The Last Drops of Mexico City
mexicocitywater.longlead.com
mexicocitywater.longlead.com
I live in a dry bit of the American west and municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture is often not very efficient because of old water rules that give water to things like hobby farms when real farms downstream don't get what they need.
California has plenty of water for it's people. If you add up ALL residential, commercial and industrial use, including all outdoor landscape watering, baseball fields, golf courses, etc - it all adds up to around 10-20% of the water used (depending on rainfall).
Where does the rest (80-90%) of California's water go? Agriculture. Half the produce of which is exported to other states and countries. Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert? And about half of that rice is exported, much to Asia (!!)
California is rather like Saudi Arabia, with the farmers pumping out all the water and selling it in the form of agricultural produce.
But take a shorter shower please! And you don't really NEED to flush that toilet.
"Golf courses in the US occupy roughly 2 million acres, which is larger than the state of Delaware but smaller than Connecticut."
"California almond growers use between 4.7 to 5.5 million acre-feet of water annually, representing roughly 14.4% to 16.75% of the state's agricultural water consumption"
WHAT THE H#$%?
Is there some better use for roughly 15% of California's water consumption?
Are you sure?
If you want almonds, grow them elsewhere, or switch to desalination.
Almonds are grown in California and not so much elsewhere, because with California's broken water policies you can grow them there for cheaper than elsewhere.
If California were to implement proper water pricing (eg via water trading), then the production costs of almonds in California would rise. And they might rise above the costs in other places, thus leading to a shift in production.
Have a look at water trading in Australia to see a good example of how that can shape agricultural practices. The Australian water trading system ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than the Californian mess. And it allowed agriculture to grow in dollar terms, despite severe limitations on the amount of available water.
If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: https://wcngg.com/2018/08/02/subsurface-drip-irrigation-has-...
More to the point, if water had a market-clearing price, California would stop growing so much alfalfa. Alfalfa uses half, half, of California's water, and California has no unique advantages at all in growing alfalfa.
But to reiterate, your first paragraph is absurd and very silly indeed. Lots of places have super cheap water but California still grows four out of five almonds on Earth. It baffles me that you thought cheap water was a plausible explanation for this.
Obviously, there are plenty of places on earth that have essentially free water, and almost none of them grow almonds.
> If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: [...]
Yes, of course. But that investment costs more money compared to what they are getting away with today, so on the margin we would see less almonds grown in California.
Your suggestion that a reasonably priced water would drop alfalfa production in California a lot more than almond production seems reasonable.
(A slight complication: the fields currently growing alfalfa would presumably grow something else instead of lying fallow. As a second order effect that might lead to more almonds being grown. It would depend on a lot of factors.)
That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.
I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.
[1] - https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/can-climate-af...
Exactly. Capitalism is already a contestable proposition, but capitalism with infinite money cheats for some?
Without proper accounting of externalities, capitalism does not work even in theory. This means water and all natural resources, it means pollution, it means harmful products like tobacco or social media, it means big cars... So on so on
There’s other reasons like California’s climate supporting a double growing season for many plants but the fertility is what really makes it so economically competitive. Farmers still have to use tons of NPK fertilizer like everyone else but most of the micronutrients are already in the ground so it’s a lot easier to get high yields with low risk and little micro optimization.
Rice benefits from flooding for weed control (because it is unusually flood resistant), but doesn't consume a lot of water (the water from flooding is available for downstream use.)
If you want to complain about water-intenaive crops in CA, the issue is almonds, not rice.
Also, while there are parts of CA that are desert or “almost desert” (desert or semi-arid climate), the area around Sacramento is hot-summer Mediterranean.
For example cow milk uses more water in absolute terms, and more water per calorie, than almond milk.
https://milkyplant.com/en-us/blogs/the-latest/environmental-...
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...
These were just two of the several sources I found, at each extreme. There was similar variation for cow milk.
Considering that it takes roughly 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond, and that 23 almonds wouldn't fill even an 8oz cup, I'm guessing that the higher end of the spectrum is probably more accurate for almond milk.
It also looks like almond milk has half the calories per gallon of skim milk and 1/4 that of whole milk.
A more reputable source would be https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks which lists almond milk as half the freshwater volume of dairy milk, and far better at every other metric (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication).
So you'd have to stretch things much farther than you did in your post for dairy milk to have an edge over almond milk. And even if you somehow did it, then dairy milk would have to then beat out soy milk which is even better than almond milk in all of these metrics, which it won't. If you care about environmental impact, dairy milk just isn't going to be in the cards. Let it take the L.
