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Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usa

Let's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a little less out of line with production seems like the obvious answer here. - But you live in Europe, not the US. You couldn't possibly know how miserable life would be without watering my lawn in the middle of the desert. And what would the neighbours say? - We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..." [0] https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezinnen https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezin... (nl) [1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water

yellowflash 4y ago
One of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.
- simonh 4y ago
  Family size of 1 is given as 108L each, but average usage per member of a family of 2.3 people is given as 89L each, so presumably an average total household usage in Flanders would be about 2.3 x 89 = 205L. I'm not sure where OP gets the 202L number from, it doesn't appear anywhere on the page. Possibly mis-reading a date as a consumption, hence I'm using capital L for Litres. That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.
  - markvdb 4y ago
    The headline says 74000l/household/year. Divide by roughly 365 days a year = 202.7392l/day. I made a rounding error and didn't read further down. Still a very useful approximation I'd say.
sshine 4y ago
> And our children's children's... I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex. (Jack Handey)
jollybean 4y ago
- benj111 4y ago
  Do Europeans live in small cupboards? There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US. Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream? >expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
  - elbigbad 4y ago
    I am in Europe now and am an American, I’ve lived in various major cities in USA including east and west coast. I have also lived in a handful of major European cities. So while my opinion is anecdotal still, it’s not uninformed. Comparatively yes, Europeans live in small cupboards by and large. There has to be some data on per capita living spaces between the two though. Largely anecdotally, I’d say people in NYC who are interns or new in careers out of school live in the same sized places that people in, for example, London or Brussels live for their entire lives, per capita speaking. Additionally they drive much smaller cars, as you probably know. None of this is a bad thing, it does tend to be an artifact of smaller, walkable cities and a sacrifice for that sort of thing.
    - morsch 4y ago
      Average living area per person in NYC is 50 m2, in Berlin it's 40 m2. http://urbancalc.com/post/NYC-Residential-Density/ http://urbancalc.com/post/NYC-Residential-Density/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/255812/umfrage/wohnflaeche-je-einwohner-in-berlin/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/255812/umfrag...
      - elbigbad 4y ago
        Thanks! This tracks my experience, good to hear it somewhat justified with data.
aaron695 4y ago
dillondoyle 4y ago
Isn't this just an argument that individual consumption is not the problem? And likely a planned distraction perpetrated by agriculture & industry. I half agree with the author in that "conservation simply can’t do the job" but their supposition seems to be framed as household use alone. Conservation changes / remove wasteful agriculture would be plenty.
cozos 4y ago
What is causing this? Is it mostly watering the lawn and gardening? Or do Americans just take longer showers? Are our toilets bigger?
- di4na 4y ago
  Mostly watering the lawn and gardening if you follow the data
  - JoBrad 4y ago
    The epa link shows that 24% is toilet, 20% shower, and 19% faucet. I expected clothes washers (17%) to be far higher, frankly.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  > Are our toilets bigger? Actually it’s the opposite. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.”
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    You can't just drop something absurd like that with no evidence or citation
    - bandyaboot 4y ago
      One of Trump’s many absurd statements. https://apnews.com/article/7a9a494570b7a505017e726ddbea321f https://apnews.com/article/7a9a494570b7a505017e726ddbea321f
fmajid 4y ago
Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate. Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water consumption to zero before their allocation can be reduced. No state politician has been brave enough to fix this because reform would be tied down in litigation for decades, as in Mark Twain’s possibly apocryphal quote that “whisky is for drinking and water’s for fighting over.” This broken system does not incentivize efficient drip irrigation, in many places they simply flood the fields with water, and you have absurdities like the despicable Saudis buying up land with senior rights and growing alfalfa, a low-value and water-intensive crop they export to Arabia to feed cows, which is basically laundering water exports.
- geysersam 4y ago
  > laundering water exports Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.
  - mcculley 4y ago
    It would not be economically viable without the market distortion caused by the subsidization. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
  - tzs 4y ago
    He's overlooking that the amount of water used to grow a plant is much more than the amount of water that ends up in the plant. For alfalfa 0.005% of the water used to grow it ends up in the product. The remaining 99.995% ends up mostly in the atmosphere around where the plants are grown, either by transpiration from the plants or by evaporation from the soil around the plants.
concordDance 4y ago
> - We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..." This makes no sense as a response. Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions. If an entire river got diverted to lawns then the effects would only be between the divert point and the sea (in the form of the river nor being available for other people to divert from and animal life not having a river to live in) and even those effects are mostly temporary. Heck, lawn water mostly goes back in to the water table, with the rest evaporating to make clouds to then fall back as rain.
- feet 4y ago
  I understand the point you are making about areas that are far apart, but in some cases it really isn't local. The Colorado river is one good example.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  I suppose water (at least natural water from rivers) is one of the few actual zero-sum games in economics. No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more, and a given river only has so much water to give.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more Cloud seeding is being studied.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      That seems like it must be taking water from whoever is downwind (but maybe that's the ocean).
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions. Not entirely accurate: > The virtual water trade (also known as embedded or embodied water) is the hidden flow of water in food or other commodities that are traded from one place to another.[1] The virtual water trade is the idea that when goods and services are exchanged, so is virtual water. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water A concrete example from another comment: > With the Saudi Arabian landscape there being mostly desert and alfalfa being a water-intensive crop, growing it there has always been expensive and draining on scarce water resources, to the point that the Saudi government finally outlawed the practice in 2016. In the wake of the ban, Almarai decided to purchase land wherever it is cheap and has favorable water conditions to produce enough feed for its 93,000 cows. * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w... * https://archive.ph/0gKrs https://archive.ph/0gKrs

