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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 he

by deet 4y ago

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.

WalterBright 4y ago
The solution is not restrictions or force. Simply raise the price of the water. The rest will sort itself out.
- suresk 4y ago
  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.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Eminent Domain allows government to adjust such rights, just like it can just take your property to run a freeway through it. The government can also tax it.
    - suresk 4y ago
      Certainly, although I think that is much closer to "force" than "raising the price". Also, it is politically infeasible in Utah.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Nobody wants to pay to eminent domain 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.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        At some point, the current system of water rights is going to collapse one way or another.
        s1artibartfast 4y ago
        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
nerdponx 4y ago
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.
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  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.
- giantg2 4y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    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.
  - toofy 4y ago
    > 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?
    - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
mrchucklepants 4y ago
The governor is from rural Utah and his family owns a farm. His deep roots in that culture will be a challenge.
- umvi 4y ago
  Well maybe Utah needs to vote in a technocrat from "Silicon Slopes" as their next governor.
  - zahma 4y ago
    I don’t see why being a farmer is implicitly linked to waste. Sure he has farm interests in mind, but farmers will be among the first to really feel the affects of a dying lake ecosystem.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      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.
      - zahma 4y ago
        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).
    - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
      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.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>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.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Urban water use generates almost no taxable activity. Aside from the entire urban economic activity? It's rather difficult to have a city without water.
  - 8note 4y ago
    You can have a city with brown lawns though
    - Someone1234 4y ago
      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.
      - lost_tourist 4y ago
        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.
jorblumesea 4y ago
Politics, those who own much of the political capital and connections are farmers or have farming interests.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  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.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    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.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      > water rights that were negotiated over 100 years ago can't just be canceled because of a current need They absolutely can, but the will is completely absent.
      - ejb999 4y ago
        what is the legal mechanism for taking someone's properties (in this case water rights) without compensation?
        tremon 4y ago
        Asset forfeiture.
        s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Does not exist in the US outside of the criminal context
thenerdhead 4y ago
> 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. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/3/749 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://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ https://www.drought.gov/states/utah#:~:text=Drought%20in%20Utah%20from%202000%E2%80%93Present&text=Since%202000%2C%20the%20longest%20duration,affected%2069.99%25%20of%20Utah%20land https://www.drought.gov/states/utah#:~:text=Drought%20in%20U....
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  Is it a natural disaster or an inevitable natural phenomenon over a long enough period of time. When it comes to water rights - yes everything can be reduced to politics.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    Exactly, it's not a drought if it's over 3 decades long. It shouldn't be treated as an exception with temporary measures.
  - terr-dav 4y ago
    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.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > 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.
adastra22 4y ago
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.
- Karellen 4y ago
  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.
  - terr-dav 4y ago
    Don't forget "recycling" [plastics] - another fossil fuel industry PR campaign!
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Plastic recycling… what an unbelievable fraud.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  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.
  - throwaway742 4y ago
    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.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  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.
fargle 4y ago
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.
- krab 4y ago
  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.
  - fargle 4y ago
    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.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      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.
jarsin 4y ago
> 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.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/8/2/1520-0434_1993_008_0181_tleotg_2_0_co_2.xml?tab_body=pdf https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/8/2/1520-043... 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.
RC_ITR 4y ago
>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).
lend000 4y ago
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. [0] https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  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.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    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.
    - John23832 4y ago
      Caloric count isn't a totally meaningful stat either. If it was, we'd all be wolfing down McDonalds with no guilt whatsoever.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  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.
avgcorrection 4y ago
(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.

by deet 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

The solution is not restrictions or force. Simply raise the price of the water. The rest will sort itself out.

suresk 4y ago
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.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Eminent Domain allows government to adjust such rights, just like it can just take your property to run a freeway through it. The government can also tax it.
  - suresk 4y ago
    Certainly, although I think that is much closer to "force" than "raising the price". Also, it is politically infeasible in Utah.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Nobody wants to pay to eminent domain 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.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      At some point, the current system of water rights is going to collapse one way or another.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        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

nerdponx 4y ago

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.

0xffff2 4y ago
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.
giantg2 4y ago
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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  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.
- toofy 4y ago
  > 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?
  - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago

mrchucklepants 4y ago

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

umvi 4y ago
Well maybe Utah needs to vote in a technocrat from "Silicon Slopes" as their next governor.
- zahma 4y ago
  I don’t see why being a farmer is implicitly linked to waste. Sure he has farm interests in mind, but farmers will be among the first to really feel the affects of a dying lake ecosystem.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    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.
    - zahma 4y ago
      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).
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    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.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>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.

masklinn 4y ago
> Urban water use generates almost no taxable activity. Aside from the entire urban economic activity? It's rather difficult to have a city without water.
- 8note 4y ago
  You can have a city with brown lawns though
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    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.
    - lost_tourist 4y ago
      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.

jorblumesea 4y ago

Politics, those who own much of the political capital and connections are farmers or have farming interests.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
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.
- ejb999 4y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > water rights that were negotiated over 100 years ago can't just be canceled because of a current need They absolutely can, but the will is completely absent.
    - ejb999 4y ago
      what is the legal mechanism for taking someone's properties (in this case water rights) without compensation?
      - tremon 4y ago
        Asset forfeiture.
        s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Does not exist in the US outside of the criminal context

thenerdhead 4y ago

> 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. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/3/749 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://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ https://www.drought.gov/states/utah#:~:text=Drought%20in%20Utah%20from%202000%E2%80%93Present&text=Since%202000%2C%20the%20longest%20duration,affected%2069.99%25%20of%20Utah%20land https://www.drought.gov/states/utah#:~:text=Drought%20in%20U....

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
Is it a natural disaster or an inevitable natural phenomenon over a long enough period of time. When it comes to water rights - yes everything can be reduced to politics.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  Exactly, it's not a drought if it's over 3 decades long. It shouldn't be treated as an exception with temporary measures.
- terr-dav 4y ago
  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.
cogman10 4y ago
> 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.

adastra22 4y ago

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.

Karellen 4y ago
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.
- terr-dav 4y ago
  Don't forget "recycling" [plastics] - another fossil fuel industry PR campaign!
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Plastic recycling… what an unbelievable fraud.
kmeisthax 4y ago
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.
- throwaway742 4y ago
  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.
emodendroket 4y ago
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.

fargle 4y ago

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.

krab 4y ago
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.
- fargle 4y ago
  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.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    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.

jarsin 4y ago

> 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.

RC_ITR 4y ago
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/8/2/1520-0434_1993_008_0181_tleotg_2_0_co_2.xml?tab_body=pdf https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/8/2/1520-043... 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.

RC_ITR 4y ago

>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).

lend000 4y ago

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. [0] https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/

HDThoreaun 4y ago
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.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  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.
  - John23832 4y ago
    Caloric count isn't a totally meaningful stat either. If it was, we'd all be wolfing down McDonalds with no guilt whatsoever.
bee_rider 4y ago
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.

avgcorrection 4y ago

(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.