Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse
pws.byu.edu
pws.byu.edu
If water were well managed here, the area is potentially blessed over the long term compared to most of the West because there are large amounts of precipitation that fall on the nearby Wasatch and Uinta mountains. These mountains and their snow melt combined with the Great Sale Lake form a somewhat contained water cycle. It's a different situation than most southwestern metro areas (Vegas, Phoenix, LA) that rely on distant sources like the Colorado river, and the problems northern Utah faces are more amenable to local solutions.
The culture of water use in the urban areas really is surprising compared to say, Southern California or Arizona. There is plenty of water wasted, little restrictions on sprinkler use, etc. This is changing though and many of my neighbors are visibly switching to more sustainable landscaping, with local government incentives.
However, urban water use is not the problem even if it's what people see every day. The cities do not really need to stop growing (as a NYT piece earlier this year seemed to suggest). The urban areas account for only 9% of diverted water (per the report).
The problem seems to be agriculture and trying to grow water-intensive crops in the arid areas west the Wasatch range. 74% of the diverted water is going to agriculture, and cutting that usage by 50% would basically meet the cited amount needed to restore the lake.
At this point, it seems to be just a political problem: can the state find the political willpower to force conservation on or buy-out the water rights of the agricultural sector?
I'm hopeful. Although the agricultural sector seems to have plenty of political power historically, other local industries have been growing far faster in economic influence and maintaining the health of the cities will hopefully take priority.
If the businesses go with option 2, you're basically SoL unless someone attempts to stand up to them.
for a large number of them i don’t think we replace the crops with anything… why are we treating massive chunks of some of the dryest desert as if it “must” grow something?
They have to eat 3 times per day, maybe more. All food now supposed to be tracked from say Great Lakes region, 1500miles?
Utah resembling Saudi Arabia?
Food typically travels farther now. Oranges in FL have been shipped in from Argentina for generations.
Agricultural interest typically have older water rights than cities which are more established. The challenges that cities in populations have grown and need more water, which does not exist.
This only becomes a problem for the agricultural businesses when cities try to take their water without paying fair market value
US law and rights prevents the government from simply coming in in taking property without compensation.
This is the same reason that the government can't simply seize land, housing, or bank accounts of law abiding citizens to address various problems like homelessness.
Same reason property rights are.
Probably a better analogy is property rights in land.
Imagine that, if you didn't allow randos to walk through a plot of land, then, eventually, the plot would become toxic and totally useless, with a value of zero. (i.e. what will happen with water rights if they keep drawing according to the assumptions that ground the law). This is a purely physical constraint.
Imagine furthermore that (like normal), the property right entitles the owner to stop randos from walking through, but also, if they don't exercise that right, then title to that plot will revert to someone else (i.e. how use-it-or-lose-it provisions work in water rights here).
In isolation, then, it's totally rational for the owner to keep randos from walking through, as that maximizes their ability to profit from the land -- even though over the long-term this destroys the total use value of the land.
The fix, then, is to say, "okay, we won't revert title to someone else anymore if you let randos walk through. Also, you can sell that right." Then, the owner will sell rando-walking right, and the land won't become toxic. Win win all around. You can even pay the owner for the lost value from the transition, and still come out ahead.
This is described in the article as leasing the water rights, and I think a solid part of the solution.
The problem is who pays for the walking rights, and how much.
If it is too low, the owner would rather use the water/land until it is depleted.
This is further complicated by the fact that in Utah, much of the farming water from rain isn't being depleted, but rather, the lake is drying up.
Someone upstream might say, I have a source of water good for the next 1000 years, and can earn $10/year. Why should I accept $5/year to send it down stream?
Also, the article mentions that a major issue is trust, which cant be stated enough. If I destroy my business and a life long investment to accept $5/year, what protections do I have that the price wont go to $1/year, or $0? If the state makes a binding contract, can I even trust that?
This lack of trust is based in history, as cities and states in the west frequently brake water contracts with farmers.
Sometimes states end up having to pay settlements for break of contract like in California, but even these are usually pennies on the dollar and decades later.
A river running through a property is less limited than its mineral rights. Water rights aren’t about access to a specific amount of water but about the right to a flow that gets seasonally replenished.
I’m not arguing that the way we do water rights makes sense. Just that it’s the way because it’s property.
If you buy/own rights to such water, it is not dissimilar to an oil field or mineral mine.
1. In most locales, you have to pay an annual tax for a % of the property's value. If you don't pay it, you'll eventually lose your property. This is closer to rent, than it is to ownership.
2. In other locales, you cannot own property indefinitely. You can only lease it from the state, for some limited period of time.
3. Eminent domain and squatters rights, and when things really go to shit politically, land reform at the point of a bayonet.
... And, as another comment mentions, there's nothing indefinite about water. Overuse it this year, and you won't have any next year.
Similarly, the course I found that governments can't impose a 100% or arbitrarily High tax on something simply to take it.
