Something like 1% of corn grown in the U.S. is used to feed people directly. The majority of it is used to inefficiently make gasoline (via ethanol) or plastic, because farm subsidies make it profitable.
And growing at that scale makes that 1% super affordable as a food source. all these 'we need AI data centers at crazy huge scales' people suddenly don't understand scale when it comes to feeding the brokies.
Subsidizing ethanol doesn’t seem like an efficient way to subsidize food for poor people- that’s why programs like SNAP exist
I agree. I’m pro-data center (or at least not against), pro-farm, and anti-ethanol. Ethanol is a scam.
While ethanol requirements are a hand out to corn farmers, it’s false to say the majority goes into gas and plastic, an equal share (~40%) goes to animal feed.
I never said that. The comment I replied to seemed to imply that water used to grow crops is used very efficiently, or at least as efficiently as water used for data centers. That is clearly not true so I objected. That is all.
I truly don’t understand how you could think that. It’s literally water, from the earth, to which it returns for recycling. Great that data centers “recycle” water, but earth is significantly better at that than google. Fun fact, water that evaporates becomes clouds and rain! Seems pretty infinitely efficient to me, unless you look at a tiny section of what is not a closed system.