Efforts to defang the California Coastal Commission could have a significant impact on Southern California’s quest for water security and fire safety. The Commission has been a barrier to constructing large-scale desalination plants that have freed Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and other arid coastal places from water shortages.
Trump Administration Special Envoy Richard Grenell has suggested conditioning federal disaster aid to California on the state killing the Commission. More recently, Representative Kevin Kiley, R-Auburn, has introduced a bill that would strip the Commission of much of its powers.
Grennell and Kiley oppose the Commission because they fear that it will impede redevelopment of Pacific Palisades and Malibu, that it blocked SpaceX from launching rockets along the coast, and that it has shown a general disregard for property rights of those who own land near the Pacific Ocean. Not too long ago, the Commission also blocked construction of a 50 million gallon per day desalination facility in Huntington Beach. The Commission took this action despite the success of a similar facility in Carlsbad and in the face of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s support for the new facility.
By blocking large desalination plants like the one in Huntington Beach, the Commission is preventing southern California from stabilizing water supplies during the frequent droughts that affect our state. And it is denying firefighters a source of fresh water during coastal fires like the one that devastated parts of Los Angeles County in January. While it is true that aircraft could dump untreated ocean water on a fire, the salt corrodes firefighting equipment and harms any remaining plant life in the affected area.
As I mentioned in a commentary back in 2018, Israel has solved its own water supply challenges by building a string of large desalination plants up and down the Mediterranean coast. Today, its largest facilities are able to produce more than three times the amount of water the Carlsbad facility can, with each providing 20% of Israel’s drinking water.
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has recently opened an even larger desalination facility. The Al Taweelah Independent Water and Power Plant can produce 240 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to meet the needs of almost three million residents. A portion of the plant’s power is provided by an onsite solar farm, an aspect which may recommend it to California environmentalists.
The desalination opponents who influenced the Coastal Commission’s adverse decision in the Huntington Beach case claim that the process uses too much energy. But Ed Ring, California Policy Center’s Director of Water and Energy Policy, recently calculated that a full build-out of desalination in California would increase our energy consumption by only about one percent, and that assumes we cannot achieve higher energy efficiency than the Carlsbad plant reached a decade ago. Whether or not California pursues desalination, the state needs to radically increase energy production if it hopes to play a major role in the implementation of artificial intelligence, which is notoriously energy hungry.
Undoubtedly, just about all Californians want to protect our beaches. But our state has hundreds of miles of coastline. Under a less ideological approach than the one currently enforced by the Commission and the Surfrider Foundation, we can develop a small portion of the coast for desalination and other strategic infrastructure, while maintaining the vast majority of it in a natural state suitable for recreation.
If we get rid of the Commission, build a string of desalination plants, and keep coastal water storage facilities like Santa Ynez Reservoir in the Palisades full, we will have a much better chance of containing future wildfires that will inevitably break out along the Pacific.
Marc Joffe is a fellow at California Policy Center.
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