A century and a half of free water use, plus interest on whatever the original payment was seems like a fair deal to me.
There is no reason that we should be paying 'fair market price', when that price is artificially inflated by non-market participants hoarding all the water that they don't have to pay for... For themselves.
The Fifth Amendment very clearly allows the seizure of private property in exchange for just compensation - which does not have to be market value.
In some places it may just compensation may be sparing your life, or other creative definitions, but that isn't how it works here.
And how are you going to determine the market value of a limited resource undergoing shortages that are caused by non-market participants taking the lion's share of it?
The first and second choices are:
1) to expand and take water until they are sued.
2) mandate restrictions on city users
My parents were on a private water system, fed by a spring. There was an owner's association, and the homeowners served by the water system owned shares in the system. The city was eventually able to buy enough shares to control the system, but it took three or four decades of trying.
So say you own a farm, and you own the water rights that enable it to operate. And your family has owned those rights ever since 1852, when they settled on that land. Each generation has passed it on to the next.
If you sell the water, you're selling the farm as a working farm. You're selling your childrens' future. That's not a decision that you make quickly, no matter how much money the city waves at you.
You've got this 100% backwards. It's the farmers who are not paying fair market value for water, as has been documented all over the place.
People might not like those agreements in retrospect, but that is not grounds to avoid ownership or contracts in the US legal system.
Sure he has farm interests in mind, but farmers will be among the first to really feel the affects of a dying lake ecosystem.
US farmers are certainly doing that right now, the incentives encourage it, and they're quick to lobby against changes in incentives.
That's also what you get from a prisoner's dilemma, a farmer switching to conservation will increase their production prices and / or lower their yields (as they'll at least need to invest in new farming methods, probably new hardware, and will have to learn those), and they'll fall behind their neighbours to say nothing of the market as a whole.
It's really no different from trying to convince a tech mogul that social media is harmful to children and adolescents. They can't see it, because they won't see it, or they won't see it, because the can't see it, since seeing it invalidates their business model.
It's a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when the farmer (not without reason) sees it as an attack on their way of life.
Yes, but I'd temper my sympathy with the knowledge that small farmers have mostly been pushed out by extremely large corporations. I have considerably less sympathy for them.
Farm economic class by sales values (USD annual) | number
1k-10k 11000
10k-100k 5100
100k-250k 900
250k-500k 520
500k-1M 310
>1M 270
Total 18100
If I'm reading that wrong, I would appreciate the correction.
I'm supportive of doing something about how water is allocated, but a strategy that writes off the meaningful number of marginal farmers as economic noise is a strategy that results in tons of opposing ads with genuinely sympathetic characters.
[EDIT] Oh my god, wait, that's revenue, not profit? I take it back, the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms, too.
nope. that's what some people live on. geez you expect HN to be entitled, but still
That’s not even hand to mouth/subsistence even in rural TN.
mostly it's subsistence farming - e.g. they raise enough food for themselves. and of course, every able bodied family member works for minimum wage somewhere, when they can. but that does NOT make it a hobby farm.
yes, in fact people in the US make the equivalent of less than 10K a year and still live.
That’s definitely subsistence farming, and common the world over in some form.
And agree, not a hobby farm at that point.
This isn't an abstraction to me. My parents were basically forced off the farm I grew up on, and their homestead made nearly valueless, by neighboring farmers whose hog-raising facilities and manure management made the place uninhabitable due to stench and dust. Their neighbors never saw their practices as a problem, at least until they retired and moved to town. I don't believe they were disingenuous in this. They simply were not equipped to imagine that their farming practices, on which they were dependent for their livelihood and self-respect, could be a terrible problem. It is precisely because they were deeply invested in them (both in $ and personal terms) that they could not see it.
How is this so in the case of the Great Salt Lake?
I never thought Democrats would be blamed for the drought as well.
Utah already has the the drought, now it just needs the urban technocrats.
Utah is already one of the most urban states (90%). And "conservative technocrats" mostly run things at the state level (SLC itself is very Democrat), so I'm a bit surprised the governor comes from a farm.
It absolutely is and they're lying through their teeth.
Because that is a political decision, for better or worse.
California is currently drowning in water from the recent storms... and an awful lot of it will run straight out to the ocean. During the summertime... we deliberately open upstream dams so that downstream rivers can be full enough to support Tubbing, Boating and Recreational Fishing... which is kind of weird if you think about it.
However, the lack of sufficient reservoirs is indeed a real problem. The population and it's water needs have greatly eclipsed the state's storage capabilities, which creates a negative feedback cycle during dryer seasons/years.
I'm sure people who are more knowledgeable about the problem are trying to work out solutions, and there is probably a straightforward answer to why we don't have a working solution already?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/31/california-drought-wh...
Here is a more recent article talking about the proposed Sites Reservoir the other article mentions.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/a-new-mega-reservoir-in-final-plan...
