The governor of Utah has a large farm growing alfalfa. This crop requires large amounts of water, much of which is exported. 82% of the water used in Utah goes to agriculture. So rather than reducing his own water consumption, he's been on TV telling Utahns to "pray for rain" - so his personal crop won't fail.
Western water use and water rights are broken. They can't be fixed as long as they are massive welfare projects. The book Cadillac Desert covers the history and politics of why this is so.
It reminds me that back in 1983 they had sandbags running down streets directing floodwater into the lake and the lake level was rising so fast that there were crews working 24 hours a day to keep raising the dam so that the interstate highway didn't flood. The Union Pacific Railroad has a track that crosses part of the lake and they raised the track bed several times during that flood episode.
I have photos I took of machinery hauling rock and materials from the interstate which was about 25 feet lower than the lake surface at the time.
I have wondered why, instead of fighting to hold the lake off of the interstate, didn't they just let it go off across the salt flats while they built an elevated interstate highway section similar to that across Lake Pontchartrain.
The level of the lake would've been lower though the shoreline and surface extents of the lake would be much larger. By continuously raising the dam level they forced the water level higher in the populated area and flooded many shoreline attractions.
The problem in your first paragraph is much broader than water rights. Politicians get money and favors from other people and corporations based on access to the office, they own and trade in shares and a lot of other things.
It's not like the governor would suddenly not be lobbied by farmers and others interested in water extraction if he didn't own his own farm.
> Western water use and water rights are broken. They can't be fixed as long as they are massive welfare projects.
Absolutely! There is a government-imposed ceiling on the price of water in the West, way below what the market would bear. No wonder the Colorado hasn't reached the ocean in years.
To me this makes it clear that the governor probably has a conflict of interest to some degree when it comes to water conservation and it's good that it's being called out.
However:
- He has described his farm as "small" in the past. Is he just lying/being misleading? I can't really find anything written about this. How much of a financial incentive does he have personally tied into keeping this farm running?
- My guess is it's probably not worth giving him the benefit of the doubt here, but I can't find whether or not his farm is held in any kind of trust or whether he is the sole or partial owner of it.
- Utah has several watersheds that don't feed into the GSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Basin_watersheds as well as a significant portion that drains into the Colorado River. Is water usage for the GSL watershed more or less geared towards agriculture?
- Fairview is in the Sevier Lake endorheic watershed, which makes it seem like at least his farm is not directly related to the GSL crisis (which often seems to be an implication).
- Agriculture using far more water than urban use is not uncommon at all, in and outside of the Western US
- How much desert agriculture is ultimately acceptable in order to save the GSL and effectively conserve for the ongoing megadrought? How close are we really to that number? How many small towns would be made infeasible without the income from farming? Zero? 100,000 people?
This narrative about Cox as a kind of alfalfa magnate who stands in the way of water rights seems to be coagulating quite a bit, but I honestly don't know whether it's a useful heuristic to understanding the dynamics at play or a misleading oversimplification. Even outside of what could very well be a huge gubernatorial scandal happening in slow motion, the entire subject of water usage in Utah seems totally underdiscussed. Local news outlets seem to mostly stay above surface level and entirely cleave either to this mostly urban and left-of-center narrative or the farmer's perspective.
Amounts matter, 82% of water use being for agriculture is unusual. Farms near me generally don’t have irrigation systems for crops because rainfall is enough.
US water rights sit outside the free market and result in exactly the inefficiency you might expect.
Worldwide farming is a ratio of 2.33:1 vs all other water use, 81% is 4.26:1 Aka a significant difference.
US Farmers generally measure water use in acre fee, each of which is 325,851 gallons and many farms are using more than that per acre. It’s not difficult to find farms that use more than 1 billion gallons of water per year. By comparison the entire US fracking industry is onky using about 25 billion gallons per year.
A quick Google says the Aral Sea is currently about 170,000 km^2 and the largest solar farm is 160km^2.
I think it would be difficult to reduce evaporation that way.
I think the logistical complications of salt water would further impede that approach.
Finally, solar is an industrial technology and would likely have a substantial negative environmental impact on an already compromised set of ecosystems.
Wikipedia puts the north lake of what used to be the Aral Sea at 3300 km^2 in 2008, the south lake similar, down from 68,000 km^2 total in 1960.
It says Utah's Great Salt Lake is 2460 km^2, so comparable. That is a lot of km^2, but we can certainly use every lick of power that solar farms could produce.
160 is 6.5% of 2460, so a pretty substantial fraction.
Salt is bad for electrical equipment, so all the wiring would need to be shrouded in silicone. But you would do that even in fresh water. I think Singapore is floating solar on sea water.
Besides cutting evaporation, floating solar panels reduce water temperature, enabling more oxygen to dissolve, provide protected habitat in their shadows, and offer perches for waterfowl and amphibians. Of course most of the lake supports only brine shrimp and brine flies, but the less-salty marshes near inflows support a huge range of wildlife threatened by the retreating shoreline.
Building floating solar farms near to the estuary marshes would probably offer the most benefit, as evaporation happens preferentially from fresher water, and a wider variety of wildlife could shelter under and around them.
Some of the power produced could be devoted to removing dissolved methyl mercury from the water, which is at 25x(!) the concentration that is considered dangerous.
Same for the Great Salt Lake in Utah. As it is they are panicking about the arsenic dust that will be blown over the city from the dry lake bed.