The Great Lake Is Dying. Utah Leaders Are Lying.
i flew back into Salt Lake this weekend, and the moment i looked out the window my stomach dropped.
i knew Utah was in trouble. i’ve watched the stories on the news. i’ve attempted to dig into the science. i’ve personally watched Utah Lake shrink and the Great Salt Lake retreat for years from the ground. But there’s a difference between knowing and seeing.
From 30,000 feet, our state looks like a body running out of blood. Utah Lake is smaller. The Great Salt Lake is honestly unrecognizable. Long, pale stretches of exposed lakebed where water used to be, looking less like geography and more like a wound.
i’ve been around a bit. i’ve lived in Utah most of my life. i have never seen it look like this.
Being a data person, i came home and pulled the data. Because if we’re going to talk about what’s happening to this state, i want to do it the way i do everything else, backed by data.
The numbers, since you’ll need them
The lake is at a historic low. As of April 2026, the south arm of the Great Salt Lake hit a new record about an inch below the 1963 low and the USGS expects another foot of decline in the coming months. The lake peaked this spring at 4,192.6 feet, more than five feet below what scientists call the minimum healthy level (4,198 feet). It’s expected to drop again now as evaporation outpaces inflow.
This year’s snowpack was the worst on record. Utah’s 2026 snowpack was the lowest ever measured, and peaked three weeks early. State officials are calling it the “no-pack” year. The director of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team said this year blows out of the water the previous record-low snowpack years (2018, 1977, 1934). Small reservoirs are already in trouble. The town of Emery had to cut off secondary water for the season. Last year my city’s secondary water reservoir literally ran dry.
Agriculture is the biggest water user and one crop dominates. Roughly 65–80% of all the water Utah diverts goes to agriculture, depending on which methodology you trust. Of that, hay (mostly alfalfa, a non-native crop with deep water needs) uses roughly half of every drop diverted in the state. Over 80% of Utah’s irrigated farmland is dedicated to alfalfa, pasture, or hay.
Hay contributes about 0.2% of Utah’s GDP. That’s roughly the same share as amusement parks.
About 29% of Utah’s hay harvest is exported overseas. Roughly two-thirds of those exports go to China.
So we are in a generational drought, with a dying lake whose collapse threatens the air we breathe, and we are using the majority of our diverted water to grow non-native cattle feed that we ship overseas, mostly to one country, for an industry that contributes a fifth of one percent to our economy.
Read that again. i’ll wait.
The data center problem
While the lake dies, our state is racing to triple data center capacity.
We currently host 48 operational data centers drawing about 920 megawatts of power. Another 2,600 megawatts are under construction or in planning, including a hyperscale facility near Delta. Last week Kevin O’Leary’s proposed mega-campus in Hansel Valley north of Brigham City got buried under formal protest filings at the Utah Division of Water Rights from residents who don’t want to hand their aquifer to a celebrity investor’s AI ambitions.
i do want to be fair here. Some new data centers are designed for genuine water efficiency. Some of the water concerns are overstated relative to ag and lawn use. A respected BYU ecologist has said data center water demand “shouldn’t start our hair on fire” compared to alfalfa but i won’t pretend the picture is so simple.
Here is my concern.
In September of last year, Governor Cox stood on the shore of the dying lake, surrounded by developers, and committed Utah to refilling it by the 2034 Winter Olympics. Doing that requires roughly 800,000 additional acre-feet of inflow per year, every year between now and 2034.
You cannot promise to refill the lake AND triple the load of one of the most water-intensive industries in the world. The maths doesn’t math. Either the pledge is pure performance or the data center expansion is reckless. Both can’t be true.
And our state leadership is acting like both can be true.
And then there’s the part that should make every Utahn a bit uneasy
You’d think a state staring down a generational water crisis would at least let its students talk about it freely.
Last week, a University of Utah student named Raquel Juarez was told by an administrator to remove the phrase “environmental justice” from her Earth Day event flyers. She was also told to remove the phrase “communities disproportionately affected by climate change” from an email advertisement.
This isn’t a rumor spread on social media. The Salt Lake Tribune reported it April 22. On April 29, U of U faculty did something they rarely do, they publicly called the administration’s action overreach and demanded an apology to the student.
The mechanism is HB 261, Utah’s 2024 anti-DEI law, passed along partisan lines and signed by a partisan, alfalfa farmer, Governor Cox, then reinforced in January 2025 by a federal executive order that explicitly named “environmental justice” as a category to be tracked and dismantled.
Note carefully what is and isn’t being banned here. The University of Utah still has a Climate Action Plan. It still has the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy. It still offers a Climate Change certificate whose webpage literally states, “Human alteration of Earth’s climate is an accepted scientific fact.”
The science is fine. What got the red pen was the language of who pays the price the framing that says, “yes, this is a chemistry problem, AND it lands hardest on poor and brown communities first.”
That’s the part the state has decided you can’t say out loud.
i am not going to soften this. That is a disgusting act by the University of Utah and Utah’s elected officials.
What this is really about
We are not having an honest conversation about Utah’s future. We are having a partisan slap-fight while the literal foundation of the state, water, collapses underneath us.
The “Utah is a great state for business” narrative? Yeah, that only works if Utah is a place people want to live. It only works if your kids can breathe the air. It only works if your housing investment isn’t sitting at the edge of a toxic dust bowl. It only works if the tech corridor isn’t choking on lakebed arsenic.
Right now we are betting all of that on the assumption that someone or something God? Snow? Hope? Prayer? will fix the water problem before the music stops. Or better said, it’s blatant science denial and identity politics dressed up as economic development.
What i want
i’m a small business owner. i’m not a lawmaker. i’m not a climate scientist. i run a small data consultancy and i write about topics for people who are tired of corporate bullshit.
But i have eyes. And a plane window. And kids. And a state i love even if the state doesn’t love me.
So here’s what i want:
i want our political leaders to stop scoring points and start telling the truth. The current trajectory ends badly. There is no path to a healthy Great Salt Lake AND tripled data center capacity AND alfalfa-as-usual. Pick.
i want our business community (Hi Silicon Slopes 👋 tech bros) to stop hiding behind “we’re investing in efficiency.” Efficiency is necessary but it is not sufficient. If we can get on a stage to celebrate moving HQs to Lehi, we can get on a stage to demand the legislature fix water rights so that conservation isn’t punished and exporting hay to China isn’t subsidized.
i want the University of Utah’s leadership to apologize to Raquel Juarez, restore her flyers, and stop using a bad law as cover for self-censorship. i want our universities to be the loudest voices on this crisis, not the quietest.
i want every Utah CEO and founder reading this, and i know who you are, to ask yourselves whether you’ve been honest in public about what’s happening here. Or whether you’ve been polite. Or whether you just don’t care as long as your bank account keeps getting bigger.
i’m done being polite, if i ever was polite to begin with.
The lake is dying. Our leaders are lying. The students are getting silenced. And the rest of us are watching it all happen like the outcome doesn’t have any real impact on us and our children.
Wake up.
Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, Utah Division of Water Resources, Great Salt Lake Strike Team / Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, Utah News Dispatch, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah College of Mines and Earth Sciences, Sustainable Waters / Environmental Challenges (Richter et al. 2025), Grist, Multistate Policy Watch, Utah News Dispatch reporting on Hansel Valley protests (May 2026).