6 ms·

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.

laxmena 5mo ago
[flagged]
somewhatgoated 5mo ago
How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
- xvedejas 5mo ago
  It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
  - tesseract 5mo ago
    And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.
  - FireBeyond 5mo ago
    A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
- jerlam 5mo ago
  I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
  - wahern 5mo ago
    > and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
    - ChadNauseam 5mo ago
      Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
  - ssl-3 5mo ago
    The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water. And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water. (Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is. It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)
JoshTriplett 5mo ago
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect. It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage. Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
- jlebar 5mo ago
  > Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - da_chicken 5mo ago
    > We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible. Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
kazinator 5mo ago
But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
- malfist 5mo ago
  Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
  - thaumasiotes 5mo ago
    > Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
    - malfist 5mo ago
      I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground. You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa. Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
- thelastgallon 5mo ago
  Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
  - kazinator 5mo ago
    But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor. The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago. :)
themafia 5mo ago
> are often foreign companies That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
ChadNauseam 5mo ago
I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
cameldrv 5mo ago
My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity. Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
expedition32 5mo ago
Those fields still provide more jobs for the locals than data centers. People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!
xnx 5mo ago
Middle east countries excel at selling irreplaceable liquids they pump out of the ground for free.

laxmena 5mo ago

[flagged]

somewhatgoated 5mo ago

How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?

xvedejas 5mo ago
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
- tesseract 5mo ago
  And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago
  A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
jerlam 5mo ago
I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
- wahern 5mo ago
  > and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
  - ChadNauseam 5mo ago
    Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
- ssl-3 5mo ago
  The driest places tend to have the most tightly-regulated water. And the wettest places tend to have the least-regulated water. (Nobody talks about it because shortages make bigger headlines than surpluses do, but there's a ton of agricultural areas in the US that have too much water and where providing drainage for farm fields is much more commonplace than irrigating them is. It doesn't really matter in this context, though, because folks hate datacenters in these water-rich areas just the same as they do everywhere else.)

JoshTriplett 5mo ago

Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect. It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage. Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.

jlebar 5mo ago
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- da_chicken 5mo ago
  > We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible. Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.

kazinator 5mo ago

But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.

malfist 5mo ago
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago
  > Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
  - malfist 5mo ago
    I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground. You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa. Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
thelastgallon 5mo ago
Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
- kazinator 5mo ago
  But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor. The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago. :)

themafia 5mo ago

> are often foreign companies That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.

ChadNauseam 5mo ago

I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

cameldrv 5mo ago

My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity. Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.

expedition32 5mo ago

Those fields still provide more jobs for the locals than data centers. People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!

xnx 5mo ago

Middle east countries excel at selling irreplaceable liquids they pump out of the ground for free.