Soy milk splits when mixed with coffee though, and doesn't really have a neutral enough taste, for that I find oat milk works great.
I can't tell if it's a change in cultivar or transcontinental transport, but something bad happened with almonds in Europe.
On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.
The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.
Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.
Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.
> but doesn't consume a lot of water
That's fine if it's a place for, say, children to play, but most of them do not get used that way.
The lawns get wrapped up in that residential water usage figure mentioned further up the chain, so it isn't a whole lot compared to Big Ag.
Also fun fact, a lot of farm managers in Saudi Arabia are either Scottish or Australian.
That's not really accurate. Much of California is Mediterranean climate, including all of Sacramento county. Yes, there's some desert in California, but most of the agriculture happens elsewhere; but it depends on what you mean by 'almost a desert', a lot of the central valley is classified as arid and that's where a lot of the agriculture happens. A lot of people also live in (different) arid parts of California though, maybe they should move to where fresh water is easier to access :P
Also, the terrain means it's relatively easy to move water from the north around the central valley, but difficult to move it from the north or central valley to the greater LA area. Elsewhere in the thread, people claim water is fungible, and it mostly is, but location is important, and moving water in Bakersfield to Los Angeles is non trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_California#/media/F...
That said, rice consumes a lot of irrigation water:
"In California, there is very little to no rainfall during the rice growing season, so this is not usually considered in water budgets. On average, about 5 acre feet/acre (AF/ac) of irrigation water is applied to a rice field during the growing"
https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiceTestSite/files/328501.pdf
Also, rice is not a particularly big water consumer compared to other crops - it's just one that came to mind. You could pick from dozens of others - Almonds, pistachios, etc.
California simply uses a LOT of water to produce a LOT of food, about half of it being exported.
But central valley agriculture only makes $37 billion a year.
> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.
- https://www.perkins.com/en_GB/campaigns/powernews/features/c...
(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).
I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.
The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.
Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).
Yeah good luck with this one
Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?
Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.
Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.
This situation came with the territory. By contrast, California's agriculture is 100% dependent on massive hydroengineering projects.
Perhaps the key insight required to explain the 20th century.
It has the force of truth: now that I see it put so simply, I struggle to understand why no one has been able to do so before.
Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive. There are optimizations you can make with regards to which kind of agriculture is done where.
If the only way you can grow almonds is by mining water out of an aquifer that will deplete in a decade, maybe we should go without almonds. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Water pricing via water trading would help move these considerations of trade-offs to the private sector.
> Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive.
Just as a silly nitpick: you can make food without agriculture. And it's not just via wild fishing, but also by directly producing edible substances from minerals, like producing margarine from coal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
In general, you are obviously right, though.
Firstly, the water mostly doesn't leave california. If they're exporting dried rice and almonds and things like that, most of the irrigation water is staying right where it was used, correct? You say water is consumed, as if it goes away or vanishes? Evaporated water or underground water is also water.
Secondly, you're giving jobs and supporting the local economy. Farmers purchase supplies, capital goods, they pay property taxes, and first and foremost they employ people. They employ large workforces. All that revenue they received from selling wherever they sell is stimulating local economies.
Lastly, exporting food is great international relations. What country will attack you when they depend on you for food? What nation will not be grateful for receiving such basic sustenance from overseas? And if we would go to war, and if you want to shut down all this agriculture, what will we eat on the home front? If we can't import food, we'd better have infrastructure to support our own needs. Any nation [state, county, city] that produces excess food is more likely to withstand siege, blockade or attack.
Liquor and soda bottlers can pivot to producing and distributing hand sanitizer or bottled water. If beer or Coke is bad for you, keep drinking it anyway, because you never know when that industry will become indispensable.
Wrong for you individually, perhaps, but please note that "The Good of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few", and as citizens of the Western Empire, we are called to make sacrifice in order that justice be done in the world. My personal private toilet is insignificant and inconsequential compared to the almighty almond.
Hobby farms with several cows and a shop that sells maple syrup consum eabout 1/10000th a percent of water as for example con-agra suppliers, nestle etc.
There is the constantly rotating story of "this one small family farm in colorado uses more of california's water than LA county". That is a LARGE conglomerate farm which is part of the corporate farm problem, not mom and pop farms.
I assure you;In the USA specifically, your families ability to eat and provide food for the things we eat WILL be more important in the long run than bathing or washing clothes, until we decide that beef proteins aren't the msot sustainable.
"It exemplifies a future that cities worldwide could face if global warming and overpopulation continue."
The city where I live is, I'm sure, very different from Mexico City, but we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown, thanks to things like xeriscaping. I imagine things are more difficult in Mexico City because there is less money, and orders of magnitude more people.