That's not to say environmental reasons aren't good reasons (with a certain balance of course).
However, in California, this has become the "go-to" excuse for blocking most new public-works projects, often tying up projects in decades of litigation and studies... which typically means the project is dead before it even starts. Californian's have become skeptical of these weaponized "studies" as a result.
As an example, the LA River is a giant concrete channel that rushes water into the Pacific. There is some support for restoring it into a more absorbent wetland state but it will take decades and doesn’t cover the whole river.
As a more farcical example, the recent storms have downed a tree across the Caltrain commuter rail line. They are slow on removing it because the jurisdiction the tree fell in consider it a historic tree despite the fact that it is eucalyptus, a species invasive to California.
There is no magical reservoir that will feed Victor David Hanson’s walnuts.
Can you elaborate? A reservoir is just something that stores water - it does not have to be on an existing river, although that is convenient.
California is huge. There is plenty of space to build new reservoirs. It's purely a political problem, as demonstrated by children comments below.
People will absolutely blame Democrats for the drought (or Republicans, it doesn't matter) if that means they are absolved of responsibility.
It's also sad that a central valley project could never happen today. There would be endless environmental impact studies.
I thought that was a bit overblown, that there are several common crops worse than almonds? Such as alfalfa, if I'm remembering correctly.
There used to be artesian springs over much of it, now the ground water is over 2500 feet below ground, and starting to be widely contaminated with arsenic.
It’s pretty mind blowing, frankly. This was generally all done via wells sunk on private property.
There has been ongoing litigation to get this under control for several decades that is starting to finally result in action.
> A factory or “fab” for making semiconductors needs a lot of water to operate. It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates, using the water to cool down equipment and clean silicon wafers. That’s about as much water as 13,698 to 27,397 Arizona residents might use in a day. Fabs are also pretty picky when it comes to water quality, they need to use “ultra-pure” water to prevent any impurities from damaging the chips.
Urban water use (e.g. your lawn and your golf course) generates almost no taxable activity. Agricultural water use magically something that was of no value to the state into revenue.
I have no hope the state curtails agricultural use before everything falls apart. It will however, curtail urban water use long before they get around to anything serious about agriculture. Look at how fisheries have historically been managed. First they make it hard for the small time operators who are of no concern to the state. Then they let it run until it collapses. Then with that revenue already gone they finally get off their butts and implement something. Then 30yr later things maybe start working again.
I hope I'm wrong, but in the absence of hardliner ideologues following the money is a very accurate predictor of how large sociopathic entities comprised of many humans who are "just doing their jobs" (e.g. states) act.
Aside from the entire urban economic activity?
It's rather difficult to have a city without water.
The whole messaging around this is disingenuous. Urban water usage is a small subset, and even within that category individual citizens are a small subset, but yet most of the PR/"make changes" have been focused on a minority of a minority.
That said, there is always the 2nd option of purchasing more water.
It's not. Saving the great salt lake requires a water consumption reduction larger than total urban consumption in Utah. You can't get 1.5 million acre-feet out of a box which contains half a million.
> A lot of urban water is wasted on lawns, pools, and parks. It is not unthinkable that it could be reduced by 25-50% per person if you banned these things.
That's literally pulled out of your ass with no supporting evidence, and even if it were true it'd still be nowhere near what's needed.
> That said, there is always the 2nd option of purchasing more water.
No there is not always the option of purchasing the thing everyone lacks.
I was talking about ensuring enough water for urban users to live and you are talking about maintaining the great salt lake.
This seems to be the confusion.
they are facing _the repercussions_ of a problem largely caused by someone else.
The farms predate all the new usage. The new usage from urbanization caused the deficit.
i was with you until the bit about “the state”.
from what i understand of the situation, the government isn’t watering the rocky, dry, dusty chunks of land that are being used as farms. these are privately owned individuals and companies throwing water away.
if the state (whether utah, or federal) declares that its absurd to waste water attempting to grow crops in _the desert_ then certain people will declare the government is unfairly throwing its weight around.
the coming water wars are gonna be such a mess unless steps are taken now to mitigate.
related sidenote: i vaguely remember reading a few years ago that oil barons were buying up land all over, separating the water rights and reselling the land minus the water rights. does anyone know of any good recent studies or reading on this?
They absolutely can, but the will is completely absent.
Have a lot of cash on you? Cops can steal it without a warrant :)
It is however within the criminal context, with at least the thin pretext if criminal wrongdoing.
This is a far cry from the idea that the government can simply take what they want because they want it.
The idea that politicians can (or should) just make a law dissolving property rights and take whatever water or land they want without compensation is misguided.
Not that I disagree... but this is roughly describes how the US was established.
Hopefully people can agree that it is not a good practice to embrace and repeat.
I don't want to live in a society where people take whatever cant be defended with force. Conversely, I don't think others would want to live in such a world with me.
