Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while.
The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.
I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.
I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.
Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.
Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.
For example, quite a lot of meat and feed for meat production is produced in Iowa where there is virtually zero irrigation and the water table comes up to the surface and not only do we not conserve water, we put down grids of porous pipes in the ground to drain rainwater faster.
No water shortages are affected by this at all, you southwest state people aren’t downstream.
There aren’t water shortages everywhere. Plenty of places it rains quite enough.
77% of all water use in the US southwest (not Iowa) is for agriculture. 32% of all water use in the US southwest is used on alfafa, corn silage and grass hay, specifically for beef production, grown here, in the US southwest.
This can help clear up misunderstandings:
https://www.vox.com/23373495/western-us-water-scarcity-droug...
The drought under discussion in in the US southwest, not Iowa, not New England, not the Great Lakes. It makes no difference if those other areas have more or less water, since there are no connections to the "great basin" (the drainage area of the Colorado and Rio Grande) from outside,
Iowa is east of the 100th meridian, traditionally the line where irrigation is not technically required for agricltural production (though it may still be used). The drought under discussion is west of that line, and agricultural production is generally impossible there without irrigation.
What I'm saying is all meat is not equal, and quite a lot of it is produced in places where water isn't an issue. Many places simply should not produce certain agricultural products, go fight for that instead of telling people their food choices are immoral. California and other southwest states stupidly setting agricultural policy for this kind of wasteful water usage are problems with those states and their governance, not people who like to eat cheeseburgers.
>not technically required for agricltural production
Is in many places entirely unused.
After about twelve months of this and getting sick of it, we settled on meals that usually have meat, but using less of it. For example; Pad Thai usually calls for mostly animal protein + noodles + tofu, so we usually pad it out with lots more vegetables, which is healthier anyway.
In 2015, Intel, the largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, used nine billion gallons of water
Hmm, I bet they build their factories by the Great lakes then!
Oh - Intel’s new Arizona fabs to be production ready in 2024, creating more than 3,000 high-tech jobs [0]
I better start taking really short showers to make up for that!
[0] https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-t...
"Irrigated agriculture is the largest user of water in Arizona, consuming about 74 percent of the available water supply." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture
"In Arizona, approximately 15 percent of the water supply is for commercial, industrial and institutional uses." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial
So it's on us to do everything we can to optimize the last 10% of all the available water.
To be clear I think we all should do our part, but there are so many misleading news stories that fail to even acknowledge the reality of our water distribution.
California is important but remove Grapes and Almonds and some of the other non essentials (like avocados, sweet potatoes, etc) and California is somewhere at the bottom of the top 10.
Compare that to #2 on the list, Iowa. If Iowa didn’t produce the $17bn of “grains, oilseeds, dry beans, etc”, then large swaths of the Americas experience severe nutrition issues.
I love California and live here, but let’s not kid ourselves - the Midwest feeds the US
You know what I meant when I said “Midwest”.
Again, the point of the article was that drought conditions are occurring and, in CA, 75% of the water consumption is due to “agriculture” as has been stated above, and after removing commercial uses, only 11% is residential.
My insinuation is that (1) Agriculture is the key impactor of drought conditions, (2) when policy makers and those with your opinions talk about the problem being irrigated water uses, it’s always deflected as “CA feeds the US, we have to protect it” giving the industry a free pass, (3) If we put in policy, like paying fairly for water, the industry would be impacted negatively, but as your document proves - it wouldn’t substantially impact core nutrition of the US - just the convenience of a bunch of rich wine and charcuterie consumers.
(Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?)
sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...
Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants. Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.
Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.
"About 80% of that water was captured after use and purified at treatment plants operated by Intel and the city of Chandler, then either returned to the fabs for reuse in manufacturing or its cooling towers, or reused within the city or injected into the ground to recharge the aquifer."
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...
Oh wow, about 1/3 of the 5 billion gallons of water this one campus was used at least more than once. Problem solved!
The whole process of setting up the system was a lot of fun and a lot of work. The soil here is quite hard, so I got a great workout digging the trenches.
I know my overall impact is negligible, but have a general sense of well-being by having the system. You could say the same about the solar systems I set up as well. I could just as easily pay Tucson Electric and Power as they are setting up big solar arrays now.
A drought will curtail inefficient agriculture, but that's about it. There's immense untapped recycling potential.
0: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial
But industries and Ag exist in a region for a reason, and none of it is related to water. Most industries (esp Ag) exist within vast contractor, raw material supply and labor networks. That means vast support networks, families, kids in school etc. that can't be moved on a whim.
With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
(Disclaimer: I grew up in Arizona. There are great people there and they deserve great jobs. But water intensive farming in an actual desert is not a valid solution)
> With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
The desalinization plants could be located nearly anywhere on the coast and we already have lots and lots of pipes running water from reservoirs both above and below ground. It's hard to imagine this being a NIMBY issue. (This seems more like continuing to blame residential areas.)
It might be sold as a NIMBY issue by agriculture lobbyists since agriculture absolutely will not want to pay for it. But this is all about agriculture wanting a cheap, infinite supply of water.
Optimizing crops is fine, but simply biting around the edges of the problem of scarcity assuming you're making progress is what's caused most of these problems.
[1] https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali...