Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
California too. While they were making it illegal for restaurants to hand out drinking water without asking, big ag carried on. It's so silly it can't be a real conservation concern, probably was just some divide and conquer from the industry.
I think the main thing to know is that water is not like electricity. There is not a grid. Every municipal system has circumstances completely unique to it.
30% looks reasonable to me. That is 70% are sold locally.
Does other water-using industries exports around the same percentage?
Alfalfa fed to local cows that are consumed locally keeps the water in our ecosystem, within the bounds of our natural water cycle. Alfalfa fed to cows overseas exports our water overseas, so it doesn't reenter the water cycle locally, and it may never find its way back (on human timescales).
You can think of it as having a trade deficit for water—we're not importing it in sufficient quantities to make up for our exports, and the result is that our local environment gradually dries out. Wetter climates don't have that problem because water that evaporates from the ocean can be treated as unlimited.
Edit: Clarified a few things.
The water doesn't physically go into the final shipped alfalfa in meaningful quantities. 99.9% of the water that is used in growing alfalfa evaporates, or ends up in the ground, and it doesn't matter whether the remaining 0.1% that actually ends up, and stays inside the plant gets exported to Mars, or consumed locally.
When growing alfalfa, 100 tonnes of water is used to produce ~300lb of biomass. When you're sourcing those 100 tonnes unsustainably, it really doesn't matter whether you export the 300lb, or not.
You're blaming a foreign boogieman for a domestic, self-inflicted problem.
My extended family are cattle ranchers in southern Utah, and a lot of alfalfa is grown to feed cattle in the winter. A lot of the weight of a bundle of alfalfa is water - probably most of it when freshly harvested. When processed, it's left to dry for a while, but the alfalfa that gets sold is probably still 10-20% water.
Our ranch doesn't sell the alfalfa we grow, but there are plenty of massive , industrial scale, operations near our ranch that exclusively sell alfalfa on foreign markets. At their scale, not shipping alfalfa overseas would make a meaningful dent in the problem. It wouldn't solve it entirely, but it would likely have a greater impact than people not washing their cars.
And for every liter of water that's left in dry alfalfa, it took ~4,000 liters of water to grow it.
You, like the parent poster, are making a huge mistake, in thinking that that one liter that's getting exported is at all a meaningful part of the water sustainability problem with going alfalfa in a desert. It's not. The unsustainable part of it is the other 3999 liters.
'Don't export alfalfa grown in a desert' optimizes the part that isn't important. 'Don't grow alfalfa in a desert' is what people actually need to be doing.
In my opinion, exporting any amount of water is too much.
Saying that doesn't mean I'm unaware of the other ways in which water could be better managed.
Alfa-alfa is grown here, packaged and shipped to Saudi-Arabia because it's cheaper this way than for Saudi-Arabia to desalinate water and grown their own stuff.
Yet my water bill is going up by 6%.
It's still a problem, but we need to keep in mind that maybe we shouldn't be farming so much animal feed in general. We'd still lose this water if we kept the feed local.
If you used a 1000000 kg of water to grow alfalfa, you'd get around 25000 kg of alfalfa (which would contain 5000 kg of water and 20000 kg of other stuff).
So for every 5000 kg of water that is in that alfalfa when shipped around 995000 kg of water stays.
Not sure we want china firing freshwater ice at utah on a ballistic trajectory?
<this is a funny joke post don’t freak out man>
Israel gets over 55% of their water from desalination.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
Water problems are simply a political\planning failure. There is no real shortage of water.
The west coast has a water problem, the tools to solve it, and complete one-party control of politics to make it happen. They are choosing not to though.
You Utah folks obviously don’t have an ocean sitting next to you, but perhaps if the west coast used less of the Colorado river there would be more for you.
Also the GSL water is entirely divorced from the CO river water.
If they stopped using water from the Colorado, there would be more water for Utah to take from it.
States up the river use less water in order to leave some for the states down river. So if the states downriver stopped using it, then states upstream could increase their usage.
I am not suggesting that Utah desalinate the Pacific Ocean or that Utah desalinate the great salt lake. I am saying they should increase their usage of water from the Colorado River.
If California stopped using the Colorado river for water, then Utah could pull more water from the Colorado.
Water can be moved in pipelines or controlled via a manmade river/channel.
