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Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/n

• deleted 3mo ago
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• fastball 3mo ago
  The thing about data centers and thermoelectric power plants is that you can make them effectively closed cycle, vs agriculture where that is somewhat intractable. Not saying that is true today though.
• darig 3mo ago
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• avazhi 3mo ago
  Probably because food and agriculture (in the region that produces a quarter of America’s domestic food supply) are required for life, while data centers aren’t?
  • scarmig 3mo ago
    Although delicious, alfalfa is not required for life. A lot of it goes to Saudi Arabia, who use it for horses and cattle, as the Saudis banned it domestically for being wasteful for water usage.
    • culi 3mo ago
      It's also grown for the same reason soy is grown. It's a highly effective nitrogen fertilizer for the soil. It's also one of the most digestible and high-protein forages
    • throwaway2037 3mo ago
      > alfalfa is not required for life This quote doesn't do much for me. It is like saying that the insane amounts of corn and soy that US (and Brazil and Canada) farmers produce "is not required for life". If you think a little deeper, it is used to feed livestock, that are used for meat, that are "required for life". (Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that.) For the record, Japan also imports lots of alfalfa from the US. Japan has far more fresh water than it can use, but it doesn't have enough arable land to grow the alfalfa that it needs to feed its livestock.
      • culi 3mo ago
        Japan imports alfalfa because of an expansion of the USJTA in where Japan committed to purchasing $8 billion in US agricultural goods. South Korea imports alfalfa because of the KORUS FTA removes all duties on forage goods. China buys alfalfa because of yet another trade deal that was brokered to prevent a trade war from spiraling. Alfalfa hay was explicitly highlighted in the Phase One agreement.
      • kuerbel 3mo ago
        >Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that. That part is actually the weakest part of your argument. You are dismissing a valid counterargument before addressing it. Something being part of a current food production system does not make it a biological necessity. People can live without meat, therefore alfalfa is not "required for life" in the literal sense. You are also shifting the meaning of "required": from "necessary for humans to survive" to "necessary for maintaining our current livestock industry." Those are very different claims. Preemptively calling an obvious counterargument "dumb" is not a way to win the argument; it is a way to avoid having it. Is it rational to dedicate enormous amounts of land, water, and energy to producing animal feed when those same resources could feed more people directly? Using crops as feed and then eating the animals is an inherently inefficient way of converting resources into food. That may be acceptable when resources are abundant, but it becomes increasingly difficult to justify as we face limits in freshwater, arable land, and ecological capacity. That is the true argument, and what the discussion should be about, not if we can (very obviously) survive without meat.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• MengerSponge 3mo ago
  Million, billion, and trillion sadly sound kind of the same when you talk about it.
  • b3lvedere 3mo ago
    I agree that is a big part of the problems we have today. But my best guess is also that the systems/people/companies that tend to abuse their power do know extremely well that the layman cannot fathom the difference between the three. Unfortunately most people also don't really care until the problems come hitting them so extremely close you have absolutely no coiche to act upon it. Then the massive outrages start. It's a very predictable cycle.
• voakbasda 3mo ago
  Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.
  • hnav 3mo ago
    It benefits whoever has the water rights since they're effectively able to export something that they're not paying the externalities on.
    • voakbasda 3mo ago
      That’s the joke. We are literally letting those growers export our water and put the profit in their own pockets and at the public’s expense.
  • xahrepap 3mo ago
    Shipped to countries that have banned the growing of the crop because of water concerns
  • riedel 3mo ago
    Even worse: this is going to cattle farms that are responsible for considerable amount of methane emissions contributing to global warming.
• JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  Nobody actually cares about water use. It's a totem for other activism efforts. Data-centre protests aren't about water, they're about wealth inequality and Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg being hated men.
  • Rzor 3mo ago
    >Data-centre protests aren't about water I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.
    • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ I suspect they’re more concerned about “rising electricity cost[s] and air-noise pollution.”
    • protocolture 3mo ago
      >>Data-centre protests aren't about water >I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ. Pulling myself together here to be as polite as possible but could you perhaps read the quoted text and your own post again and try and square that circle? Otherwise, are you perhaps in the running for some kind of internet non sequitur award I am unaware of? I would vote for your comment if you simply make me aware of how to do so.
      • smcin 3mo ago
        Residential users' water bills aren't (currently) affected by datacenter-related demand, unlike their power bills which are. The resource contention for water is between datacenters and agribusiness (or other industrial users), not residential users. Instead of being sarcastic to GP's post, we could try to find a succinct explanation of how water rights are owned/sold/taxed in the US. This seems to be a patchwork quilt by state, county, seniority and related legislation. But anyway, datacenter usage of water isn't impacting residential users' water bills.
• tzs 3mo ago
  Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?
  • smcin 3mo ago
    When I try to find out what % of California's alfalfa production is exported, I get conflicting numbers, some as high as 38%, some much lower.
  • smcin 3mo ago
    So, the other 25% does not all go to cattle, certainly not California. Some fraction of that alfalfa is exported in containers to China/Japan/Saudi, for their cattle. Doing that from a semi-desert during a declared drought (2020-3) seems like pretty obvious proof that the agricultural cost of water is distorted and too low. If any of that was artesian water, then it's even worse.
• supriyo-biswas 3mo ago
  Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group. The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.
  • arjie 3mo ago
    The necessity of alfalfa exports from water-scarce US states is certainly not obvious. Why do you believe this is essential?
    • throwaway2037 3mo ago
      > alfalfa exports from water-scarce US states Which states are those?
      • messe 3mo ago
        California for one.
        • throwaway2037 3mo ago
          California is not water-scarce. It has plenty of water in the north and mountains to the east.
          • wookmaster 3mo ago
            They're growing it in the south Central Valley, not the north and not the east mountains. Though assuming you're referring to snowpack in the mountains and not looking to pump the lakes dry its completely dependent on the years precipitation.
      • xahrepap 3mo ago
        Utah
      • 3mo ago
• topato 3mo ago
  lol, if you bothered to check the reference your “article” stole from, you’d find a medium post that includes ANOTHER link to a follow up medium post entitled, “I was wrong about data center water consumption” It’s not 6 billion per day. It’s 650 billion per day. In the United States alone. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat... lol
  • rayiner 3mo ago
    Thank you for the note. But the article I linked to above relies on the page you linked for the Alfalfa number, not the data center number. The data center number in my article, 6.2 billion gallons annually for Google's data centers, is consistent with Google's numbers elsewhere: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/data-center-water-use-black-box-google-trying-to-change/ https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/data-center-water-use-bla... Also, your correction needs as correction: > If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated. However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption. If you exclude the water “consumed” by hydroelectric plants via reservoir evaporation, you get something closer to perhaps 275 million gallons per day.1 And if you take into account the fact that lots of data center operators use renewable energy PPAs (mostly from wind and solar sources), my guess is that you get something closer to 200-250 million gallons per day (though I haven’t run a detailed calculation here). It's not 675 billion gallons a day, it's 675 million, which is about 246 billion gallons a year.
• throwaway2037 3mo ago
  > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use I did some research on this statistic. More than 90% of this is returned to source. So if the power plant is drawing water from a river (or aquifer), it is returned after being used to generate electricity (create steam, turn turbines). For example, if you have a 1GW coal powerplant on a river, it might draw 4 billion liters of water per day, but will only evaporate about 5-10% of that amount. The rest is returned to the river. Of course, this is much less exciting (click-baity) than writing "41% of US water use is for thermoelectric power plants".
  • tesnorindian 3mo ago
    Most rivers drain into Oceans while some do drain into inland lakes.
  • yreg 3mo ago
    Is it different with data centers?
    • consp 3mo ago
      Depends on if they use evaporative cooling or not. But the water returned is warmer which can harm the ecosystem quite a bit, both for power plants and data centers.
