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Comment by 8note | Hacker News Reader

You can have a city with brown lawns though

The Church and Utah governments are also the biggest waster there too. That is also political.

The whole messaging around this is disingenuous. Urban water usage is a small subset, and even within that category individual citizens are a small subset, but yet most of the PR/"make changes" have been focused on a minority of a minority.

It's a literal "solve the 90% problem first" but right wing people like to blame democrats pointing with one finger while pocketing cash from their industrial, eco-killing practices with the other hand. That's the way it has always been. They will have enough money to move out of Utah when it goes dry. The other 99% who were dumb enough to be duped by them will suffer and starve.

The focus is on the Urban water users because they are the ones that are facing the problem and need a solution. They can do that either by reducing water usage or procuring more water.

Urban users cannot reduce water usage enough to solve the problem.

I think that is debatable. A lot of urban water is wasted on lawns, pools, and parks. It is not unthinkable that it could be reduced by 25-50% per person if you banned these things. Church and government water use you mention also fall under the control of the urban governments.

That said, there is always the 2nd option of purchasing more water.

> I think that is debatable.

It's not. Saving the great salt lake requires a water consumption reduction larger than total urban consumption in Utah. You can't get 1.5 million acre-feet out of a box which contains half a million.

> A lot of urban water is wasted on lawns, pools, and parks. It is not unthinkable that it could be reduced by 25-50% per person if you banned these things.

That's literally pulled out of your ass with no supporting evidence, and even if it were true it'd still be nowhere near what's needed.

> That said, there is always the 2nd option of purchasing more water.

No there is not always the option of purchasing the thing everyone lacks.

I think we are talking about two different subjects.

I was talking about ensuring enough water for urban users to live and you are talking about maintaining the great salt lake.

This seems to be the confusion.

Maintaining the Great Salt Lake is the topic of the article.

Yes, but much of the discussion is of urban vs agricultural usage, and which group should bear the burden.

Urban utahn are not "the ones that are facing" the loss of the great salt lake. The state is.

In terms of the salt lake, I think you are right. In terms of access for urban use, I think it is their problem to solve.

> The focus is on the Urban water users because they are the ones that are facing the problem

they are facing _the repercussions_ of a problem largely caused by someone else.

They did cause it by moving there and building a life there (including building their gardens). If the city had remained a small backwater town, this problem wouldn’t exist because the farms are 75% and the 25% consumed by the city today would end up as surplus each year replenishing water supplies.

The farms predate all the new usage. The new usage from urbanization caused the deficit.

Alternatively, Farms would use 100% of the water, the lake would go dry, and the population would largely accept it as a necessity to maintain their agricultural usage.

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