Both are largely influenced by one overwhelming organization with nearly infinite money. If you live in Utah you know who i'm talking about.
They don't care about the environment and they aren't overly concerned with public health. Yet most politicians in Utah will only get and stay in power with their blessing and approval. Thats why Utah has had the same senator for 42 years.
We need the utah public to wake up and vote with some intelligence to get people in power who want to and can actually make change and care about these things.
I lived in Utah for almost 2 decades (as an adult). I moved out 5 years ago and it was the absolute best decision I ever made.
You can cherry pick anything to suit a narrative.
Orin Hatch served 42 years; his successor is serving only one term. What does that mean?
I agree that it isn't unique, but why does it matter? The point isn't that it is a unique situation, the point is that Utahns are being underserved by their officials.
Example: This recent donation of agricultural water rights that they owned, to divert the water into lake preservation instead.
https://naturalresources.utah.gov/dnr-newsfeed/church-donate...
I live in Oregon where the majority of people live in a tiny corner of the state (the Portland Metro area) which is Democrat heavy. The rest of the state is mainly populated with rural Republican-leaning conservatives. The rural portion of the state is essentially constantly mimicking you about how the entire state government is controlled by Democrats and how “We need the Oregon public to wake up and vote with some intelligence to get people in power who want to and can actually make change and care about these things.” It has gotten to the point where they want the majority of the counties in the state to secede and join themselves to Idaho. Of course, there is no more chance of that happening than you trying to convince the majority conservative Utah population to not vote for conservative candidates. And, the Oregon liberal majority will keep voting for liberal candidates.
If farmers can grow alfalfa cheaply enough when the water isn't free, by being more efficient with water usage, then they will continue to do so because it will be profitable. If it's not profitable, then they'll stop growing alfalfa.
We don't need to make laws about agriculture in particular; simply start charging people for the resources they use, and market forces will grind to dust anyone who uses resources inefficiently.
If your great, great grandfather was a pioneer and moved into the SLC valley 150 years ago- a particularly harsh and rugged place, and then started a small farm that was perfectly sustainable, but then millions of transplants moved in, what exactly makes them so entitled to the water under your property? Sounds like theft to me.
Less government wouldn’t prevent this outcome. A more just one that doesn’t ignore the rights of natives would.
I’m actually curious how people make arguments while referring to a completely different period of time with its own problems.
All those low life expectancy numbers were due to high infant- and childhood-mortality rates.
That nitpick aside, yeah gramps’ prior claim should not be given the weight it has.
And if you are going to go "property is theft", well, you're going to have to justify that with more than just the slogan itself, because it's a huge change, and the bigger the change the more justification you need for it. And you're going to have a hard sell, because people like owning stuff.
But also, federal/state/municipal authorities do eminent seizure on private property all the time, when it is necessary for a larger public need. Forcing title holders to sell back their "water rights" and then putting them on level footing isn't that much different, is it?
In theory states could seize those water rights through eminent domain (or a similar process) but under the 5th Amendment the state would have to pay fair market value for this. That would be enormously expensive. States would have to raise taxes on everyone to fund that, which would be political suicide.
Water allocation rights are generally use-it-or-lose-it, so early water rights are incentivized to make even marginally productive use of their full allocation, rather than to leave it for other higher-value use.
Didn't the Nestle CEO say something like this and everyone crucified him?
Alfalfa water usage per acre is not much different than that of spinach, tomato, lettuce, wheat, or corn. As an aggregate it uses more water because (1) there is a lot of acreage of alfalfa, and (2) it can be grown nearly year around.
Furthermore, its water efficiency (how much is produced per unit of water used) is high.
If water costs go up some farmers might be able to make more money then by switching to alfalfa since it is more efficient.
Salt Lake City requested that residents reduce usage to keep enough drinking water in the reservoirs. This is pretty separate from the lake and upstream farming issues, no? I think the canyon runoff goes to Utah lake and not GSL? Some places legitimately went very very low on drinking water last year due to low runoff and high usage. I think it’s important to care about both watering lawns and the salt lake.
Depends on the canyon. The canyons in Salt Lake County go to the GSL; the canyons on the Wasatch Back go to either the Provo River (and then Utah Lake) or the Weber River (and then the GSL).
