I don't think they're saying golf courses in the desert are defensible. I think they're saying that Nevada does better water conservation job than other nearby states (I believe Utah is the worst per capita) and has not nearly as much impact on the colorado river, so there's probably bigger fish to go after in terms of saving water than Las Vegas. When you get down to it like >80% of the water use out west is agriculture. If you're going to make significant savings you have to tackle agriculture practices. Not that you shouldn't clamp down on the golf courses too (I totally think they should, just deal with the artificial turf golfers if you want to golf in the middle of an arid desert and go golf in the scottish highlands if you want real grass), it just probably wouldn't help all that much in the grand scheme of things even if golf courses didn't exist at all. Surprisingly the best thing to do to conserve water would be to reduce meat consumption, most of what's grown is for livestock feed not human consumption.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231030112319/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html

Lake mead is being drained from the other direction into Utah and you'd have known that before commenting if you'd actually looked that shit up before going to say something that spectacularly unaware of what's going on.

Vegas actually net zeros their allotment of the water share every year, as far as Mead is considered, Vegas almost doesn't exist.