Just casually throwing in 'overpopulation' when in so many places, water for actual human needs like drinking, bathing and even washing clothes, is a tiny fraction compared to much more wasteful things like grass, America's largest crop.
I live in a dry bit of the American west and municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture is often not very efficient because of old water rules that give water to things like hobby farms when real farms downstream don't get what they need.
Nifty3929 102 days ago [-]
100% this. or 95%. When you say "grass, America's largest crop" I assume you are referring to lawns, but actually I think your last point is the crucial one: "...municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture..."
California has plenty of water for it's people. If you add up ALL residential, commercial and industrial use, including all outdoor landscape watering, baseball fields, golf courses, etc - it all adds up to around 10-20% of the water used (depending on rainfall).
Where does the rest (80-90%) of California's water go? Agriculture. Half the produce of which is exported to other states and countries. Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert? And about half of that rice is exported, much to Asia (!!)
California is rather like Saudi Arabia, with the farmers pumping out all the water and selling it in the form of agricultural produce.
But take a shorter shower please! And you don't really NEED to flush that toilet.
ForOldHack 102 days ago [-]
I think he is referring to Golf Courses:
"Golf courses in the US occupy roughly 2 million acres, which is larger than the state of Delaware but smaller than Connecticut."
"California almond growers use between 4.7 to 5.5 million acre-feet of water annually, representing roughly 14.4% to 16.75% of the state's agricultural water consumption"
WHAT THE H#$%?
arbitrary_name 102 days ago [-]
Wait, the migrating birds need the wetlands that the rice pairs imitate. It's not as bad as you think. The whole central valley was wetlands, this is better than draining all of it for alfalfa or almonds.
mapt 102 days ago [-]
California right now has an endorheic basin which is rapidly subsiding due to groundwater draws, and that doesn't really work for agriculture in the long term. We need to re-establish a gradient to the ocean, and a limited wetland system, to flush out the salts if nothing else.
samatman 102 days ago [-]
That water grows 77% of all almonds, worldwide.
Is there some better use for roughly 15% of California's water consumption?
Are you sure?
zdragnar 102 days ago [-]
Yes, leave it in the ground. It isn't a renewable resource on any relevant time scale.
If you want almonds, grow them elsewhere, or switch to desalination.
samatman 102 days ago [-]
If "grow them elsewhere" were plausible, California wouldn't be growing 77% of them.
eru 102 days ago [-]
That's a bit silly.
Almonds are grown in California and not so much elsewhere, because with California's broken water policies you can grow them there for cheaper than elsewhere.
If California were to implement proper water pricing (eg via water trading), then the production costs of almonds in California would rise. And they might rise above the costs in other places, thus leading to a shift in production.
Have a look at water trading in Australia to see a good example of how that can shape agricultural practices. The Australian water trading system ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than the Californian mess. And it allowed agriculture to grow in dollar terms, despite severe limitations on the amount of available water.
samatman 102 days ago [-]
No, almonds are grown in California because of a uniquely favorable climate. They're profligate with water because they're allowed to get away with it.
More to the point, if water had a market-clearing price, California would stop growing so much alfalfa. Alfalfa uses half, half, of California's water, and California has no unique advantages at all in growing alfalfa.
But to reiterate, your first paragraph is absurd and very silly indeed. Lots of places have super cheap water but California still grows four out of five almonds on Earth. It baffles me that you thought cheap water was a plausible explanation for this.
eru 101 days ago [-]
Underpriced water contributes to California's almond growing. I did not wish to imply that it's the sole cause of all of California's almond growing.
Obviously, there are plenty of places on earth that have essentially free water, and almost none of them grow almonds.
> If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: [...]
Yes, of course. But that investment costs more money compared to what they are getting away with today, so on the margin we would see less almonds grown in California.
Your suggestion that a reasonably priced water would drop alfalfa production in California a lot more than almond production seems reasonable.
(A slight complication: the fields currently growing alfalfa would presumably grow something else instead of lying fallow. As a second order effect that might lead to more almonds being grown. It would depend on a lot of factors.)
RugnirViking 102 days ago [-]
Why? Id truly be interested to know what makes Californian geography so massively advantages competitively that isn't infrastructure or economics of scale
GeneralMayhem 102 days ago [-]
The Central Valley is an incomprehensibly vast area of incredibly fertile soil, due to its history as a seabed and collection basin of all the mineral runoff from the mountains. It also has California weather, which means one of the longest growing seasons on the planet. Crops grown there grow faster and easier than anywhere else to begin with, and then on top of that you get to grow them twice in one year. It's really kind of unfair when you compare to farmers trying to scratch out a crop anywhere else.
That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.
I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.
> And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
Exactly. Capitalism is already a contestable proposition, but capitalism with infinite money cheats for some?
Without proper accounting of externalities, capitalism does not work even in theory. This means water and all natural resources, it means pollution, it means harmful products like tobacco or social media, it means big cars... So on so on
throwup238 102 days ago [-]
Most California lowlands like the Central Valley sit on alluvial plains where water runoff from the mountains evaporated over millions of years, depositing nutrients dissolved from rock. It’s like the Nile river delta but over time instead of flooding every year. They were also once an ocean, so there’s a very deep layer of fossilized organisms that provide nutrients too.
There’s other reasons like California’s climate supporting a double growing season for many plants but the fertility is what really makes it so economically competitive. Farmers still have to use tons of NPK fertilizer like everyone else but most of the micronutrients are already in the ground so it’s a lot easier to get high yields with low risk and little micro optimization.
lesuorac 102 days ago [-]
Also exclude cheaper water prices for almond grows then residential.
AngryData 102 days ago [-]
They can also grow almonds where it actually rains and requires little to no irrigation. Just because destructive exploitation of natural resources makes producing almonds 5% cheaper, that doesn't mean it is the only way or place to grow almonds.
dragonwriter 102 days ago [-]
> Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert?
Rice benefits from flooding for weed control (because it is unusually flood resistant), but doesn't consume a lot of water (the water from flooding is available for downstream use.)
If you want to complain about water-intenaive crops in CA, the issue is almonds, not rice.
Also, while there are parts of CA that are desert or “almost desert” (desert or semi-arid climate), the area around Sacramento is hot-summer Mediterranean.
rcpt 102 days ago [-]
The issue is animal agriculture, not almonds.
For example cow milk uses more water in absolute terms, and more water per calorie, than almond milk.
Nifty3929 102 days ago [-]
I'm not so sure. A quick Google search came up with wildly varying amounts of water to produce a gallon of almond milk, from 23 gallons of water to ~1600:
These were just two of the several sources I found, at each extreme. There was similar variation for cow milk.
Considering that it takes roughly 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond, and that 23 almonds wouldn't fill even an 8oz cup, I'm guessing that the higher end of the spectrum is probably more accurate for almond milk.
It also looks like almond milk has half the calories per gallon of skim milk and 1/4 that of whole milk.
hombre_fatal 102 days ago [-]
That 1611 liter figure looks like nonsense the second you dig into it, if the link even went anywhere. Random google result when you google the quote that responds to the source of the claim: https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/almond-milk-water-usage
A more reputable source would be https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks which lists almond milk as half the freshwater volume of dairy milk, and far better at every other metric (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication).
So you'd have to stretch things much farther than you did in your post for dairy milk to have an edge over almond milk. And even if you somehow did it, then dairy milk would have to then beat out soy milk which is even better than almond milk in all of these metrics, which it won't. If you care about environmental impact, dairy milk just isn't going to be in the cards. Let it take the L.
102 days ago [-]
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 102 days ago [-]
I think soy milk tastes better than almond milk
p1necone 102 days ago [-]
Almond milk has always tasted terrible to me. And most western produced soy milk. Warm, freshly pressed soy milk is amazing, and the kind of minimally processed bottled stuff you get from chinese grocery stores is pretty good too.
Soy milk splits when mixed with coffee though, and doesn't really have a neutral enough taste, for that I find oat milk works great.
riffraff 102 days ago [-]
It's fun cause (sweetened) almond milk was considered a delicacy in Italy, and had been supplanted with shitty tasting almond milk in recent years, much like almond-tasting almonds have been replaced with tasteless ones.
I can't tell if it's a change in cultivar or transcontinental transport, but something bad happened with almonds in Europe.
mapt 102 days ago [-]
Imported American almonds maybe?
riffraff 99 days ago [-]
I guess, but I'm not sure why California almonds shouldn't taste like almonds.
102 days ago [-]
hammock 102 days ago [-]
Were you raised on formula by chance?
fakedang 102 days ago [-]
You're comparing whole oranges with orange slices. When comparing vegan food with animal protein, bother to take into account the entire package rather than one part. Animals are actually a much more energy intensive source of nutrition, and excellent for efficiency in terms of calories delivered. Our bodies process more nutrients from animal protein, while deriving nutrition from grains is a more recent evolution for us. You could easily feed entire villages with a couple of cows (as is done even today in many parts of the world). And this isn't including their value as milk producers and fertilizer generators.
On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.
hombre_fatal 102 days ago [-]
<2% of input calories become beef calories. <4% of input protein becomes beef protein. Animal food products require an eye-watering amount more land than plant food products, even milk.
It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.
AngryData 102 days ago [-]
While you are correct, you also have to consider the fact that cows are fed alfalfa, which is a crop that requires no fertilizer or pesticides and actually produces excess nitrogen fertilizer, which otherwise must be produced from natural gas. It also takes very little physical labor to harvest and store grasses and alfalfa compared to human food sources.
The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.
aziaziazi 102 days ago [-]
I eat alfalfa too, and sell some in my shop. But neither me or the cows eat only that: we like to diversify our intake to stay healthy and (global or local) logistic bring us a variety of other food/nutrients.
Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.
Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.
genocidicbunny 102 days ago [-]
I recall reading that rice field flooding in those parts is also helping with recharging the aquifers somewhat, the depletion of which has been a major problem in the CA central valley. The rice fields hold the water for longer than if it just drained into the delta, giving some of it time to percolate down.
throwaway2037 102 days ago [-]
> but doesn't consume a lot of water
If the area around Sacramento is "hot-summer Mediterranean", wouldn't there be a lot of natural evaporation of this water, so you need to constantly replenish it to keep the fields flooded?
That's fine if it's a place for, say, children to play, but most of them do not get used that way.
bobthepanda 102 days ago [-]
Californian water agencies have offered money to convert lawns to rock or low-water gardens for a while now.
The lawns get wrapped up in that residential water usage figure mentioned further up the chain, so it isn't a whole lot compared to Big Ag.
davidw 102 days ago [-]
Yeah, xeriscaping helps. In terms of municipal uses though, watering is a significant chunk in the city I live in. Not much compared to ag or actual waste, but it's a number the city is happy to push down - and has been.
fakedang 102 days ago [-]
It gets better. Grown in California for export to China and Saudi Arabia, where they're used for cattle feed.
Also fun fact, a lot of farm managers in Saudi Arabia are either Scottish or Australian.
wnc3141 102 days ago [-]
A big part of depletion of the Ogallala aquifer is due to domestic policy to include corn in just about anything - including fuel.
toast0 102 days ago [-]
> Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert?
That's not really accurate. Much of California is Mediterranean climate, including all of Sacramento county. Yes, there's some desert in California, but most of the agriculture happens elsewhere; but it depends on what you mean by 'almost a desert', a lot of the central valley is classified as arid and that's where a lot of the agriculture happens. A lot of people also live in (different) arid parts of California though, maybe they should move to where fresh water is easier to access :P
Also, the terrain means it's relatively easy to move water from the north around the central valley, but difficult to move it from the north or central valley to the greater LA area. Elsewhere in the thread, people claim water is fungible, and it mostly is, but location is important, and moving water in Bakersfield to Los Angeles is non trivial.
GP’s statement you quoted is entirely inaccurate. The natural state of California’s Central Valley is a wetland, which is how settlers found it in the 1800s, full of swamps, fish, deer, and lakes. And then they set to the work of draining all of the swamps so they could grow things there. It’s an unnatural desertification, and if the dams and waterworks were removed, it would return to the marshland. Even now, the rice grown near Sacramento is grown in land that is periodically flooded by the river.
102 days ago [-]
Nifty3929 102 days ago [-]
Some responders have challenged my assertion that Sacramento is a desert. I concede the point - it's actually classified as Mediterranean.
That said, rice consumes a lot of irrigation water:
"In California, there is very little to no rainfall
during the rice growing season, so this is not
usually considered in water budgets. On average,
about 5 acre feet/acre (AF/ac) of irrigation water
is applied to a rice field during the growing"
Also, rice is not a particularly big water consumer compared to other crops - it's just one that came to mind. You could pick from dozens of others - Almonds, pistachios, etc.
California simply uses a LOT of water to produce a LOT of food, about half of it being exported.
yimby2001 102 days ago [-]
Are you saying California shouldn’t export food? It’s one of the best food growing environments on the planet.
mapt 102 days ago [-]
CA's central valley is missing ~140 million acre feet of groundwater relative to historical norms, and is pumping an additional ~15 million acre feet a year. Ban that and desalinate 30 million acre feet of oceanwater at $2000 per acre-foot and you can have your cake and eat it too at a cost of 60 billion dollars a year, expand agriculture and develop a sustainable aquifer & watershed.
But central valley agriculture only makes $37 billion a year.
fakedang 102 days ago [-]
Well if you wish for California to become the next Sahelian desert, sure. California is already on track to become one adverse climate event away from turning into a complete clusterfuck.
animal_spirits 102 days ago [-]
I kind of understand this argument, but I kind of don't. Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.
There's a lot of crops that are grown in CA that are not native to the area, and require a lot of water to be viable in that area. Trying to grow a crop native to monsoon areas in a dry area is just unsane.
KoolKat23 102 days ago [-]
And growing a human in that area? Would it not also be a drag on the area? At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).
Ntrails 102 days ago [-]
> At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.
The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.
dylan604 102 days ago [-]
A person can live in that environment on much less water than the crops. Just growing different crops would consume less water.
njarboe 102 days ago [-]
There is a reason 80%(?) of the world almond crop is grown in California. It has a great climate for almonds, a lot of land, and water to support the trees. We need to trade something for our IPhones besides the promise of future dollars (debt).
KoolKat23 102 days ago [-]
I don't think that's true unless they're living in extreme poverty.
PaulDavisThe1st 102 days ago [-]
> Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).
joshuaissac 102 days ago [-]
Tax water for agricultural usage enough to fund desalination plants for their water use. The market participants should then adapt by switching to less water-intensive crops, or paying the tax and getting the desalination plants.
grantsucceeded 102 days ago [-]
pretty sure there is no salt water in the central valley either.
rcpt 102 days ago [-]
> tax water for agricultural use
Yeah good luck with this one
netsharc 102 days ago [-]
From the survival of civilization scale, most of "almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes" are probably luxury items that we can ill afford.
Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
Strange because you are naming staples that are concentrated sources of nutrition and energy that can indeed ensure survival, and components of “trail mix” for this very reason.
Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.
Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.
PaulDavisThe1st 102 days ago [-]
> Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
This situation came with the territory. By contrast, California's agriculture is 100% dependent on massive hydroengineering projects.
