Femke Oldham and Rachel Golden are first-year MPP students at the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Everyone in California knows there’s a drought. We read about it in the news, we see dramatic photos of dry riverbeds, we marvel at the lack of rain.

Less visible, though, is another problem—a big problem. A problem that has endured through both wet and dry months, a problem that will not be fixed by rainstorms or water conservation. A problem that should not exist in a wealthy state in a developed country.

Over 21 million Californians live in 682 urban and rural communities that rely on contaminated groundwater as their primary source of drinking water. Among these people, millions live without access to safe and affordable water. It is difficult to convey the gravity of this situation in writing. “No access to safe water” may seem like the typical environmentalist catch-phrase and might cause your eyes to glaze over.  But stick with us so we can paint a picture for you.

If you live in one of the many areas of California that lacks basic public services, it is likely you regularly face these conditions:

• Your tap water has unsafe levels of lead, arsenic, nitrates, and other pollutants in it, making it dangerous for you and your family to drink or cook;
• Showering causes you to break out in rashes and large clumps of hair to fall out;
• Your house is not connected to sewer lines, so septic tanks overflow and back up into your toilet and shower; and,  
• The streets outside your house don’t have adequate storm drains, so when it rains, polluted water floods the streets.
  
  

California is the sixth largest economy in the world, yet it is home to people living in conditions more common in the developing world. Most of the people experiencing these conditions live in poor and marginalized communities in the counties of Los Angeles, Kern, San Bernardino, Fresno and Tulare. These areas without basic services are just a bus-ride away from major cosmopolitan cities. We are not just talking about the Central Valley. Unsafe water conditions persist across the state, and across the country for that matter.  

Toxic water has economic consequences as well. Families and communities are forced to purchase bottled drinking water at high prices and to pay exorbitant fees for sewage disposal. Additionally, environment-related health problems may lead to missed days at work and mounting medical expenses.

Recently, Colin Bailey, the executive director of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water spoke at the “California Drought Roundtable” event at the Brower Center about the grassroots effort to prioritize access to safe water. He explained how government inaction and lack of enforcement of existing laws are a form of environmental discrimination. He described how communities and tribes from across the state banded together to lobby for the Human Right to Water Bill (AB 685), which, after much opposition, finally passed in September 2012. However, the government has done little since then to move forward on improving conditions for people without safe water in California.

The smart policy talk these days is about “integrated water planning” or “not waiting for emergency responses.”  We’re all for that.  We agree that we need water policies that are integrated with energy policy and other “soft responses” like drought-tolerant gardening and conservation. But integrated also means abolishing the oppressive system of haves and have-nots that currently exists in our state. Integrated means that every human in California, regardless of ethnicity, immigration status, or home location, can turn on the tap and drink clean, healthy water. As California lawmakers create new policies and strategies to deal with the drought, the people living in a perpetual “clean water drought” should be at the top of the agenda.

For more, watch this 2 minute video.

Leo Covis is a second-year MPP student at the Goldman School of Public Policy.


The climate change debate has shifted. It used to be that people opposed to climate change solutions could be labeled as “deniers” because they did not believe (or refused to believe) that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions caused climate change. Now that the climate has begun to change, that point of view is demonstrably invalid. This has lead fossil fuel advocates to subtly change their arguments and environmentalists so far have not caught on.

Case in point: at a recent panel on fracking California’s Monterey Formation of oil shale, fossil fuels advocate and self-styled energy philosopher Alex Epstein made some interesting comments about how climate change is affecting people’s lives. For instance, Epstein said that since fossil fuels have been used on a wide scale, the number of people dying from drought has gone down by 9 percent9%. The statement may be true (note, he did not claim that climate change had reduced drought, only that fewer people have died from drought since climate change started changing weather patterns) but was clearly designed to sound ridiculous and thus produce ridicule from the other panelists. Another panelist, Robert Collier from Next Generation, took the bait hook-line-and-sinker. He responded by saying that he did not feel it necessary to respond to “laughable” climate denialism that any smart person could see was preposterous. This allowed Epstein to chide Collier for making ad hominem attacks while his real argument went unchallenged. Collier looked childish while Epstein did not have to clarify or defend his reasoning.

