Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.
1. Numbers from a pro-almond group: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
I actually wonder if there is not single moderately sized industry that does not have some interest group...
They're basically necessary to do business in an advanced society that has rules governing every aspect of life. Those rules (even if good) often have unintended consequences and advocacy groups can help ensure that their industries are considered when rule-making.
Like, the only reason "almond advocacy" even exists is because dairy and beef are some of the most lobbied and blessed industries in America. They can practically do whatever they want, whenever they want, so fuck you, pal.
lobbyists will advocate for taking the water right from under the noses of the workers, and the workers will turn around and praise their employer for maintaining their jobs... it's often some kind of perverse shell game
at the end of the day the owners fly off to wherever with a pile of money and the workers are left without jobs or water — these false dichotomies of "if it weren't for lobbyists all jobs would be regulated away" is often used to disenfranchise people from actually changing these systems
It only becomes advocacy when you take the money out of it.
>In a series of secret meetings in 1994, the Resnicks seized control of California’s public water supply. Now they’ve built a business empire by selling it back to working people.
https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
The level of subsidy the relatively unimportant crops get with their basically free water is astounding, especially considering the high urban prices of water
Not exactly the same, but can I interest you in a caramel-waffle-oat-milk latte?
The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.
While almond milk is an incomplete substitute for bovine mammary secretions, it is so much closer than candy corn that it has been used as a substitute for the last 800 or so years, and shared the "milk"-ness in the name before we had an English language:
The word “milk” has been used since around 1200 AD to refer to plant juices.
This makes this use of the word older than English people spelling the thing chickens lay as "eggs" rather than "eyren": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5znvym68k
The Romans called lettuce "lactūca", derived from lac (“milk”), because of the milky fluid in its stalks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lettuce
Similar examples abound.
For example, I grew up in the UK, where a standard Christmas seasonal food is the "mince pie", which is filled with "mincemeat". While this can be (and traditionally was) done with meat derivatives, in practice those sold in my lifetime have been almost entirely vegetarian. The etymology being when "meat" was the broad concept of food in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat
Further examples of this: today we speak of the "flesh" and "skin" of an apple.
Personally, I don't like almond milk. But denying that something which got "milk" in its name due to it's use as a milk-like-thing, before our language evolved from cross-breeding medieval German with medieval French, to argue against someone who said "Insofar as it is used for milk", is a very small nit to be picking.
Candy corn in my coffee wouldn't taste anywhere near as good
Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.
Animal agriculture is wildly inefficient and honestly it's not surprising because you have to keep living moving animals around for it.
California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.
And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.
That's insane
Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.
Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.
But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ
The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.
A microcosm of the US problem basically.
No one wants to be reminded that their 4 oz burger they had for lunch used 460 gallons of water to produce.
It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.
IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.
I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"
My understanding is that the closed-loop systems are rather new; like, "we started using these things in 2024 literally because everyone's been moaning about our AI water usage" new. I'd assume that many new constructions are starting to leverage them, but its not 100%, and existing DCs would be slow to upgrade.
Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.
Beef and milk are harvested ready to eat. Vegan substitutes are all highly processed. Processed food consumption is associated with greater cancer and diabetes risk.
It isn't meaningless due to industrial farming. Chickens and pigs are even more likely to be industrially farmed than cattle are.
If we lowered our meat consumption by about 90% then we wouldn't need to industrially farm meat and the 10% would be much more ecologically justifiable.
Then the problem is that the soy we've replaced our meat with is industrially farmed...
If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.
It is inconceivable that American's consume as much beef as they do, yet production has been able to scale without resorting to factory-farming. Every other commodity food is factory farmed. It's asinine to think beef is immune to that.
What's really asinine is that you have such strong opinions about a subject you know nothing about and demand that other people do research for you.
Feedlots are absolutely necessary at the levels that American's consume beef. It might look like there isn't a shortage of pasture for cows, but the truth is there is not enough land to transition to 100% grass-fed with American's level of consumption. [1]
Glad to see you finally looked it up and saw that I was right. Your attempt to save face is amusing though. From "factory farmed" to "the pastures are a bit small" is funny.
And no, feed lots aren't necessary. They make beef cheaper by making cows bigger, therefore making the industry more profitable, but if you did away with them Americans would still be eating enough beef to make urban vegan weenies seethe.
I agree pigs are raised in abominable conditions.
Compared to an almond? Who the fuck eats almond steaks? It's a nonsensical comparison. If you want less fat and more protein per calorie, chicken beats beef. Chicken also has a lower water and carbon footprint.
> Vegan substitutes are all highly processed
Beans aren't "highly processed". Learn to cook and you'll understand that there are options besides processed food for vegetarians and vegans.
This book is science, front to back, cementing the idea that animal products are not ideal for human health. https://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/16...
And also, what? You'll die if you don't eat meat today? Because that's what "immediately" means. That's news to all the world's vegetarians.
Most people attribute this difference to the GDP/capita ($89,600 vs. $12,132 PPP) or the number of doctors per capita (36.082 vs. 7.265 per 10k), not the diet.
