> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").
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.
> 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".
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.
I'm all about stomping on the agribusiness water usage and think that whole swathes of agribusiness in CA should get shut down.
However, as I understand it, the alfalfa is a soil restorer that the agribusinesses are going to grow anyway. The question is whether there is any benefit to forcing the agribusinesses plow it under vs exporting it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
They're about the environment. They're about corruption and local city councils being bought out. They're about white collar crime and all the skirting of regulation these developers are getting away with. They're about the affordability crisis. They're about one more tool that promises a massive concentration of wealth. They're about tools of war that have already resulted in the bombing of an elementary school. They're a backlash to silicon valley ideology. And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.
Right. Big umbrellas seldom achieve policy goals. They’re about mobilising folks for something else. People don’t actually turn out over water. That’s the root of the problem and answer to rayiner’s conundrum.
Farms could double their water usage while datacenters halve theirs; the contours of protest wouldn’t materially change.
If you want to create a political coalition today, and have an AI datacenter being debated near you, rally against it. Like, try to stop it. But if you do doesn’t matter. The coalition is what matters. The datacenter—like the water—isn’t actually what anyone is angry about.
> And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.
Being more worried about data centers than agricultural aquifer use is a damning indictment of the poor in this country, right up with the surprisingly bi-partisan nature of anti-vaxx thinking (https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/14/poll-rfk-maha-vacci...)
I didn't even mention water waste in my comment yet you out of touch techies managed to return to your industry talking point AND hate on poor people in one go of it.
And yes, despite your industry talking points, water waste is absolutely a major concern. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers (which are over 90% of data centers) allow almost all the water to evaporate. Similarly, about 30-40% of water used in agriculture filter back down to the water table. Agriculture use is also dispersed over large areas whereas data centers draw from a single pipe. Closed loop systems also have their own environmental concerns and need to "bleed the lines" every month or so to get rid of the toxic sludge that builds up. They also use dramatically more electricity which requires a lot of water to generate.
The point being, if you live somewhere where a new data center is getting built, you WILL see a massive spike in your electricity bill. What do you get in return? Sam Altman buying another politician? Another elementary school bombed? I agree that agricultural waste is out of hand but at least people get a tangible benefit out of it.
You keep trying to ignore all the points and change it to a topic you think you can win but you're still misinformed on that issue.
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.
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.
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.
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-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.
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?
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]
We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.
There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter.
But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.
I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.
The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.
If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.
If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.
We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.
The hilarity of being post food scarcity when the quality of food in stores has declined precipitously both in terms of nutrient density and taste. Most of the processed food contains high fructose corn syrup, sketchy preservatives, and worse. Even if people think we “succeeded” on this front, the truth is that we have failed. The ultimate consequences of our failure have yet to play out.
I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.
Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.
I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out.
I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
not only do they exist, they are by far the more common variant. Whenever you hear about a massive unfunded pension liability it's a defined benefit plan.
>In an aquifer that’s permanently collapsed, artificial recharge—pumping water forcibly back underground—is the only option, according to Shirzaei. That’s expensive and carries the risk of triggering earthquakes.
I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.
It has more possible side effects than just earthquakes (not my expertise in a geological stable country). One such side effect of mixing two types of groundwater is the potential to release minerals in the geological medium that can be above beneficial use criteria (and ultimately contaminate the groundwater). There is a USGS program called PHREEQC that is used for this specific type of modelling.
> does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.
Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.
The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)
Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.
You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?
Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.
Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.
Given enough solar/wind/battery power i do wonder if a desalination plant could run pretty cheaply. A quick chat with ChatGPT tells me it should be feasible. Roughly investing around 1 billion dollars and around 40 million per year for keeping it run producing around 100.000 m³ per year. Cost price of the water would be around $0.20 per m³. Could run for more than 25 years.
That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.
For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
I have been reading articles like this for more than 20 years. Really, it feels like click/rage-bait at this point. The answer is pretty simple: (1) Build desalination plants (Calif already has a few) and (2) switch to more efficient uses of water in agriculture (drip irrigation, that is already widely practiced in water stressed areas of the world). Sure it costs money, but California is insanely rich and can afford to make these changes. For the last 100 years, Calif has been farming on "easy mode". Ok, so now it gets a little bit harder.
> California’s Central Valley, where one-quarter of the food produced in the United States is grown
I am so tired of this quote. It is 25% of total (economic) value, not by calories or volume or weight. This quote is very misleading.
> We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
Correction. It’s the next generations who are insanely fucked. People don’t hope it goes away, they think they won’t be around to see the consequences.
* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.
* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.
* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.
Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.
>Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.
Governments are just a structure for people to coordinate collective action. In democracies, it’s not that distinct from “us all”. We exercise this responsibility through representatives but they are our agents not our rulers. Outcomes depend on our ability to direct them, and the ability of our opponents to do so likewise.
For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.
I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.
Uh...they're just going to pave it and throw something over it.