Owning the water rights and the land are separate issues from political influence. That is a legal matter, not political.
The longer states wait to buy back those water rights, the more expensive it is going to be.
https://www.zipdatamaps.com/politics/state-level/districts/m...
It is not like the Federal senate where each state gets fixed representatives, independent of population.
For example, Salt Lake country has 12/29 senate representatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Legislative_distric...
Imagine trying to fill 10 cups to 51% with one cup of water.
There are so few people in actual rural areas that if you go to a meeting where delegates are allocated by population they are few and far between. The vast majority of the population comes from four counties on the Wasatch Front - Salt Lake, Utah, Davis and Weber - and the next four counties (Washington, Cache, Tooele, and Box Elder) are predominantly urban populations as well.
The government usually has to pay them off for their buy-in for Big Ticket decisions with taxpayer money
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/3/749
I can't agree with you that this is just a political problem. Utah has been in a drought for majority of the last couple decades. This is instead a natural disaster. Not everything has to be reduced to politics.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
https://www.drought.gov/states/utah#:~:text=Drought%20in%20U....
When it comes to water rights - yes everything can be reduced to politics.
It's a complicated issue. However, politics (or really, the lack of government involvement) is exacerbating it.
The problem? We are, and have been, in a sustained drought made worse by global warming. So, what should happen? Water conservation efforts across the board that, at a minimum, minimize the draining of things like the snake river aquifer.
Nothing has stopped farms from pulling up more and more groundwater. Nothing has pushed farmers into farming more drought tolerant crops. There is no market force strong enough to enable water conservation. Without intervention, farmers are simply going to draw groundwater until there's none left to draw. At which point, a LARGE number of farms in the region will collapse.
One solution I've seen kicked around is spending a bunch of money to buy back those shares at well above market rates to conserve the water.
The government can also tax it.
Similarly, the courts have found that taxes intended explicitly to extort and take property are illegal.
If the city wants Walterbright's house, they can't just impose a 1000% property tax on you to avoid buying your house.
Currently there is a large conflict between three parties: government, environmentalist, and owners.
Ultimately I think private owners will increasingly sell out or lease their resource rights to the government.
This will leave the government to arbitrate the conflicts between human usage and human consumption.
My guess is that this will eventually take place under the existing systems of Rights and ownership in various States.
Whether you call this a collapse or simply a shift is just a matter of terminology.
My hope is that this will be a lawful transition where governments and people who want water buyout the interest and stake of those who currently own it
Every car owner could was their car every day with a hose and water their lawns and it’d hardly make a dent in water allocation for just almond trees.
People wash their cars anyway, they just don’t do it when the HOA president is watching or when the cops are looking. Or in San Jose, they don’t give a crap anyway since there is a giant homeless encampment half a block away, and human feces floating into the sewers anyway.
It’s like bag bans - inconvenience, more junk, more cost, and for little to no actual improvement, coupled with feel good ‘look how much we’re helping’ propaganda.
Also irritating.
Are these major impediments to life? No. Are they lame? Yes. Do they accomplish what they putatively are for? No.
Murder? Of course it should be illegal. And society generally takes it seriously.
Banning plastic bags - the cause of the month - or washing your car?
Most of society is going to not give a rats ass, and it will undermine the rest of the system because of it.
More laws don’t create less lawlessness. Laws which address, and give teeth to effective enforcement for, actual problems create less lawlessness.
No one enforces the laws i’m referring to widely, and your average American rolls their eyes at it. Law enforcement doesn’t try to enforce them either normally. Though they do occasionally get used to harass someone they don’t like.
So society doesn’t care, and it just gives more ammo to harass the occasional person they don’t like for other reasons.
When society cares, then the law is followed more (and enforced more), and it matters for the putative reason the law was created.
For instance, murder? People will murder someone sometimes, obviously, regardless of the law. When that happens, investigations happen, and people go to jail (when it all lines up, anyway). But also, laws against murder do stop people from murdering folks they otherwise would! Because they know it will be taken seriously.
Interestingly, this effect can be seen from things like Serial killers and the victims they choose, who are often people society doesn’t seem to take murders of seriously, including runaways, prostitutes, women of color or natives, etc.
A law against murder is stopping more harm than it causes, by a pretty large margin, near as I can tell. Putting more effort and focus into ensuring it’s investigated more thoroughly seems like it would pay clear dividends in many ways.
That is not clear for plastic bag bans. Near as I can tell, plastic bag bans are causing more harm - environmentally, even.
But no one does, generally, because they don’t care. At least after whatever original cause-of-the-month crusade got it in.
In some cases, it may be a valid state, and it isn’t a problem now, but would be a problem if it was repealed. But that is a rare situation.
