Maria Archibald: This year’s snowfall was an opportunity for the Great Salt Lake. Utah legislators are wasting it.
It’s our job to hold our leaders accountable.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Framed by dust, strong winds blow fine particulate matter obstructing the view of Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake Friday, Sept. 1, 2023.
In early April, on the heels of a record-breaking winter, I woke up to this headline: “The Great Salt Lake seemed like it was dying. But there’s been a ‘miraculous’ shift.” Not a week later, as I sipped my coffee and scrolled through the news, another headline flashed across my screen: “Utah’s Great Salt Lake risked disappearing. Unprecedented weather is bringing it back.”
These headlines aren’t the full story. In fact, they’re misleading. A few paragraphs in, the articles acknowledge a more complex reality: This year’s snowfall can only offer the Great Salt Lake, which in 2022 dropped to its lowest recorded level, a temporary marginal reprieve. It remains in serious jeopardy, but to the casual headline scroller, the takeaway message was just as optimistic as it was wrong: “precipitation saved the Great Salt Lake.”
The truth? The state’s egregious misappropriation of water for agriculture, mineral extraction, power generation and municipal and industrial use – along with climate change – are responsible for the crisis at the Great Salt Lake. Weather did not cause the problem, nor will it solve it. Only a fundamental shift in water policy and management can do that.
It’s true that this wet winter postponed the Great Salt Lake’s collapse by a couple years, and that’s worth celebrating. But the lake requires an additional five feet to reach a healthy state, and water levels are already declining again. In fact, despite the brief respite, the lake may now be in a worse position than before.
That’s because the snowfall was an opportunity, not a solution, and state leaders are squandering it. The Utah Legislature has interpreted the reprieve as a permanent change in the trajectory of the lake’s health. In reality, humans drain 1.2 million acre feet per year more than rain and snow can replace, and the Great Salt Lake remains on track to vanish within a decade unless authorities intervene. These trends show no sign of changing, but state leaders have buried their heads in the snowpack.
Before the snowfall, it appeared that our leaders might finally take the decline of the Great Salt Lake seriously. In late 2021, Gov. Spencer Cox announced his new budget — including $50 million to conserve Great Salt Lake — from the shores of Antelope Island. State lawmakers even dubbed the 2022 legislative session “the year of water” to highlight their supposed commitment to the issue. For a moment, it seemed that the Utah Legislature had finally been forced into action after years of delay. But after the record-setting snowfall, that urgency vanished.
Not only have state leaders failed to use this reprieve to plan for a sustainable future for the lake, but they’re lashing out at their critics. At a symposium this year, Gov. Cox threatened that legislators will withdraw from the issue altogether if constituents continue to criticize their inaction. When asked about the state of the lake, leaders often avoid the question and instead emphasize the unprecedented precipitation – not to mention the flooding, mudslides and property damage it caused – while failing to attribute such extreme weather patterns to another leading cause of the lake’s decline: climate change.
Meanwhile, during the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers quietly killed a resolution setting a target minimum lake elevation of 4,198 feet above sea level and blocked a bill to dedicate $65 million annually to acquire water rights for the lake.
If the Great Salt Lake declines further, or vanishes completely, the results will be catastrophic for the region’s communities, lands and wildlife. And with $2.5 billion of commercial activity directly connected to the lake, its demise would be not only an ecological and public health tragedy, but also an economic disaster for a state that is projected to grow by more than 2 million people by 2060. By then, we could be living in the Great Salt Dust Bowl.
But there is hope. If we act now, we can save the Great Salt Lake. First, we must put an immediate stop to new water development projects including the ongoing Bear River Development and a recent proposal to subsidize an international hay exporter, which would use over 200,000 acre feet of water each. Instead, we must conserve the water we already use for commercial purposes by a third to a half in order to increase inflow to the lake by one million acre feet per year.
In order to attain this bold yet achievable goal, the Legislature must acknowledge its responsibility to protect the Great Salt Lake for the public good and commit to restoring the lake to an elevation of 4,198 feet, which scientists agree is its minimum viable level. As the 2023 legislative session showed, however, our leaders will not take serious measures to protect the lake without pressure from constituents. At a time when irresponsible media headlines and misleading government rhetoric fuel complacency, we must stay more vigilant than ever. It’s our job to hold our leaders accountable; if we do, we can keep the Great Salt Lake great.
Maria Archibald
Maria Archibald is the lands and water programs coordinator for Sierra Club Utah.
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Thanks for your email - and your brief review of Maria’s article.
I agree: “Impressive” is a good one-word summary.
As you say in your follow-up…
The piggies never pay their downstream costs. (I was not familiar with the word “externalities,” thanks for putting it on my radar.)
And, as a rule, the piggies pay the bare minimum for their upstream costs, especially if they’re dealing with people of color - if at all possible, ripping them off, like “killers of the flower moon.”
And the triple whammy is that these Cowboy Capitalists pay bloody little in taxes, although one of Biden’s many accomplishments has been the imposition of a minimum 15% corporate tax.
I’m not sure if it’s still true, but Warren Buffett pays less income tax, then his secretary.
We still live The Wild West, and the bandits continue to rule.
Pax et amor
Alan
PS I loved Maria’s image of Utah’s so-called leaders “burying their heads in the snow pack.”
PPS If truth were told — and we knew the souls of all our legislators in state and federal government, what percentage of them would be “so-called leaders.” (in the last couple of years. I’ve spent some time with the North Carolina state, representative named Renée Price. As an insider in the state assembly, she has a pole to the point of nausea by what she sees every day on the Republican side of the aisle. Similarly, Danny’s godfather, Steve Dear, who used to lobby on North Carolina assembly floor as pretty much full-time job, confided: “Alan, there are no more than two or three people in the whole assembly, who are truly human.” Some years ago, while trying to account for how we became “The United States of Barbaria” - and why the cream so seldom rises to the top - I was reminded that, about half the time, shit floats.
It is God’s truth that Maria, you, or I would make better legislators than the vast majority of those lost souls currently occupying congressional seats. At least here in North Carolina.
I have even come to believe that it would be a worthwhile experiment to choose our legislators — as many Mexican tribes choose their leaders — by randomly picking people for one or two-year terms. Not only would it be an interesting experiment in raw democracy, I think we would be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. It works for Mexican tribes. Just “working” is more than we can say for our current Congress.
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