Salt in the air
8. A deep dive on a shallow lake, and a quick look at the fire season
Note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of Azolla Ventures or Prime Coalition.
Housekeeping
Insurance: I have a feeling that creative, forward-looking insurance will be a pillar of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Here’s my entry-level take: insurers are in the business of pricing risk, but the risk environment is changing in unprecedented ways, so innovation is needed. But there’s a lot more to it, and I don’t know what I don’t know. So, I’m looking to chat with people who actually know insurance. If that’s you, shoot me a note. I’m easy to find, or you can reply directly here on Substack. Thanks!
Climate surprises
One of the things we do here is explore the weirder effects of climate change. Everybody knows that climate change will be bad, but not everybody knows that it’ll be weird. It’s not just that the planet will get warmer, it’s that: oops the Gulf Stream might collapse, is that bad? I don’t know, but it’s definitely weird.
Another point in exploring the weird parts of climate change is to think creatively about what we might do in response. We’re not helpless. As a species, we’ve navigated lots of environmental disasters, and we’ll do it again. Our solutions obviously haven’t been perfect, but many of them have worked well enough for long enough to allow humans to thrive.
Climate adaptation is the next chapter in the book of human ingenuity, a species-wide response to the biggest macro trend of the first century of the third millennium AD. I’m worried about what the changing climate will mean for societies, especially the most vulnerable, but at the same time, I’m interested in the spaces for innovation that it creates. You’d rather not have to innovate in this way, but here we are. In the face of a new threat, we have the opportunity and responsibility to build new things. It’s clarifying.
Anyway, so here’s a weird one courtesy of Christopher Flavelle at the New York Times:
SALT LAKE CITY — If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
“We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that’s going to go off if we don’t take some pretty dramatic action,” said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake.
As the early Mormon settlers were establishing what would become Salt Lake City and starting to mine gold, silver, lead, and iron, I wonder what they thought about the runoff that was making its way into the lake. The mostly likely answer is “nothing,” but maybe eventually you’d find some fishers who were concerned that the flies and the brine shrimp might die off. In any case, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thought, “Well what happens if the lake dries up one day and kicks up lots of dust clouds containing all this toxic runoff?”
I say this not to dunk on mid-19th century Utahns, but to highlight that this would have been an absurd thing to think about. There’s a lot that’s just unknowable at the time. Today’s environmental problems are yesterday’s environmental solutions.
Coming back to 2022, let’s zoom in on the whole toxic air thing. This seems like something we simply can’t let happen. I’m not going to spend more time diagnosing the problem here – the article does a good job – but I do want to ask: what do you do about this? This is a big problem tying together land management, climate change, public health, water rights, and of course, politics.
Here’s a small handful of options. I’m sure there are others. If you have others, please tell me! We’re out here learning together.
Let’s dive in.
Raise water prices
Let’s start with economic interventions. You could raise water prices to better reflect physical reality. People and businesses would use less water, and more could be diverted to the lake.
There might be some headroom to get this done. While Utah has among the highest water prices in the country, Salt Lake City is a different story:
Of major U.S. cities, Salt Lake has among the lowest per-gallon water rates, according to a 2017 federal report. It also consumes more water for residential use than other desert cities — 96 gallons per person per day last year, compared with 78 in Tucson and 77 in Los Angeles.
Charge more for water and people use less, said Zachary Frankel, executive director of the Utah Rivers Council. “Pricing drives consumption,” he said.”
Okay, fair. But no politician wants to be the one to raise rates. It’s not a great way to get re-elected. This also doesn’t work very well for people struggling to survive under the current, flawed, pricing regime. There are similar critiques here to the ones leveled at carbon taxes, gas taxes, and electricity rate increases. On the one hand, externalities should be priced in, but on the other hand, raising the price of critical commodities can do real harm to people at the margin, and the backlash can hurt your cause. Eh, maybe it’s not financially responsible for people to be in that situation to begin with, but who are you to make that judgment for someone else? I can see both sides and am not sure I agree neatly with one or the other. So in a state already sensitive to water rights and prices, it indeed appears to be politically toxic:
In the state legislative session that ended in March, lawmakers approved other measures that start to address the crisis. They funded a study of water needs, made it easier to buy and sell water rights, and required cities and towns to include water in their long-term planning. But lawmakers rejected proposals that would have had an immediate impact, such as requiring water-efficient sinks and showers in new homes or increasing the price of water.
Kill the alfalfa
Here’s another economic intervention. As one NYT commenter suggested, you could kill Utah’s alfalfa industry:
As many local conservationists will tell you, northern Utah doesn’t have a water problem so much as an alfalfa problem. Ag uses about 80% of the water in the state and the biggest agricultural user is alfalfa. The producers will claim that it’s an important part of our food chain - in reality it goes overseas, mainly to Japan and Saudi Arabia. So unless you think Kobe beef and Saudi racehorses are important…. Also, alfalfa production is highly mechanized, so we’re not talking lots of jobs here either. We could solve all the problems you outline by eliminating alfalfa production and the cost would be a lot less than otherwise. The few individuals who make a lot of money off of it would of course be unhappy, and they have not neglected to cultivate political influence, so I’m not holding my breath. It would however be the most sensible solution.
