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me_irl (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/me_irl@lemmy.world
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[–] -3 points 2 months ago (14 children)

This is an argument for cynicism and inaction. And it's servile boot-licking to insist that wealthy people should set moral cultural standards for the rest of us.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    I live in the southwest US, water saving measures for households are basically as good as they can get without asking people to stop bathing every day. And really it’s not household use (even wasteful household use) here that threatens aquifers, it’s relentless pumping of ground water and overuse of river water for agriculture. In California in particular this is tied up with water rights that allow farmers to use excessive amounts of water with minimal or no cost associated with it. Not all of what’s grown is even a food product either, ex alfalfa.

    Obviously we need farms and food, but we have to modernize how plants are watered to minimize water loss. Drip irrigation is much more effective, but since it costs more money than just flooding a ditch many farmers don’t bother.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    Isn’t CA craziest water user the almond industry? Other than data center bullshit.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Household use is 5 million acre feet/ year in CA. Almond use is 6.8 million acre feet. Alfalfa and other crops to feed cattle is about 8 million acre feet.

    An acre foot is 325,851 gallons, or how much water it takes to cover an acre in a foot of water.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Supposedly the almond farming industry uses somewhere between several times more to dozens of times more water than data centers

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    That is a data center investment hype blog. It’s also dishonest to compare resources used growing food to resources used so that Chase in accounting can generate a nude image of someone, fake reports, etc.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I love almonds but we should not be unsustainably subsidizing their production by allowing farmers to massively deplete aquifers with little costs borne on their part because their great great great grandpappy happened to settle early enough to get a disproportionate share of the water rights. If they have to shoulder that cost then they have a reason to grow more water efficient crops rather than spamming almonds.

    Farmers effectively mining out the groundwater below them can be really bad in areas that recharge those aquifers very slowly, particularly since that changes the soil to be more compacted such that instead of filtering down and recharging the groundwater the water instead piles up on the surface and runs off as floodwaters to areas unfortunate enough to be downstream.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Absolutely true for all of that (and I talked about some of these issues in my earlier comment), but anyone listening to data center bros telling them x crop is SO bad because it consumes SO much water is listening to a wolf talk about how the sheep don’t eat enough. They aren’t interested in restoring the ecosystem, they want that water for themselves.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    Ok, but they give sources and get into the numbers, and out of all the articles on the first page of seach results about the comparison that I looked at it seemed like the best source. The point isn't that almonds are worse than data centers, I just don't think the specific claim that almonds use less water than data centers is true and so I am refuting it. I didn't find any sources that tried to support that claim, but I'd read them if you know of any.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    One of those things provides food and drink products for people, and the other is degrading our collective ability to think critically while providing literally nothing of value.

    Yes, almond farming is an issue, but it's not even on the same level

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