yellowflash 4y ago

One of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.

simonh 4y ago
Family size of 1 is given as 108L each, but average usage per member of a family of 2.3 people is given as 89L each, so presumably an average total household usage in Flanders would be about 2.3 x 89 = 205L. I'm not sure where OP gets the 202L number from, it doesn't appear anywhere on the page. Possibly mis-reading a date as a consumption, hence I'm using capital L for Litres. That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.
- markvdb 4y ago
  The headline says 74000l/household/year. Divide by roughly 365 days a year = 202.7392l/day. I made a rounding error and didn't read further down. Still a very useful approximation I'd say.

sshine 4y ago

> And our children's children's... I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex. (Jack Handey)

jollybean 4y ago

benj111 4y ago
Do Europeans live in small cupboards? There are energy exporting nations in Europe and they're still more energy efficient than the US. Is Europe also food poor because they experience lower rates of obesity? Is eating yourself to death an expression of freedom and the great American dream? >expansive thinking Yes why don't you take your own advice.
- elbigbad 4y ago
  I am in Europe now and am an American, I’ve lived in various major cities in USA including east and west coast. I have also lived in a handful of major European cities. So while my opinion is anecdotal still, it’s not uninformed. Comparatively yes, Europeans live in small cupboards by and large. There has to be some data on per capita living spaces between the two though. Largely anecdotally, I’d say people in NYC who are interns or new in careers out of school live in the same sized places that people in, for example, London or Brussels live for their entire lives, per capita speaking. Additionally they drive much smaller cars, as you probably know. None of this is a bad thing, it does tend to be an artifact of smaller, walkable cities and a sacrifice for that sort of thing.
  - morsch 4y ago
    Average living area per person in NYC is 50 m2, in Berlin it's 40 m2. http://urbancalc.com/post/NYC-Residential-Density/ http://urbancalc.com/post/NYC-Residential-Density/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/255812/umfrage/wohnflaeche-je-einwohner-in-berlin/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/255812/umfrag...
    - elbigbad 4y ago
      Thanks! This tracks my experience, good to hear it somewhat justified with data.

aaron695 4y ago

dillondoyle 4y ago

Isn't this just an argument that individual consumption is not the problem? And likely a planned distraction perpetrated by agriculture & industry. I half agree with the author in that "conservation simply can’t do the job" but their supposition seems to be framed as household use alone. Conservation changes / remove wasteful agriculture would be plenty.

