Things I Think I Know

Things I Think I Know...

about the apparent stabilization of California's population over the past decade.

First, I'm a child of the environmental movement who turned ten in the early '80s. I remember distinctly the profound cynicism of the environmental scientists regarding the population of California at that time.

They were concerned primarily with two big considerations: water and air. That the air pollution in southern California has improved significantly, poor as it still is, since that time is already an epic win.

To have the population stabilize in California generally, even if it is much higher than water capacity projections would have had it in the early 80s, is a second epic win.

Now, I stipulate that California did not reach population stability in anything like an equitable manner.

That said, if you go back and look, you'll find that most folks who were paying attention threw up their hands in resignation precisely because no one believed that population stability could occur without truly draconian restrictions, far worse than the Brownian motion effect that appears to be in play here.

That California has, willy-nilly, stumbled into a locally stable population number by, in essence, an accident of high real estate prices is unexpected, to say the least. I can't recall anyone who predicted that this would occur (economists with training in this area may be able to point to someone, but if so, their opinions/projections were, I don't think, either popularly known or used as a road map to this point.)

Again, I'm well aware that there are a lot of factors that are incomplete and poorly balanced in getting here. Race, class, these things and all the others.

But we're here, and this, I feel, is a moment to be cautiously optimistic.

So, you can see where I am then wary of Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias, as the tip of an iceberg of thought leading, pushing for California in particular, and the U.S. in general, to increase total population.

Not because I don't agree with their stance on population growth in the abstract. New growth, new people, these are, in the absence of other considerations, good things.

However. As a general rule, no state west of I-35 in the continental U.S. can be said to be water secure against a large population growth. The current hydrology is already over-subscribed, over-burdened. My own state of Texas went through this in the last major drought period around 2010-2013, and Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio in particular were very close to the edge of massive water supply collapse then.

To the point that the major reservoirs, such as Lake Travis in Austin, were completely bone dry. Every western U.S. state is one bad three year period from seeing some truly horrific water deprivation problems, the kind where we have to at least contemplate relocating the populations of multiple million+ person cities simultaneously.

This doesn't mean that, especially as water desalination techniques are coupled with the increasing availability of residential scale solar tech, water won't become available in broader quantity, in principle.

But realize that, for the immediate future, these processes will be scalable only for the coastal cities. Pumping water into the interior (and here I mean from the Gulf to Colorado, or the Pacific to Nevada, the head pressures combined with distance of travel are significant) will likely remain far out of reach for decades, if not a century, even with the broad availability of cheap renewable power. *** Updated my thoughts a bit on this particular topic here. 4/7/2021, mkd ***

So what do I think I know, in summary? Somehow or another, in the usual American manner of stumbling backwards in the fog, California has stabilized their population over the past decade or so.

There are a lot of problems, both in the way it's occurred, and in where this might go. Under the current environmental limits, this stable population is likely to remain the upper limit of the west coast for some time to come.

Further, pressures to increase the population in the face of these practical environmental limits, and without also getting general buy-in from folks who already feel like they're too crowded, will likely be both counter-productive and fruitless for something on the order of a century, simply due to the pure physical requirements of providing water not just to California, but to the rest of the western U.S., since it's a dead-cinch certainty that, if California's population does start growing again, so to will Nevada, Colorado, etc.