The Times Spiked an Op-Ed for Saying Farmers Should Pay for Water

Even The New York Times is aware that the American West is running out of water. The editorial board approached agricultural scientist and science communicator Sarah Taber for an op-ed and then changed their mind when she replied that her argument was “make farmers pay for water.”

Editorial judgment runs both ways. The New York Times can decline to run a column for any reason. But Dr. Taber is an expert and also a skilled science communicator. Why back away at this point?

My guess is that my Vichy counterparts were afraid of two things. First, a vital part of The New York Times’ propaganda project is depicting farmers as Real Americans, closer to the land and more authentic than urban types who read the paper.

Dr. Taber has constantly pointed out that modern farms are highly capitalized medium-sized businesses, and their owners commensurately wealthy and educated. Farm-owners, as opposed to farm-workers, are upper class by any definition. Farms are also reliant on a robust network of government subsidies, from outright payments to the infrastructure legacy of the Bureau of Reclamation which built ecologically devastating and unprofitable dams across the American West. Farm owners might be wearing Carhartt instead of Brooks Brothers, but strip away the aesthetics and it’s another businessman complaining that he can’t figure out how to make money with all the money he has and needs a public bailout.

One recent example of the genre: a thousand words on the Watsons’ last season without ever saying what 326 acres and a herd are worth, or who ends up owning them.

The second reason is more subtle and systemic. Water issues are intimately tied to climate change, and have similar political solutions. Roughly, water in the American West is distributed through a system of senior rights, where the date you started using the water decides whether you keep it in a shortage. And if people don’t use all their rights each year they lose them. It is a deliberately wasteful and inefficient system, and even “expensive” agricultural water is hundreds to thousands of times cheaper than what we pay per gallon.

Water rights desperately need to be reformed. And reforming water rights is the same kind of political project as decarbonization: it means telling people that an asset they were counting on is worth far less than they thought. There are many possible paths through the energy transition, all of which require investment in the present, and all of which imply that current fossil assets, from proven reserves to refineries to gas stations, are worth far less than their owners have booked them at — or are outright liabilities.

The energy transition will be messy. There will be losers. The New York Times prefers mass extinction to the possibility their allies might lose.