Conservation Alternatives

David Friedman’s April 19 Opinion column (“The Divining Rod of Water Politics”) seeks to justify a new version of the Peripheral Canal by making a wide array of false statements about California water issues. Astonishingly, what is missing from Friedman’s diatribe is any consideration of the cost-effective alternatives to new dams and canals. The cheapest and best solution to the state’s conflicting water demands is conservation.

The health of California’s environment and economy depends upon a healthy Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The health of the Bay-Delta system has been in decline for decades, largely due to the excessive amount of fresh water that is taken out of the system. The Natural Resources Defense Council and government fish and wildlife experts believe that a crucial part of the solution is to return some water to our rivers and to the Bay-Delta estuary. The cheapest and easiest way to do this is to require Californians, especially agriculture (which still uses approximately 80% of the state’s developed supply), to use water supplies more efficiently.

The inaccuracies in Friedman’s opinion piece are too numerous to correct in this letter. He is wrong about the history of Delta water-quality standards, he is wrong about San Francisco’s lawsuit, he is wrong about the involvement of environmentalists in that lawsuit. However, most baffling is his idea that obtaining new water supplies through an expensive Peripheral Canal instead of improved agricultural water conservation would be better for Southern California’s lower income communities. Not only is this a groundless and divisive attempt at obscuring the real issues, it ignores the fact that reducing overall water demands through water conservation and recycling, incentive pricing, retirement of marginal agricultural lands, water transfers and other water-use efficiency mechanisms actually would be a cheaper way to improve water supply reliability for Southern California.

RONNIE COHEN, NRDC, San Francisco