cozos 4y ago

What is causing this? Is it mostly watering the lawn and gardening? Or do Americans just take longer showers? Are our toilets bigger?

di4na 4y ago
Mostly watering the lawn and gardening if you follow the data
- JoBrad 4y ago
  The epa link shows that 24% is toilet, 20% shower, and 19% faucet. I expected clothes washers (17%) to be far higher, frankly.
bandyaboot 4y ago
> Are our toilets bigger? Actually it’s the opposite. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.”
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  You can't just drop something absurd like that with no evidence or citation
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    One of Trump’s many absurd statements. https://apnews.com/article/7a9a494570b7a505017e726ddbea321f https://apnews.com/article/7a9a494570b7a505017e726ddbea321f

fmajid 4y ago

Residential consumption is not the issue, subsidized water for agriculture in California is. Agricultural users paid as little$70 an acre-foot for water, which is less than a thousandth the residential rate. Under the state’s ridiculously baroque system of senior water rights, just because someone was first to nail a notice to a tree by a river in the 19th Century, everybody else in the area has to cut their water consumption to zero before their allocation can be reduced. No state politician has been brave enough to fix this because reform would be tied down in litigation for decades, as in Mark Twain’s possibly apocryphal quote that “whisky is for drinking and water’s for fighting over.” This broken system does not incentivize efficient drip irrigation, in many places they simply flood the fields with water, and you have absurdities like the despicable Saudis buying up land with senior rights and growing alfalfa, a low-value and water-intensive crop they export to Arabia to feed cows, which is basically laundering water exports.

geysersam 4y ago
> laundering water exports Sorry I might be ignorant but this sounds ridiculous. How could that ever be economically viable? If you wanted to import water, there are plenty of places (less populated than California) closer to the Arabic peninsula (not on the other side of the world) where water is more plentiful.
- mcculley 4y ago
  It would not be economically viable without the market distortion caused by the subsidization. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
- tzs 4y ago
  He's overlooking that the amount of water used to grow a plant is much more than the amount of water that ends up in the plant. For alfalfa 0.005% of the water used to grow it ends up in the product. The remaining 99.995% ends up mostly in the atmosphere around where the plants are grown, either by transpiration from the plants or by evaporation from the soil around the plants.

concordDance 4y ago

> - We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..." This makes no sense as a response. Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions. If an entire river got diverted to lawns then the effects would only be between the divert point and the sea (in the form of the river nor being available for other people to divert from and animal life not having a river to live in) and even those effects are mostly temporary. Heck, lawn water mostly goes back in to the water table, with the rest evaporating to make clouds to then fall back as rain.

feet 4y ago
I understand the point you are making about areas that are far apart, but in some cases it really isn't local. The Colorado river is one good example.
HPsquared 4y ago
I suppose water (at least natural water from rivers) is one of the few actual zero-sum games in economics. No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more, and a given river only has so much water to give.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > No matter not hard you try, it won't rain more Cloud seeding is being studied.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    That seems like it must be taking water from whoever is downwind (but maybe that's the ocean).
throw0101a 4y ago
> Water usage is a local issue where water goes through X rather than Y. Water usage in Pakistan has zero effect on Germany, unlike CO2 emmissions. Not entirely accurate: > The virtual water trade (also known as embedded or embodied water) is the hidden flow of water in food or other commodities that are traded from one place to another.[1] The virtual water trade is the idea that when goods and services are exchanged, so is virtual water. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water A concrete example from another comment: > With the Saudi Arabian landscape there being mostly desert and alfalfa being a water-intensive crop, growing it there has always been expensive and draining on scarce water resources, to the point that the Saudi government finally outlawed the practice in 2016. In the wake of the ban, Almarai decided to purchase land wherever it is cheap and has favorable water conditions to produce enough feed for its 93,000 cows. * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w... * https://archive.ph/0gKrs https://archive.ph/0gKrs