Maybe because I can conceptualize "in 5 years" a lot easier than some other ecological disasters we have ongoing on the scale of "in 100 years" but I found reading this to have a more profound impact on me than other pleas.
Hopefully it will have the same impact on those in charge.
This is not a lake created by a dam, is it? It seems to have existed for thousands of years so I don't get the implication that this lake is returning to it's former state.
Utah settlers took pride in making the "desert blossom as a rose" [1]. In new developments you can drive by lush green lawns, and see the natural, arid land on the lots right next to those lawns. It's going to take a massive cultural shift for people in Utah to take this seriously. They have to embrace the desert and stop trying to turn Utah into one gigantic, English garden.
I've only been in the SLC area, but this is my observation as well -- I saw a lot of lush gardening and extensive "beautifying" water use, including to ridiculous ends (the parking lot of the hotel I was in flooded because they couldn't be bothered to put the sprinklers on a schedule).
Combined with an extractive rather than preservative agricultural tradition, it doesn't bode well for Utah's future.
85% of water use in Utah goes to agriculture but people focus on lawns because they can see them. Most water issues in the west are caused by contracts made back when nobody lived there and there was tons of water to go around. Now those contracts are in effect a water subsidy to legacy agricultural interests.
There wasn't even as much water to go around back then as the contracts stated. They divided something like 20% more water than existed. They knew at the time that everyone was promised too much, but no one cared because they never hit the real physical limit.
The politicians may have used a very wet year to justify dividing more water than existed normally, but I believe the scientific community back then knew that the numbers were too high and was ignored.
I'm not sure that's true, or at least not true any more. In the watershed that feeds the Great Salt Lake, there isn't all that much agriculture. There's some along the Bear River, and there's some around Heber. But I'd bet the lawn area in Salt Lake, Davis, and Utah counties is larger than the agricultural area.
I haven't seen actual numbers though. If you have them, I'll listen.
I think what they are arguing is looking at aggregate usage isn’t important if that water wouldn’t flow into the lake.
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.
Most of the issues with the Great Salt Lake are directly due to diverting water for agricultural, industrial, and residential use - in that order. See figure 5.
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%.
Yeah, as lazide said, this is different. All the water for Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, and suburbs (plus agriculture in Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber, and Summit counties) would flow into the Great Salt Lake. It's all the same watershed.
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.
There is much more agriculture in Utah County, particularly in the southern portions, and the Great Salt Lake is fed by the Jordan River flowing from Utah Lake.
While I agree that Utah needs to change its ways regarding their green lawns, it is worth noting that according to the report this use case is only accounting for ~8% of water usage from the Great Salt Lake [1]. This is not insignificant of course and should be brought down to a more appropriate proportion; however, it appears to be the category with the lowest percentage [2].
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.
> 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.
There are many reasons this is bad, but personally I find the arsenic release to be the scariest. If I were starting a family in SLC I would be thinking hard about if it’s where I want to stay long term.
Really hope the policymakers are able to find a path forward here.
Arsenic release is more scary than running completely out of water? Both are solved by the same mechanism, water conservation and prioritization over profits of 3% of the farmers. Seems like a no-brainer, but right wing christian conservatives in Utah won't realize that until it's too late.
Unfortunately, I doubt they'll take any sort of actual action to fix the problem. Most of the water is used for agriculture and a significant voting bloc that will block any solutions that involve water rationing or reducing. The local government being entirely in the pocket of business-oriented Republicans also means they're not likely to do anything that would significantly affect the bottom line of agricultural businesses. Or anything that would affect the middle upper class that uses a lot of cheap water for their gardens and what not.
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.
The title of the CNN article that alerted me to this paper is: Great Salt Lake will disappear in 5 years without massive ‘emergency rescue,’ scientists say
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?
One of the things you learn about Utah history is prehistoric Lake Bonneville which used to cover majority of Utah. The Great Salt Lake is the remnant of it and many of the popular tourist attractions have names representing the high shoreline as it continued to lower in its regression phase.
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.
I think you're right. I was struck by this line in the article:
> 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."
Reminds me a bit of football games where one team plays poorly the whole game, then complains they lost because the kicker missed an impossibly long field goal on the last play of the game.
This reminds me of another recent news story where the state of Kansas finally admitted that a) their plan had always been to completely drain the Ogallala aquifer and b) as of December 2022 maybe that wasn't the best plan.
