> Utah's agricultural water usage is overwhelmingly (68%) alfalfa and hay, of which 30% gets sent overseas [0].
Surely the right solution is to set an appropriate price for the use of water and let the market figure it out. If exported alfalfa is actually an economically appropriate use of limited water, fine. If not, then it would be uneconomical with appropriately priced water.
(Or perhaps it would be economical with appropriately priced water, but growers would need to become more efficient. That would be fine, too.)
Environmental damage is one place free market thinking has completely failed, repeatedly. It surely is not the right solution. First off, there’s a massive delay between environmental changes and outcomes. We’d have had to foresee this problem and set the right prices 100 years ago when water rights were being handed out and priced. Secondly, prices are never “appropriate”, we simply cannot forecast the outcome of environmental changes. Cost benefit analyses in the past when it comes to the environment have been wrong by orders of magnitude [1] Third is that viewing things through an economic lens distorts the value and gives automatic preference to the party that is profiteering off the environment. Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross, that’s not how we should handle public safety or our environment. Think about all these issue with respect to air pollution & CO2. What would it have taken to solve it with free markets? We haven’t solved it yet, and it would have needed to be priced and debated starting 100 years ago. And there is no appropriate price for clean air and the earth to stay habitable.
> Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross
It's also incredibly easy; SLC could outbid the farmers hundreds of times over and it wouldn't be even a rounding error in the city budget. It's difficult to see anyone opposing this as anything other than useful idiots for the ag lobby.
Because it’s easy is not a valid reason to charge the public to compete with business for the right to keep the lake and not get sick living near it. We need to restrict business interests from driving critical resources into the ground for profit. I’m all for farming and farmers making some money, but we can’t let that be unlimited like it has been forever.
And it’s incredibly short sighted to suggest we should go down that road even if it’s easy. The only reason it’s affordable now is because way-too-cheap water rights have been grandfathered in for decades and decades. There hasn’t been free market prices ever, so if we introduce them, the prices are going to skyrocket immediately, and it won’t be so easy anymore.
Yes, I wish that we could do that. We're currently mired in some ancient laws established in an unusually wet period more than a hundred years ago that give a lot of property owners unreasonable rights over "their" water. The government can't just take that away forcibly, and it's hard to persuade taxpayers in Utah to approve large government expenses of any sort.
Market failures are common, and it might make sense to try to buy up the water to prevent alfalfa farming, even if that water isn't used elsewhere. Consider it a water rights conservation easement. Once you own them, if farmers attempt to pump it, sue them.
Maybe alfalfa farmers would prefer utility scale solar income versus farming? Not in Utah, so unsure how palatable that concept is. In 2022, coal fueled 53% of Utah's total electricity net generation, down from 75% in 2015, and natural gas accounted for 26%. More renewables near SLC would be helpful imho.
> Surely the right solution is to set an appropriate price for the use of water and let the market figure it out.
The idea that money of all things should define environmental and health interests is so laughable, there’s literally a cartoon about it. (“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.”)
Putting that aside. Yes, the 19th century water rights laws where certain people get guaranteed drawdowns and are encouraged to use all of the water every year is destroying the western United States. We need to blow up the entire system and star again. And if this means screwing over golf courses, mining, and inappropriate agriculture that inevitably uses unsustainable irrigation practices, so be it.
Surely the right solution is to set an appropriate price for the use of water and let the market figure it out. If exported alfalfa is actually an economically appropriate use of limited water, fine. If not, then it would be uneconomical with appropriately priced water.
(Or perhaps it would be economical with appropriately priced water, but growers would need to become more efficient. That would be fine, too.)