I recently saw a video about Utah’s water crisis saying we are doomed by scarcity and water use should be curtailed. It blamed agriculture, which represents only 1% of Utah’s GDP. While directionally correct, this is incomplete. GDP is skewed by the tech and finance sectors, and in rural Utah, farming remains the backbone of many household economies.
Conservation is not a growth strategy. Asking Utahns to consume less water is like asking India to burn less coal: it might delay a crisis, but it also caps growth.
A bolder solution is to import water at scale. Imagine a pipeline bringing desalinated water from the ocean to Utah. This would not be unprecedented. The Central Arizona Project was a $4.4 billion system built over 20 years to deliver 1.4 million acre-feet of water to Phoenix.
The system could easily bring many billions of dollars in long-run GDP across Utah. The real barrier is not financial. The real barrier is political coordination. Routes through California, Arizona and Mexico, and Washington are available. This would require national coordination, but if Utah joins other Western states in lobbying together, we may compel the federal government’s immediate attention.
Conservation ensures stagnation. New water infrastructure ensures prosperity. Utah’s research institutions and university economics departments should study this proposal, refine the estimates, and compare alternatives. The path to an affluence of water in the West is open. The only hurdle is whether we have the vision and political will to climb it.
Dave Bird, Utah native
Houston, Texas