The Daily - Utah’s ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

The Great Salt Lake is drying up.Soaring demand for water, exacerbated by drought and higher temperatures in the region, are shrinking the waters, which play such a crucial role in the landscape, ecology and weather of Salt Lake City and Utah.Can the lake be saved?Guest: Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Utah’s dilemma raises a core question as the United States heats up: How quickly are Americans willing to adapt to the effects of climate change, even as those effects become urgent, obvious, and potentially catastrophic?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is drying up, creating a bowl of toxic dust that threatens to poison the air in one of the nation's fastest-growing metro areas. Today, my colleague Christopher Flavell on the struggle to avert that catastrophe. It's Friday, July 22nd. So, Chris, you cover climate for The New York Times. Tell me why you decided to go to Utah. So at the beginning of the year, I started hearing stories about what's happening with the Great Salt Lake. And in particular, this fear that it was beginning to dry up.

Our top story this morning, the levels of the Great Salt Lake have tied the record low that was set back in 1963. They hit a record low last summer. This week, the Great Salt Lake has been flirting with historic low levels. Which caused everyone to suddenly sit up and pay attention. Utah Governor Spencer Cox has now declared a state of emergency and called on the people of Utah to reduce their water use and pray for rain. And start to ask themselves, wait, what would actually happen if this lake disappeared? Okay, so let's start with the lake itself. When you say the name, I think Utah because of Salt Lake City. But otherwise, I'm not sure I know very much about this lake. Sure.

Covering 1,700 square miles, it's the largest American lake west of the Mississippi. Picture a gargantuan body of water that really defines the northern half of Utah. What makes Great Salt Lake so unique is that its water is up to five times saltier than the ocean. It is, as the name suggests, heavily salty. The eastern shore of Great Salt Lake is America's Serengeti for migratory birds. So birds that are flying across the continent stop here for food. This lake is not just a landmark, though. It is a linchpin for our ecology, the ecology of a region where most Utahns live. Crucial part of the landscape in terms of weather patterns. It protects

us from dust storms. It helps our snowpack. It helps increase precipitation and snowfall in the mountains, which increases water supply for those who live there. And it also powers over a billion dollars of Utah's economy. And it's powers over a billion dollars of Utah's economy. And it's an important part of sort of the psyche and the identity of Salt Lake City and Utah. So it would be hard to overstate just how important this lake is for a lot of reasons. Got it. So you said there was a fear that the lake might actually dry up completely. So what would happen if the lake did actually dry up? You know, one of the state lawmakers I met with, who's a Republican, said it would be like an environmental nuclear bomb going off if this lake disappeared.

Wow. going off if this lake disappeared. Wow. So I realized I had to see the lake for myself and also get a better idea of what's causing it to shrink and what people are doing about it, trying to save it. So one of the first things I did when I landed in Salt Lake City was I drove out to the lake. But even before you say anything else, something looks wrong, right? You're looking out of the side of the causeway and you see these vast expanses of dry land. And it's a kind of dry land that doesn't really fit any framework that I had.

It's not soil. It's not sand. There's clearly no vegetation. It just looks wrong. So I drive past these empty expanses and meet Kevin Perry. If we go a little bit further south, we can get a really nice perspective of what used to be lake, which is completely dry. A professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. And what did he tell you? He described two big challenges that are causing the

lake to shrink. It's mostly due to the fact that we divert too much water for other purposes. Right. The first is how much water humans are pulling from rivers and streams before that water gets to the lake. The water that's being diverted, what's it being diverted for? 70% of it's being diverted for agriculture. You know, 15% for cities and 15% for industry. So think of the watershed around the Great Salt Lake as sort of a perfect miniature system.