Sorry, but I just don’t believe it’s a crisis when I can see that it pretty clearly isn’t a big enough crisis to stop growing horse food in the desert.
And not to pile on the infinite number of ways that California is a failure: but if you guys arent racing to build nuclear desalination plants, then I don’t believe you either.
Sorry but I’m getting pretty fed up with hearing that I need to live in a crisis, but that the people telling me in need to live in a crisis don’t.
Things change when enough people care about a problem. Electing people who care about the problem is one of the primary ways to fix it. Electing people who care about the problem isn't going to happen if everyone collectively stops caring about the problem.
The current behavior of corporations and politicians is BS, but concluding that "I'll change nothing" feeds/perpetuates the problem, which is still ultimately a collective concern. The problem will eventually come to a head forcing regulatory change, and it's far better if people have already started moving in a healthier direction.
I agree with that parent comment, which is that trying to guilt consumers into worrying about their shower length or grass watering is plain bad policy if meanwhile we do nothing about agricultural usage. If anything, I think making it loudly known that consumers aren't going to do squat unless agriculture is tackled is a step in the right direction.
If they modernized their practices, they could greatly reduce water usage. I don't know if that alone would save the lake, but it certainly is worth a try.
The issue is agriculture, full stop. Of course, we all need food to eat, but as you point out we could produce just as much food if we just modernized our irrigation practices. I'm not saying that would be cheap, or that we shouldn't have government support for that modernization, but whenever I hear some nonsense about how we should stop washing our cars I just tune that out. It's a form of green washing when we focus on inconsequential bits and then let the biggest water users continue to waste water.
Same point is often made about flooded rice fields in northern California. The water "used" by this process, that is the water that does not return to the river, transpires into the air. For a given crop the transpiration is the same whether flooded or irrigated by another method. The crop is the problem, not the flood.
Is this true?
Are you saying that flooding a field loses the same amount of water to evaporation as other, more targeted, means of irrigation? Or are you saying "alfalfa itself uses the same amount of water regardless of irrigation methood."
If it's the latter, that makes sense. A plant can only use so much, and that rate of use is consistent for a given crop, but that doesn't address the water not used by the alfalfa. Wouldn't flooding lose more water to evaporation than other irrigation methods?
It is true that the water will flow somewhere, so isn't "lost", but the point is that the diversion decreases how much makes it downstream to the Salt Lake.
I thought the water cycle causes almost all of the precipitation to happen before going over the mountains? It's why the west side of the Sierras are wet and the east side dry.
The US treaty with mexico dictates the salt content of the river at the border for this reason. The southwest US used to be home to a widespread desert irrigation agricultural people, the Hohokum, and failure to manage soil salt content is afaik still the leading hypothesis for their disappearance. So no unfortunately water that flows back into the river isn't neutral.
As this seems to be the core of the lawsuit, I'm curious whether this is accurate from a legal perspective. Not that it's always the right thing to do, but governments typically have legal leeway to make all kinds of decisions like damming rivers, flooding canyons, etc. So I wonder if there's specific legislation about preserving the lake in the Utah State Constitution or legislation that would form the legal basis of this lawsuit.
> The public trust doctrine is well-established in Utah law, confirmed by statutes, Supreme Court decisions, and the Utah constitution. Under this doctrine, the public owns many natural resources, and the State holds and manages them in trust for the public, which is the beneficiary of the trust. Such resources include the Great Salt Lake—a historically navigable waterway—and the sovereign lands underlying the Lake. As trustee, the State of Utah has an ongoing obligation to protect the Great Salt Lake’s waters and underlying lands, so that Utahns can continue to use them for navigation, commerce, brine shrimp fishing, recreation, and other uses recognized under the public trust doctrine.
That is, they're arguing that the state government has a duty to protect the public waterways, alongside its powers to manage them. They elaborate on their interpretation of the public trust doctrine in the Legal Background section; the precedents they cite don't look like obvious bunk to me, but I'm no lawyer, much less an expert in Utah law.
[0] https://earthjustice.org/press/2023/lawsuit-targets-state-of...
Do I have to say it? Fuck the farmers. They make a minuscule amount of money for the economy and contribute nothing to the ecology. We know this isn't sustainable and the water's going to dry up anyway, but we need to let these good ol' boys create an environmental disaster first 'cuz the livestock in the desert gotta eat. Stop coddling these people.