AngryData 102 days ago [-]
We can afford them, it costs maybe 5% more to grow them other places. We just don't anymore because that is 5% someone can skim off the top because they don't have to pay for environmental destruction and other downstream effects.
throwanem 102 days ago [-]
> California is rather like Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps the key insight required to explain the 20th century.
It has the force of truth: now that I see it put so simply, I struggle to understand why no one has been able to do so before.
stevenwoo 102 days ago [-]
Cadillac Desert posits this about most of the American West, it was sparsely populated prior to the widespread usage of pumps for water and dam program (to generate electricity to pump reservoir water) of Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. Those power plants and population growths might have fueled American productivity in WW2 but it also was a subsidized consolidation of farms under large corporations and rich individuals when it was meant to help smaller farmers. It's an older book with a 2017 update.
WillPostForFood 102 days ago [-]
It is a key insight, indirectly. The power of a falsehood to sway emotions on
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
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throwanem 94 days ago [-]
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vkou 102 days ago [-]
Grass is not America's largest crop, but it is by far the most wasteful.
Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive. There are optimizations you can make with regards to which kind of agriculture is done where.
If the only way you can grow almonds is by mining water out of an aquifer that will deplete in a decade, maybe we should go without almonds. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
eru 102 days ago [-]
> The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Water pricing via water trading would help move these considerations of trade-offs to the private sector.
> Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive.
Just as a silly nitpick: you can make food without agriculture. And it's not just via wild fishing, but also by directly producing edible substances from minerals, like producing margarine from coal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
In general, you are obviously right, though.
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
Okay, it may seem strange to rob the homeland to feed the world, but think geopolitics.
Firstly, the water mostly doesn't leave california. If they're exporting dried rice and almonds and things like that, most of the irrigation water is staying right where it was used, correct? You say water is consumed, as if it goes away or vanishes? Evaporated water or underground water is also water.
Secondly, you're giving jobs and supporting the local economy. Farmers purchase supplies, capital goods, they pay property taxes, and first and foremost they employ people. They employ large workforces. All that revenue they received from selling wherever they sell is stimulating local economies.
Lastly, exporting food is great international relations. What country will attack you when they depend on you for food? What nation will not be grateful for receiving such basic sustenance from overseas? And if we would go to war, and if you want to shut down all this agriculture, what will we eat on the home front? If we can't import food, we'd better have infrastructure to support our own needs. Any nation [state, county, city] that produces excess food is more likely to withstand siege, blockade or attack.
Liquor and soda bottlers can pivot to producing and distributing hand sanitizer or bottled water. If beer or Coke is bad for you, keep drinking it anyway, because you never know when that industry will become indispensable.
skulk 102 days ago [-]
I think your first paragraph misses the mark a bit. Yes, the export of almonds probably represents a tiny amount of water leaving the system. But this isn't about that, this is about water allocation. At the end of the day, if there isn't enough water being allocated for daily use ("don't flush your toilet") BUT there's enough to export so many almonds, something has gone wrong.
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
> something has gone wrong
Wrong for you individually, perhaps, but please note that "The Good of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few", and as citizens of the Western Empire, we are called to make sacrifice in order that justice be done in the world. My personal private toilet is insignificant and inconsequential compared to the almighty almond.
skulk 102 days ago [-]
bah. Eventually, Poe comes for us all.
FuriouslyAdrift 102 days ago [-]
The almond lobby is incredibly powerful in California, too.
Reubachi 102 days ago [-]
The "real farms" (Ie beef, dairy, grains, corns) you mentioned are absorbing on the order of 80 percent of the water, not commercial and private lawns/grass.
Hobby farms with several cows and a shop that sells maple syrup consum eabout 1/10000th a percent of water as for example con-agra suppliers, nestle etc.
There is the constantly rotating story of "this one small family farm in colorado uses more of california's water than LA county". That is a LARGE conglomerate farm which is part of the corporate farm problem, not mom and pop farms.
I assure you;In the USA specifically, your families ability to eat and provide food for the things we eat WILL be more important in the long run than bathing or washing clothes, until we decide that beef proteins aren't the msot sustainable.
dralley 102 days ago [-]
While that's true it has very little to do with Mexico City's specific issues. It's at 7300 feet elevation surrounded by a ring of mountains that keep out a lot of the rain and moisture, and there's already not that much agriculture going on given the limited space.
davidw 102 days ago [-]
I don't know anything about water allocation and provisioning in Mexico City, but the article itself doesn't limit itself to Mexico city either:
"It exemplifies a future that cities worldwide could face if global warming and overpopulation continue."
The city where I live is, I'm sure, very different from Mexico City, but we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown, thanks to things like xeriscaping. I imagine things are more difficult in Mexico City because there is less money, and orders of magnitude more people.
PaulDavisThe1st 102 days ago [-]
> we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown
I don't know where you live, but if it is a city like most others, you've likely reduced your per-capita water use, but not total water use. This is certainly true of most cities in the American west. They have made impressive (above 30%) reductions in per-capita water use, but they have (in many cases) grown by more than that.
bri3k 102 days ago [-]
I hate when they promote the use of low-flow toilets which save 1-2 gallons when compared to irrigation of farm land measured in acre-inches of water. A acre-inch of water is 27,000 gallons. Corn needs 12 acre-inches to grow to maturity, or over 325,000 per acre.
I live in Mexico. About 30 mins from where I live, Amazon and others have built data centers (presumably for AI) which consume water. This is affecting agriculture in a region that is already suffering from drought.
I would imagine you are talking about Queretaro. Google and Microsoft also have data centers there.
This is a thing that has been more than a decade in the making, mostly because Queretaro does not have seismic activity and is only a couple of hours north of Mexico City.
While the water sources are completely different, both regions are prone to intense water seasons and, in the last couple of years, intense droughts.
More specifically, Queretaro is a semi-desert, so this behavior is a bit more expected.
Aside: Coming from personal experience I don't think that current agricultural methods are the best and are pron to wasting water, at least what I remember from Queretaro
pier25 102 days ago [-]
Yes, Querétaro state (not the city).
If you check the link in my comment these are not the data centers close to the city which everyone knows but newer ones in Colón.
cicloid 102 days ago [-]
For all intents and purposes, Colon is considered to be part of the ZMQ (Zona Metropolitana de Queretaro)^1
Funny thing the english wikipedia article does not even mention it. But yeah, Each of those Cloud providers, have at least 3 buildings distributed on multiple industrial parks in the metropolitan area and I'm not even mentioning the ones from Kio Networks, IBM (SoftLayer). We are one step away from having one from OVH and Hetzner.
The only data center I know that is in the middle of the city of Queretaro is the one from Triara (aka Telmex, one of the many companies from Carlos Slim). Most of them are in the outskirts of the urban area.
Genuinely curious, how much water do data centers consume? I would think they might need a good amount of water at startup, but any use would be in a closed system. Am I misunderstanding their water use? Do they lose a lot of it to the atmosphere somehow?
physhster 103 days ago [-]
Some data centers use evaporative cooling, in outside chillers. The water use is fairly high.
Robotbeat 103 days ago [-]
Is there a reason the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water, so the net effect of the data center is zero?
Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.
jncfhnb 103 days ago [-]
Water is fungible. If they need to pipe in 1 gallon of water, who pays the extra cost? The entity that used the last gallon? The entity that used the most? Nah. It’s averaged out across all users.
You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably
commercially viable.
Robotbeat 103 days ago [-]
Right, so just make Amazon pay whatever is a commercially sustainable price. This shouldn’t be particularly hard.
jncfhnb 102 days ago [-]
That means _everyone_ pays the higher price. Water is fungible. You can tax them if you want. But you can’t expect market forces to do it.
102 days ago [-]
ketzo 102 days ago [-]
Wait, what? Utilities all over the world have rate systems that offer higher or lower prices based on who's paying. "Water is fungible" doesn't mean that you can't charge Amazon more for it than you do the little old lady down the street.
I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.
jncfhnb 102 days ago [-]
Those are the result of heavy regulation, not deregulation.
Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.
Robotbeat 97 days ago [-]
Your last sentence disproves the first.
actionfromafar 102 days ago [-]
Deregulation is good, they said. Don't be an alarmist, they said.
Robotbeat 102 days ago [-]
? Yeah, actually, deregulated water would mean Amazon would have to pay the full price instead of a subsidized price for water.
actionfromafar 102 days ago [-]
And if it turns out that Amazon would still "win" the price fight over the people who lived there before Amazon came there, it's all good?
And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?
"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".
What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.
Robotbeat 97 days ago [-]
I was responding to someone who made a joke about an obvious mispricing by the govt as being due to deregulation when it’s really the opposite.
As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
>> Water is fungible
I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?
There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.
Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
jncfhnb 102 days ago [-]
If you want to get overly pedantic, money is not fungible either then. Sanctioned currency, dirty money that needs laundering, etc.
But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about
samatman 102 days ago [-]
The existence of various grades of a commodity says nothing about whether that commodity at those grades is fungible. Mostly it implies the opposite, in fact.
AStonesThrow 102 days ago [-]
But you can't then say unqualified that "water is fungible". Sewer water is not fungible with potable water. Greywater is not fungible with distilled or RO water. I'm not convinced that sewer water is fungible at all, considering its unknown content!
samatman 102 days ago [-]
People do this all the time actually. "Cotton is fungible", "oil is fungible".
The grading is assumed.
AStonesThrow 99 days ago [-]
I will remember this next time Amazon tries to ship me Artesian Spring Deuterium or Tritium to me, and extra shipping/handling charges apply
There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.
ForTheKidz 102 days ago [-]
> Is there a reason the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water
The market is typically not a great place to solve conflict. Unless you're the richer party, of course.
bobmcnamara 103 days ago [-]
Government usually, same as it is with Nestle in the US.
hwillis 102 days ago [-]
> the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water
Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.
> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.
Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?
> is it just a mispricing of the water?
...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
betaby 102 days ago [-]
I'm not aware of any single one like that in Mexico.
> Having it generate a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
> 10 to 50 queries consume about 2 litres of water (½ gallon).2
yimby2001 102 days ago [-]
Right, but you know that’s not true.
quickthrowman 102 days ago [-]
Most data centers use evaporative cooling towers, they’re much more efficient than a closed loop system.
102 days ago [-]
non- 103 days ago [-]
One thing I'd like more info on is in what ways Nestlé and other water companies have contributed to the problem.
I've long heard that they lobby to prevent the local Government in CDMX from providing potable water in order to protect their bottled water and water-delivery business, but I actually don't know how well substantiated those accusations are.
On the positive side of things, Mexico City gets a ton of rain during the wet season which can be harvested with rooftop collectors.
myaccountonhn 103 days ago [-]
When I lived in Oaxaca it was a massive issue with portable water only being available through private means from private springs in the nearby area. All hotels and tourist attractions had access to water, while the rest went without, some for months.
nozzlegear 102 days ago [-]
Do you remember how much they would charge for water?
alephnerd 103 days ago [-]
Nezahualcoyotl/Neza, Naucalpan, and Ecatepec (the municipalities mentioned) are not in Mexico City proper.
They along with Iztapalapa are the former slum towns. How much of the water crisis can be attributed to the fact that these were all unplanned muncipalities, with split governance between Mexico State and CDMX
Edit: Yep, looks like only 15% of water in Mexico is allocated to human consumption and the rest is for agriculture and manufacturing [0].
Now I'm curious how many seats in Estado Mexico's assembly are within the CDMX metro and how many are not. If majority of them aren't within the CDMX metro then it's the classic democracy dilemma you see in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, etc as well.
But American sewage systems are also functional and maintained/upgraded.
I'm not sure how DPW-style work is funded or managed at the municipality level in MX.
ForTheKidz 102 days ago [-]
Medico city is basically at the level of the water table, no? Building a sewer must be a serious pain in the ass.
alephnerd 102 days ago [-]
Edit 3: My hypothesis about state impact doesn't hold (forgot that Mexico follows the same system as the US of direct governer elections plus a mix of direct and proportional representation).
That said, now I'm curious about how public funds are disbursed to localities. How do local municipalities and unincorporated areas get services funded in Mexico?
thelastgallon 102 days ago [-]
It is never mentioned that electricity from fossil fuel generation consumes a lot of water.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
Thermoelectric power plants—including coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants—boil water to create steam, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity. Cooling water is passed through the steam leaving the turbine to cool and condense the steam. This step reduces the steam's exit pressure and recaptures its heat, which is then used to preheat fluid entering the boiler.
I live in Mexico City and a large part of this is the odd compulsion that chilangos have to put concrete over absolutely everything. It rains but there is very little unpaved surfaces to absorb any of that water and return it to underground sources. I've had friends and family members inexplicably rip out nice gardens at their houses and replace it with paved surfaces. My in-laws have a large yard that only has a few square meters of unpaved ground left. My street has flooding problems during intense rains every couple years in large part because no water can be absorbed anywhere and if the small street drains get clogged with branches it is a disaster.
roncesvalles 102 days ago [-]
The choices are either pavement or grass. Open ground creates dust and mud.
The reason why 1st world cities look "cleaner" is because every single sq inch is either paved or turfed with grass.
r00fus 102 days ago [-]
Xeriscaping is a thing. Also are other greenery options than grass. We had a dust/mud patch, but then planted 100% clover (by simply throwing seeds on the ground). Now we have completely unmanaged greenery. It's not neat, we don't even water it - it's green in the spring, golden/brown in other seasons. Easy peasy.
ForTheKidz 102 days ago [-]
Anyone who claims the west is clean has never been to philly
LeftHandPath 103 days ago [-]
Off topic: This page is beautiful. Love it when people use magazine-style layouts on the web.
jppullen 102 days ago [-]
Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
Thanks so much for reading!
internetter 102 days ago [-]
A couple pieces of feedback from someone who loves your content
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)
jppullen 101 days ago [-]
Thank you!
1. Being RSS-compatible would unbundle the editorial and art from the design. I wish RSS readers and aggregators would support our builds, but they do not. We do produce newsletters (currently through Substack) that do/would, but those are very different editorial products.
2. I understand this critique. We have outgrown this build, and are looking to develop a new website this year. It was good when we were starting out, but it doesn't serve our readership well anymore -- as you're pointing out!
internetter 101 days ago [-]
This was killed by the HN community. I’ve vouched for it. Killing posts you disagree with isn’t the point of the flag feature.
With that being said, I understand your perspective. I’ve grappled with this myself. Please note that having RSS does not mandate that there’s content attached to each entry. It can “just” be a title, date, stable id like your slug, and a link. That way, if you insist on directing visitors to your own site, that can be done, while still allowing the reader to get updates in their reader.
I can assure you that if you add an RSS feed, I will regularly consume your content. If you don’t, I won’t even know it exists. For all the faults of legacy media, attaining readership is not one of them. They’d all remove RSS feeds in an instant if they could without loosing readers.
true_blue 103 days ago [-]
It's pretty for sure, but it breaks reader view which I use a lot, so I don't like it. also it requires a lot of unnecessary scrolling to read since the text is broken up so much
karpovv-boris 102 days ago [-]
It's like old "science and life" journals. If you have that experience, then you'll be appreciating it. Love it
jppullen 101 days ago [-]
[dead]
ericmay 103 days ago [-]
Is it just me or is anyone else unable to swipe to go back to the parent HN page from the longlead.com website?
