Kari Lake’s recent op-ed in the Star set forth her platform for the “most urgent issue” facing Arizona and the South-west: water. I agree, which is why it’s so disappointing that she has so little to offer.
Let’s unpack her three main ideas.
First, Lake attacks the Biden Administration for policies she thinks will “put farmers out of business.” As the Colorado River Basin suffered through a 22-year- drought, states and then the federal government began to offer users of the Colorado River financial incentives to reduce their draw on the river.
These incentives encourage land fallowing as a short-term help in addressing the drought, but the long-term goal is to encourage farmers to use the proceeds to modernize their infrastructure, for example, by converting from flood irrigation to drip or micro-irrigation. More efficient irrigation systems will allow farmers to grow more valuable crops and to participate successfully in the competitive international food market. Rather than putting farmers out of business, these incentives allow farmers to adapt, thus ensuring the long-term viability of agricultural com- munities across the West.
Another example of using federal funds to invest in the future is the 2023 decision of the Biden Administration to use $327 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to settle Indian water rights claims. These moneys will provide reliable water supplies for tribes, including tribal farmers.
Second, Lake calls for increasing storage of water by building new dams. The pitch for more dams seems strikingly tone-deaf to the history of dam removal over the last 40 years. From the Kennebec River in Maine to the Klamath in Oregon and California, nearby communities have come to realize that dams impose more environmental costs than the generate in economic benefits. Plus, all the good dam sites are taken and many dams, due to human demands for water and climate change, no longer fill up.
Third, perhaps the centerpiece of her platform is to embark on an aggressive program of ocean desalination. It is possible to take the salt out of ocean water, but it’s costly, energy intensive, and poses a nasty problem of getting rid of the concentrated salt.
Lake thinks that desalination plants “could easily be built along the coastlines of both Mexico and California.” I beg to differ. In 2021-2022, I was a member of the California Salton Sea Management Program’s Independent Review Panel, charged with evaluating proposals to import water to the Salton Sea. Most of the 18 proposals involved ocean desalination. After 18 months of study, the panel endorsed none of them.
In California, there is fierce resistance to ocean desalination projects — even for projects that would generate water for Californians.
Proposals to build in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez contained several fatal flaws. First, what’s in the proposals for Mexico? It turns out: not much. Second, some of these plants are 20 times the size of the largest desalination facility in the United States. These enormous facilities would need to be supported by new, and equally large, power plants and by power lines that brought electricity in from … well, it was never quite clear.
Finally, what would these plants do with the concentrated brine generated by the reverse osmosis process? They would put the brine into the Sea of Cortez, dubbed by Jacques Cousteau as “the aquarium of the world.” The fragile Sea is home to the endangered Vaquita Porpoise, other protected species, and the site of international wetlands of importance protected under inter- national law by the Ramsar Convention.
The Sea is also home to Mexico’s most important fishing industry: shrimp, which annually contributes $260 million to the
nation’s economy and is the largest em- ployer in the Sea area.
Dumping brine into the Sea would be an economic and environmental catastrophe … for Mexico. So much for being a good neighbor.
View this article at: Arizona Daily Star