The governor is from rural Utah and his family owns a farm. His deep roots in that culture will be a challenge.
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.