Water Rights and Water Rights

If you were to explain legal water rights in the western United States to someone who knows nothing about it, I don't know if they would believe you. It's so ludicrous and steeped in historic inequality, I can't defend it. I wrote a little bit about it in Living history back in 2015.

Our Boulder condo straddles a water ditch, but our HOA does not own the water rights to the rain and snow on our property.  In fact, our rain gutters feed into the ditch because some white farmers, back in the 19th century, filed paper claims to the water that falls on our property in perpetuity.  If we need water, we have to buy it from them, or someone similar (all white men), who was granted water rights by the white men who ran the government at the time.

Do I have your attention?

Back in April, I posted the first half of my March 2020 report to the LWV/LAC about water safety in Los Angeles County.

Here's the water affordability background and discussion.

Back in 2012, California enacted AB 685, now Water Code Section 106.3.  It statutorily recognizes that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”  Safe and clean are already defined by multiple water quality laws federal and state.  Declaring it doesn't make it so.  You have to add some homework and $.

In 2015, that was followed by AB 401, which requires the CA State Board of Equalization and other stakeholders to develop a plan for funding and implementation of the Low-Income Water Rate Assistance Program.

In 2019, SB 200 established the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund to assist low-income Californians.  The law spelled out how it would be funded, but the implementation details are still being worked out.

The California Water Board released a report on low-income water affordability to satisfy AB401; related to AB685 and SB200:

Options:

1. Direct bill assistance (does not help renters whose water bill is included in rent)
2. Renters’ water credit (gives help once a year while water bills are monthly; poorer families move more frequently and may not be on lease or receive aid)
3. Crisis assistance can be added to either option 1 or 2 and can keep the water from being shut off.
4. Set $ assistance per household assumes 3 people at 49 gpd (gallons per person per day) and does not take into account household size.

Shortly after this report came out, Covid-19 hit.  Governor Newsom issued an executive order that protects homes and small businesses from water shutoffs for non-payment during the pandemic.  Water service providers still have to purchase and provide water, but they may not necessarily get paid for it.

It is absolutely vital that everyone gets water, especially during a pandemic when good sanitation is a life or death matter.  But what about the water providers?  Some were already struggling financially before the Covid-19 crisis because their customers were already economically struggling.  Yet, help from the state from AB401 still hasn't arrived.

The stopgap may be the same solution as for water safety: merging the struggling water service providers to stronger ones.  Strong can mean many things, including access to clean water through paper water rights and/or money to purchase water from those that hold paper water rights.

One such scenario is playing out right now in southeastern Los Angeles County.  I'm following it closely and will do more research before blogging about it.

The inequality of COVID-19 deaths

The data and data analysis is rolling in on the inequality of COVID-19 and it doesn't paint a pretty picture about our society. I'm not going to dwell on it here because regular readers will know how I feel about that and how hard I am working using my limited bandwidth and my personal need for emotional distance from the enormity of it all.

Let's just discuss air pollution, statistics and bicycling--three perennial favorite blog topics.

First off, read the synopsis of Exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States: A nationwide cross-sectional study. You can also read the full study on Medrxiv.org

Results: We found that an increase of only 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2%, 15%). The results were statistically significant and robust to secondary and sensitivity analyses.

Conclusions: A small increase in long-term exposure to PM2.5 leads to a large increase in the COVID-19 death rate. Despite inherent limitations of the ecological study design, our results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis. The data and code are publicly available so our analyses can be updated routinely.

This is only county-level data and represent deaths only up to April 22, 2020.*

Fig 1: Maps show (a) county-level 17-year long-term average of PM2.5 concentrations (2000‒2016) in the United States in 𝜇g/m3, and (b) county-level number of COVID-19 deaths per 1 million population in the United States up to and including April 22, 2020

A risk ratio is the amount of risk you incur relative to some baseline or reference group.  The baseline can be the average, e.g. the average air pollution exposure of all people.  In the case of Black people, the ratio is computed relative to all people who are not Black.

