303
Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake: ‘Trying to avert disaster’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
303 points (99.7% liked)
News
23014 readers
8 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The amount of water used for agriculture makes cutting down on residential use irrelevant.
It doesn't.
70% of the non agricultural water use is residential. Which means residential water use is a little more than 20% of the state's water usage. Let's be generous and say that watering yards is only 15% of the state's total per capita consumption.
15% of an already massively over taxed water system isn't anything to shake a fist at. It's even more important when you consider how much more water Utah is using than it's neighbors, which while difficult to precisely calculate, isn't a small amount by any measure.
We need food, we don't need green lawns.
Lawn use of water in Utah (by all entities, residential, government, and business) is between 6-8%, half of your "generous 15%" https://utahrivers.org/are-we-running-out-of-water#:~:text=Outdoor%20lawn%20watering%20in%20our,of%20Utah's%20total%20water%20use.
And that use is spread across millions of people. Even if you cut lawn use by 75%, you're cutting at most 6% of the states use. Or can cut agriculture use by 10% and get a larger reduction in overall water use.
We don't need alfalfa. We don't need flood irrigation. We also don't need Lawns, but that is such a small percentage you might as well tell people to stop flushing their toilet when they shit.
We don't need alfalfa to feed livestock if more people went vegan, though.
Ruminants are much more efficient processors of plant fiber than humans are. They also eat a lot of agricultural waste that humans can't.
To replace the calories lost from meat, we'd actually need *more."
Not to mention that we'd be creating a lot of agricultural waste we can no longer deal with.
No offense if you're on a vegan diet, but vegan diets are ridiculous. They aren't the solution they're purported to be, and most people can't stay on them longer than a few years before health issues creep in.
Not to mention the swathes of the population that are diabetic or prone to diabetes that require a low carb, high fat diet that can't be easily done vegan, and can't be done in a healthy way without animal fat and protein. Not without a lot more nuts and avocados which are, as it happens, huge problems for the environment on their own.
Ruminants might be more efficient processors of plant fiber, but the transformation of plant fiber into meat for consumption is a hugely inefficient process.
Meh. Most of it isn't traveling very far. You're tilting at windmills now. None of it travels half as far as the bananas you put on your oatmeal, which has also traveled farther to most Americans than cattle feed to most cattle.
There are a lot of processes we could be doing now efficiently. It would be better to eat exclusively locally grown meat and produce and pasture raise every farm animal. It wouldn't be affordable but it would be environmentally better.
I don't think you've been following the science.
I'm not going to sit here and spell it out for you, because it's a fruitless effort. But know that you're wrong and the vast majority of the world's scientists agree.
In Utah, it absolutely does not. It takes a massive amount of water to keep lawns, parks, and golf courses green. The amount of 'green' space that you'd get from adding up everyone's lawns isn't insignificant.
You can remove excess from more than one group at a time.
Oh look, another 'come after anyone but me' kind of guy.