Edit-
To be clear maybe not specifically in this case, but "oops we've ruined this ecosystem to the point we can't farm it" rarely ends with "better move down the road and let nature reclaim it". It's a lot more "cool now we can put strip malls/data centers/whatever here"
It’s unlikely strip malls and data centers will be built on the land, but utility solar PV is an acceptable use that requires no water, is beneficial to the local environment, and gives the land 20-30 years to recover from agricultural use.
It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch. Underground water aquifers operate on similar timescales, if they can regenerate at all. The land needs time to recover from the demands of present timeline position humans.
Planting more PV farms isn't better, it just convolutes the equation and hides the true sources of damage behind things with a less negative image, and would eventually just prove Jevon's law, one way or the other.
Not preceding "using better" with "consuming less" (on a system-wide basis) would get you the same result as going for recycling while forgoing the first R: empty, marketing points in green-coloured font.
It gives the land time to recover and requires nothing from it, nor human labor. All racking and conductors can be removed from the land in the future to return it to its original condition. All components can be recycled today, through metal and ewaste streams. It hides no externalities or harm. It quietly produces energy more efficiently than any crop, with no inputs besides the sun shining.
As my links demonstrate, California plans on developing 21GW of solar on farmland that no longer has water available for it.
> Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually
> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California
[2] 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
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".
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.
However, as I understand it, the alfalfa is a soil restorer that the agribusinesses are going to grow anyway. The question is whether there is any benefit to forcing the agribusinesses plow it under vs exporting it.
https://floodlightnews.org/saudi-owned-corporate-farms-are-d...
Not saying that is true today though.
I 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.”
Farms could double their water usage while datacenters halve theirs; the contours of protest wouldn’t materially change.
If you want to create a political coalition today, and have an AI datacenter being debated near you, rally against it. Like, try to stop it. But if you do doesn’t matter. The coalition is what matters. The datacenter—like the water—isn’t actually what anyone is angry about.
Being more worried about data centers than agricultural aquifer use is a damning indictment of the poor in this country, right up with the surprisingly bi-partisan nature of anti-vaxx thinking (https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/14/poll-rfk-maha-vacci...)
And yes, despite your industry talking points, water waste is absolutely a major concern. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers (which are over 90% of data centers) allow almost all the water to evaporate. Similarly, about 30-40% of water used in agriculture filter back down to the water table. Agriculture use is also dispersed over large areas whereas data centers draw from a single pipe. Closed loop systems also have their own environmental concerns and need to "bleed the lines" every month or so to get rid of the toxic sludge that builds up. They also use dramatically more electricity which requires a lot of water to generate.
The point being, if you live somewhere where a new data center is getting built, you WILL see a massive spike in your electricity bill. What do you get in return? Sam Altman buying another politician? Another elementary school bombed? I agree that agricultural waste is out of hand but at least people get a tangible benefit out of it.
You keep trying to ignore all the points and change it to a topic you think you can win but you're still misinformed on that issue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
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.
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.
With AI that minimum is expected to increase.
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-dat...
lol
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.
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.
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.
We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.
[1]: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/prog...
[2]: https://archive.gov.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2015/04/01/news1891...
But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.
I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.
The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.
If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.
If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.
Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.
Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.
Peak irrelevance.
I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
Literally defined contribution [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defined_contribution_plan
I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00137...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cauvery-water-managem...
#SaveWater #SaveElectricity #SaveFuel
Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.
Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.
Wouldn't it be for rain to fall and the aquifer's levels to rebound less than expected?
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
And the same is true for global carbon-related climate change, for which the real bill will become increasingly due over the next 10 years.
We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
Correction. It’s the next generations who are insanely fucked. People don’t hope it goes away, they think they won’t be around to see the consequences.
Ignorance and stupidity are the greatest threats to human survival - but perhaps it's for the best.
* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.
* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.
* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.
Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.
>Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
This is not correct at all...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini... one source of many. Also local pollution is reduced, e.g. nox and particles.
For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.
https://uttoncenter.unm.edu/resources/2026-06-1-update-paper...
https://www.organicproducenetwork.com/organic-growers/califo...
Edit- To be clear maybe not specifically in this case, but "oops we've ruined this ecosystem to the point we can't farm it" rarely ends with "better move down the road and let nature reclaim it". It's a lot more "cool now we can put strip malls/data centers/whatever here"
It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch. Underground water aquifers operate on similar timescales, if they can regenerate at all. The land needs time to recover from the demands of present timeline position humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/03/21-gigawatts-of-solar-f...
https://www.goldenstatecleanenergy.com/valley-clean-infrastr...
Not preceding "using better" with "consuming less" (on a system-wide basis) would get you the same result as going for recycling while forgoing the first R: empty, marketing points in green-coloured font.
As my links demonstrate, California plans on developing 21GW of solar on farmland that no longer has water available for it.
https://www.tuletrust.org/land-fallowing-program