Earlier estimates pegged an increase of 1 𝜇g/m3 in PM2.5 with an 15% increase in the COVID-19 death rate.  The analysis was recomputed taking into account confounding variables to separate out the risks of being poor, being black, density, etc.

It turns out that living with more pollution is deadly--even just 1 𝜇g/m3 more of long-term PM2.5 exposure increases your risk of dying should you catch COVID-19 by 8%.  For context, the national average is 8.4, 𝜇g/m3.  The California legal limit is 12 𝜇g/m3 and the Federal limit is 15 𝜇g/m3.

Table 3: Mortality rate ratios (MRR), 95% confidence intervals (CI), and P-values for all variables in the main analysis.

Being black in the US is deadly.  COVID-19 is no exception.  It increases your risk of dying by 45% (1.45 ratio relative to non-black people living with the same air pollution exposure.) P-value** is a measure of how sure we are of the finding.  A lower number means we are more sure.  In this case, there is zero doubt that anti-black racism kills.

In contrast, the association with density is less certain.  A p-value of 0.40 means there is a 40% chance the association isn't really true.  Better than 50/50, but still weak.  The association with home ownership is stronger (but still weak)--perhaps because older people are more likely to own their homes?

Anyway, I just want to point out that racism and environmental racism kills.

Because of the link between air pollution and COVID-19 mortality, governments around the world are trying to keep people from getting back into cars.  In Los Angeles, we have done nada, zip, zilch.

An emergency bike lane in Bogotá, Colombia, March 2020. Photo by Gabriel Leonardo Guerrero Bermudez/iStock

* I live in anomalous Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the US with 10 Million residents and 88 cities.  In contrast, NYC has 8.4 Million people in 5 counties that make up 1 city.  I look forward to more granular analyses of within-county differences later.

** Physics professor Eric has written an excellent guest-blogger series clearing up misconceptions about P-values.

• What is the P-Value of Bullshit? Part One
• What is the P-Value of Bullshit? Part Two

I've got a busy day ahead so I'll save the rest for later.

Can flying ever go green?

Define green.

Today I learned that United Airlines uses biofuels from municipal sewage for a portion of their jet fuel for flights out of LAX.  In 2016, they contracted to purchase up to 15 Million gallons of biofuel over 3 years.  At the end of the contract, they signed up to purchase up to 10 M gal/year, doubling their use.

In 2016, WaPost wrote that the biofuel would be blended in a mixture of 30 percent biofuel and 70 percent traditional fuel.

But the use of biofuels is one possibility for existing machines to cut down on their emissions without having to upgrade their engines or other aspects of their design or engineering. “Drop-in” fuels are renewable fuels that are designed to work safely with existing engines, although as in the case of the United flights, they sometimes require mixing with traditional fuels.

This is analogous to cars in California using a blend of 15% bioethanol and 85% gasoline. If the ethanol comes from grains like corn, then the carbon savings is minimal.  If the bioethanol and biomethane comes from food waste, then the payoff is bigger.

Putting it in perspective.  United Airlines used 4292 Million gallons of fuel in 2019, of which 5 M gal was biofuel.  Even if they were to double that to 10 M gal/year, that would be 0.2% of their fuel use.

So, biofuels in airplanes is better than diesel.  But it's even better if we cut down on our flying overall.  It doesn't have to be much.  Cut down on one round trip long haul flight per year and it's as much carbon savings as if you traded in your gasoline-powered car for an electric car.

I copied the figure from Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options, which I also wrote about in New Paper on Global Data-Driven Climate Actions.

We cut back on personal flights so that we make one long-haul trip every few years.  I was supposed to fly home from Germany yesterday-today.  Bad Dad was going to represent his family at the commemoration of the liberation of Bergen Belsen 75 years ago.  The ceremony will be postponed.

We don't fly long distances for short trips.  We make fewer, longer trips.  We had planned to spend 3 weeks, visiting Berlin, Munich and some smaller towns in between.  I even planned to show him the small town where I had been an exchange student in high school (German Gymnasium.)  It will have to wait.