5 ms·
Expecting all the modern amenities of life while living in the desert is just pure arrogance. I seriously don't know why governments subsidize it.
by JohnWhigham 5y ago
Expecting all the modern amenities of life while living in the desert is just pure arrogance. I seriously don't know why governments subsidize it.
- Koshkin 5y agoTalk about sending people to Mars...
- kylecordes 5y agoYou are right... but if I understood the above, it's not the modern amenities using up the bulk of the water, it's the agriculture.
- treis 5y agoBecause people don't really "use" water. When you flush the toilet or take a shower the water doesn't get destroyed. The vast majority of it gets treated and put back into the river. The water used in agriculture will mostly evaporate or become part of the plant. Little of it will make it back to the source.
- ashtonkem 5y agoPeople absolutely use water by this metric, but most of it goes to their lawn.
- throwawayboise 5y agoEvaporated water eventually falls as rain, though probably somewhere else.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoAccording to the stats above, modern amenities of life aren't the main consumer of the water: > 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. In 2021, we don't need to grow Alfalfa in the desert. Especially not when it's being exported out of state anyway.
- dv_dt 5y agoFrom your perspective and mine yes, but politically one needs a policy that also addresses all the people already involved making their living from that activity. This is a micro sized problem of the larger scale fractal problem of climate crisis and industrial shifts needed to address it.
- dylan604 5y agoWhat is the number of people directly involved in production of alfalfa in the desert that would no longer have work if the alfalfa production in the desert stopped. Do these jobs absolutely 100% depend on alfalfa, or would they "pivot" to other crops? Is the "farming" sector in Utah that artificial that there is no other crop?
- lostapathy 5y agoAlso consider the markets that depend on the alfalfa that you'd disrupt. I'm not arguing it's not worth disrupting, but it's not a simple problem.
- dv_dt 5y agoChange to “another crop” is like a farmer telling a software company built on Java to switch to a C++ stack because it’s just another language. There is crop specific knowledge that makes it not just planting something else. It’s also not just the knowledge and technology capital involved, like many startups here, it’s connection to markets that matter to produce income. Ag wise it’s not clear what other, lower water-usage crop one would switch to, or how our system would encourage, or require, or incentivize that change.
- dylan604 5y agoWhile that may be true, how many people is it? The water from the river that is wasted in Utah means it is not available for more viable uses downstream. What impact will that have? I'm guessing the number of people positively impacted from stopping this use of water will be greater than the number of farmers impacted. If the main reason that this is not being discussed is because the person in charge has literal skin in the game, then it makes it even worse (potentially criminal?).
- nostromo 5y agoPeople absolutely should live in the desert. It's better than what we usually do: destroy natural bio-diverse habitats along rivers and coasts and replace them with housing and strip malls.
- ansible 5y agoI live in an area of the country that has some of the very best environment in the entire world for growing crops. Length of seasons, rainfall, topsoil depth and quality, etc. The very best in the world, no hyperbole. And yet, due to this land being near a major metroplex, we are busy paving it over with roads and buildings. Mostly what is grown now is Kentucky bluegrass, which doesn't do so great here (or anywhere besides Kentucky?) and so needs frequent applications of pesticides and water to stay green. Market forces, I know. But from a larger perspective, how does this situation make the slightest bit of sense?
- Kye 5y agoDeserts are natural bio-diverse habitats.