The climate-change-driven LA wildfires were a fittingly horrific herald of convicted felon Donald Trump’s second term. Trump’s simple-minded denialism — calling global heating “a hoax” — is the most low-energy non-response to the biggest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. There was no effort at all to engage with the actual, complex problem. So it wasn’t surprising to see all manner of petty foolishness follow in its wake. He baselessly blamed California Democrats and their policies, laying the groundwork for cruelly denying disaster relief, or extorting concessions to get it. And he cartoonishly claimed to have heroically saved the day, by releasing water from Kern County reservoirs that would never leave the Central Valley.
In stark contrast, here on the ground in Los Angeles, the task of responding, rebuilding and reorienting how we live in light of the ever-growing climate threats we face requires an enormous amount of hard work and attention to detail. The rains that came with an atmospheric river on Feb. 12 and 13 put a giant exclamation mark on that, with flash floods, mudslides and evacuation orders, as the resulting run-off flooded storm drains, creeks, rivers and beaches with a flood of pollution far more toxic than usual.
While Trump’s talk of a “giant faucet” in the Pacific Northwest is a Simpsons episode fantasy, it does reflect a kind of large-scale water-moving mentality that may have seemed to make sense in the past but is ill-suited to the problems facing us today, according to Kelly Shannon McNeill, associate director of LA Waterkeepers.
“These are 20th-century solutions that just absolutely cannot keep up with climate change. And in the 21st century we know better,” McNeill told Random Lengths. “We know that local is absolutely the most resilient, most secure, most equitable way forward, and that we cannot continue to rely on water imports that are based on a reality that no longer exists.”
Climate change shifts things in multiple ways, she noted. “We do not get that same amount of snowpack that we once did. More of our precipitation is coming in the form of rain, instead of snow. The snow pack we do have is melting more quickly than ever, and so that snowpack that used to be able to get us through summer and fall is now pretty much gone by June.” On top of that, “We have this weather whiplash, where we have these really increasing dry climate patterns that are punctuated by really heavy, ferocious downpours of storms, which really makes it all the more important for us to capture that water when we get it.
“Importing water has of course allowed our city to flourish and grow to this megatropolis that we have now, but it has done so much harm to ecosystems from the Colorado River to the Sacramento-Bay delta to the Owens Valley and there’s been a lot of injustice from that,” McNeill said. And such import systems “are very vulnerable to disruption,” she noted, “There’s so much that we could use here to create a local water source that is not going to be carbon intensive — because importing water is the number one non-utility energy user in the state of California. So it is not just vulnerable to the impact of climate change, but actually a core driver of climate change.”
In contrast, she explained, “At LA Waterkeeper, our core recommendation is that there is a need for what we call an integrated approach to water management.” Measure W, passed in 2018, provides $285 million annually through the Safe Clean Water Program for a broad range of projects — 126 so far — across nine distinct watersheds that have the region headed in that direction.
“We are absolutely the leader in the United States when it comes to stormwater capture,” she said. “But most of the projects that have been implemented so far, have been shovel-ready grant infrastructure projects that just needed a little bit more funding to get them across the finish line, and they were primarily projects put forth by large municipalities with the primary goal of meeting water compliance,” prevent pollution from stormwater, which they’re required to do by law. But that’s only one of three main program goals. The other two goals — “creating a local resilient water supply by capturing stormwater so that it can be used for drinking water and other purposes and creating green spaces” — have languished so far. “The green space, in particular, there’s been very little impervious surface removed.”
But there’s a shift underway. “The Clean Water Program and LA County, through our advocacy efforts, have now started a watershed planning process to try and go from what has largely been a reactive grants program that really benefits large municipalities” who have greater capacity, “to community-based organizations, and neighborhood councils that would put forward more community benefit programs, and even smaller cities [that] had been really disadvantaged.”
There are nine different watersheds and they have “different soil and different challenges, different opportunities,” McNeill said. “In the San Fernando Valley, in the San Gabriel Valley, where we have more open space, where we have really good soils for infiltration, we have these incredible aquifers underground that we could be creating more infiltration opportunities for that provide a lot of the water supply benefits. But then we’ve got to look at other areas of LA County, especially in the LA Harbor Area, where you don’t have good soil for infiltration, you’ve got a lot more hardscape, and impervious surface.” In these watersheds, “There’s significantly greater need for green space and park space, and most of the problems are around controlling pollution.”
With such differences in mind, “We really want the county to take a more visionary proactive approach, look at the different challenges, look at the different opportunities and needs in the various areas and then put forth a plan and say, ‘You know what this parcel in this community is really well-suited for this type of project, and so we’re going to go out and find partners, really engage with local communities to build projects like that.’”
Regionally, wastewater recycling is hugely important. “Recycling our wastewater could provide as much as half of the supply for the region of Los Angeles,” McNeill notes, and there are two projects being developed, one by the City of LA, another by the county and the water district. “But these are really expensive projects, and they’re going to take years to fund, years to build,” she notes, “So water conservation, increasing efficiency and incentivizing hardscape removal and turf replacement for rain gardens and native plants, those are also going to be an important part of this equation, and a more immediate solution to our water supply and pollution challenges.”
The Los Angeles River represents a “unicorn opportunity,” she said. “It provides the greatest opportunity to increase access [to] green space for communities, to improve stormwater capture, prevent pollution, etc. And there’s a lot of great parcels along the lower Los Angeles River that have been part of the Lower LA River master plan.”
The big projects in particular, are reliant on federal infrastructure funding — specifically from Joe Biden administration spending bills — “and that funding is right now frozen” with an uncertain future. “There is discussion about, if it’s not going to all be canceled it might be repurposed for bad things that we don’t want to see happen, they like greater investment in oil, gas, dirty energy instead of really pushing forward with a new green economy. And so that’s a huge threat that I think that we’re all trying to reckon with.”
In the immediate aftermath of the wildfires, Trump made vague threats about conditioning disaster aid, and other Republicans, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, got very specific in saying they wanted California to do things like changing its election laws — using their climate denial to piggy-back another fantasy, that of widespread voter-fraud, spurred in part by resentment that the GOP lost seats in California, in part due to the work of California Grassroots Alliance. One Alliance leader, Patti Crane, called Johnson’s remarks “disgusting.”
“Federal aid for California wildfire victims is not meant to be a weapon,” Crane said.
“Our system of elections is one of the best in the nation,” said Tom Benthin, another Alliance leader. “Voters here rejected three MAGA reactionaries fair and square, in contrast to the blatant MAGA voter suppression and gerrymandering in many other states, which is the only reason Johnson is Speaker”
It’s impossible to say how all this will shake out. After all, California gives far more to the federal government than it gets in return. But one thing is clear: here in LA, on the local level, there’s significantly more attention focused on collaborative efforts to build local resilience.
“The way forward for our region is really thinking about multiple benefits,” McNeill summed up. “That’s why the Safe Clean Water Program is so unique, in that it’s not just focused on one thing, but it’s recognizing that, especially because our taxpayer dollars are so precious, we should be leveraging them in the most efficient and most effective way possible, by combining things like building parks where you can also capture stormwater, prevent pollution and create community benefits.”