You've got precipitation falling in the mountains above Salt Lake City as snow, and that snow melts feeding rivers and streams, and eventually those rivers and streams empty into the Great Salt Lake. But along the way, you've got people diverting that water with a massive amount going to agriculture. And what's changing now is you're seeing a huge population boom in Salt Lake City that's making things worse, pulling even more water away from the lake. It's one of

the fastest growing areas in the country. And when you're there, you can feel it. You can see new subdivisions sprouting all the time at the edge of the metropolis. It's almost literally getting bigger as you watch it. So as more people come to Salt Lake City, and a lot are coming, this diversion problem gets worse. Exactly. But even as that's happening, you've got a separate challenge, an interlocking set of problems related to climate change. The western United States is facing a severe drought, and that's really shorthand for two things. One is less precipitation, which means less snowpack forming in the first place. Right. So we're having a

fairly poor snowpack this year. We're like 80 percent of normal. So if we were at 100 percent of normal on snowpack, we divert so much water that the lake would still shrink another foot next year. Right. And the other one is heat. Higher temperatures mean that even if the snowpack does form, you've got more of that snow evaporating due to high heat. Well, last year, the spring runoff, we got six inches of water in the lake. And we still lost two feet. So we went down a foot and a half last year. Right. So it's not just less precipitation.

It's that once the snow falls, more of it is being lost back into the air and less of it is entering these tributaries to begin with. Got it. So it basically evaporates as opposed to turning into water and flowing into the lake. Exactly right. evaporates as opposed to turning into water and flowing into the lake. Exactly right. Okay, so between population growth, drought, and rising temperatures, this lake is really facing a crisis. So Chris, how much longer do we expect the Great Salt Lake to actually exist? The short answer and the reason this is so scary is no one really knows how long we might have left until this lake disappears. But the better question and maybe the scarier

question is how long until the negative effects of that lake shrinking start to be felt? And on that point, the really scary answer is they might have started already. Okay, so let's talk about those effects. Walk me through what's happening. Well, let's start with the economic consequences. One of the reasons that this lake is so important is it helps increase the amount of snow that falls in the ski resorts above Salt Lake City. The snow that we get in October, November, December would be primarily lake effect snow, and that's what you need to jumpstart your season. Really, really great ski resorts that are a big tourism driver for the local economy.

Not only that, but as the lake shrinks, it hurts the mineral extraction industries. But it's the only source of magnesium metal for the United States. Really? Yes. So you've got a lot of money in Utah coming from companies that can use this water to extract minerals like magnesium from it. So as the lake shrinks, that starts to go away. The second one that starts to go away. The second one is the ecological consequences. The Great Salt Lake is a massively important stopover. You hear the number of 10 million migratory birds stopping here. The base of the food chain is the brine flies and the brine shrimp.

They all congregate at this lake because it's a source of food. And when the lake hits 19% salinity, then the brine shrimp have to spend so much energy expelling salt that they can no longer reproduce. And at that point, the food chain collapses. Kevin Perry said 19%, but a different expert I spoke with said that number could be as low as 17% salt content. And the lake is expected to hit that number

this summer, right now. So what you're saying, Chris, is that there are a lot of fates tied to this lake. I mean, there's the fate of agriculture, the mining industry and tourism, and the fate of the environment. Exactly. But we haven't gotten to the worst part yet. It's also the people who breathe the air around the Great Salt Lake, because what is trapped in the earth underneath this lake is very hazardous heavy metals. I'm talking about things like arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium, things that you do not want in your body and that you do not want in your lungs. And as the lake disappears,

those metals and the soil they're trapped in become exposed. And then once you get dust storms and wind pulling that soil, that dirt off the exposed lake bed, moving it into the air and eventually into the air and eventually into the lung tissue of people who live in Salt Lake City. And that could be the most serious concern and serious consequence as the lake dries up.

Can people die from inhaling it? I mean, how dangerous is it? Yeah. So there's two specific threats that are different, but both worrisome. There's an acute threat, which is as this dust gets kicked up from this exposed lake bed, it can cause really serious breathing problems, especially for those who have chronic conditions like asthma or COPD. But long-term, you have a separate thing, which is some of these heavy metals are carcinogens. And over time, they can start taking cases of cancer in people who are exposed to them. And so you've got both an immediate shock as the supply of dust increases and a long-term problem