103 days ago [-]
eudhxhdhsb32 102 days ago [-]
It's annoying to read on my phone. Text and pictures are moving at different speeds than I'm scrolling.
racl101 103 days ago [-]
Pretty stylish.
Wouldn't want to read this on a phone though I tell you hwhat.
Aardwolf 103 days ago [-]
Works great in firefox on android. Text takes exact screen width and is not too small nor too big, and there are no stupid floating right side icons overlapping the text, what more do you need
It does have an unneeded text-scrolling-up effect, and breaks reader view which means they're doing something sinister, but at least reader view isn't actually necessary in this one for the way it looks
jppullen 101 days ago [-]
[dead]
ropable 102 days ago [-]
Counterpoint: it's super clear and easy to read on Firefox mobile. No popups or interstitial ads. Yes it's quite lengthy and there are many pictures, but you know what you're getting into with any long article like this one. This is exactly what I want for reading on mobile.
Suppafly 103 days ago [-]
>Wouldn't want to read this on a phone though I tell you hwhat.
Most decently designed sites know how to respond to different screen sizes.
Marsymars 102 days ago [-]
I read it on my TV, and it was pretty nice.
jppullen 101 days ago [-]
[dead]
mjmsmith 102 days ago [-]
Why on earth is jppullen's comment dead?
jppullen 102 days ago [-]
Well that's not cool. Here it is again:
Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
Thanks so much for reading!
mjmsmith 102 days ago [-]
Please consider adding an RSS feed for us old fogeys.
jppullen 101 days ago [-]
[dead]
saagarjha 102 days ago [-]
New account, likely. It's been vouched for now presumably.
pdntspa 103 days ago [-]
Ugh no. My scroll wheel finger hurts because they are allergic to a simple text flow. I hate it when people get too fancy with this shit
glenneroo 102 days ago [-]
Pro-tip: If you click anywhere on the page, you can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll up/down and avoid finger-wheel-fatigue :)
eddof13 102 days ago [-]
Been in Mexico almost 7 years- it's common knowledge, you don't drink the tap water, ever. The destitute who can't afford bottled water might be the exception.
blovescoffee 102 days ago [-]
I’ve lived here for 3 years and been drinking the tap for about a year. I’ve got lots of friends with “filters” that don’t actually do anything for microbes, and they drink that water. Anyways, very very few people can’t afford a garrafón.
whymauri 102 days ago [-]
It's not the microbes in my experience, it's the heavy metals suspended in the water.
It's like a 0.1% damage over time effect. A few days drinking it? Fine. A few weeks? Still fine. Months? I started feeling just a bit more sick until I cut it out for filtered water.
ForTheKidz 102 days ago [-]
Brita filters most certainly do filter out "microbes". Just with low certainty that drops over the age of the filter.
blovescoffee 102 days ago [-]
FWIW I was not referring to brita filters. Two days ago I was at a friends house who had a literal fabric filter on top of his big water carafe.
102 days ago [-]
4fterd4rk 102 days ago [-]
The majority of the world has non-potable tap water.
jajko 102 days ago [-]
Try drinking tap water in Africa, India, Bangladesh, most of South America and South Asia, in fact most of the 3rd world... good luck. Ie India had (maybe still has) high infant mortality due to water-transmitted diseases. Once you can't effectively 100% separate waste water from natural water table or other sources for drinking, everything becomes contaminated.
eckmLJE 103 days ago [-]
I kept hoping they'd provide a reference of Tenochtitlan. Possibly the most striking thing I learned when visiting Mexico City.
>Mexico City was built on top of what used to be a large body of water, which would make its water shortage appear ironic if it wasn’t so tragic. In the early 1300s, the Mexica (or Aztecs) settled on an island in the middle of what used to be a huge lake called Texcoco, the largest among five intertwined lakes.
But after the arrival of the Spaniards, the city started to expand, and the urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up. By the early 20th century, the rivers feeding the once-rich lake zone were put into pipelines to make way for motor vehicles. Very little is left of the lakes, while the rivers have become practically invisible.
eckmLJE 102 days ago [-]
Thank you! I scanned the text and scrolled through all the pics, and searched for `tenoch` and didn't get any hits. "The urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up" glosses over a super interesting sequence of decisions that led to the disaster.
Ok, so nobody seam to talk about the privatisation of water in Mexico.
It is at the root of the problem. Coca Cola is the most known absurd operator of this industry. National water is too cheap and used by private company for nearly nothing. Vicente Fox was a president of Coca Cola company in Mexico before becoming the president of Mexico, you can guess the « colonisation » was easier by that. (Coca Cola isn't alone, it is just the most known, Danone, the French company is also plundering Mexico water for example, AI datacenter too, ...).
Coca cola is known to be responsible for the drying of Monterrey and San Cristobal de Las Casas.
tomw1808 102 days ago [-]
I have an honest question here, that is a bit off-topic:
When I look at the pictures, I see most people are overweight (some are outright fat and obese). Is that just by accident on these particular pictures with a tiny sample size? Or is that a problem in Mexico?
I'm from Europe and when I think about Mexico, I do not have overweight people in my mind, instead a relatively healthy diet of local produce. Is that a misconception?
wow, that is quite an eye opener. That's terrible really. It's like a whole country is addicted to sugar drinks and wheat flour (?).
Thanks for sharing
littlekey 101 days ago [-]
It's a very real issue. The main problem is that Coca Cola basically took over the whole country. In my experience you can't find a dinner table without a liter bottle of coke or processed juice. I've gotten strange reactions when asking for water, it's just not done most of the time.
The other factor is that because they (and Nestlé I think) use up so much of the water supply to produce their drinks in the first place, it drives up the price of water in those areas to such an extent that you "might as well" just buy soda.
I've heard from a Mexican buddy that Coca Cola is cheaper in Mexico than drinking water.
xdc0 103 days ago [-]
That’s a myth. In many parts of Mexico, if not everywhere, water treatment is bad and drinking tap water is not advised, so you buy purified water.
It cost around 10 pesos (50 cents) to fill a 19 liter (5 gallon) jug. That’s cheaper than a single 12oz can of coca cola
Marsymars 102 days ago [-]
What's with the $5/5 gallon reference in the article? I thought that seemed expensive.
blovescoffee 102 days ago [-]
That’s not accurate. At least in the majority of the city. You can buy a brand new 5 gallon garrafón for $65mxn ~ $3.25. You can fill one up from empty for ~$35mxn.
"A key reason for the rise in consumption is its availability and, in many cases, its lower cost compared to drinking water. In many rural communities in Chiapas, access to safe drinking water is limited, local stores are well-stocked with Coca-Cola, and the company's marketing campaigns have ensured that the drink is always within everyone's reach."
rzz3 102 days ago [-]
It’s simply not true. Not in any place I’ve ever seen in all the years I’ve been in Mexico.
recursive 103 days ago [-]
Coca Cola should just make a new formula that doesn't have any flavoring, carbonation, or sweetener. That should be even cheaper.
dhosek 103 days ago [-]
They can call it Dasani and sell it for more than they charge for the sweetened flavored carbonated beverage.
potato3732842 103 days ago [-]
Soft drinks get carbonation and syrup added and are bottled close to point of use (because that's cheaper and better than shipping the finished product) so they're subject to local potable water costs. Unless government is distorting thing that just doesn't make sense.