In California, other examples off the top of my head include:
- the nunchuck/throwing star/random scary weapon bans (went in during the 80’s because of ‘scary gangs’ in action movies, but it was an invented problem)
- about 90% of common municipal recycling programs (aluminum and ferrous metals excluded)
- federal anti-marijuana laws
- a ton of vehicle modification rules/laws (though they are starting to get enforced now in some cases, which is good!)
Therefore, having it on the books just gives ammo to folks trying to punish people they don’t like arbitrarily (instead of actually apply the law), and decreases overall faith in the system because it exists in that state.
But folks get jerked around so much by panic-of-the-month, I’m not holding my breath.
For those folks, they’re just wasting their time, because it has to go through the same sorting process as single source does, as everyone’s recycling gets co-mingled, and most others just throw random trash in there.
And that won’t scale for non-economic recycling (aka currently things that aren’t Aluminum and certain other metals).
In a lot of the Bay Area (even Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Santa Clara!) it’s normal for folks to go through every morning and raid everyones recycle bins for valuable recycling before the city trash vendor can arrive, then sell it.
Everything else gets left of course, as it’s a cost, and usually just gets sent into the trash anyway.
Actually, it's usually less water, period. A commercial wash uses 25+ gallons, even with water recycling systems. I don't know about you, but I never used that much during a bucket wash.
This is incorrect. It’s harmful because people have limited cycles to think about these things and having them focused on their own use is a great way to prevent the actual issue from getting fixed.
A bunch of government rules on personal use gives the wrong impression that personal use is even relevant.
I just did a little math and it's about right: an average crop irrigation might be 2-acre-feet water per-acre (imagine water 2ft high covering the field) which is 651800 gallons. It's almost double that for alfalfa. Most crops are in between and it varies depending on how many harvests per season are done.
Now, at 7 homes per acre at average of 12,000 gallons a month is 7 x 12 x 12000 = 1008000. About 50% of that goes to landscaping/pools/etc., btw. and with better management could be significantly reduced if people, as a whole, gave a hoot.
So ballpark, it's pretty accurate. The difference isn't that ag is so wasteful. It's whether you have 10 taxpayers and a whole bunch of carrots per 640 acres or two thousand taxpayers.
Doing the same with taxpayers would be problematic.
it's odd that you focus on "growing carrots" is wasteful when if you got rid of lawns and golf courses in the desert you'd immediately save enough water to fix the problem in this article. at least when you grow carrots you have a product. a suburban lawn produces nothing whatsoever.
suburbia is, in it's current form, far more wasteful of water and also produces far less carrots. but far more tax revenue.
That's simply not true. 75%-80% of the water use in the southwest is used for agriculture [1]. Even if "lawns and golf courses" are the remaining 20-25%, it is a minority of the water use. Furthermore, food doesn't have to be grown there. Bananas come from South America, oranges come from Florida, why does alfalfa (the food for livestock) need to be grown there? The answer is it does not but the current water is so cheap that people don't care salting the earth to line their personal pockets.
[1] - https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/impacts/society/water_deman...
if it's good enough to shift the high water use crop farming elsewhere, then why isn't it good enough to shift the golf courses and lawns, to say Iowa then too?
it's the same answer for houses, the climate is good and the land/houses/water/etc. is cheaper. you choose the characterize the farmers as "don't care salting the earth to line their personal pockets" while excepting the developers putting big cities in the middle of a desert for the same reason and for the same result.
That's very easy to answer. Because the number of humans impacted is minimized. An average farm size is ~400 acres. This is around 0.6 square miles. SLC's density is 1,800 per square mile so 400 acres is ~1k people. What do you think is easier? Displacing 1k people in a city center or 1 farmer? No one is saying the solution is perfect but between nobody being able to enjoy SLC due to inaction, 1 farmer, or 1k people, the obvious solution is for the 1k people to band together, buy the farm, and shut it down.
As per your last comment, no one here is saying that other people choosing to live in the desert are nobler than farmers. No one is "blaming" the farmers for making use of cheap water and fertile land. It all makes economic sense. The reality is that there is a finite resource and we should be working together to maximize societal benefit otherwise the tragedy of the commons will ensure none of us can. At this point in time, the most good least harm principle makes the calculus straightforward that agriculture is where the ROI is at.
you don't need to displace anybody. you need to stop blaming the farmers and/or taking their water and start ENFORCING reasonable water restrictions on the existing developments. About 50% of the water being used by municipalities is potable drinking water being sprayed on lawns and golf courses. You get rid of that before a telling a farmer to get lost because it's "easier".
Per acre suburbia consumes more, but as it stands farming is the vast majority of water consumption overall. It doesn’t matter how efficiently they use it. If farmers don’t make major cuts the lake will be gone.
Getting rid of lawns and golf courses will barely slow down the decline, let alone change the direction. You’re talking about optimizing 20% of the water users and suggesting the 70% is fine, which is insane.
Put another way, if all urban usage stopped immediately, the lake would still dry up because of the farmers irrigating away with reckless abandon.