I don't know where you live, but if it is a city like most others, you've likely reduced your per-capita water use, but not total water use. This is certainly true of most cities in the American west. They have made impressive (above 30%) reductions in per-capita water use, but they have (in many cases) grown by more than that.
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug... is really informative.
https://www.context.news/ai/thirsty-data-centres-spring-up-i...
This is a thing that has been more than a decade in the making, mostly because Queretaro does not have seismic activity and is only a couple of hours north of Mexico City.
While the water sources are completely different, both regions are prone to intense water seasons and, in the last couple of years, intense droughts.
More specifically, Queretaro is a semi-desert, so this behavior is a bit more expected.
Aside: Coming from personal experience I don't think that current agricultural methods are the best and are pron to wasting water, at least what I remember from Queretaro
If you check the link in my comment these are not the data centers close to the city which everyone knows but newer ones in Colón.
Funny thing the english wikipedia article does not even mention it. But yeah, Each of those Cloud providers, have at least 3 buildings distributed on multiple industrial parks in the metropolitan area and I'm not even mentioning the ones from Kio Networks, IBM (SoftLayer). We are one step away from having one from OVH and Hetzner.
The only data center I know that is in the middle of the city of Queretaro is the one from Triara (aka Telmex, one of the many companies from Carlos Slim). Most of them are in the outskirts of the urban area.
1. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_metropolitana_de_Quer%C3%...
Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.
You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably commercially viable.
I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.
Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.
And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?
"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".
What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.
As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.
I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?
There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.
Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about
The grading is assumed.
There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.
The market is typically not a great place to solve conflict. Unless you're the richer party, of course.
Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.
> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.
Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?
> is it just a mispricing of the water?
...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
> Having it generate a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
> 10 to 50 queries consume about 2 litres of water (½ gallon).2
I've long heard that they lobby to prevent the local Government in CDMX from providing potable water in order to protect their bottled water and water-delivery business, but I actually don't know how well substantiated those accusations are.
On the positive side of things, Mexico City gets a ton of rain during the wet season which can be harvested with rooftop collectors.
They along with Iztapalapa are the former slum towns. How much of the water crisis can be attributed to the fact that these were all unplanned muncipalities, with split governance between Mexico State and CDMX
Edit: Yep, looks like only 15% of water in Mexico is allocated to human consumption and the rest is for agriculture and manufacturing [0].
Now I'm curious how many seats in Estado Mexico's assembly are within the CDMX metro and how many are not. If majority of them aren't within the CDMX metro then it's the classic democracy dilemma you see in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, etc as well.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2024/11/26/mexico-water-crisis-claudia...
But American sewage systems are also functional and maintained/upgraded.
I'm not sure how DPW-style work is funded or managed at the municipality level in MX.
That said, now I'm curious about how public funds are disbursed to localities. How do local municipalities and unincorporated areas get services funded in Mexico?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
Thermoelectric power plants—including coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants—boil water to create steam, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity. Cooling water is passed through the steam leaving the turbine to cool and condense the steam. This step reduces the steam's exit pressure and recaptures its heat, which is then used to preheat fluid entering the boiler.
U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
The reason why 1st world cities look "cleaner" is because every single sq inch is either paved or turfed with grass.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
Thanks so much for reading!
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)
1. Being RSS-compatible would unbundle the editorial and art from the design. I wish RSS readers and aggregators would support our builds, but they do not. We do produce newsletters (currently through Substack) that do/would, but those are very different editorial products.
2. I understand this critique. We have outgrown this build, and are looking to develop a new website this year. It was good when we were starting out, but it doesn't serve our readership well anymore -- as you're pointing out!
With that being said, I understand your perspective. I’ve grappled with this myself. Please note that having RSS does not mandate that there’s content attached to each entry. It can “just” be a title, date, stable id like your slug, and a link. That way, if you insist on directing visitors to your own site, that can be done, while still allowing the reader to get updates in their reader.
I can assure you that if you add an RSS feed, I will regularly consume your content. If you don’t, I won’t even know it exists. For all the faults of legacy media, attaining readership is not one of them. They’d all remove RSS feeds in an instant if they could without loosing readers.
Wouldn't want to read this on a phone though I tell you hwhat.
It does have an unneeded text-scrolling-up effect, and breaks reader view which means they're doing something sinister, but at least reader view isn't actually necessary in this one for the way it looks
Most decently designed sites know how to respond to different screen sizes.
Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
Thanks so much for reading!
It's like a 0.1% damage over time effect. A few days drinking it? Fine. A few weeks? Still fine. Months? I started feeling just a bit more sick until I cut it out for filtered water.