ForTheKidz 102 days ago [-]
It's not cheaper. However, Coca-Cola does consume an enormous quantity of water and it is popular and it does drive the cost of water up. I'd prolly be pissed too if I were mexican.
pier25 103 days ago [-]
I've never seen this
southernplaces7 102 days ago [-]
Been a resident of Mexico for nearly 20 years now, and no, coca cola is emphatically not cheaper than drinking water. This nonsense myth needs to die.
josu 102 days ago [-]
An important detail that the article has somehow left out. Texcoco, one of Mexico City's main lakes is salty. The Aztecs built a system of dams to separate the salty waters of the lake from the rain water of the effluents.
erickhill 102 days ago [-]
My goodness my eyes really must suck. Had to zoom into that article multiple times in order to read it (especially the photo captions).
arrty88 102 days ago [-]
Will any of the feet of snow that dropped on Colorado Cali and Utah make it down to CDMX supply basins?
ahmeneeroe-v2 102 days ago [-]
no, even if we removed every dam and didn't consume a drop of water, it would not reach CDMX by natural means.
oldgregg 103 days ago [-]
Also Valle De Bravo is the Hamptons of Mexico
MRMsys 99 days ago [-]
Nuclear desalination. We could have had this decades ago, the real atoms for peace dividend. The boomers are stupid though, and the fact that the world has freshwater shortages and we have to consider carbon emissions (to whatever degree it will be a problem) from electricity generation is entirely their fault. And they are still squandering this gift.
ck2 103 days ago [-]
How are we doing with next-gen solar desalination?
I know some US warships have massive desalination plants onboard, are they nuclear powered? Can we use the new micro-nuclear-reactors to power those for cities?
seanmcdirmid 103 days ago [-]
Do data centers need to use fresh drinking water or can they use water with some salt in it (I'm guessing not because the salt corrodes?). They could at least use gray water?
Robotbeat 103 days ago [-]
Data centers don’t need any water. They can reject heat directly to the air. If the price of water were high enough, that’s what they’d do instead of evaporative coolers. This is a fake problem driven by clickbait headlines or, at worse, mispricing of water.
collingreen 102 days ago [-]
> Data centers don’t need any water.
Is this using "need" to only mean "there is no possible alternative in any design"?
Your statement -implies- datacenters don't use water for cooling or, if they do, it isn't enough to cause any problem.
How do you square this with the fact that lots of datacenters DO use water for cooling? Yes, if water was prohibitively expensive businesses would find alternatives - that's what prohibitively expensive means so I'm not adding anything more than a tautology here.
Similarly does your claim that at worst this is a mispricing of water mean that they DO use water and it drives the cost up? Isn't that the point here, that businesses driving up the cost of water is bad for the people that also need (your definition of "need" above) water?
Robotbeat 102 days ago [-]
Water is a slightly cheaper way to reject heat if you have unlimited almost free water. I don’t think you’d use water for cooling if you had to pay residential water rates instead of like agricultural rates for water. It’s not at all a showstopper to just dump the heat into the air without using an evaporative cooler. It just costs somewhat more. Compared to the capital cost of an NVidia GPU server, the cost is small.
seanmcdirmid 102 days ago [-]
Ok, granted, I'm guessing they are just working with different capital costs (to build air-based cooling; i.e. via a huge air cooling tower). But I'm sure there is a place where data centers could be using subprime water for cooling economically without artificially low water prices (the issue then would be capital costs for transporting and using subprime water).
cicloid 102 days ago [-]
that was also my understanding. Nearby Mexico City, in a semi-desertic area (Queretaro), there are a high amount of data centers, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have a region there.
I would think they only need cheap electricity, connectivity and in the case of Mexico, far away from seismic activity.
thfuran 102 days ago [-]
Evaporating a gallon of water eats about 2.5 KWhr. Buying a gallon of municipal water costs me about 0.6¢, or about 2% of the equivalent amount of electricity. AC is efficient, so say we'd only have to increase water prices by about 500% to make it not worth it to use evaporative cooling.
Your claim is that increasing the price of a basic utility by several hundred percent to prevent a company from using a huge amount of it is a fake problem? That sounds like complete bullshit to me, and I don't even live in a city that's collapsing into the ground due to aquifer overuse.
Robotbeat 102 days ago [-]
If you are literally drawing so much from the aquifers that the city is collapsing into the ground, I think the water probably is mispriced.
And there’s no reason you have to charge industrial users of water less than residential users if the real price (meaning the cost to replace that water) is higher than the residential price. 0.6¢/gallon is less than I pay and I live in a wet city. I pay about 2¢/gallon. So for industrial electricity rates of 5-7¢/kWh, A/C is approximately a wash vs using residential water for cooling.
thfuran 102 days ago [-]
>If you are literally drawing so much from the aquifers that the city is collapsing into the ground, I think the water probably is mispriced.
Cool story. But every human needs water, and no data center needs water. Why should every person have to pay more to live just to prevent Amazon from breaking the world for a tiny increase in profits?
Robotbeat 101 days ago [-]
“And there’s no reason you have to charge industrial users of water less than residential users if the real price (meaning the cost to replace that water) is higher than the residential price”
…is what I said. You can, of course, charge residential users less for the first 100 or 1000 gallons of monthly use, as is common for utilities in the US.
Good faith engagement on this topic probably requires thinking for 5 seconds if the objection you raised isn’t easily addressed by common methods already.
Additionally, industrial/industrial-scale-agricultural uses of water are almost always more sensitive to water prices. An incredibly poor population would benefit from the tax revenues and jobs offered by companies moving in.
pkaye 102 days ago [-]
I've heard Mexico City has a lot of leaking water pipes so updating that infrastructure might be better. Also to do desalination, they need to be close to the ocean. There are SMRs close to being in production (NuScale Power is one) but solar power might be another cheaper option.
charlie0 102 days ago [-]
CDMX is massive and very old. I can only imagine updating the infrastructure is going to be cost prohibitive. Still, it needs to be done.
Desalination plants produce a lot of brine, which you need to dispose of. You can't just put it back in the sea without killing marine life. It's not a simple problem to solve.
hylaride 102 days ago [-]
The economics of desalination can be complex, but the TL;DR is that in most cases it's only economical when there's no alternative for potable water and not industrial/agricultural use (though that doesn't stop some places from doing it anyways for security or too much money reasons, particularly Saudi Arabia).
Desalination also doesn't help inland areas like Mexico city, as there'd also be large costs to pump the water from the coasts - Mexico City is 2200m above sea level.
The only nuclear powered surface vessels left in the US fleet are the Aircraft Super-carriers, and their water is created for supporting itself - ~5-6K sailors and any that's needed for operations (cleaning, steam launchers on the Nimitz, etc).
Nuclear micro-reactors are still a ways away and are probably not a viable option for developing countries - Mexico currently has only one nuclear power plant. There is probably a future for nuclear powered desalination for coastal cities in arid areas, but it won't help everywhere.
matthewdgreen 102 days ago [-]
Is it actually cheaper to power this with nuclear plants (especially micro-reactors that don't really exist in production) than just deploying a lot of wind/solar/batteries to do it?
hylaride 102 days ago [-]
We don't know because nobody is mass building any nuclear reactors right now (micro or traditional - it's one of the main reasons there's so many cost overruns with anything being built right now). There's also no mass scale example of renewable desalination, either. It's almost all bespoke, so it's mostly theoretical.
