There is a downside to assessing this idea. And that’s that enduring the prospect of such a stunning move to conserve the lake would be the civil engineering version of vaporware.
Vaporware is a phrase used in the marketing of computers and electronic appliances interpreting a rumored or even declared new machine or operating system that will give rise to all others obsolete. While waiting for it to arrive on the market, users acknowledge one purchasing any other upgrades, even affordable and practical ones, as they linger for the Next Big Thing to appear on the market.
The apparent answer to a shrinking lake is to put extra water in it. But the water that would generally flow that path, through the Bear and Jordan rivers, is on the fall for two purposes. First is the megadrought that the Southwestern United States resumes to suffer through. The other is the heightened pulls of water from the Great Salt Lake’s tributaries borrowed for drinking, irrigation, industry, and all the other things that go up along with the size of the mortal population.
Because lawmakers don’t expect to do nearly enough or even anything at all to curtail the demand for water upstream of the lake, they have been rushing around for a different alternative. They don’t face the truth that Utahns utilize more water per capita than just about any other state and that 80% of our water consumption is for agriculture, extensively for alfalfa that is sent abroad.