Yeah I watched Ken Burns' Dust Bowl series, curious to find out how the dust bowl was resolved. Long story short, it was solved by pumping water from the aquifers which will eventually run out.
> We recommend setting an emergency streamflow requirement of at least 2.5 million acre-feet per year until the lake reaches its minimum healthy elevation of 4,198 feet
Targeting recovery at reaching - not even sustaining - the minimum level just means that the problem will continually reoccur.
As a recent transplant from California to Utah, watching the discussions of this situation play out locally has been interesting.
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.
The question is: what do the agricultural business interests plan to do? They basically have two strategic choices: 1) try to fix things, taking a short term hit for long-term business sustainability, 2) obstruct fixing things, extracting as much value as they can before the collapse, and plan to exit as soon as the collapse really starts to hurt.
If the businesses go with option 2, you're basically SoL unless someone attempts to stand up to them.
They're obviously doing the latter. The numbers are virtually exactly the same across the west. We've already seen residential wells run dry in California and Oregon at least as farmers just drill deeper and deeper wells.
You're also likely to be SoL on option 1. What new crops exactly can we replace those crops with? What do the financials for that look like? In general, if it was financially feasible and less risky then people would already have switched to that technology/crop/etc.
At some point people have to realize that just because there is a vast area of relatively flat land, does not mean that land is good for agriculture. If something cannot be grown there in the native environment without artificially propping it up, then it might just be time to not do that there any longer.
> What new crops exactly can we replace those crops with?
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?
The thing is that for the most part, business interest don't have a problem while cities do.
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
Why should water rights be indefinite? Seems like a bad deal for the state. Realistically they should be auctioned off each decade or come with heafty yearly liscensing fees based off demand & supply.
I agree that maybe they should be. The question is how you go from the current state of affairs to this new paradigm.
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.
Well ... in order to carry this over to ordinary real property, and make the situation analogous to water rights, you'd have to tweak a few things.
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.
OK, I think I largely agree that the solution is to let owners sell walking rights.
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.
Property is indefinite (it exists as long as the legal system remains the same); fresh water is a limited resource. Care to explain which "same reason" applies to finite and infinite resources equally?
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.
Some ground water is almost identical to mineral rights, particularly aquafers which are not replenished. There is water that has been there for a hundred thousand years, and can be either used up, left in place, or somewhere in-between.
If you buy/own rights to such water, it is not dissimilar to an oil field or mineral mine.
There's nothing naturally indefinite about property rights.
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.
There's a meaningful distinction in that state can't simply take your house away as long as you pay the taxes. Similarly, even with eminent domain you have to pay was considered a fair market price for what the government takes. This is the value of a property right.
Similarly, the course I found that governments can't impose a 100% or arbitrarily High tax on something simply to take it.
So eminent domain these rights, and pay the owner back for the two sacks of turnips that their great-great-great-grandfather paid for them back in the 19th century, with whatever interest that would have accrued.
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.
It is often market value, but it doesn't have to be.
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?
Cities can and do buy water rights, but it's very slow.
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.
Historically farmers (and most people really) have sucked the area dry before getting worried.
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.
You make a good point, but perhaps that one “their own” is at the helm can make a difference in ensuring trust so as to break the prisoner’s dilemma (see point 6 in the executive summary).
It's only because agriculture is the big user, and the most dependent on overdrawing water resources. Farmers are no different from other people, and the oft-quoted line of Upton Sinclair that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends upon his not understanding it," answers your question. Farmers who have built a livelihood on irrigation are resistant to the notion that their water use is the problem, because if they admit it, they have to drastically change, or maybe give up, their way of making a living.
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.
I'd extend a bit more sympathy to farmers. When they purchased the land, they were also purchasing bundled water rights; land without the related water rights would have been a fraction of the price. And the property, inheritance, etc taxes they pay on the value of the land are assessed at a price that includes those rights. And all of a sudden when those rights become much more valuable, people want to take it from them?
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.
What I'm getting from that is chart is... yes, farming is completely dominated by large companies. Something close to 90% of farms by number comprise as much as (but probably less than) 25% of the economic output. This is making a wild (but I would guess conservative) assumption of what ">1M" translates to.
If I'm reading that wrong, I would appreciate the correction.
