4 ms·

It's great that people set up rainwater collection, or or practice efficient water use, and if that makes them feel better, great, but it's not doing anything.

It's great that people set up rainwater collection, or or practice efficient water use, and if that makes them feel better, great, but it's not doing anything. Almost all water use is Ag, Commercial, and Industrial. Residential is a minute percentage.

RC_ITR 4y ago
I always find this so funny: In 2015, Intel, the largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, used nine billion gallons of water Hmm, I bet they build their factories by the Great lakes then! Oh - Intel’s new Arizona fabs to be production ready in 2024, creating more than 3,000 high-tech jobs [0] I better start taking really short showers to make up for that! [0] https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-two-new-semiconductor-factories https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-t...
- andirk 4y ago
  Pro tip for giant corp: build where it's cheapest regardless of nature. The State will pick up the buck!
  - pm90 4y ago
    not really. States don't always honor agreements if they don't make sense. They can have a change in leadership etc.
    - hobs 4y ago
      Then you sue and generally win, contracts with big corps usually have a lot of force.
- glitcher 4y ago
  Yes, and the media is very guilty of pushing this narrative that households need to be held responsible for rationing water, when the Arizona Department of Water Resources openly shares this data: "Irrigated agriculture is the largest user of water in Arizona, consuming about 74 percent of the available water supply." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture "In Arizona, approximately 15 percent of the water supply is for commercial, industrial and institutional uses." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial So it's on us to do everything we can to optimize the last 10% of all the available water. To be clear I think we all should do our part, but there are so many misleading news stories that fail to even acknowledge the reality of our water distribution.
  - llamaimperative 4y ago
    Well hey, what else are you expecting those farms in the middle of the desert to use? I mean, my great great great grandpappy put this farm here and it's basically communism to take away our unlimited free and nearly-free water.
    - artificial 4y ago
      Speaking of desert farms: California feeds the US. https://stacker.com/stories/3183/states-biggest-agriculture-industry https://stacker.com/stories/3183/states-biggest-agriculture-...
      - baidifnaoxi 4y ago
        So, not exactly. California just shows up as #1 because of the total value of the crop. Look at the moneymaker: “Fruit, Tree nuts”. That’s Grapes (for wine) and Almonds. Both crops are non-essential (speaking scientifically). Others are important, but also fall lower on the spectrum of key essentials. California is important but remove Grapes and Almonds and some of the other non essentials (like avocados, sweet potatoes, etc) and California is somewhere at the bottom of the top 10. Compare that to #2 on the list, Iowa. If Iowa didn’t produce the $17bn of “grains, oilseeds, dry beans, etc”, then large swaths of the Americas experience severe nutrition issues. I love California and live here, but let’s not kid ourselves - the Midwest feeds the US
        artificial 4y ago
        Yes, the do produce and the midwest isn't a state. https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Exports_Publication.pdf https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Exports_Publica...
        baidifnaoxi 4y ago
        Thanks for posting that. It simply proves my point. Add up the non-essential products (almonds, grapes, etc) and remove that from the total. You will see the total output of CA agriculture drops significantly. You know what I meant when I said “Midwest”. Again, the point of the article was that drought conditions are occurring and, in CA, 75% of the water consumption is due to “agriculture” as has been stated above, and after removing commercial uses, only 11% is residential. My insinuation is that (1) Agriculture is the key impactor of drought conditions, (2) when policy makers and those with your opinions talk about the problem being irrigated water uses, it’s always deflected as “CA feeds the US, we have to protect it” giving the industry a free pass, (3) If we put in policy, like paying fairly for water, the industry would be impacted negatively, but as your document proves - it wouldn’t substantially impact core nutrition of the US - just the convenience of a bunch of rich wine and charcuterie consumers.
- greeneggs 4y ago
  To put 15 billion gallons of water in context, that's about the same amount of water as used by 15 to 30 square miles of alfalfa. Arizona has ~400 square miles dedicated to growing alfalfa, worth ~$400 million per year. (Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?) sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plant-need-per-day/ https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an-end-to-arizonas-alfalfa-heyday/ https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    If you are going to use water at least let it be used for an industry that ads to the economy. Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants. Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Do you mean "western" as in "Western USA" or as in "the West, i.e USA, Europe etc" ? Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.
- ars 4y ago