Also I don't fully know what to make of this wave of environmental law suits but it feels very Ministry for the Future.
You may not enjoy being there, but that doesn't make it not worth saving.
We can try taking Sauron to court?
I’d even say save it if it was always disgusting. It’s certainly unique.
Today, it's disgusting and obviously sick. That same beach is a sandy field a mile from the water, and when you do get to the water, it's a sludge that's probably not healthy to be around.
Running out of water is a concern, but it's not because we won't be able to farm or wash or cars or whatever. It's because if that sludge dries, it turns to dust, and all the very nasty stuff (arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals), starts polluting our air.
And when it comes to air pollution, even without a dry lake of nasty stuff, the Salt Lake City metro area is one of the worst - especially so in the winter. We get an inversion later that traps air pollution in the valleys, and the air becomes brown. Not even a hint of brown, but just brown.
Very bad things will happen to the health of everyone in this area should the lake go dry.
That said, the more dead the sea becomes, the less it smells. The Salton Sea smelled so much worse when there were will fish to die off [0]. The fish population would go through population boom and bust cycles. I haven't seen a dead fish there in about 10 years now. Now that it's mostly dead and sterile, the smell isn't as bad. And that's not necessarily a good thing....
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-12-mn-65092...
Not that you are arguing that they aren't though. It's an interesting anecdote. A dried-up salty lake doesn't sound inviting.
In this video, he gives a talk about some various projects. In the first one, he uses these methods to clean up a site contaminated with the top 15 pollutants (at least at the time). Heavy metal were sequestered by algea; 14 of the 15 toxins were below detectable levels, and the 15th was reduced by 99.999%; solids were eaten by armored carp. The output is drinking standard water, and it takes 10 days for the contaminated water to flow through the system.
The key design principle is putting many species across all five kingdoms, from different biomes, and they start self-organizing around the pollutants. The resulting communities break down the pollutant, but are all new.
In a different interview, he talks about microplastics — and while he has not worked on it, he believes a solution can be found in incorporating all five kingdoms. So not just sequestering them, but breaking them down so they can be useful in the ecosystem again.
It's enormous. 950+ square miles.
It's a salt lake. Far saltier than the ocean. No carps are going to be eating solids. The algea or other biological methods described in the video will not work to reset a lake of salt that is nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Revitalizing an area of that size would likely be a far larger undertaking than solving the problem of reduced flow into the lake due to agricultural overuse.
I'm all for clever solutions, but they can also lead people into thinking that it's a problem solved, and that addressing the root cause of the problem isn't needed. It allows people to be complacent and allow abuse to continue. When it all implodes, those who caused it get sit back and see how the rest of us deal with it.
I'd be more generous though...it's not Mordor. It's where Mordor residents go on vacation. The beach in Death Stranding was cleaner, but a beach is a beach even if it's full of jagged rocks, hot sand and dead organic matter. I walked it barefoot and came down with blisters and a bacterial infection so nasty I couldn't walk for a month.
Not saying it's not worth saving, only that it's not worth advertising as a recreational venue. It's gross. It's literally a sump tank.
And then yes there were occasional times where the lake would recede a bit and the smell could make you flinch from miles and miles away.
It also happens to be a system that people will legitimately fight and kill others to preserve. The political challenge to change this system is enormous and I'd bet most people have no idea how fucked it is.
The concern is that the farmers and towns are using the water before it can get to the Salt Lake.
The consequences of the lake drying up is the end of the "lake effect" cycle, the arsenic in the dried lakebed being released into the air, etc
Given the state government has taken actions intended to address the water level in the lake it would appear that the fact of the water level being a problem isn't the main point of dispute. I'm not entirely familiar with US law but I guess the legal question might be whether the state's actions are sufficient to protect the lake and also whether the sufficiency or insufficiency is a justiciable matter (rather than a political/legislative one).
This seems to be a copy of the original written arguments from the plaintiffs. [1]
1. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/pd...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FvOZZ-DacAAIfbc?format=jpg&name=...
What remedy is available here in the medium-term? Teaching the entire Utah legislature and executive how to do a rain-dance?
The one thing they haven't really tried doing is giving industrial scale agriculture a reason to help solve the problem. If big ag's profits were actually at risk because of big ag's overuse of water, they'd be incentivized to use less, by any means.