As the article points out, this happened once already when SLC was much smaller and it was just lucky enough to be rescued by a thousand year rain event.
Farmers can pound sand, regardless of their water rights. Constitutional water rights for a shared resource are a travesty. They should pay for it like the rest of us so market dynamics can properly identify what is important and the lake can be protected.
Using your numbers, it sounds like the rule of thumb should be that an acre of carrots uses 1/2 as much water as an acre of tract homes, no?
the point is that, the water use for developed land is roughly the same either way.
the secondary point is that growing something is productive and 50% of the water used by today's suburban lifestyle is just wasted. there's such a thing as "desert landscaping" vs. lawns.
i point this out from time to time because where ever i first heard it (in the southwest US where these water fights and drought has been brewing for more than 50 years), it made and impression on me.
it's also subtly snarky because we all hope and suppose that good government will save us from the perennial water crisis. but of course government is a machine that feeds and grows on tax revenue. and since fixing the urban and suburban sprawl doesn't align well with the government's feeding habits, here we are.
Here in northern CA, our water bill for a single-family home on about a 1/3 acre lot might peak around 110 gallons/day in summer so under 3.5k gallons/month, while in other seasons it might be 10-20% less.
Two things are wrong with this comparison:
1 - Houses use potable water. Crops use a mix of irrigation water and rainfall. When you grow crops in arid climates like Utah, you lose the benefit of rainfall and have to pull everything from irrigation. Ideally you'd grow those crops in environments that provide more of their water needs from the sky rather than divert rivers to cover it all.
2 - Carrots aren't being grown in Utah, it's alfalfa and hay. Alfalfa is one of the more water-intensive crops to grow.
3 - The news articles say that Utah is growing a lot of this alfalfa for export. They're basically exporting their water to other locations, at the expense of residents.
It doesn't make sense for an arid state with a shrinking lake to allow people to use 2/3 of their water to export a water-intensive crop like alfalfa.
Now, over-farming or farming the wrong crops isn't right either, but if you cancelled all the ag, every different crop and replaced it with houses, guess what - still a drought.
That's why I used carrots in my comment. In the area where we experienced this, they over-built and also somewhat over-farmed. Ran out of ground water. Create water board which decided that the carrot farmers who had been there 100 years were 2nd in line for the water under their own land, which they both had legal title to and state constitutional rights to, and took it from them. They ran them out of town because it became uneconomical. Then the developers (who also ran the water board) bought the now-cheaper land and put houses there. Guess what, 20 years later - still not enough ground water. Still a bunch of suburban nimbys watering their lawns, just a lot more of them now. Guess why we import carrots from mexico now.
I grew up in park city. They get that snow because of the great salt lake. It's called the lake effect. No telling what happens if that lake is not there.
Luckily, the impact of lake-effect from the Great Salt Lake is much more of a talked about thing than a practical thing.
Lake effect is real, the Great Salt Lake makes it happen, but it's a lot smaller and rarer than you'd think (partly because the lake is much smaller than the Great Lakes, which cause places like Upstate NY to be very dependent on the lakes for their precipitation).
I honestly wonder if the Rochester <> Salt Lake City Mormon connection is part of why it became such a meme.
This is honestly one of the few 'good news' things that so many people ignore when talking about things like climate change.
People like to imagine SLC/Vegas/Phoenix abandoned in the near future because there's no drinking water, when really for most places (Sedona and some other aquifer-dependent small towns excluded), it will only force us to stop growing alfalfa in the desert and cows will have to be fed something else (or not raised at all).
Of course this would be kind of unfortunate. We like our diverse diets. But, that’s really more for the enjoyment of flavor rather than necessity. And people also enjoy their lawns…
IMO it would be best to slowly increase water costs over time, to induce people to consider the trade offs.
Ever since I was a kid I was taught that the Great Salt Lake would eventually dry up(not in my lifetime). But each year I lived there and would drive by or fly in a small plane across it, I would see more flats and less water. Just last June I visited and much of Utah seemingly is becoming a dust bowl.
I think it is way too late to save it. But we will see plenty of people point fingers at those in charge today, those growing crops, and residential usage when the reality is that this was hardly talked about in terms of sustainability decades ago when it was at its highest.
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
> The choices we make over the next few months will affect our state and ecosystems throughout the West for decades to come
That's a big bag of wishful thinking. What they're actually saying is "the choices we have made over the past decades have effected the current state of the ecosystems in this area, and there's only a few months left to undo those decisions."
https://kansasreflector.com/2022/12/15/its-time-to-deal-with...
[1] https://zionnationalpark.com/zion-national-park/the-desert-s...
Combined with an extractive rather than preservative agricultural tradition, it doesn't bode well for Utah's future.
Symbolic gestures are good, but careful analysis and appropriate changes are needed to really make a difference.
If people use half as much, you can have twice the population with the same water budget.