as rates of serious diseases like cancer could very well increase with perennial exposure to these chemicals in the air. Okay, so this is crazy. I mean, the bottom of the lake coming up and effectively poisoning the air, this sounds incredibly dangerous and potentially catastrophic, both for people in the state of Utah and for wildlife that depends on the lake. And the remarkable thing is that it's not happening at some point in the distant future. It's happening now. Not only is it happening now, but we know where it's going, or at least where it could go, because this isn't the first time the situation has come up. Not too far west of the Great Salt Lake is another lake in California called Owens Lake, which went through a very similar situation, not due to

climate change, but because the river that feeds the lake was diverted to provide drinking water for Los Angeles. After that happened, Owens Lake dried up. And it became the worst source of dust pollution in the United States. Requiring enormous spending in the billions of dollars to try to hold that dust down. Pretty much killing a community on the shore of that lake, what used to be the shore of that lake. a community on the shore of that lake, what used to be the shore of that lake, and also providing a really, really stark warning that if you let these lakes dry out, the results are catastrophic. Now, what's different is the Great Salt Lake is many times bigger than Owens Lake used to be, number one. Number two, it's right next to one of the great Western American cities, Salt Lake City. And so if what happened in the Great Salt Lake were similar to what happened with Owens Lake,

the consequences are almost too severe to imagine. We'll be right back. So, Chris, you've just painted a pretty dire picture of Utah's future, if things keep going the way that they're going. I mean, you said it will put two-thirds of the state's population in pretty immediate risk. How much do local officials understand the severity of this? And what are they doing about it? Well, there's no question that state and local officials are aware of the problem. In this year's state legislative session, state lawmakers really aggressively focused on the problem of the Great Salt Lake and passed a series of bills that are designed to begin to address the problem. Things like beginning to make it easier to trade water rights or sell water rights to their highest, best use. Compelling local governments to account for water needs in planning. Trying to put some

pressure on builders to account for how they use water and things like appliances and homes. But none of the laws that were passed in this year's sessions by themselves will really be enough to address this problem. So for the moment, the actors that matter the most here are local officials, in particular, local officials who have authority over drinking water. So back when Salt Lake City was initially being settled by the pioneers and Mormon pioneers in 1847, there is a problem of actually getting this water to upper elevations. So when I was in Salt Lake City, I spent time with a woman named Laura Briefer,

who was the official who was in charge of the department that runs that city's drinking water supply. And so the topography wasn't suitable. And one of the main points she made was, at some fundamental level, the question of water is not a new problem in Salt Lake City. This is a city built in the desert. It's always had to worry about its water. And so the waters that were more pristine and also could be gravity fed to a culinary

drinking water system were tapped. And those are these mountain streams. Okay. So from its earliest days, it sounds like the city has been diverting water from the lake. I mean, I guess it seemed reasonable in the 19th century, but it turned out to be pretty bad environmental hygiene. Yes. The thing to remember is, for a long time, this made sense. And the things that have changed are relatively new. The huge population growth and the pressure on that system from droughts and heat. So it turns out there's an upper limit on how many households and businesses you can safely supply water to in Salt Lake City if you don't want the lake to disappear.

And Laura Briefer drove me around to help me understand how their water system works. And so the other source, the reservoir feeds directly into the plant or it's, okay, that sounds nice. Okay, so Laura Briefer's agency, the city utility agency, is the government body that keeps an eye on this issue. But how closely are they following it? Well, they're following it very closely. And in fact, they prepare crisis management documents regarding water usage and availability that looks forward decades. And running out of water in this context means that your main supply goes dry and then your reservoir goes dry? Or does it just, maybe the meaning is more simple, it's just you don't have the daily supply to meet your daily demand?

It's daily supply meeting daily demand. Okay. What do your office's protocols call for? What would your first step be if demand exceeded supply one day? And they have different stages indicating how bad the situation is and what to do about it. So we have a water shortage contingency plan. Right.

And there are five stages of action to be taken. And those stages go from stage one, which is sort of a minor shortage, where they advise voluntary reductions in water use, all the way to stage five, which is the most critical stage. And you hit the second stage last year. We hit the second stage last year, which is a precautionary, very proactive stage. Stage two out of five. But what does that mean? So stage two is when you move past strictly voluntary limits and you start to impose mandatory limits on some of the bigger

water uses but not yet on households so it's sort of creeping into the territory of telling people how much water they can use i would never want to be in the situation where we ran out of water right and i assume all those stages are designed to prevent that from happening. So if you hit stage five, does that mean that your demand has a shrimp supply? Or it's the last step that you have to prevent that from happening?