If climate change continues and water becomes something to fight over like oil was in the 20th century, then we may finally see traction on both fronts.
matthewdgreen 102 days ago [-]
But there are pretty large-scale deployments of renewables and battery storage going on, so presumably some fraction of the power used in today’s desalinization plants is generated from renewables (at least in China.) At very least there should be no deep mysteries about the generation costs.
hylaride 102 days ago [-]
Sure, but desalination is very power hungry. In Oman they managed to get a desalination plant to be 1/3 directly covered by solar in the desert and they still need alternative power for when that 1/3 is unavailable. Battery costs are still high. If it was that easy, it would be done.
matthewdgreen 101 days ago [-]
What’s technically more achievable: adapting desalinization so it can work efficiently on intermittent power, reducing battery costs, or getting SMRs up and widely deployed along the Mexican coast in the next decade? I don’t have any idea if the answer to this but I don’t think they’re all equally pie in the sky either.
hylaride 100 days ago [-]
In theory, SMRs - *if* they're built out at scale (meaning for many other uses). The problem is the first users are going to pay a premium and it likely won't happen until they're already scaled out (and may still have to compete with renewable subsidies).
Renewables should still be competitive in certain cases, though.
infinghxsg 103 days ago [-]
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heavymetalpoizn 102 days ago [-]
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njarboe 103 days ago [-]
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mlsu 102 days ago [-]
Desalination is not trivial. It must be done on the coast and produces truly immense amounts of brine which kills everything, -- all plants, all animals -- in the vicinity. People talk about desal as if you can just plop a plant anywhere and get infinite water, but it does not work that way, you need to manage the brine. Either you commit ecological genocide or you find a way to pump corrosive salt water miles out to sea (and in a spread out network of underwater viaducts to keep the concentration down). Very very expensive.
It's basically a non-starter at agricultural scale. It's suitable only for small amounts of drinking water.
Sabinus 102 days ago [-]
To add to this, the brine also often has anti-corrosives and anti-scaling chemicals mixed in with it.
njarboe 97 days ago [-]
Except is it done all over the middle east.
throwway120385 102 days ago [-]
Remind me, who controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency in the US? And how do you propose building all of this infrastructure? Are we going to put peoples' taxes to work on this kind of problem? What makes that a more valid use of the money versus water conservation efforts? Is it just that this is your dream, much like Germany once dreamed of farming the Mediterranean sea floor?
fads_go 102 days ago [-]
What is your plan for dealing with the super-brine which is also produced by desalinization?
sofixa 102 days ago [-]
You might want to check a topographic map of Mexico and exactly where Mexico City is located before being so dismissive. It's in an elevated plain (more than 2km elevation), surrounded by mountains in the middle of the country, ~300km from the closest sea. Also, it's a seismically active place, with active volcanoes, and with highly unstable ground that is sinking.
While desalination is unquestionably a good solution to combat the overconsmption of water in many places, aqueducts from desaliatnion plants on the sea coast to Mexico City would be extremely expensive. And you'll have to figure out what to do with the salt brine.
quickthrowman 102 days ago [-]
Mexico City is 7,350 feet above sea level.
switchbak 102 days ago [-]
Pumped hydro, except the storage is in your body.
cicloid 102 days ago [-]
I'm still waiting for the Solarpunk future I was promised as a child.
panzagl 102 days ago [-]
Keep waiting, the dystopian cyberpunk future I was promised in my childhood is finally arriving...
actionfromafar 102 days ago [-]
Which flower children are in power at this time?
zuminator 102 days ago [-]
...of our own creation.
marianaenhn 102 days ago [-]
Mexico City is having a serious problem right now
uAdoofus 102 days ago [-]
Interesting article.
Terrible craftmansship in the HTML/CSS department.
readthenotes1 102 days ago [-]
It works well on my phone in dark mode whereas webpages like this usually don't.
What exactly are you calling terrible?
metalman 102 days ago [-]
Mexico city is doomed, to what exactly and when, is an open question, and perhaps it's where it's position on the doomometer compared to anywhere else, is pertenent. It serves "us" as a distraction of our own doomomedness and why not, my Mexican friends, are (jovialy) derissive about any number of things happening in, redacted, redacted, gringredacted, places.
Rendered at 04:22:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I live in a dry bit of the American west and municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture is often not very efficient because of old water rules that give water to things like hobby farms when real farms downstream don't get what they need.
California has plenty of water for it's people. If you add up ALL residential, commercial and industrial use, including all outdoor landscape watering, baseball fields, golf courses, etc - it all adds up to around 10-20% of the water used (depending on rainfall).
Where does the rest (80-90%) of California's water go? Agriculture. Half the produce of which is exported to other states and countries. Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert? And about half of that rice is exported, much to Asia (!!)
California is rather like Saudi Arabia, with the farmers pumping out all the water and selling it in the form of agricultural produce.
But take a shorter shower please! And you don't really NEED to flush that toilet.
"Golf courses in the US occupy roughly 2 million acres, which is larger than the state of Delaware but smaller than Connecticut."
"California almond growers use between 4.7 to 5.5 million acre-feet of water annually, representing roughly 14.4% to 16.75% of the state's agricultural water consumption"
WHAT THE H#$%?
Is there some better use for roughly 15% of California's water consumption?
Are you sure?
If you want almonds, grow them elsewhere, or switch to desalination.
Almonds are grown in California and not so much elsewhere, because with California's broken water policies you can grow them there for cheaper than elsewhere.
If California were to implement proper water pricing (eg via water trading), then the production costs of almonds in California would rise. And they might rise above the costs in other places, thus leading to a shift in production.
Have a look at water trading in Australia to see a good example of how that can shape agricultural practices. The Australian water trading system ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than the Californian mess. And it allowed agriculture to grow in dollar terms, despite severe limitations on the amount of available water.
If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: https://wcngg.com/2018/08/02/subsurface-drip-irrigation-has-...
More to the point, if water had a market-clearing price, California would stop growing so much alfalfa. Alfalfa uses half, half, of California's water, and California has no unique advantages at all in growing alfalfa.
But to reiterate, your first paragraph is absurd and very silly indeed. Lots of places have super cheap water but California still grows four out of five almonds on Earth. It baffles me that you thought cheap water was a plausible explanation for this.
Obviously, there are plenty of places on earth that have essentially free water, and almost none of them grow almonds.
> If water were priced by auction, which I support, almond growers would invest in less wasteful irrigation methods, mostly subsurface drip: [...]
Yes, of course. But that investment costs more money compared to what they are getting away with today, so on the margin we would see less almonds grown in California.
Your suggestion that a reasonably priced water would drop alfalfa production in California a lot more than almond production seems reasonable.
(A slight complication: the fields currently growing alfalfa would presumably grow something else instead of lying fallow. As a second order effect that might lead to more almonds being grown. It would depend on a lot of factors.)
That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.
I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.
[1] - https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/can-climate-af...
Exactly. Capitalism is already a contestable proposition, but capitalism with infinite money cheats for some?
Without proper accounting of externalities, capitalism does not work even in theory. This means water and all natural resources, it means pollution, it means harmful products like tobacco or social media, it means big cars... So on so on
There’s other reasons like California’s climate supporting a double growing season for many plants but the fertility is what really makes it so economically competitive. Farmers still have to use tons of NPK fertilizer like everyone else but most of the micronutrients are already in the ground so it’s a lot easier to get high yields with low risk and little micro optimization.
Rice benefits from flooding for weed control (because it is unusually flood resistant), but doesn't consume a lot of water (the water from flooding is available for downstream use.)
If you want to complain about water-intenaive crops in CA, the issue is almonds, not rice.
Also, while there are parts of CA that are desert or “almost desert” (desert or semi-arid climate), the area around Sacramento is hot-summer Mediterranean.
For example cow milk uses more water in absolute terms, and more water per calorie, than almond milk.
https://milkyplant.com/en-us/blogs/the-latest/environmental-...
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...
These were just two of the several sources I found, at each extreme. There was similar variation for cow milk.