The only viable alternative is to purchase more water rights for the cities, which is generally a political non-starter
No you can’t, salt lake will be gone if all residential use disappears and agriculture does nothing. The article was very clear on how dire this is.
The other reason is because lawns are ornamental and food is utilitarian.
I haven't seen actual numbers though. If you have them, I'll listen.
We also have this disconnect in the debate around water in California. You could stop watering every almond grove in the state and that wouldn’t change anything about major urban water supplies, because the watersheds aren’t related.
From the paper “ Agriculture dominates water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed (Fig. 5)25,26,69. Irrigation of alfalfa and other crops directly accounts for around three quarters of total consumptive water use…”
Agricultural diversions of stream water that would otherwise go to the Great Salt Lake account for 74% of the water used.
Industrial and mining, 18%, evaporation 8%, and cities and residential use 8%.
This isn’t like California.
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366876763_Emergency...]
Next question: Does anyone have statistics on how much of the precipitation in that watershed is due to the "lake effect"? (For those not in the know: When storms cross the Great Salt Lake, they pick up evaporation, which increases the precipitation of the storms when they get to the Wasatch Mountains. That precipitation then flows - or would flow, if not diverted - back into the lake.)
If the lake dries up, so does the lake effect. That could reduce the amount of precipitation that we get. If it's a major effect, it could be big trouble for the environment and the economy.
Evaporation has been decreasing as salinity increases and surface area have been shrinking, and total precipitation has been staying roughly the same.
Which makes sense - most inflows are via precipitation on several large mountain ranges nearby (and relatively infrequent storms), and unless air movement was limited/locked to be solely within the great salt lake basin (in which case precipitation should be noticeably dropping, but it isn’t), the air volumes from daily evaporation would only rarely overlap with the air volumes causing the large rain and snow storms in the mountains.
Definitely still some effect though! And worth asking about for sure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake_effect
What needs to happen, according to the report, is that we give the lake back the proportion it needs to survive and then adjust the amount of water that everyone is using. Overall usage needs to go down, not just what is used for decorative plants.
1. From the report: "Cities and industry account for the final 9% of consumptive water use, of which 90% is outdoor water use (irrigation for lawns and other decorative plants)". 9% of 90% is about ~8%.
2. The report lists "reservoir loss" as 8%, but it also generally refers to that as indirect loss from agriculture use so I lump that 8% into the agriculture category.
There's not ever a firm line between "natural" and "after humans interfered" as if those are separate, unrelated and incompatible things. But in this case it is particularly fuzzy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cahuilla#History
The lake existed in several stages over the last 2,000 years, periodically drying and refilling and eventually disappearing sometime after 1580. Between 1905 and 1907, due to an engineering accident, the Salton Sea formed in parts of the lower basin of Lake Cahuilla. Were it not for human intervention, the sea might have grown to the size of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla.
My reading is that people settled it only to find that it is naturally an unstable environment, and now want to create a "restoration plan" to reduce it's natural instability because of economic dependency on it's continued existence.
The catastrophe was the filling, not the drying.
The flood was part of an irrigation project to bring water to the desert. Irrigation of the imperial valley from the Colorado river continues today. For decades after the flood, excess water from farms would trickle into the slowly drying lake, and people got used to it being there. They also got used to the lack of dust from the dry lakebed.
Now that it is going back to it's "natural" state, people don't like the prospect.
As someone else pointed out with the Salton Sea, Utah doesn't have a monopoly in the west on dumb myopic views on the natural world. And we are really bad with respect to caring about how things were when our grandparents were kids. Or their grandparents. Or the colonists, or the people they displaced.
I do however care what things will be like for my grandchildren, and perhaps 1000 years from now.
But we also have cultural complexes that managed not to destroy the land for tens of thousands of years prior to industrial agriculture, and boy wouldn't it be handy if we could learn from them instead of having to derive the same things they did from first principles, but within a culture that is fundamentally extractive in nature and hence is poorly equipped to see the forest for the trees, real or proverbial.
I agree that we have no idea what things will be like 1000 years from now. Verry little damage is irreversible on those timescales
There were no primeval forests when Europeans arrived. It was all deeply curated and stewarded 'nature', heavily laden particularly with fire-adapted edible plants that the locals helped along if it had been too long since the last lightning storm took care of things. Nothing savage about it, debatably noble. Just a more animistic point of view and a bit more hedging against random acts of nature. We had some of that in europe too, but most of it was stamped out by the time Augustus became emperor.
Written history is written by the victors. And the victors in Europe were agricultural+conqueror nations. Everything else got wiped out.
It's not much but a step in the right direction.
[1]: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/drought-wat...
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/08/04/former-utah-...
Those are two examples behind closed doors. Other legislators don’t want to excommunication, so they’ll never speak up. And then there’s the times the church has made direct public statements or direct cash contributions to political causes like gay marriage in Utah or prop 8 in California.