You're right in terms of economic output, but that's not the only measure, particularly when it comes to politics; small farmers might not do much for the economy, but they still vote.
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.
Most of the first tier and probably some of the second are rich-people tax-dodge "farms", I bet. The rest of the first category is hobby-farming—my family probably counted as among that group, at times, because my dad grew up on a farm and liked doing some farm-stuff on farm-zoned land as an adult, but it represented almost no actual income—he worked an ordinary job, the farming was a hobby with books that just happened to sometimes be slightly in the black.
[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.
No one in the US is living on < 10k of farm REVENUE, and almost no one can live on < 100K of sales. They’d be lucky to clear 10-20% of that after costs, if that.
That’s not even hand to mouth/subsistence even in rural TN.
yeah, it's pretty sad, right? but that's what they do.
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 using the farm mostly to feed themselves, and then supplementing with a bit of income here and there for ‘hard currency’ - which is very different in my mind at least from supporting themselves with the farm (as a business). But I see your point.
That’s definitely subsistence farming, and common the world
over in some form.
I am sympathetic with anyone whose livelihood and investments are threatened by external realities or evolving social expectations. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying, which is a realistic assessment of whether farmers will voluntarily alter their water usage. Most won't, and most won't even admit that their usage is a major problem that needs to be fixed. And it's for the reason I quoted: almost no one is able to see themselves as the problem if their livelihood or personal self-respect is invested in their not being the problem.
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.
ISTR some mentions of social media tech moguls raising their children either without access to social media at all, or at least severly limiting their screen time.
Sorry, I thought the comment was associating politics with environment.
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.
You people who see everything as a demo vs repub battle are tiresome. I couldn’t care less about political parties. I know that concept is unthinkable to you.
Yep, sure, which is why you went with good ol' tired dumping on california. Very believable, thank you for the laugh. Have a nice day. But maybe try avoiding the obvious tell if you're trying to keep your ideological affiliations hidden?
I was born and raised in CA. Give me a break. If anything, I see myself as more inline with the classic Berkley-style, free will, spiritual esotericism of the 60s/70s. But like I said, political dispassion is beyond your comprehension, does not compute.
While it would obviously be ridiculous to blame a political party for the weather... we can indeed lay blame on a political party for refusing (and blocking attempts) to build new water reservoirs in an ever-expanding, highly populated and frequently dry state.
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.
California isn't one region, and the monsoon season does the same thing to Arizona as it does to Southern California. The opening of dams to support sports is usually a bipartisan decision (conservatives as well as liberals like their electorates to be happy).
You're right about the sporting uses... it's just absurd given California's dry history.
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.
There are plenty of underground aquifers that need to be recharged, I assume the limiting factor is that when the rain comes all at once (during a monsoon) it can't be absorbed quickly enough before running into the ocean. Usually snowpacks build up and then release gradually (that's how the Colorado river works), but the drought and global warming have been reducing those (and the ability to build them back up) at a very quick rate.
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?
In California, specifically, there is an impressively strong opposition to building new above-ground reservoirs (think dams, tanks, lakes, etc). The opposition usually cites environmental reasons, but in California we're effectively a One-Party state so there is no meaningful pushback.
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.
Yup this is a huge problem in CA. We simply have not been able to get any new meaningful reservoir projects done. Take a look at the Sites Reservoir. It is probably the closest to actually doing something.
California has strong local governments captured by NIMBYs which makes intra-jurisdictional projects hard and inter-jurisdictional ones nigh impossible.
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.
The real problem here is not seeing that nature doesn’t draw arbitrary lines in the soil. What affects Utah will make its way to California. Keystone ecosystem disruption is very bad news.
Having lived in Utah rural areas for "a while", they will have to have a dust bowl 2.0 in the ag area to be brought to their senses, it's that simple. No amount of logic or begging from liberals will change that. Reality has to set in
You see a similar effect in California, where farms continue to grow almonds and pistachios, highly profitable crops that require ridiculous amounts of water. Although some farms have starting switching away from these crops as water prices have soared, you can still see nut orchard after nut orchard as you drive through the central valley. Moreover, Big Ag is fighting tooth and nail to prevent any restrictions on water usage, claiming that dams are the only answer. Maybe try switching to a more sustainable crop? But that would mean less profit.
The Antelope Valley Aquifer in California has had thousands of feet of ground water depleted growing Alfalfa. It’s part of the Mojave Desert.
