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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

People keep comparing datacenter water use to agricultural water use, and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't tell if it's a bad-faith comparison or if people really know that little about how water is used in these industries.

The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.

That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.

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Golf courses are a better comparison. Data centers use a fraction of the water that it takes to keep the grass green for a hobby enjoyed by a handful of people.

Bringing up agriculture is definitely a bad faith attack.

People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.

People need to eat, but they don't need to eat meat.

It's true we're not obligate carnivores, but we do need a lot of the nutrients that meat also provides and is an easy source of

Providing a fully vegetarian diet for everyone is kind of non-starter.

On a biological level, there'd be no problem providing a vegetarian diet for everyone. A healthful vegetarian diet is not hard to achieve, at least no harder than a healthful non-vegetarian diet.

From an infrastructure point of view, providing everyone vegetarian food sources overnight would not be possible, but that's not a realistic scenario. With a gradual transition, the transition would reduce overall resource use on basically all fronts, so there's no reason to expect extraordinary problems.

Of course, this is all theoretical unless people care enough to change their lifestyles.

Of course the reason that people don't care enough to change their lifestyles is because

> A healthful vegetarian diet is not hard to achieve, at least no harder than a healthful non-vegetarian diet.

Might be true but isn't sufficient

It's still way easier to have an omnivore diet than a strictly vegetarian one. Partly that's due to how society is currently structured, but people still ate meat long before society was structured this way. Because it was easier.

It doesn't make sense to me either, but in a different way...

We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.

edit: considering this is HN and the downvotes, people here prefer datacenters over food

People here generally don't believe that the water usage in DCs is enough to affect agriculture or that the areas so short on water are the ones we should be growing food in anyways.

The downvotes are probably about reasoning about your your conclusions instead of the things that led you to them. Though it'd be nice if that had been discussion instead of silent downvotes.

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