If only we were given a sign.
How about these:
Utah has suffered more than 790 wildfires this season, according to state data, impacting more than 49,000 acres. Firefighting crews are spread perilously thin throughout the western United States.
Air quality in Salt Lake City and other parts of the state has been throat-chokingly horrible this summer due to fires here and as far away as California and Oregon.
Utah has been sweltering through day after day of record-breaking heat. At least four people are known to have died because of it. Scientists are starting to refer to it as “the new normal.”
The Great Salt Lake, after showing some signs of recovery after the heavy snows of last winter, is receding again.
The resulting exposure of lakebed is not only adding toxic chemicals to our air, it is pumping tons more greenhouse gases into the environment. That creates a particularly vicious cycle that will cause even more drought and further accelerate the lake’s disappearance. And all the other effects of climate change.
And the response of Utah’s political class?
Nothing.
Actually, worse than nothing. State and local officials, and our congressional delegation, can be relied upon to actively oppose every effort of the federal government and others to slow the climate emergency.
What are we waiting for? A plague of frogs?
Utah leaders go out of their way to stand against cleaner energy
Utah could be a national, even a world, leader in turning the tide against the destruction of our natural environment. We not only have everything to lose from the status quo, we also have a great deal to gain — environmentally and financially — from a new green economy.
Utah is naturally poised to be the mother lode of solar, wind and geothermal energy. The transition to renewables is happening, but it would be moving a lot faster if our state leaders would embrace it as the cash cow it could be instead of bull-headedly devoting so much of their time and your money clinging to the dead-end extractive fossil-fuel economy.
Rocky Mountain Power did have plans to phase out its carbon-belching Hunter and Huntington power plants in Emery County, moving toward more renewable generation and storage, by 2032. But last spring the multi-state utility giant, sheltered by Utah laws that push utilities to stick with coal by allowing them to pass the higher costs on to consumers, announced that it would keep those plants in operation as far into the future as 2042.
The Intermountain Power Agency, a utility owned by a consortium of local governments around Utah, has had to constantly fight off legislative attacks on its plans to shift from coal to a clean hydrogen-based system that has great potential for limitless, and profitable, energy production.
Seven counties in eastern Utah, backed by the state, are literally going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of an awful idea to build a new rail link from Uinta Basin oil fields to supposedly spur a five-fold increase in the area’s petroleum output.
Utah state officials are also dragging the U.S. Bureau of Land Management into court, again, over the agency’s plans to start doing what it should have done all along — count conservation as a good use of public land.
Apparently, if you hold public office in Utah, you just don’t think it’s hot enough, or the air is dirty enough, around here. If the people feel otherwise, they should say so.
State efforts to save the Great Salt Lake need to be accelerated
A couple of good snowfall years helped the levels of the Great Salt Lake recover somewhat from their recent record lows. But it still fell short of some expert predictions.
Gov. Spencer Cox and the Utah Legislature are not ignorant of the situation. Laws have been passed and executive orders signed to allow the state to buy water rights from mostly agricultural users, to grant more than $200 million in state funds to boost water-saving efforts of farmers and canal operators and to pause the granting any new rights.
Benighted plans to dam sections of the Bear River upstream of the lake apparently have been abandoned. The Legislature acted to slow the kinds of mineral extraction that depletes the lake.
Lawmakers are admitting that they know what they don’t know — how much of the water supposedly being saved from improved agricultural practices is actually getting to the lake. They have tasked various executive branch departments to get out of their silos to work together and find out.
Early in 2023, the Legislature put up $275,000 to buy gadgets to improve the state’s ability to monitor the pollutants that rise from the Great Salt Lakebed. As of this summer, the money hadn’t been spent and the monitors hadn’t been installed.
Now that state officials cannot, and largely do not, claim ignorance about the risks of a shrinking lake, more must be done.
Allocating more state money to buy or lease more private water rights, mostly from farmers, can, if it makes our conservative leaders feel better, be framed as a “free-market solution.”
Actually there is no other choice, as government in the United States is constitutionally prohibited from seizing private property, even for the most necessary of public purposes, without compensation.
It will be the best money the state of Utah ever spent.
