Yes, building U.S. cities in hot deserts w/o water wasn’t a great move - but too few know that HEATING homes uses more energy than COOLING does.
Homes in Miami use less energy to control climate than homes in Minneapolis, but we don’t finger-wag about the foolishness of building in cold places.
"Phoenix has lower per capita carbon emissions than Boston" (almost entirely due to heating in Boston) is one of those factoids people get really mad at you if you tell them.
people also don't like hearing that Phoenix has been a continuously inhabited site of fixed agriculture and dense population for several thousands years and is not, in fact, a dumb or unsustainable place to build a city (though it is, in my opinion, unpleasantly hot)
It's frustrating what wasteful water uses people internalize and talk about (golf courses, ai) versus the actual major water risks (bad agriculture policy)
Basically every single other thing is a rounding error compared to "we insist on growing cash crops in the desert because it makes us a little more money"
That's the frustrating thing. It's not even a necessary thing, and is fairly easily fixed if you can overcome the farming lobby (biggest if).
You can also keep finding variants of this problem across agriculture.
the basic unit of measurment for agricultural water use in the US is the acre-foot, which is about 325,000 gallons. Alfalfa usually needs about four or six. per acre cultivated. everything else is a rounding error.
Ya you see those articles that are like "AI used (Dr evil voice) ONE MILLION GALLONS" and it's like basically totally insignificant, a fraction of an acre of desert cultivation
and if i'm not mistaken, when a data center uses water, it's not like it just disappears, it's just getitng warmed a bit and put back into the municipal water system or whatever, not literally being dumped into the dirt
Depends on the cooling system I think. Some data centers use big evaporative pools. Still, like with ag this is an area policy could help. Encourage use of recycled water, encourage development of alternate cooling methods (some ceramic advancements recently), and put them in efficient places
As i understand it the coolant water ends up with more particulate in it, particularly calcium, which needs to be dealt with before reused (which takes energy (which often requires water))
you are mistaken in that it is frequently fresh water, not grey water.
also you really don't want it dumped back into the stream or whatever
this is specifically a big problem with the bitcoin mines in texas for example.
some discussion in this interview we did last year with Jackie Sawicky, who is fighting the bitcoin assholes in Texas:
amycastor.com/2023/10/23/t...
note also environmental risks e.g. toxic leaching into the local tap water
In general people act like there's a tank labelled FRESH WATER and if we run out, it's gone for good. While this is fairly accurate for fossil aquifers, it is not the universal case!
But it gives them an easy set up for the Resource War of their fantasies and dreams, I guess.
The Four Corners Generating Station uses 28,000,000 gallons of water per day...
roughly equivalent to just 5,700 acres of alfalfa.
Fondomonte, just one company (Saudi), farms ~3,500 acres of alfalfa in Arizona alone.
FWIW, Saudi alfalfa use is already being curtailed in AZ. But the state has a longer-standing cotton industry that is similarly disastrous. The issue isn't "people in AZ", it's the type of people. AZ has built a culture that is scornful of effective water use, and attracts people who like proflicagy
Let’s just start with getting them to try and cover some of their countless water canals to save just a little bit of the evaporated water that they so carelessly throw away.
Honestly, the Saudis investing in the alfalfa was a bit of a boon for this water advocacy. It gave people evil foreigners they could blame for taking their water instead of Good American Farmers
Yeah, I dont have any love for Saudi ag work, but it serves as a useful bogeyman when the fact is that we split the CO River up at an exceptionally wet time and we've run SW H20 policy on a bum model. I don't hold much malice for anyone, we haven't figured out how to say "this can't sustain you" yet
Here's a chart of the annual flow of the Colorado River. The green arrow points out to when the CO River Compact was struck, and water amounts were apportioned out. Perhaps you can see the inherent disasters baked into the US southwest water scheme...
People act like large scale farming is some salt-of-the-earth shit but a significant chunk of this country was turned into attempted farmland because people *literally* thought that if you tilled the soil it would directly *cause* rain.
That’s who we defer to on water policy.
We also insist on watering it on the surface, where some huge fraction of the water evaporates, instead of installing stuff like underground irrigation that would reduce that by a lot. This seems like an under-explored area.
Agreeing and extending. It's frustrating when you agree with some of that critique (e.g. maybe golf courses in the desert aren't the best idea) but get told you're still a problem when you don't fully agree with every item (e.g. okay with golf courses in otherwise naturally wet areas).
