(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Kayakers on Quail Creek State Park in Washington County in August.
When you are running low on a precious commodity, there are basically two things you can do: Use less or find more.
Hope that you might be able to do the latter should not be allowed to distract from the necessity of the former.
Recently we have seen examples of both approaches touted by some Utah state leaders in their approach to the growing water shortages here and throughout the American Southwest. Sadly, if predictably, the balance seems unsustainably tilted toward the dream that we can find more water than the reality that we have to find ways to live with less.
The states that live along, and survive on, the Colorado River are stuck at an impasse over how to manage the ever-dryer basin. A Nov. 11 deadline for Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California to work out new policies for distributing water blew by with no resolution.
They tell us that negotiations are ongoing and that the next milestone in the process, mid-February, may produce a settlement detailed enough to avoid a threatened takeover of river management by the federal government.
The talks are secret, but Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has publicly put the blame for the loggerheads on the four Upper Basin states — Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico — for an alleged unwillingness to accept any of the sort of mandatory conservation steps that the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — have instituted.
Utah officials may feel political pressure to guard their state’s share of the Colorado River flow. But their argument that the Upper Basin states should not have to sacrifice now because they have not used all of their allotments in the past is meaningless.
No matter what a 103-year-old agreement says, you can’t claim a larger share of water than isn’t there and, thanks to climate change, isn’t going to be.
Meanwhile, Utah officials are also pointing with pride to efforts to coax more water from Nature with new methods of an old trick, cloud seeding. In so doing, this Republican-dominated state is breaking with others in the national party who are touting various unfounded conspiracy theories that view cloud seeding as unsafe at best, nefarious weather manipulation at worst.
The real issue with cloud seeding is not so much that it adds yet another chemical to the biosphere as that it provides political cover for avoiding tough conservation moves, on a flimsy promise that more water is coming.
Water policy in Utah is sounding troublingly like water policy in Iran — seed the clouds and pray for rain.
Serious, if expensive, conservation measures must be at the top of our list. Not a command and control approach, but the beneficial use of market forces such as charging higher prices for water, with per-gallon rates rising as consumption does. And stepping up state efforts to lease or buy more agricultural water rights so that water now sucked up by alfalfa stays in our rivers and, especially, flows to the increasingly toxic Great Salt Lake.
When 70% of our water use goes to a sector that is less than 2% of state GDP, no other approach makes sense.
In that vein, there is good news from Washington County.
The dry and rapidly growing corner of a dry and rapidly growing state has instituted new rules for larger water users, requiring extra levels of approval for potential water hogs such as data centers and, notably for the recreation mecca, golf courses. That makes good sense because, as with the rest of the state, a tiny fraction of large water guzzlers use the lion’s share of the supply.
The cheapest gallon of water is the one we don’t use. Conservation, not fighting over imaginary new sources of water, must be the touchstone for Utah from now on.