New Hope for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund for California?

Back in July I wrote an "RIP" post commemorating the death of the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, scuttled on June 8, 2018, during California state budget negotiations.

With the advent of a new governor, this fund has found new life.

Gavin Newsom budget calls for drinking water tax to help poor communities
(D. Kasler et al., Sacramento Bee, Jan. 10, 2019)

Applause for this initiative came from the Community Water Center, a proponent of the fund, per their Jan. 11, 2019, press release.

However, the opposition has not gone anywhere.

Despite record surplus, Gov. Newsom wants new water, phone taxes
(C. Reed, Cal Watchdog, Jan. 14, 2019)

Californians with bad water ask for help while opposition mounts to Newsom’s proposed tax
(M. Ashmun, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 7, 2019)

Neither have the proponents.

Read a Jan. 13, 2019, post "Shared interest in universal safe drinking water" by Dr. Jay Lund on the California WaterBlog, a blog maintained by the UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. Dr. Lund, Director of that center and UC Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, doesn't explicitly promote the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, but does lay out the argument for having such a fund:

Prosperity and democracy together seem almost essential to having near-universal safe drinking water supplies.  Prosperity and democracy together bring effective social organization and resources needed to deliver safe and affordable drinking water. [...]  California’s failure to provide safe, affordable drinking water to the remaining roughly 1% of residents is probably the most solvable and affordable of California’s many difficult water problems.  There will always be isolated small systems with vexing problems, but the number of Californians currently without access to safe affordable drinking water is embarrassing and irresponsibly high.

Dr. Lund's Tweet promoting that blog post gives the moral of the story:

All water systems suffer when any drinking water system is unsafe.

The idea of "the human right to water," meanwhile, is progressing toward meaningful implementation in the state. This is taking form partly through a state report following on AB 685, asserting the human right to water in California. When Governor Brown signed AB 685 in 2012, California became "the first state in the nation to legislatively recognize the human right to water" per the California Water Board's web page "Human Right to Water Portal."

Comments on the draft report "A Framework and Tool for Evaluating California's Progress in Achieving the Human Right to Water" are due to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment  (OEHHA) by 5 PM Feb. 19, 2019. The deadline was extended from Feb. 4 to Feb. 19 at the request of some of the opponents to that original Human Right to Water Bill, a water utility and the professional organization for California water utilities, the Association of California Water Agencies.

I'm pleased to see that comments are to be sent to:

HR2W
Attn: Carolina Balazs
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
1515 Clay Street, 16th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612

I saw Carolina Balazs present her impressive research on water quality issues in the San Joaquin Valley when I was a policy Master's student and she was a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. She worked with the Community Water Center during her research, and then was a staff research scientist at the CWC starting in 2012. Her research was used to support the CWC's campaign to pass the Human Right to Water bill (AB 685). She is uniquely well-suited (well-trained and well-informed) to be the broker of the process by which that bill turns into action.

What is the human right to water? 

The United Nations General Assembly recognized "the ‘human right to sanitation’ as a distinct right, together with the ‘human right to safe drinking water’" on Dec. 18, 2015 (per UN High Commissioner for Human Rights press release). There is an interesting 2016 PowerPoint titled "The Human Rights to Water and Sanitation : Progress in theory and practice" on the website for the High Commissioner for Human Rights. It appears to be from a presentation by Léo Heller, Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, including slides on the legal basis for the human rights to water and sanitation, and where they stand in regard to the various related UN development goals (MDGs, SDGs).

See my previous post on the passage of AB 685 in 2012.

Grasslands, Kelp > Trees: my parking lot of helpful threads and papers

I've now twice had to go rummaging around on Twitter for these helpful threads and links to help me back up a claim that trees are not a good global panacea for climate change. Today yet another person in my friend circle saw a scary climate change article (in her case right after reading about how mass genocide of Native peoples led to afforestation and global cooling in the 15-16th c.) and responded with "plant trees!" So I had to go spam her with links. And then realized, oh, this seems to be a recurring event.

Welcome to my parking lot of helpful threads and papers to support the idea that grasslands and other non-tree carbon sinks like kelp forests are better than trees for slowing climate change.

Native grassland/prairie restoration project by CAFNR, U Missouri (CC BY-NC 2.0) 

~A paper out of UC Davis last year:

Grasslands More Reliable Carbon Sink Than Trees: In Wildfire-Prone California, Grasslands a Less Vulnerable Carbon Offset Than Forests - Article by Kat Kerlin (July 9, 2018, UC Davis), describing the findings published in this paper:

Grasslands may be more reliable carbon sinks than forests in California (2018) by Pawlok Dass (UC Davis) et al. Environmental Research Letters. 

- And it doesn't appear to be behind a paywall! 

~December 2018 Twitter threads by crop scientist Dr. Sarah Taber:

Dec. 10, 2018: Responding to a question about the carbon footprint of pasture-raised burgers, and then going on a wonderful GIF-rich rant about the cultural biases behind tree-centric climate change/land management research and policy. Excerpt:

The other thing is that "How much carbon can we lock up in trees?" is a lot better researched than "How much carbon can we lock up in grasslands?"

Because northwest European land management is more about forests than grasslands, so that's where rich countries' grant $ goes.

Dec. 11, 2018: Thread about "blue carbon" and the potential of kelp forests to act as carbon sinks. Excerpt:

Most importantly- unlike trees that can burn in wildfires or grasslands that can be plowed up, carbon locked in the deep ocean is not prone to any known human or natural interference. It's the most secure place we know of to sequester carbon.

~Around the same time, on Dec. 9, 2018, a grassland scientist Tweeting as Pastures Politic responded to someone posting "Spoiler alert: it's trees," referring to the Scientific American article "The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change Isn't a Technology" (Dec. 5, 2018), with "NOPE. It's grasslands. Trees are dorks who put loads of their carbon aboveground." Here's the helpful thread supporting that nope.

After the "trees are dorks" comment, my favorite quote in that thread, by a plant scientist I follow on Twitter, posting as Itati Vasquez Chavez Santamaria:

Savannas and grasslands are basically underground forests which regenerate their top layer content due to fire and grazing. 

(See original Tweet)

~I first got hip to the importance of native perennial grasses in carbon sequestration and soil water retention hearing presentations by Wendell Gilgert, Working Lands Program Director at Point Blue. He was talking about some remarkable rangeland restoration projects he's done (the projects are now collectively called the Point Blue Rangeland Monitoring Network, I think). He left the impression on me that California could turn its water problems around across the state if these native perennial grass pilot projects could be scaled up.

There are a whole lot of interesting articles and threads out there discussing the importance of nomadic herding and pastoralist culture to maintenance of healthy grasslands, but I'll save those for another future parking lot post.