Editorial:  North to Alaska for L.A.’s water?

There’s a company that owns much of the fresh water in the distant Pacific island nation of Fiji, another with rights to melting glaciers in Iceland, others that tap into lakes and streams in similarly exotic locales. They ship their liquid freight across the oceans aboard carbon-spewing tankers so Californians can drink it from snappy square-bottomed plastic bottles while they flush their toilets with melted snowflakes from crystal clear Sierra streams and shower in water that fell a season or two ago in the Rockies.

We’re in the fourth year of severe drought — actually the eighth, if you discount the anomalously wet winter of 2011 — and should be deep into serious conversation about adapting our needs and habits to a land that is likely to become noticeably drier. We must use and reuse our water more prudently and divvy it up more carefully. Ideas for how we can live within our water means, even if they seem a little out there, are welcome — if they are properly thought through and not merely headline grabbers or crazy business schemes.

That brings us to Janice Hahn, the congresswoman and heavily favored candidate for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who read an article in USA Today about a company that owns a lake in Alaska and wants to barge its water to Southern California. Hahn saw this as such a serious part of the state’s water discussion that she assembled public officials from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to figure out how to accommodate the tankers and build infrastructure to offload and store the fluid.

Don’t worry, Hahn said in the Daily Breeze story, this imported Alaska lake water would be only for drinking, not irrigation.

Really? Well over half the “drinking water” that urban and suburban Californians consume is used for lawns, toilets and showers. We can hardly restrict the Alaska stuff for drinking. Unless we put it in snappy square-bottomed plastic bottles and sell it.

Shipping water from ever-more distant lands carries enormous costs. The environmental toll of even more carbon-spewing tankers bringing designer water to market, this time as part of the regular household supply, would only exacerbate the warming conditions and changing weather patterns that helped get us into this fix in the first place. And doing it while knowing full well that there are folks like the Bel-Air resident who’s using 32,000 gallons a day in the midst of a drought, as mentioned by Times columnist Steve Lopez — well, that only encourages us to continue the cycle of building and planting in patterns unfit for the arid West, and it only pushes further into the future the day when we finally decide to balance what we need against what we have.

In droughts past, water professionals have chuckled, appropriately, at schemes to keep our lawns soaked, our alfalfa growing and our toilets flushed by towing icebergs from the Gulf of Alaska. The plan Hahn is touting sounds very much in that vein. It’s entertaining — but now let’s get back to discussing some serious solutions.

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