I’ll show my cards: I think this is a bad idea. But to engage, it’s a similar argument to one you often hear elsewhere: big ag industry uses most of the water, so they should change their ways first.
It feels cathartic to make this argument – it’s clean. But play that out another step or two and you’ll find the problem back at your doorstep. Who consumes agricultural products broadly? Who benefits economically from agricultural products, even when you ship them overseas? And then there are second-order effects. Where would you draw the line with other industries? What message would that send and incentive would that give to other farmers already facing thin margins? And how would you even shut down an industry? I don’t just mean that the blowback from this political bloc will be harsh (it will). Literally, how would you put an end to a law-abiding industry? We generally don’t do that in the US.
Let’s keep going.
Put water back in the lake
Let’s look at a solution that is part economic, part physical. Independent of prices, just divert water back to the lake:
Saving the Great Salt Lake would require letting more snowmelt from the mountains flow to the lake, which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region’s breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture — something state leaders seem reluctant to do.
In other words: fix the physical imbalance directly. The city is already close to maxing out its water budget, but expected to grow nearly 50% by 2060. Something’s gotta give, so how about new people and businesses give this time? Sorry, not enough water to go around, try somewhere else.
This seems reasonable in some ways – but it’s also basically NIMBYism. This solution takes away opportunities from those who might seek to move to Salt Lake City for lower prices, natural beauty, access to four of the best ski areas on the planet, and so on. Maybe those opportunities shouldn’t exist in the first place, but again, who are you to decide that?
As a political solution, this doesn’t seem impossible. People do tend to like when their representatives enact NIMBY policies. But it also happens to be tied up with high-value agriculture, so state leaders don’t want to do this. Future residents can’t vote you out of office, but the farmers can.
Manage the dust
You could address the dust directly. We have a few tools to do this! Los Angeles, for example, has managed dust for the now-dry Owens Lake, which at one point was the worst source of dust pollution in the country:
The city has tried different strategies: Covering the lake bed in gravel. Spraying just enough water on the dust to hold it in place. Constantly tilling the dry earth, creating low ridges to catch restive dust particles before they can become airborne.
How big a project would this be? We’re not going to get into details here,1 but signs unsurprisingly point to “big.” The Owens Lake project cost the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power about $2B, and Owens Lake was nowhere near the size of the Great Salt Lake. Owens was about 108 square miles at its peak, whereas the Great Salt Lake was about 3,300 square miles, or 30x larger, at its peak. So to a first approximation, you might expect a dust mitigation project for a fully dry Great Salt Lake to cost $2B × 30 = $60B. That’s… more than double Utah’s 2021 state budget. You’d need lots of federal help over quite a few years. A tough pill to swallow.
Conjure more water
Last: could we just pull more water out of the sky? We talk about cloud seeding pretty often around here, and early on I noted that it has quietly been employed in the American West for decades. However, we don’t really know how effective it is. Some studies find no effect, some studies find an effect. Maybe it’s time to find out for real.
Zooming out
I have to say that I don’t feel great about any of these options. If I were a betting man, I’d spread my chips across begrudging water rate hikes, usage restrictions like we see in California, and some dust management.
Again, there are probably other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’ve got the political physics wrong and there’s a bigger solution space. Maybe we could pipe water long distances like we do with electricity. Maybe bitcoin solves this.2 Climate change is weird, and we’ll need some creativity to get through it.
How’s wildfire season going?
From the National Interagency Fire Center:
June 24, 2022
Nationally, seven new large fires were reported, four in Alaska, two in Texas, and one in Florida. Firefighters managed to contain five large fires yesterday.
Since January 1, 32,247 wildfires have burned 3,360,037 acres in the United States.
Is that bad?
Well, on the one hand, wildfire is something that has long been happening in the background in the American West. It’s a natural part of many ecosystems, clearing dead biomass off of forest floors and allowing nutrients to return to the soil.
But on the other hand, we know that climate change exacerbates wildfires, and this sure seems like more than usual:
Two things. First, 2022 has the largest number of wildfires of any year in the past 10, but not by much. Divide acres burned by number of fires, and you get numbers on the order of 100 acres/fire. In other words, the average fire is small, and the ones you hear about are massive outliers. As a measure of climate-induced environmental damage, this isn’t the greatest metric.
But, second, 2022 also has the largest number of acres burned, crossing 3MM acres for the first time this early in the year. That’s a bit more meaningful. For context, the entire US is 2.43B acres, so 3MM acres is greater than 0.1% of the country. Look, we’ve still got the other 99.9%, but I don’t love that we can measure this in tenths of a percent.
Readers in San Francisco might also might glance at the bars for 2020 and think, “that seems low for the year the sky turned orange.” But that didn’t happen until September, so it’s not factored in here. Or put another way, there’s still time to see how 3x the burn rate plays out. It’s looking like it’ll be a hot one this year.
Elsewhere:
Thanks for reading!
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