It's the last step we have, and in that stage, we ration water, outdoor irrigation, it know, is very, very limited. There are mandatory actions that the community has to take and they're regulated. So at stage five, not only is the city actively policing individual water use, but it also has to go out and try and find ways to bring water in from nearby communities because it can no longer meet its own needs. But what happens if you actually have demand that exceeds supply

and you've gone through five stages? Yeah, we've never been there. But for us, we have some interconnected systems with Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District and Central Utah Project. So you could draw from neighbors? We could potentially draw from neighbors. One problem with that staging plan is Salt Lake City and the surrounding cities and counties ultimately share the same source of water.

So if one place runs out, chances are good that the surrounding areas could be running out too. I hate to be Debbie Downer. But what if the whole state of Utah... It seems like since it's all one watershed, it's at least plausible that if you ran out of water, your neighbors would as well. Hopefully it doesn't happen that abruptly. Right.

So hopefully we see it coming. Yeah. So officials hope that they'll have time to prepare. But the underlying problem is population growth. And the population is growing now. And from my reporting and talking to local and state officials, it didn't seem like there was any appetite to do anything that would curb that growth now. I read the state water plan that came out in December on my flight in.

now. I read the state water plan that came out in December on my flight in. One of the things that struck me was it seemed to accept as given the premise that the population of the state will double by 2060. Not that I'm taking a stance on the wisdom of that, but I thought that seems not to be fixed, right? And it seems like of the universe of potential options, I would have thought that one option might be, well, maybe the state shouldn't grow as much. If the question is, how do you find new water supplies for a doubled population? Maybe the answer is don't double your population. Do you feel that your office has sort of the pull to say to the development people, you know, guys, rather than just asking us to find more water, maybe we can ask you to grow less? Yeah, that, I don't feel like that is the conversation that happens between water managers and developers very often.

and developers very often. But I'm curious, Chris, can someone like Laura Briefer just go to the city and tell them, we need to stop growing or we're not going to sustain this? So the authority is there in theory, but if I want to densify a given plot, do I have to get a permit from your office? Yes, we do. Yes.

Okay. And do you use that authority? Not very often. I would think rarely. That would seem like a real buzzkill politically. But the issue, unsurprisingly, is the politics aren't that great. And of course there's always politics involved too.

Right. And so there's a balance that we try to maintain. But you're offering the same. The impression I got from speaking with Laura Briefer was that she doesn't see it as her job to regulate or affect the rate of growth, and probably others don't see it as their job either, either at the state or local level. Those are higher decisions that really, really belong to elected officials.

So this is a really hard problem. And it's the reason we're kind of stuck in a lot of the country in terms of dealing with climate change. I mean, most places are looking to grow. It's equated with progress, right? And a city like Salt Lake City doesn't want to pump the brakes on that, even if the lake is going to dry up, because it would mean saying no to something that everybody wants to say yes to growth. We want to say yes to low cost growth, right? I think elected officials don't want to impose costs on their constituents. And they also don't want to say anything about limiting their constituents' choices for how they live. So if you get a lawn and you want to water that lawn, nobody wants to tell you not to water that lawn. No one wants to

tell you where you can or cannot live. I think there's a mentality in this country that we don't want to impose sacrifice on Americans. And unfortunately, a lot of adapting to climate change really means imposing some degree of sacrifice, some narrowing of the choices that they have. some narrowing of the choices that they have. And what's so revealing about this case is Salt Lake City is reluctant to impose meaningful change or meaningful sacrifice on its residents, even knowing that the cost of inaction could mean poisoning the air and losing their water. So, Chris, if you had to guess and kind of look into your crystal ball, what do you think the chances are that the Great Salt Lake will dry up entirely? I think that's the right question. And it's the same question that I pose to state and local officials when I was in Utah.