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 is not the problem even if it's what people see every day
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.
The Church and Utah governments are also the biggest waster there too. That is also political.
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.
It's a literal "solve the 90% problem first" but right wing people like to blame democrats pointing with one finger while pocketing cash from their industrial, eco-killing practices with the other hand. That's the way it has always been. They will have enough money to move out of Utah when it goes dry. The other 99% who were dumb enough to be duped by them will suffer and starve.
The focus is on the Urban water users because they are the ones that are facing the problem and need a solution. They can do that either by reducing water usage or procuring more water.
I think that is debatable. 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. Church and government water use you mention also fall under the control of the urban governments.
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.
They did cause it by moving there and building a life there (including building their gardens). If the city had remained a small backwater town, this problem wouldn’t exist because the farms are 75% and the 25% consumed by the city today would end up as surplus each year replenishing water supplies.
The farms predate all the new usage. The new usage from urbanization caused the deficit.
Alternatively, Farms would use 100% of the water, the lake would go dry, and the population would largely accept it as a necessity to maintain their agricultural usage.
> 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.
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?
I strongly disagree. In the West, the urbanized population generally have the political power, but the law happens to be on the side of the farmers. Most of the difficulty we see is the conflict between these two facts.
correct. The law is on the farmers side, water rights that were negotiated over 100 years ago can't just be canceled because of a current need - only way out is likely to use taxpayer money to buy back those rights from farmers that are willing to sell, but my guess is it won't be cheap.
I agree that that's the only long-term vible solution. Some states like California are trying to work around buying the rights by simply making it illegal for some people to exercise their water rights but not others. I don't think this will work out in the long run and they will eventually be forced to come to the table with cash offers by the courts
Cops don't need a criminal conviction to conduct civil asset forfeiture. They don't even need to arrest someone. They just have to claim that the property itself is suspected of being involved in a crime.
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.
Yeah, that is how every nation state on earth was established.
It is what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now.
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.
Correct - its not that farmers have outsized voting influence - they don't - what they do have is contracts and rights that can't just be taken away without compensation.
The longer states wait to buy back those water rights, the more expensive it is going to be.
That'd be true if there were fair maps. But the metro has been diluted so significantly with rural voters that I stand by it, SLC has approximately no power in the legislature.
Im willing to agree jerrymandering occurs, but there is simply no mathematical way to jerrymander 90% of voters into a minority position, only pick off a seat or two.
Imagine trying to fill 10 cups to 51% with one cup of water.
Guess what? The entire Wasatch Front is predominantly urban, in fact it is one of the most urban areas in the country. It is all metro area in other words, even if not part of the SLC metro area.
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.
I also strongly disagree with this. In most places, the wealthy have the political power. The power in voting is diluted significantly when the choices are gate-kept by the wealthy.
In California least, the wealthy and the political power is on the side of the environmental movement. The Sierra Club and other groups essentially run the political process when it comes to natural resource decisions.
The government usually has to pay them off for their buy-in for Big Ticket decisions with taxpayer money
> Iran is the only country where the government has promised to fully eliminate the problem of a drying lake. The government has stated a full reversal of the problem as the goal. However, thus far, it is the government that has achieved the least.
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.
It's not a natural disaster, nor an inevitable (& naturally occurring) phenomenon. The decades-long drought is a direct result of a century of burning hydrocarbon deposits that have been in the ground for millennia.
> This is instead a natural disaster. Not everything has to 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.
Even with a drought you could have sustainable urban and agricultural practices - the reality is there hasn't been and Utah is highly allergic to many sustainable environmental efforts.
This has been happening for commercial/residential cases, but most agriculture is based on water shares - a right to a certain amount of water that someone purchased a long time ago, so you can't really raise the price on them.
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.
I don't know if the water rights system will collapse, but ownership is definitely in for a shake up.
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
Urban (and suburban) water use isn't the problem anywhere. In California it's about the same percentage. It is agricultural PR campaigns that try to make water conservation a personal issue, since this diverts attention away from wasteful agricultural water practices which are really to blame.
See also "your carbon footprint" - a fossil fuel industry PR campaign to try to make CO2 emissions a personal issue, diverting attention away from the systemic structural practices which are the root cause of the problem.
