California must bypass water politics and work toward solutions for our thirsty state

California’s water wars are epic. They’ve inspired Hollywood productions and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. Water has been the source of both great wealth and great poverty in California. A fellow Irishman, James Mulholland, who was born around the corner from where I was and even baptized in the same church, delivered water to the City of Los Angeles with what was described as “chicanery, subterfuge … and a strategy of lies.”

In California, water is political, but it’s time that we work together to remove the politics from the delivery of clean and reliable water for working Californians.

We all know that California is getting warmer and drier. The fires across California this fall are painful evidence. As California works to decrease its carbon footprint by increasing its portfolio of renewable energy production and storage, increasing access to mass transit and making our society progressively more sustainable, we are nonetheless facing increasingly warm temperatures that compromise the snowpack we have traditionally relied on as our natural water storage system, creating a looming, indisputable water crisis.

At the Building Trades, we are working hard across the state to both address the effects of climate change and make our state energy independent. Our members have proudly built the many utility-scale wind and solar farms across the state that have lessened California’s reliance on foreign coal-fired power production. We have championed mass transit projects statewide — including the high-speed rail that, with a Biden administration, will soon take hundreds of thousands of cars off of the road.

We have partnered with next-generation technology like hydrogen fuels and carbon capture to develop industrial facilities that will decrease our carbon footprint yet maintain in-state production and keep California working. Our 68,000 apprentices train at state-of-the-art training facilities around the state to learn how to deliver locally produced energy — the cleanest and most efficient in the world — direct from in-state resources to Californians.

But truth be told, every solar and wind farm — actually, every single energy or mass transit project that Building Trades members have eventually built — has only been built after an unnecessary and lengthy political battle.

As we face a water crisis that promises to make scarce the clean and reliable water that families around the state depend on, what is California doing about it? Mostly playing politics.

A couple of years ago, I traveled to Australia to study its water infrastructure. In the early 2000s, Perth, an isolated city characterized by suburban development, was facing a crisis that was forcing working people to move in order to afford the water that their households required. People were scared about how they could afford to live in Perth in the years to come as water became increasingly scarce and expensive.

Over enormous political opposition, a public-private partnership built a large desalination plant that ended up supplying nearly 20% of household water through a historic drought. Based on the Perth model, desalination plants were built throughout Australia as a major tool for successfully dealing with water scarcity and affordability.

The lesson from Perth was not ignored in California, as almost 10% of San Diego’s water is now supplied by a desalination plant approved in 2012. But even with these models, including San Diego’s, our state’s ability to produce water through desalination has been stymied by coastal politics.

There are two projects, both privately funded and designed to meet our future water needs, that are prepared to break ground, one in Orange County and the other in Monterey. Both have been bedeviled by the same extremist politics that slowed down our ability to provide utility-scale solar and wind — and we just don’t have the luxury of time.

These two projects, requiring zero public dollars, will each take several years to build, employing thousands of local construction workers during what promises to be a historical recession in California, and then be poised to provide millions of gallons of locally produced potable water for local families at affordable rates. But we are almost out of runway.

If we don’t move decisively now, we risk many things. First and foremost, we risk becoming a state that is unable to provide water to its residents. Second, we risk a scenario in which water becomes so scarce that the expense creates one more reason that working people can’t afford to live here.

Third, we risk the possibility that the private investment that is willing to invest in these projects will dry up like our gardens as this recession deepens and other investments elsewhere prove less of a fight. And, if you don’t believe this will happen, just think about the more than half a million industrial jobs that have left the state in large part because of the politics surrounding career sustaining development.

Another Irishman, John F. Kennedy, said, “Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes — one for peace and one for science.” We have the science; we need only to look to Perth or San Diego for that, what we don’t have is the peace. California has a long tradition of politics in water. At this point in history, we simply cannot afford to allow this tradition to continue.