70% of Utahans listen to a living prophet who shapes their ethics, morality and world view. If you think politics ends at the state house doors or at the ballot box you’re sorely mistaken.
In 2016 the first presidency published a letter urging members to vote, and vote with their morals. The church and the living prophet dictate their morals. It’s a pretty straight line.
It’s a theocracy, the church always gets what it wants. The U.S. government has turned its cannons against the state house because it recognized that it was a theocracy. The organization and methods have changed significantly since then, but the people in power have not.
The generally conservative inclination of Utah voters even less so. It is well known that conservative voters in Utah quite often are outspoken in ways that run directly contrary to the church's lobbying position. Immigration policy is a good example of that, and also an extremely good example of legislators not just voting any way the church lobbies them to.
The last time major immigration policy changes were made in the state they passed a bill that made it more illegal to be an unauthorized immigrant in the state than they were before, where the church implies it doesn't really want any immigration enforcement at all. Needless to say its more conservative members generally disagree on that.
It is true however that most members and the church as well prefer not to have brothels and bars on every street corner, and don't want to legalize casino gambling across the state either.
The idea that the church could announce a position on the state budget, or criminal law enforcement, or even the way water rights should be reformed and have LDS legislators just vote like they were on puppet strings is hopelessly naive.
Really hope the policymakers are able to find a path forward here.
There really isn't a choice here between shutting down agriculture in the southwest vs not shutting it down. The only choice is between doing it in a planned, gradual way, or in an unplanned, chaotic way. Do you want this plane to crash, or do you want it to land?
Although in a doc titled “Emergency Measures Needed” it might more useful to have less euphemism.
That’s a lot more blunt. Is “will disappear” editorial? I’d be OK with that one as an academic journal EIC.
It’s a variously slippery/tractive surface, sloped in many directions.
ETA: I’m puzzled how my comment above is a detriment to conversation. If you see it differently, why not engage?
It's not editorial - it's lifted from the report:
> If this rate of water loss continues, the lake would be on track to disappear in the next five years.
I was there in 1985. My father was working with hundreds of others to build dikes to stop the lake from flooding the city. Probably shouldn't be using a flood picture as the 'before' photo.
The idea that the lake could drain seems scary to me since the lake effect helps to increase the amount of snow in the Wasatch. Without the lake, would the Wasatch front look like other basins to the West?
It is worth noting that the Salt lake drainage basin is closed but through the Central Utah Project some of the Colorado basin water is claimed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Utah_Project
This summer I listened to an interview with a guy who paddled around the lake, it was interesting to hear since so much of the lake was more theoretical to me than real. Getting to the edge of the water in many parts wasn't possible or wasn't easy. https://bendingbranches.com/blogs/resources/kayaking-on-grea... https://radiowest.kuer.org/agriculture-and-the-environment/2...
Sorry, not all this was aimed at you but I figured I'd condense some thoughts into a single reply.
I believe the general consensus is that the lake effect is marginal at best in terms of total precipitation received in the area.
1. See this youtube video which shows a photo from each year from 1984 - 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THg0AEV7nK8
> Depending on future weather conditions, achieving this level of flow will require cutting consumptive water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed by a third to a half. Recent efforts have returned less than 0.1 million acre-feet per year to the lake with most conserved water held in reservoirs or delivered to other users rather than released to the lake.
Hopefully it will have the same impact on those in charge.
Targeting recovery at reaching - not even sustaining - the minimum level just means that the problem will continually reoccur.
So I don't see much hope for this until the storms of toxic dust from the now empty lakebed spur people into action. By then though it'll be too late.
Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes.
Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.
We were in provo, and I like the cities up there, but I don't think we'll ever go back. I definitely wouldn't want to live there when the arsenic clouds kick up.
Because we've already seen the lack of response when a million die, we start working on the next million.
> Air pollution already causes 1-in-5 deaths globally—around 12.1 million premature deaths annually.
Is this accurate?
The deficit is ~1.5 million acre-feet. That's 488 000 000 000 gallons / year.
Or 1.3 billion gallons per day.
As far as I'm aware, the largest pipeline in the US has around 1/10th that capacity (Colonial has a capacity of 3 million barrels or 126 million gallons a day).
Also pumping that much from the pacific would likely annihilate whatever's on the other end of that pipe.
But the main problem is stealing water from rivers feeding it. If they don't get a handle on that, nothing else can help much. There is no substitute for sound governance. Unfortunately, Utah is in the grip of a commitment to bad governance as officially advertised policy. I don't know how you get back from that.
I.e. one good year, won't fix 10 bad ones. Not even close. No offense, but it's worth very little, and is an outlier the future doesn't hold well for this being a 'trend', especially as we enter el nino next year where ocean temps rise, and the west enters a dryer period.
We just change maps from "Great Salt Lake" to "Great Salt Plains".
It’s varied from ‘nothing’ to ‘massive inland lake larger than most states’ over 10’s and hundreds of thousands of years.