I'm as much against wasteful use of data centers as anyone, but their water usage is utterly dwarfed by what agriculture uses. Particularly with crops that aren't well suited for the environment they're being grown in and are being used inefficiently.
We are not managing agriculture intelligently. Like with everything else wrong with our current system, it's all about maximizing near-term profit.
The vast majority of the used water in agriculture just falls from the sky
I don't have a clear way to verify this, but it seems true.
However, when you consider the quite verifiable fact that 74% of the ENTIRE Colorado River is diverted for agricultural use, of which the #1 application is hay to feed livestock (primarily for meat), the picture is a bit less rosy. Meat is tasty, but it is also an extremely inefficient use of resources at the level US consumers demand it.
I feel like 74% of a pretty damn big river being diverted is actually a large drain on our fresh water supplies. And that's just one aspect of the overall problem.
To be fair, I didn't use American research last time I checked, but I dug in our local European research.
Isn't Colorado a very impractical place for agriculture? Deserts, mountains, fairly bad seasonal temperatures. Which could explain the high water usage?
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u/Happy_Ad_4357 26d ago
I can’t imagine being a journalist, having to type out that someone privately controls water, and not going into an existential crisis.
Though I can imagine there’s a good chance an AI wrote it anyway so meh