After the panel I asked Epstein what he meant and it became clear to me why he would try to obfuscate his real point. Epstein explained that although climate change has caused more droughts throughout the world, technological progress, largely fueled by carbon-emitting energy that causes that very climate change, has made it possible to adapt to climate change (there may be more drought, but using fossil fuels we can move water to people who need it). I asked Epstein if he expected our adaptation capabilities to continue in the face of ever-increasing global temperatures and he unequivocally stated that he did. This is the argument that Collier should have responded to because it is the basis of the pro-fossil fuel position and easy to break down.

To see precisely why the pro-fossil fuel argument is invalid, one need only ask them to explain how it will continue to work. For example, the Breakthrough Institute, in a recent issue of their journal, noted that Venice, Italy is developing a complex system of hydraulic pumps and sea-locks to protect the island city from rising sea levels. These engineering feats would not have been possible without the technological advancements wrought by abundant fossil fuel energy. Thus, the cause of climate change will protect us from climate change.

What this argument does not address are the climate change problems that cannot readily be solved by enormous engineering projects. For example, the low-lying island nations of Micronesia and Oceania are not built on wooden pylons, like Venice, and therefore cannot be protected by hydraulic pumps and sea-locks. As sea levels rise, they will sink, displacing their entire population. This will lead to refugee crises wherever these people move to. People in other parts of the world will have their own intractable problems, ranging from prolonged drought to uncontrollable flooding. Some of these problems may be ameliorated by significant technological responses, but assuming that they all will be solvable is dangerous. The new argument against climate change response relies on a weak heuristic: because we have been able to deal with climate change up to now, we will continue to be able to do so in the future.

Obviously, this argument has several faults, not least of which is reliance on teleological reasoning. Unforeseeable disasters and worsening consequences from climate change do not enter into the equation. It should be easy to show that this argument is unfounded, but few environmentalists are pointing out its weaknesses. Environmentalists are being left behind in the climate change debate by hanging on to the debates of the past. Few people, including fossil fuel advocates, still deny climate change. The fossil fuel advocates, for their part, seem to recognize that their arguments have little merit and brilliantly try to hide that fact by dressing their new arguments in the clothes of their former beliefs. Environmentalists will need to recognize that and adjust their arguments accordingly if more people are going to join the call for alternative fuels and significant action to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. 

Anna is a student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. 

We can’t fix climate change without fixing our food system (see pretty chart).  

At Thursday’s SNAPP meeting, we tackled the question “What can we realistically change about the food system 10 years from now?”  Bob Epstein, the event’s featured speaker and a member of GSPP’s board of advisors, is working on three answers to that question.  His goals include removing antibiotics from the meat supply (partially as a trigger to reform meat consumption more generally), training a young generation of food policy advocates, and establishing a sustainable food institute here at Berkeley. 

In introducing his ideas, he provided an approach for how to think effectively about change to a complex system that involves some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.  Solutions must simultaneously achieve goals and be profitable.  

Framing certain environmental issues as cost-saving should be easy, but what if the cost-savings are not so obvious?  What if the change is indeed costly?  Where do we expect profit seekers to use their moral compasses, such as they are, and where do we need government to step in and regulate?  

If there is no incentive to not do damage, profit-maximizers will be unlikely to change.  Epstein described the role of policy as creating a minimum set of rules for everyone to follow that prevents the damage from being done.  Policies we make must allow at least some profit-seeking entities to continue to thrive while achieving our environmental and social goals. 

The SNAPP event drew a diverse group of people interested in food from across campus and beyond.  Policy issues tend towards the interdisciplinary, and the variety of ideas in the room produced an impressive list of 10-year projects, ranging from a garden in every school to effective implementation of behavioral economics in front-of-package food labeling.    

What do you think we can accomplish in 10 years?