  > used nine billion gallons of water "About 80% of that water was captured after use and purified at treatment plants operated by Intel and the city of Chandler, then either returned to the fabs for reuse in manufacturing or its cooling towers, or reused within the city or injected into the ground to recharge the aquifer." https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands/2022/03/04/arizona-semiconductor-intel-tsmc-water-use/6915685001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >Intel has two campuses in Chandler with multiple fabs, for example, which used about 16,000 acre-feet (5bn gallons) of municipal water in 2020... About 6,200 (1.5bn gallons) acre-feet of water were treated on-site and reused without entering the municipal wastewater system. Oh wow, about 1/3 of the 5 billion gallons of water this one campus was used at least more than once. Problem solved!
pj_mukh 4y ago
I see this comment every-time water resources in the west are mentioned. But industries and Ag exist in a region for a reason, and none of it is related to water. Most industries (esp Ag) exist within vast contractor, raw material supply and labor networks. That means vast support networks, families, kids in school etc. that can't be moved on a whim. With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.
- rcpt 4y ago
  It's absolutely related to water rights. California farm owners wouldn't opt to grow alfalfa if water were priced sanely for them
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Ag should exist only in locations where it's viable for it to exist, which yes, is very closely related to water. If Arizona wants to have a thriving agricultural economy, it should farm rocks. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Arizona. There are great people there and they deserve great jobs. But water intensive farming in an actual desert is not a valid solution)
- cgriswald 4y ago
  Agricultural exists here in California somewhat independently of water but the choice of what crops or livestock to carry is absolutely about water. Many California farms would choose less water-intensive crops or livestock if they had to pay more for water. There are plenty of crops to choose from that are supported by the existing soil, contractors, materials (of which water is one...), and labor networks. > With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned. The desalinization plants could be located nearly anywhere on the coast and we already have lots and lots of pipes running water from reservoirs both above and below ground. It's hard to imagine this being a NIMBY issue. (This seems more like continuing to blame residential areas.) It might be sold as a NIMBY issue by agriculture lobbyists since agriculture absolutely will not want to pay for it. But this is all about agriculture wanting a cheap, infinite supply of water.
bpodgursky 4y ago
I think that's kind of the point — water supply is not a meaningful constraint on residential growth. A drought will curtail inefficient agriculture, but that's about it. There's immense untapped recycling potential.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
+1, even though I slightly disagree with you. I live in the mountains of Central Arizona, BTW. Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while. The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Former Arizona resident here. The solution is simple: stop subsidizing water. It's completely insane that you have cattle ranchers and cotton farms in a nearly Martian landscape. It'd be economically unviable if it weren't for massive water subsidies, so it should be.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    +1 I agree. I would extend this to all farming and meat production, even in non-arid areas. I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.
    - windexh8er 4y ago
      I'll offer a hat tip to our little bubble here. Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play. I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.
diskzero 4y ago
Tucson resident here. It did make me feel a bit better setting up my harvesting system. I collect about 10,000 gallons that I use to irrigate my thirsty grapefruit and lemon tree. If I didn't have to collected water, it would cost me a few hundred a month to keep them healthy. If I didn't have the collected rainwater, I wouldn't have the trees. Using city water to irrigate my citrus just feels obnoxious. The whole process of setting up the system was a lot of fun and a lot of work. The soil here is quite hard, so I got a great workout digging the trenches. I know my overall impact is negligible, but have a general sense of well-being by having the system. You could say the same about the solar systems I set up as well. I could just as easily pay Tucson Electric and Power as they are setting up big solar arrays now.
- iamtheworstdev 4y ago
  is it legal for you to collect rain water? apparently it's not legal in a lot of places.
  - diskzero 4y ago
    Yes, it is legal. There is no state in the US where it is completely illegal. Colorado and Utah limit the amount you can collect.
munificent 4y ago
The Arizona Department of Water Usage says ag is 74% [1]. I wouldn't describe 26% as a "minute percentage". [1]: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture
- panopticon 4y ago
  You forgot to subtract commercial and industrial from that 26% which leaves you with about 11% as residential [0]. 11% might still not classify as minute, but it does seem silly to have these campaigns telling people to optimize their small 11% portion of the water pie. 0: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial

RC_ITR 4y ago

I always find this so funny: In 2015, Intel, the largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, used nine billion gallons of water Hmm, I bet they build their factories by the Great lakes then! Oh - Intel’s new Arizona fabs to be production ready in 2024, creating more than 3,000 high-tech jobs [0] I better start taking really short showers to make up for that! [0] https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-two-new-semiconductor-factories https://www.chandleraz.gov/news-center/intel-breaks-ground-t...

andirk 4y ago
Pro tip for giant corp: build where it's cheapest regardless of nature. The State will pick up the buck!
- pm90 4y ago
  not really. States don't always honor agreements if they don't make sense. They can have a change in leadership etc.
  - hobs 4y ago
    Then you sue and generally win, contracts with big corps usually have a lot of force.
glitcher 4y ago
Yes, and the media is very guilty of pushing this narrative that households need to be held responsible for rationing water, when the Arizona Department of Water Resources openly shares this data: "Irrigated agriculture is the largest user of water in Arizona, consuming about 74 percent of the available water supply." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture "In Arizona, approximately 15 percent of the water supply is for commercial, industrial and institutional uses." https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial So it's on us to do everything we can to optimize the last 10% of all the available water. To be clear I think we all should do our part, but there are so many misleading news stories that fail to even acknowledge the reality of our water distribution.
- llamaimperative 4y ago
  Well hey, what else are you expecting those farms in the middle of the desert to use? I mean, my great great great grandpappy put this farm here and it's basically communism to take away our unlimited free and nearly-free water.
  - artificial 4y ago
    Speaking of desert farms: California feeds the US. https://stacker.com/stories/3183/states-biggest-agriculture-industry https://stacker.com/stories/3183/states-biggest-agriculture-...
    - baidifnaoxi 4y ago
      So, not exactly. California just shows up as #1 because of the total value of the crop. Look at the moneymaker: “Fruit, Tree nuts”. That’s Grapes (for wine) and Almonds. Both crops are non-essential (speaking scientifically). Others are important, but also fall lower on the spectrum of key essentials. California is important but remove Grapes and Almonds and some of the other non essentials (like avocados, sweet potatoes, etc) and California is somewhere at the bottom of the top 10. Compare that to #2 on the list, Iowa. If Iowa didn’t produce the $17bn of “grains, oilseeds, dry beans, etc”, then large swaths of the Americas experience severe nutrition issues. I love California and live here, but let’s not kid ourselves - the Midwest feeds the US
      - artificial 4y ago
        Yes, the do produce and the midwest isn't a state. https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Exports_Publication.pdf https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Exports_Publica...
        baidifnaoxi 4y ago
        Thanks for posting that. It simply proves my point. Add up the non-essential products (almonds, grapes, etc) and remove that from the total. You will see the total output of CA agriculture drops significantly. You know what I meant when I said “Midwest”. Again, the point of the article was that drought conditions are occurring and, in CA, 75% of the water consumption is due to “agriculture” as has been stated above, and after removing commercial uses, only 11% is residential. My insinuation is that (1) Agriculture is the key impactor of drought conditions, (2) when policy makers and those with your opinions talk about the problem being irrigated water uses, it’s always deflected as “CA feeds the US, we have to protect it” giving the industry a free pass, (3) If we put in policy, like paying fairly for water, the industry would be impacted negatively, but as your document proves - it wouldn’t substantially impact core nutrition of the US - just the convenience of a bunch of rich wine and charcuterie consumers.
greeneggs 4y ago
To put 15 billion gallons of water in context, that's about the same amount of water as used by 15 to 30 square miles of alfalfa. Arizona has ~400 square miles dedicated to growing alfalfa, worth ~$400 million per year. (Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?) sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plant-need-per-day/ https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an-end-to-arizonas-alfalfa-heyday/ https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  If you are going to use water at least let it be used for an industry that ads to the economy. Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants. Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Do you mean "western" as in "Western USA" or as in "the West, i.e USA, Europe etc" ? Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.
ars 4y ago
> used nine billion gallons of water "About 80% of that water was captured after use and purified at treatment plants operated by Intel and the city of Chandler, then either returned to the fabs for reuse in manufacturing or its cooling towers, or reused within the city or injected into the ground to recharge the aquifer." https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands/2022/03/04/arizona-semiconductor-intel-tsmc-water-use/6915685001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >Intel has two campuses in Chandler with multiple fabs, for example, which used about 16,000 acre-feet (5bn gallons) of municipal water in 2020... About 6,200 (1.5bn gallons) acre-feet of water were treated on-site and reused without entering the municipal wastewater system. Oh wow, about 1/3 of the 5 billion gallons of water this one campus was used at least more than once. Problem solved!