And they all told me that they think they'll find a way. There's so much that Utah could do. There's so much that Salt Lake City could do. They could impose higher costs on water users per gallon and that way get people to do less of the activities that consume lots of water, like watering their lawns. They could become a little more aggressive about when they approve and when they deny permits for more construction. They could be upfront with people about the cost of growing and using water.

So there's a lot that could happen. It's not like it's some binary on-off switch where either they go with the flow or they become environmental radicals, right? And so I wouldn't want people to come away from this with the impression that the only salvation for Salt Lake City is doing the unthinkable and slamming the brakes on growth. and slamming the brakes on growth. You could do a lot in the meantime, and it's just not clear to me that even those sort of intermediate fixes are underway because, again, they're not popular. And that just seems to me the most shocking takeaway from all of this. And Chris, on that note, in the pretty plausible scenario that they don't act fast enough,

and this dire future you've been describing really does happen, what would life in Salt Lake City look like? I mean, after the story ran, some people joked to me that this is going to be great news for people who make gas masks that filter arsenic out of the air. arsenic out of the air. And, you know, at some level, you could imagine a world where if everything else fails, living in Salt Lake City becomes an exercise in just expecting the worst, having a gas mask on you in case of a dust storm, and just accepting it as the cost of living there. The air is bad, but people just get used to it. So Chris, I wonder how we should be thinking about this problem in terms of the rest of the country. I mean, here you have a city that's about to experience this slow motion car crash, right? In some sense, it's already started.

And the consequences are understood. They're not disputed. And there are clear solutions. But they are politically and economically very costly. So I guess my question for you is, do you think that that is the basic approach we'll see across the United States more broadly? That we will likely not try to stop the problem from happening, but put all of our resources into making the problem less bad once it does happen, for better or for worse. So in one sense, the Great Salt Lake saga is about human nature and how the incentives point towards inaction, even in the face of catastrophe. But the glass half full take on what's happening in Utah might be that other cities could look at this and think, well, we don't want to be like them. So maybe the lesson here is anticipate these problems.

They tend not to come out of nowhere. And start a conversation early with your residents and your voters about what the local climate crisis is going to look like and try to figure out some kind of consensus about what people are willing to give up to head off that crisis. I think many cities will look at Utah and say, thank God we don't face those kinds of problems. But the reality is almost everywhere in the United States faces some version, some variety of this kind of challenge. And the question for all of them is going to be, will you wait as long as Utah did, or will you act faster? Chris, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Here's what else you should know today. Here's what will be clear by the end of this hearing. President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home. He chose not to act. During the eighth televised hearing of the January 6th committee, former White House aides recalled that for nearly three hours, Donald Trump refused to take any steps to call off the rioters or to protect those inside the Capitol, despite their repeated pleas

that he do so. So are you aware of any phone call by the President of the United States to the Secretary of Defense that day? Not that I'm aware of, no. Are you aware of any phone call by the President of the United States to the Attorney General of the United States that day? No. Are you aware of any phone call by the President of the United States to the Secretary of Homeland Security that day? I'm not aware of that, no. Instead, they said, Trump watched the attack unfold on TV. Even his Secret Service agents protecting Vice President Pence at the Capitol

became so fearful for their lives that they used their radios to say goodbye to their families. Never-before-seen video revealed that when Trump finally did call for rioters to go home on January 6th, he ignored the carefully worded script approved by his aides and instead sympathized with the rioters in improvised remarks. And then in a speech the next day, he refused to say that the election was over. I'm going to do this. Let's go. But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results. I don't want to say the election's over. I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election's over, OK? And.

Hey, folks, guess you heard this This morning I tested positive for COVID. But I've been double vaccinated, double boosted. The symptoms are mild. President Biden will isolate in his White House residence for at least five days after testing positive for COVID-19, becoming the second U.S. president to be infected with the virus. I'm doing well. I'm getting a lot of work done.

I'm going to continue to get it done. The president's physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, I'm doing well. I'm getting a lot of work done. I'm going to continue to get it done. The president's physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, said that Biden is experiencing fatigue, a runny nose and a dry cough, and is taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid to minimize the severity of his infection. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson, Carlos Prieto, and Ricky Nowetzki. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willans, contains original music by Dan Powell and Chelsea Daniel, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsferk of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.