But agreed that diet is also not the only link to longevity. Although a Mediterranean diet is higher on plant based foods, considered healthier, and those countries do have better life expectancy than USA.
https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick3/
The protein doesn't necessarily have to come from beef, although that is one of the highest quality sources in terms of digestibility (for most people) and essential amino acid balance.
It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
The upper limit seems to be 1g per lb (454g) of body weight. This is for people who lift heavy regularly to build and grow muscle. The lower bound is about 1/3 of that.
A 165 lb person needs about 55g of protein daily for maintenance. This is about one cup of black beans and 3 eggs. Huevos rancheros for breakfast will cover most or all of an average person's daily protein needs and that's before even counting the protein in the cheese or tomatoes.
While vegetables don't have much protein it still adds up. A single medium tomato has 1g, a potato has 3g, 1g in an onion, 0.5g in a carrot, and so on. Eat your daily portion of veggies and you can get maybe 10g of protein. That's nearly 20% of what you need!
Carb-heavy foods such as breads and rice also have some protein. More than veggies, less than lentils, eggs, dairy, and meat. A standard serving of pasta has 7g of protein. A cup of cooked brown rice has 5g.
All of this is to say even vegans who eat a healthy, varied diet are not deficient in protein. If they are ovo-lacto vegetarians it's a layup. They may need to supplement with whey and creatine or eat some chicken a few times a week if they want to squat 3 plates.
Insufficient protein is mostly not a problem in the first-world. The problem is eating crap. Eating grass-fed steaks every meal doesn't compensate for a crap diet.
Lots of sources of complete protein on there besides beef. Don't limit yourself. A combination of quinoa, buckwheat, eggs, soy, pea, milk, whey, beans, and nuts will provide all the amino acids you need. Even beef, despite being a complete protein, is deficient in tryptophan.
I like meat. I'm not a militant vegetarian or vegan or anything like that. I dislike the laundering of people's love of eating meat as "essential for health", when it's anything but (special dietary needs aside). Eating meat is a mostly a choice.
I'll repeat again: varied diets are essential. A single protein source won't cut it. And most people get enough protein going just by raw numbers.
You've been pretty reasonable. Not everyone is.
But "Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above" is an insane thing to say in a random online conversation. No, you cannot expect people to listen to a whole podcast to make whatever random unsubstantiated point you have. Explain the important things you took away from the podcast and link it as a reference for if people disbelieve you for whatever reason.
Presumably, after a cow is done being used for milk, it can then be sold for meat.
So you wouldn't want an old cow steak, but a stew or burger made from an old cow can be awesome.
Dairy cows from commercial confinement dairies are a different matter. They eat almost exclusively grain and develop horrible health problems.
Yet the same can be said of any meat produced in a CAFO, when compared to that produced on most small farms. Garbage in, garbage out.
I am critical of this metric though, since the water isn't really lost in many cases. Especially if datacenters use water never meant for consumption.
If you look at it as a power generation problem it become much more plastic. That is of course as long as the water doesn't get expended in regions that lack it.
Although if you want to compare datacenter usage to agriculture, you could say that one is more essential than the other. Even if modern agriculture is a high tech industry that uses datacenters.
The real waste is the energy required to produce, clean, and transport the water that is being “wasted.”
sustainability, availability and maximum marginal price matters, just as with electric power generation
If your tap water comes from a river and flows back to a river, leaving it running mostly just wastes energy.
You seem to think there is only one way to count. That's completely wrong. The important thing is whether you are clear about what you are counting and why.
Your comment is odd. But let me be the first to give you permission to count things how you want. Just make sure you explain the criteria and reasoning. Have a good day.
Likewise, the power company is going to generate electricity regardless of whether a data center is there or not. The power company has various means of generating electricity available which use more or less water. The amount of water used in generating electricity is attributed to the power company, not the data center.
Contrary to your belief that it is about clickbait, it's actually just about how to accurately evaluate environmental impact of data centers backed by science and basic logic.
Depending on the method of power generation, it might also need a certain consistent base load to run most efficiently, so adding in a data center that will be a consistent load running 24/7 could actually increase the efficiency.
The water normally continues to exist, so presumably it's some other resource we are using. This may seem pedantic but it's not - raw groundwater, or unprocessed grey water is not potable as in "water a person uses" for drinking, which is a subset of the water a person uses overall (directly in showers etc, or by proxy in bought products, building materials etc).
In each case, water is more of a "carrier" for some other resource or property. If in CA the almonds go through a lot of water (is this due to perspiration? i.e. their cooling mechanism?), the water will still create clouds that I presume increases rainfall elsewhere? In fact, the water now holds more energy (from solar) that might be useful somehow.
Similar comments around "land usage", entirely depends on opportunity loss otherwise.
It feels reasonable that we should have the same detail of information for data centers.
If it is the power company, then the relevant metric is the amount of power consumed, as it would be up to the power company to find a more water-efficient way to produce power.
That’s a good idea. Like nutrition facts but for everyday economic climate decisions.
One gallon of cow milk uses more water than one gallon of almond milk.
An gallon of raw almonds requires a massive amount of water.
Using numbers to create illusions of comparison is the marketing equivalent of parsley in your tooth.
Will it though