pj_mukh 4y ago

I see this comment every-time water resources in the west are mentioned. But industries and Ag exist in a region for a reason, and none of it is related to water. Most industries (esp Ag) exist within vast contractor, raw material supply and labor networks. That means vast support networks, families, kids in school etc. that can't be moved on a whim. With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned.

rcpt 4y ago
It's absolutely related to water rights. California farm owners wouldn't opt to grow alfalfa if water were priced sanely for them
ethanbond 4y ago
Ag should exist only in locations where it's viable for it to exist, which yes, is very closely related to water. If Arizona wants to have a thriving agricultural economy, it should farm rocks. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Arizona. There are great people there and they deserve great jobs. But water intensive farming in an actual desert is not a valid solution)
cgriswald 4y ago
Agricultural exists here in California somewhat independently of water but the choice of what crops or livestock to carry is absolutely about water. Many California farms would choose less water-intensive crops or livestock if they had to pay more for water. There are plenty of crops to choose from that are supported by the existing soil, contractors, materials (of which water is one...), and labor networks. > With the infinite energy being beamed down on the West, desalination plants along the California coast + Water Pipelines seem a lot more realistic tbh, NIMBY-ism be damned. The desalinization plants could be located nearly anywhere on the coast and we already have lots and lots of pipes running water from reservoirs both above and below ground. It's hard to imagine this being a NIMBY issue. (This seems more like continuing to blame residential areas.) It might be sold as a NIMBY issue by agriculture lobbyists since agriculture absolutely will not want to pay for it. But this is all about agriculture wanting a cheap, infinite supply of water.

bpodgursky 4y ago

I think that's kind of the point — water supply is not a meaningful constraint on residential growth. A drought will curtail inefficient agriculture, but that's about it. There's immense untapped recycling potential.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

+1, even though I slightly disagree with you. I live in the mountains of Central Arizona, BTW. Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while. The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.

ethanbond 4y ago
Former Arizona resident here. The solution is simple: stop subsidizing water. It's completely insane that you have cattle ranchers and cotton farms in a nearly Martian landscape. It'd be economically unviable if it weren't for massive water subsidies, so it should be.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  +1 I agree. I would extend this to all farming and meat production, even in non-arid areas. I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.
  - windexh8er 4y ago
    I'll offer a hat tip to our little bubble here. Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play. I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.

diskzero 4y ago

Tucson resident here. It did make me feel a bit better setting up my harvesting system. I collect about 10,000 gallons that I use to irrigate my thirsty grapefruit and lemon tree. If I didn't have to collected water, it would cost me a few hundred a month to keep them healthy. If I didn't have the collected rainwater, I wouldn't have the trees. Using city water to irrigate my citrus just feels obnoxious. The whole process of setting up the system was a lot of fun and a lot of work. The soil here is quite hard, so I got a great workout digging the trenches. I know my overall impact is negligible, but have a general sense of well-being by having the system. You could say the same about the solar systems I set up as well. I could just as easily pay Tucson Electric and Power as they are setting up big solar arrays now.

iamtheworstdev 4y ago
is it legal for you to collect rain water? apparently it's not legal in a lot of places.
- diskzero 4y ago
  Yes, it is legal. There is no state in the US where it is completely illegal. Colorado and Utah limit the amount you can collect.

munificent 4y ago

The Arizona Department of Water Usage says ag is 74% [1]. I wouldn't describe 26% as a "minute percentage". [1]: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture

panopticon 4y ago
You forgot to subtract commercial and industrial from that 26% which leaves you with about 11% as residential [0]. 11% might still not classify as minute, but it does seem silly to have these campaigns telling people to optimize their small 11% portion of the water pie. 0: https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/commercial-industrial