My backyard faces a farmer who basically flooded his property continuously throughout summer. Every time there's a government plea to reduce water usage I just point and laugh at the backyard.
Yep it's called furrow irrigation and I see it used extensively here in the CA desert. It is one of the cheapest, but least efficient forms of irrigation.
In and of itself I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reduce urban use just because it's not the chief contributor. It is not as though an outdoor water fountain on your patio or a lush green lawn in front of your house are equally valuable as agriculture.
Because that's wasteful and also leads to all the detergents and grime going into roadways/public drains, right? I mean I agree that it's not going to match almond growing but that doesn't make it a bad idea.
I can’t really empathize with the sense that not allowing driveway car washing makes life “much more irritating” and, even beside the water issue, the detergent and sludge just washing into the drains is a real concern. There’s a reason they don’t let the car wash do that.
Looking at the overall scheme of things, the things you mention get lost in the noise.
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.
So laws are only worth having if everyone already agrees that the things they prohibit are very bad and they can't really change anything about what behavior people engage in? I think we have a lot of counterexamples, from litter to drunk driving to accessibility to discrimination. In my experience, appeals to laws being unenforceable are often made by people who just oppose the laws in the first place.
"Most of society is going to not give a rats ass, and it will undermine the rest of the system because of it" suggests that nobody is going to stop doing something they don't personally think is wrong just because a law is passed banning it, doesn't it?
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.
Well, doesn't that imply that, if I am convinced a driveway-wash ban is a good idea, it makes more sense to agitate for better enforcement than give up because enforcement is too spotty?
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.
I think recycling might be a bit more practical if we gave up on the ridiculous idea of single-stream recycling, which offers a small amount of convenience to people at the cost of obliterating whatever small margins recycling offered in the first place.
When someone tries non-single source recycling, it becomes clear how much of the current recycling dog and pony show is bullshit - because all except a small hard core of folks won’t do it unless they get paid! Which, frankly, is a really strong signal.
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.
This is not some bizarre thought experiment that's never been tried; other countries, such as Japan, have had a system like this for decades. Once again, if we're serious we should be enforcing it.
It actually uses less water if you wash your car on your lawn and then skip running the sprinklers.
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.
In and of itself? No – having a lush garden or a green lawn is completely optional and serves no functional purpose. And yet the point is definitely (as already stated) to blame individual “lifestyle choices” (or household choices) and thus divert attention from how society operates overall. So is such a focus worth it? No, because the cost of the propaganda is far greater than the miniscule water gain.
I find this discussion tends to go in unsatisfying circles. Yes, any one person’s lifestyle choices are insignificant (well, unless you’re stratospherically wealthy at least). But fostering a shared sense that something needs to be done is not necessarily bad. Furthermore, farmers aren’t growing alfalfa just to gratify themselves but to support patterns of consumption we have come to expect.
> In and of itself I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reduce urban use just because it's not the chief contributor.
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've heard the rule of thumb is that an acre of carrots uses as much water as an acre of tract homes.
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.
Growing carrots in an arid area is wasteful, because you could grow them at a place where water is more abundant. Then, carrots can be transported and they don't need almost any water anymore.
Doing the same with taxpayers would be problematic.
highly problematic also for the agencies collecting the taxes.
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.
All home water usage in Utah amounts to about 2% of the total use state wide. Literally you could get rid of every residence including lawns, and you'd still have 98% of the water use from farms, industrial, and commercial enterprises. Alfalfa farming I believe is at least 80% of the total water use and there's zero need to keep farming water-intensive crops which alfalfa is, we wouldn't even need to stop all farming activities just this one crop.
> 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
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.
apples and oranges - per acre suburbia if anything uses more water.
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.
> 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?
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.
oh, I don't blame the 1000 people. I blame the asshat developers who tricked them into buying into a fake utopian suburbia there.
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".
You’re being deliberately obtuse and are repeating propaganda that’s irrelevant for total water usage.
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.
Your math isn't really accurate though, is it? you say 7 homes uses 1,008,000 gallons and then you eliminate 50% of that usage because it's for 'pools and landscaping' - but homes have pools and landscaping, so you can't just ignore that usage.
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?
i didn't make that rule of thumb up. but yeah, it's within margin of error. change the crop or number of harvests or have less lawns and it could go either way.
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.
Like some of the power usage discussions here, these numbers surprised me!
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.