>Mexico City was built on top of what used to be a large body of water, which would make its water shortage appear ironic if it wasn’t so tragic. In the early 1300s, the Mexica (or Aztecs) settled on an island in the middle of what used to be a huge lake called Texcoco, the largest among five intertwined lakes.
But after the arrival of the Spaniards, the city started to expand, and the urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up. By the early 20th century, the rivers feeding the once-rich lake zone were put into pipelines to make way for motor vehicles. Very little is left of the lakes, while the rivers have become practically invisible.
More reading for anyone interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexico_City#Floodin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco#Artificial_draina... https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2022/09/mexico-citys-desage-of-160...
It is at the root of the problem. Coca Cola is the most known absurd operator of this industry. National water is too cheap and used by private company for nearly nothing. Vicente Fox was a president of Coca Cola company in Mexico before becoming the president of Mexico, you can guess the « colonisation » was easier by that. (Coca Cola isn't alone, it is just the most known, Danone, the French company is also plundering Mexico water for example, AI datacenter too, ...).
Coca cola is known to be responsible for the drying of Monterrey and San Cristobal de Las Casas.
When I look at the pictures, I see most people are overweight (some are outright fat and obese). Is that just by accident on these particular pictures with a tiny sample size? Or is that a problem in Mexico?
I'm from Europe and when I think about Mexico, I do not have overweight people in my mind, instead a relatively healthy diet of local produce. Is that a misconception?
Thanks for sharing
It cost around 10 pesos (50 cents) to fill a 19 liter (5 gallon) jug. That’s cheaper than a single 12oz can of coca cola
"A key reason for the rise in consumption is its availability and, in many cases, its lower cost compared to drinking water. In many rural communities in Chiapas, access to safe drinking water is limited, local stores are well-stocked with Coca-Cola, and the company's marketing campaigns have ensured that the drink is always within everyone's reach."
Or has all science been defunded at this point?
https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
I know some US warships have massive desalination plants onboard, are they nuclear powered? Can we use the new micro-nuclear-reactors to power those for cities?
Is this using "need" to only mean "there is no possible alternative in any design"?
Your statement -implies- datacenters don't use water for cooling or, if they do, it isn't enough to cause any problem.
How do you square this with the fact that lots of datacenters DO use water for cooling? Yes, if water was prohibitively expensive businesses would find alternatives - that's what prohibitively expensive means so I'm not adding anything more than a tautology here.
Similarly does your claim that at worst this is a mispricing of water mean that they DO use water and it drives the cost up? Isn't that the point here, that businesses driving up the cost of water is bad for the people that also need (your definition of "need" above) water?
I would think they only need cheap electricity, connectivity and in the case of Mexico, far away from seismic activity.
Your claim is that increasing the price of a basic utility by several hundred percent to prevent a company from using a huge amount of it is a fake problem? That sounds like complete bullshit to me, and I don't even live in a city that's collapsing into the ground due to aquifer overuse.
And there’s no reason you have to charge industrial users of water less than residential users if the real price (meaning the cost to replace that water) is higher than the residential price. 0.6¢/gallon is less than I pay and I live in a wet city. I pay about 2¢/gallon. So for industrial electricity rates of 5-7¢/kWh, A/C is approximately a wash vs using residential water for cooling.
Cool story. But every human needs water, and no data center needs water. Why should every person have to pay more to live just to prevent Amazon from breaking the world for a tiny increase in profits?
Good faith engagement on this topic probably requires thinking for 5 seconds if the objection you raised isn’t easily addressed by common methods already.
Additionally, industrial/industrial-scale-agricultural uses of water are almost always more sensitive to water prices. An incredibly poor population would benefit from the tax revenues and jobs offered by companies moving in.
Desalination also doesn't help inland areas like Mexico city, as there'd also be large costs to pump the water from the coasts - Mexico City is 2200m above sea level.
The only nuclear powered surface vessels left in the US fleet are the Aircraft Super-carriers, and their water is created for supporting itself - ~5-6K sailors and any that's needed for operations (cleaning, steam launchers on the Nimitz, etc).
Nuclear micro-reactors are still a ways away and are probably not a viable option for developing countries - Mexico currently has only one nuclear power plant. There is probably a future for nuclear powered desalination for coastal cities in arid areas, but it won't help everywhere.
If climate change continues and water becomes something to fight over like oil was in the 20th century, then we may finally see traction on both fronts.
Renewables should still be competitive in certain cases, though.
Terrible craftmansship in the HTML/CSS department.
What exactly are you calling terrible?