JohnTHaller3• 11 years ago

I looked up and did the conversions because I had no idea what a foot acre was. I thought other folks would be interested as well. I expressed no opinion on whether it was a worthwhile endeavor one way or another.

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.

swax• 11 years ago

Can someone put the amount of water into perspective?

JohnTHaller3• 11 years ago

4 billion gallons of water to save 6 actual fish.

jfoutz• 11 years ago

Is 4 billion a lot? that's like 1/2 a day's flow of the Mississippi.

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.

raldi• 11 years ago

It's like flushing your toilet 3,125,000,000 times.

Or leaving your shower running for 4,756 years.

tim3332• 11 years ago

California’s water system manages over 40,000,000 acre feet (49 km3) of water per year. (Wikipedia)

The fish need 12,000 acre feet so 0.03% of that. Or a 245m cube.

CHsurfer• 11 years ago

6 fish or green lawns. I'll have to think about it...

spenrose• 11 years ago

Yes.

thrownaway24242• 11 years ago

Did you know you can eat fish? Or you could, if Central Valley growers hadn't killed them all.

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.

octatoan• 11 years ago

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.

hueving3• 11 years ago

Did you know you can eat fish? Or you could, if Central Valley growers hadn't killed them all.
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.

briandear6• 11 years ago

Really? Industry had a habit of causing extinctions? Extinctions have been going on since the beginning of life.

glaugh• 11 years ago

Not that this is a simple answer politically, but every time I see an article about whether we should use water on almonds[1] or alfalfa[2] or six endangered fish, I wish we would just price water more appropriately, and let more valuable uses of water win out over less. Wouldn't solve this particular issue, but a more appropriate price for this decision would at least help focus minds on what exactly is the tradeoff.

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...

ScottBurson• 11 years ago

Pricing water appropriately would be great, but there's more to this issue than that. In a nutshell: what is the value of keeping a fish species from going extinct? That's a policy question requiring public debate.

sandworm2• 11 years ago

The public debate has already come and gone. The law is written. The fish wins.

tim3332• 11 years ago

They should mandate water supply for endangered species and then after that price water at the same price for everyone. Much of the current agriculture would become unviable and the farmers could switch to either less thirst crops, growing somewhere wetter or just get some comp and do something else. Agricultural water use would plummet. Problem solved. Apart from politics of course.

anigbrowl6• 11 years ago

Argh. I am so sick of this PR line about the fucking fish from the farmers and conservatives. I'm very disappointed to see Wired framing the story this way.

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 >:-(

luckydude• 11 years ago

What this guy says. Amen. Smartest thing I've seen on this topic.

shaneofalltrad• 11 years ago

Awesome, good to see this type of thinking is backed up. Sadly, I am for the first time starting to underestimate the value of large scale farming in California. It is becoming big business instead off a good source of food, at least at a level that goes back into Californians. This might open a can of hate, but why don't we just ban exportation of our farmed food in for example a red zone district due to water shortage, i.e. it can only feed us. I bet the water usage would drop significantly.

frozenport• 11 years ago

>saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a variety of economic interests

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.

anigbrowl6• 11 years ago

We're not doing it for 6 fish. 6 fish are all we have left this year, whereas it used to be several thousand fish. (Edit: I should say that we have only found 6 in the annual survey. There might be hundreds or thousands in total; I don't know the exact relationship between the sample and the overall population,a nd I'm not sure anyone has an exact number.) We only found out that there are only 6 left about 3 weeks ago. The amount of water allocated doesn't immediately get adjusted to reflect the fish population.

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.

spikels• 11 years ago

I agree there is lots of misinformation on this issue. But how is it not a zero sum issue? Either the water goes to the farms or to the fish. No matter how much we talk, hold hands or sing kumbaya we can't have both.

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!

themgt• 11 years ago

Many decisions are zero sum if considered in a single moment of time, but not when considered over a longer-term perspective. Obviously the thing being left out is, this wasn't about saving 6 individual fish, it was about saving a handful of the surviving members of a species of fish that they're attempting to repopulate.

Remember "do things that don't scale" - you save 6 fish so in a couple decades you'll be at 60,000.

anigbrowl6• 11 years ago

Because a functioning ecosystem benefits everyone. As someone else pointed out, fish swimming upstream to spawn deposit nutrients from the ocean that help to replenish the land.

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.

nether• 11 years ago

If they do this I am going to personally go over there and catch those fish. And kill them.

AlexandrB• 11 years ago

Please visit the region's golf courses immediately afterwards and kill the grass while you're there.

hueving3• 11 years ago

The golf courses are just a distraction. They use nothing compared to the farming.

quanticle• 11 years ago

If it prevents 4 billion gallons of water from going towards growing alfalfa in the middle of a desert, then yes, I am entirely in favor of spending 4 billion gallons to save 6 fish.

sandworm2• 11 years ago

How much water should California spend on golf lessons for children? Or outdoor swimming pools in which nobody every swims?

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.

briandear6• 11 years ago

A swimming pool doesn't use much water. It takes about 1 shower's worth of water to keep one filled each day.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

One of the ways I like to do this evaluation is calculate how much the water would cost if desalinated. @$0.50/m^3 (modern price for reverse osmosis desalinated water at scale, based on pricing from Singapore desalination costs on a 25 year committed contract of a design-build-run factory) - 4B gallons = 15 million cubic meters.

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.

nazgulnarsil• 11 years ago

upvoted for shutting up and multiplying. It's good to see.

shalmanese• 11 years ago

Using the same metrics, it would cost about $3.70 in water to produce a lb of beef which is more than that same beef would sell for wholesale.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

Which is one of the reasons why we don't grow beef from desalinated water.

trhway• 11 years ago

no, we should spend it to grow a 2M lb of almonds, a $12M at retail. $12M is the peanuts ... err... almonds we're ready to finish an ecosystem for. Our brain has long way to go in order to develop any semblance of intelligence.

Should California Spend 4B Gallons of Water on Six Endangered Fish?

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