> I've heard the rule of thumb is that an acre of carrots uses as much water as an acre of tract homes.
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.
That doesn't explain why suburban lawns are needed in an arid climate. At least alfalfa is a product. When you water a lawn with potable water you are flat out wasting it. When you water a crop you are using it.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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).
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).
This is a common trope, and while true, it should be mentioned that we need the food produced by this water, too. Perpetually drought stricken California produces more food (by value) than any other state in the country [0]. Sure, some of that is water-intensive crops like almonds and pistachios, but that accounts for less than 20% of the gross receipts. It isn't like people in urban areas aren't responsible for water that goes to farms -- if you eat, you are part of that cohort as well.
Water intensive crops accounting for just 20% of gross receipts is evidence in favor of agricultural water reform, not against it. These states can continue to have successful agricultural industries without their disastrous water usage. Just switching the most water intensive crops and requiring efficient irrigation would lead to huge water savings.
Water intensive crops is a meaningless distinction. Almonds and pistachio produce more calories per gallon then most fruits and basically all vegetables. Don't even get me started on grapes and wine.
We need some food which requires some water. It isn’t obvious (to me at least) how it should be prioritized. For example I guess if we were trying to optimize water usage, we’d prefer kale to iceberg lettuce, right? And we could probably get by without a lot of herbs. And we’ll have to pick which fruit is best.
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.
(Disclaimer: Not American) The discourse around California residental water usage has always ground my gears. Agriculture uses a lot of water to grow water-intensive crops in that arid California climate (like Utah, apparently). Yet people’s lawns are the problem? As if Orange County and other middle class neighborhoods adapting New Mexico-style cactus gardens would solve the problem.
The Great Salt Lake is starting to look like the Salton sea [1] which is considered the largest environmental catastrophe in California history. If this keeps going SLC may quickly become unlivable. I still remember the smell in the LA basin when the winds blew from the Sea and it was awful - think that smell around large colonies of seabirds with a tinge of death.
The Salton Sea, however, is unnatural. Before humans interfered, it was just a dry valley. It was never sustainable, regardless of the usage pattern or climate trajectory.
Wasn't it one of the two end-points the colorado used to alternate between? When it was draining that way it was there, and when it flipped every few decades or centuries it wasn't.
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.
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.
When the Colorado flowed into that valley, it also flowed out through the Hardy River, with the exit near Nuevo Leon. The metastable state that existed then inundated most of what is now the Imperial Valley; the city of Mexicali (pop ~1M) would be underwater.
So reading about it I don't really see an environmental catastrophe. The basin has been filled 3 times in the last 1200 years, fills intermittently as the course of the Colorado river changes, and has no outlet which means it's ecology is unstable. It last filled around 1900 which is when it appears the current story began.
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 filling in 1900 was due to a manmade accident, which I think could rightly be considered an environmental catastrophe. A poorly designed canal inlet catastrophically failed, diverting the entirety of the Colorado river to the dry lake for two years. It was so much water that it is still drying out.
Misguided environmental sentiment based on the status quo after the flood but not before?
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.
Most people who know about John Muir love him... Except for people who have studied any history of the indigenous peoples of California. Then he's a figurehead who tried to erase the natural and cultural history of California in an effort to further his own pastoralist agenda. That's the charitable way to interpret that. Much worse things are said about him.
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.
You have no way of knowing how things will be 1000 years from now. The best you can do is know how the trends are going and try to be cognizant of them.
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 dont think modern culture is any more extractive than those that preceded it, we just have greater technology and capability. I think people have a bit a of a noble savage ideation for earlier times.
I agree that we have no idea what things will be like 1000 years from now. Verry little damage is irreversible on those timescales
That's a Eurocentric view of history, and yes, that comes with a certain Noble Savage aspect. There are newer generations of books on indigenous peoples of North America. They still 'noble' it up a bit (the Lakota book in particular, which very carefully uses euphemisms for cannibalism). Robin Wall Kimerrer's books are easily the most romantic of the ones I've read. Tending the Wilds basically dismantles Muir's world view with a crowbar, and it's been a while but I don't remember if she even mentions Muir. It's very clear they are dismissing that same theory of California though.
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.
Using a satellite photo from 1985 to show how far the lake has receded is disingenuous.
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.