      • deleted 3mo ago
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      • AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
        Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be higher than it is at the inlet, before it diffuses back into the background. Naturally the way to mitigate this is to pull more water through the cooling system, all of which you're still returning, but then you raise the temperature of twice as much water by half as much temperature, which is what you want since the temperature delta is the concern. Of course, doing this will cause people to accuse you of using more water, even though you're neither consuming the water nor modifying the amount of heat being transferred to the environment. In addition to that, water has extremely different levels of scarcity depending on what region you're in. Parts of California and Texas have arid climates and extremely limited economical means to source additional fresh water. Areas like the Midwest get dramatically more rainfall and as a result fresh water is not meaningfully scarce there.
• pstuart 3mo ago
  There has been outrage. It's yet another tragedy of the commons. Water pricing should be revisited to be closer to its true value -- and while food production should be recognized as essential, even that has to be rethought: is growing alfalfa for dairy less vital than growing vegetables? Especially if that dairy is produced and consumed in Saudi Arabia? The other thing that we should be doing all over is better management of our watersheds so we can try to replenish those aquifers.
• ChuckMcM 3mo ago
  Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California [2] https://www.convertunits.com/from/billion+gallons/to/acre+foot https://www.convertunits.com/from/billion+gallons/to/acre+fo... [3] "Agrivoltaics as a climate-smart and resilient solution for midday depression in photosynthesis in dryland regions" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1
  • kbenson 3mo ago
    If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
    • SlightlyLeftPad 3mo ago
      There’s also the possibility of famine. But hey at least we’d have AI.
    • interactivecode 3mo ago
      I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer. Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity. often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
• brador 3mo ago
  84.1% of people have <115 IQ. The minimum required to critically think about the modern world and affect its function. With AI that minimum is expected to increase.
  • b3lvedere 3mo ago
    The immense amount of CO2 isn't also doing wonders on our brains.
    • brador 3mo ago
      Lead and cadmium in food caused by cheap fuel and roads closer to farms is also negatively affecting population IQ. Then there’s the internet.
      • b3lvedere 3mo ago
        "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." [1] [1]: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/wilensky.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/wilensky.ht...
• sylos 3mo ago
  I know plenty of folks who got worked up over the wasteful farming that drains and damages aquifers. much like the penalties that kardashians received when they broke the water usage laws, it amounted to nada.
• Melatonic 3mo ago
  They do and have been - unfortunately the farms are far from most people and isolated. And in super hot arid areas. Not ideal but many people aren't directly affected
• aaron695 3mo ago
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• Omniusaspirer 3mo ago
  California water policy vs other western states in one image: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sandy+Valley,+NV+89019/@35.8026036,-115.6813226,14630m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x80c8aae9c0cd61e3:0xc7c0eff092faecca!8m2!3d35.8169191!4d-115.6322283!16zL20vMHhja3E?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDcyOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sandy+Valley,+NV+89019/@35... A town of 1700 people with a rapidly depleting aquifer (600 AF/yr recharge, equal to a single one of those circles) so 1 or 2 farmers with no restrictions on water usage can grow as much alfalfa as they'd like.
• lII1lIlI11ll 3mo ago
  I would assume because water-wasting concerns are just another tool for the left to use against their political opponents, not an actual concern most of their constituents deeply care about. Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore (I bet those birds covered in oil after spills enjoy it and are a treat to the eye!). Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.
  • watwut 3mo ago
    The opposition against data centers is remarkably both side things. Both MAGA opposes it and progressive opposes it. And no, I do not think maga and progressive are the same, but they do in fact both oppose data centers. > Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore What is their actual issue there? They want the electricity to be more expensive? They want the global warming to warm faster? > Western lefties consider farmers their class allies Pretty much all American leftists I have ever seen talking about the issue consider farmers to be the core MAGA/Trump constituency. Leftists do NOT consider them allies.
    • deleted 3mo ago
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• andsoitis 3mo ago
  > Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers Agriculture produces food.