Was that when the pumps were built on the Nevada border to get water out of the drainage if needed? The shallowness of the lake makes it different to think about than lake most people are used to. It is more of a big puddle, as a kid being told it was ~30 feet deep at the deepest was hard to believe since I was used to smaller lakes deeper than 100 feet.
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?
Yes, the pumps were built in the late 1980s and are still maintained, but have never been used for much of anything since then. I believe they ran for about two years. Also, the western edge of the lake (where the pumps are) is still about sixty miles from the Nevada border. Lots of empty salt flats to pump water on top of if that becomes necessary again someday.
I believe the general consensus is that the lake effect is marginal at best in terms of total precipitation received in the area.
I grew up very close to the lake. I'm well aware of the flooding that occurred. It indeed would have been better to use a satellite photo from 1989 when the pumps were shut off. I think the contrast is still pretty stark regardless [1].
And the comment section is filled with people saying that these changes are not so bad. I fear our fate is that of the boiling frog as the general population still appears overwhelmingly apathetic to global warming.
They just need to float solar farms on it. Those will cut evaporation. Likewise, the Aral Sea.
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.
Utahn here. We don't have a water problem so much as we have an alfalfa problem. It consumes most of our water with very little economic benefit to the state as a whole.
Along with Lake Mead, the ogalla aquifer.. That whole area is turning from semi-arid to desert. Time to start moving people away. If I was in charge of those areas, I'd start by buying up and closing farms in order to perform a controlled shutdown of the agricultural sector in those states. The people would leave on their own without the industry there. Without agriculture, the water inputs and outputs would be balanced, at least for the present.
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?
Dumb question: could we build a big pipeline from the Pacific Coast and just pump billions (trillions?) of gallons of ocean water to the Great Salt Lake?
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.
What if we built a huge gulf basically down the plains just on the other side of the rocky's so basically there's a gulf splitting America into two completely by waters from the artic ocean or north pacific, I'm talking we dissect all the way north through canada all the way down through mexico etc. This would maybe create new weather patterns, in combination we'd need to plant LOTS of trees which also creates weather patterns to change, but we could terraform the utah desert to be more like the midwest, but it would be defense-budget costly to do so, but if it worked it could be worth it.
If you have 5x 8oz cups that are only 25% full, and you add enough water to fill up the 5th cup so that its 100% full, you've still got 24oz of water missing, that needs to catch up.
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.
I live in Salt Lake and most of the time when I mention this issue to friends or family it isn't even on their radar, but this is likely going to cause my wife and I to move somewhere else. It's too bad because this is such a great place to live and its where our family is at. We usually have a really bad inversion in the winter time, and it seems like the summers for the last few years have been filled with wildfire smoke. I'm sick of constantly worrying about the quality of the air I am breathing.
I'm also from North of SLC. I once read that this area was originally called Smokey Valley by Native American tribes that roamed the area but who usually avoided the valley because of the smoke pollution. It has something to do with how air moves through the area protected by the mountains and the lake. That was before the industrial revolution. I'm sure that the quality of that smoke has degraded with the burning of fossil fuels, but it is interesting that the area has been known as the "smokey valley" for at least a couple hundred years.
Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter.
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.
Geneva Steel in Utah County was constructed for World War II steel production, but fortunately has been closed and its site remediated for a couple of decades now.
Wife and I moved down to Cedar City/Enoch area, it's nice here but airbnb is making rents horrible, we need a housing boom or something to lower housing rates but that's another issue and prevalent all over the state. The air here is much easier though, except sometimes during fire season.
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.
The giant dust storms are new too. I was just driven out myself and it was with a heavy heart, but I couldn't take the air quality anymore. I was there because I loved the outdoors, but there were just too many days I couldn't even be outside.
300 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadHopefully it will have the same impact on those in charge.
We just change maps from "Great Salt Lake" to "Great Salt Plains".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake
It’s varied from ‘nothing’ to ‘massive inland lake larger than most states’ over 10’s and hundreds of thousands of years.
[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.
> 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.
Really hope the policymakers are able to find a path forward here.
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.
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.
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...
Targeting recovery at reaching - not even sustaining - the minimum level just means that the problem will continually reoccur.
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.
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.
https://sitesproject.org/sites-news/
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).
[0] https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
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.
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
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.
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?
Because we've already seen the lack of response when a million die, we start working on the next million.
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.
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.
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.