Considering that it takes roughly 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond, and that 23 almonds wouldn't fill even an 8oz cup, I'm guessing that the higher end of the spectrum is probably more accurate for almond milk.
It also looks like almond milk has half the calories per gallon of skim milk and 1/4 that of whole milk.
A more reputable source would be https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks which lists almond milk as half the freshwater volume of dairy milk, and far better at every other metric (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication).
So you'd have to stretch things much farther than you did in your post for dairy milk to have an edge over almond milk. And even if you somehow did it, then dairy milk would have to then beat out soy milk which is even better than almond milk in all of these metrics, which it won't. If you care about environmental impact, dairy milk just isn't going to be in the cards. Let it take the L.
Soy milk splits when mixed with coffee though, and doesn't really have a neutral enough taste, for that I find oat milk works great.
I can't tell if it's a change in cultivar or transcontinental transport, but something bad happened with almonds in Europe.
On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.
The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.
Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.
Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.
That's fine if it's a place for, say, children to play, but most of them do not get used that way.
The lawns get wrapped up in that residential water usage figure mentioned further up the chain, so it isn't a whole lot compared to Big Ag.
Also fun fact, a lot of farm managers in Saudi Arabia are either Scottish or Australian.
That's not really accurate. Much of California is Mediterranean climate, including all of Sacramento county. Yes, there's some desert in California, but most of the agriculture happens elsewhere; but it depends on what you mean by 'almost a desert', a lot of the central valley is classified as arid and that's where a lot of the agriculture happens. A lot of people also live in (different) arid parts of California though, maybe they should move to where fresh water is easier to access :P
Also, the terrain means it's relatively easy to move water from the north around the central valley, but difficult to move it from the north or central valley to the greater LA area. Elsewhere in the thread, people claim water is fungible, and it mostly is, but location is important, and moving water in Bakersfield to Los Angeles is non trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_California#/media/F...
That said, rice consumes a lot of irrigation water:
"In California, there is very little to no rainfall during the rice growing season, so this is not usually considered in water budgets. On average, about 5 acre feet/acre (AF/ac) of irrigation water is applied to a rice field during the growing"
https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiceTestSite/files/328501.pdf
Also, rice is not a particularly big water consumer compared to other crops - it's just one that came to mind. You could pick from dozens of others - Almonds, pistachios, etc.
California simply uses a LOT of water to produce a LOT of food, about half of it being exported.
But central valley agriculture only makes $37 billion a year.
> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.
- https://www.perkins.com/en_GB/campaigns/powernews/features/c...
(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).
I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.
The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.
Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).
Yeah good luck with this one
Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?
Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.
Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.
This situation came with the territory. By contrast, California's agriculture is 100% dependent on massive hydroengineering projects.
Perhaps the key insight required to explain the 20th century.
It has the force of truth: now that I see it put so simply, I struggle to understand why no one has been able to do so before.
Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive. There are optimizations you can make with regards to which kind of agriculture is done where.
If the only way you can grow almonds is by mining water out of an aquifer that will deplete in a decade, maybe we should go without almonds. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Water pricing via water trading would help move these considerations of trade-offs to the private sector.
> Agriculture in general, on the other hand, needs a lot of water, and we need agriculture to stay alive.
Just as a silly nitpick: you can make food without agriculture. And it's not just via wild fishing, but also by directly producing edible substances from minerals, like producing margarine from coal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter
In general, you are obviously right, though.
Firstly, the water mostly doesn't leave california. If they're exporting dried rice and almonds and things like that, most of the irrigation water is staying right where it was used, correct? You say water is consumed, as if it goes away or vanishes? Evaporated water or underground water is also water.
Secondly, you're giving jobs and supporting the local economy. Farmers purchase supplies, capital goods, they pay property taxes, and first and foremost they employ people. They employ large workforces. All that revenue they received from selling wherever they sell is stimulating local economies.
Lastly, exporting food is great international relations. What country will attack you when they depend on you for food? What nation will not be grateful for receiving such basic sustenance from overseas? And if we would go to war, and if you want to shut down all this agriculture, what will we eat on the home front? If we can't import food, we'd better have infrastructure to support our own needs. Any nation [state, county, city] that produces excess food is more likely to withstand siege, blockade or attack.
Liquor and soda bottlers can pivot to producing and distributing hand sanitizer or bottled water. If beer or Coke is bad for you, keep drinking it anyway, because you never know when that industry will become indispensable.
Wrong for you individually, perhaps, but please note that "The Good of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few", and as citizens of the Western Empire, we are called to make sacrifice in order that justice be done in the world. My personal private toilet is insignificant and inconsequential compared to the almighty almond.
Hobby farms with several cows and a shop that sells maple syrup consum eabout 1/10000th a percent of water as for example con-agra suppliers, nestle etc.
There is the constantly rotating story of "this one small family farm in colorado uses more of california's water than LA county". That is a LARGE conglomerate farm which is part of the corporate farm problem, not mom and pop farms.
I assure you;In the USA specifically, your families ability to eat and provide food for the things we eat WILL be more important in the long run than bathing or washing clothes, until we decide that beef proteins aren't the msot sustainable.
"It exemplifies a future that cities worldwide could face if global warming and overpopulation continue."
The city where I live is, I'm sure, very different from Mexico City, but we have reduced our water usage while the population has grown, thanks to things like xeriscaping. I imagine things are more difficult in Mexico City because there is less money, and orders of magnitude more people.
I don't know where you live, but if it is a city like most others, you've likely reduced your per-capita water use, but not total water use. This is certainly true of most cities in the American west. They have made impressive (above 30%) reductions in per-capita water use, but they have (in many cases) grown by more than that.
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug... is really informative.
https://www.context.news/ai/thirsty-data-centres-spring-up-i...
This is a thing that has been more than a decade in the making, mostly because Queretaro does not have seismic activity and is only a couple of hours north of Mexico City.
While the water sources are completely different, both regions are prone to intense water seasons and, in the last couple of years, intense droughts.
More specifically, Queretaro is a semi-desert, so this behavior is a bit more expected.
Aside: Coming from personal experience I don't think that current agricultural methods are the best and are pron to wasting water, at least what I remember from Queretaro
If you check the link in my comment these are not the data centers close to the city which everyone knows but newer ones in Colón.
Funny thing the english wikipedia article does not even mention it. But yeah, Each of those Cloud providers, have at least 3 buildings distributed on multiple industrial parks in the metropolitan area and I'm not even mentioning the ones from Kio Networks, IBM (SoftLayer). We are one step away from having one from OVH and Hetzner.
The only data center I know that is in the middle of the city of Queretaro is the one from Triara (aka Telmex, one of the many companies from Carlos Slim). Most of them are in the outskirts of the urban area.
1. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_metropolitana_de_Quer%C3%...
Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.
You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably commercially viable.
I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.
Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.
And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?
"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".
What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.
As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.
I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?
There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.
Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about
The grading is assumed.
There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.
The market is typically not a great place to solve conflict. Unless you're the richer party, of course.
Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.
> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.
Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?
> is it just a mispricing of the water?
...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
> Having it generate a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
> 10 to 50 queries consume about 2 litres of water (½ gallon).2
I've long heard that they lobby to prevent the local Government in CDMX from providing potable water in order to protect their bottled water and water-delivery business, but I actually don't know how well substantiated those accusations are.
On the positive side of things, Mexico City gets a ton of rain during the wet season which can be harvested with rooftop collectors.
They along with Iztapalapa are the former slum towns. How much of the water crisis can be attributed to the fact that these were all unplanned muncipalities, with split governance between Mexico State and CDMX
Edit: Yep, looks like only 15% of water in Mexico is allocated to human consumption and the rest is for agriculture and manufacturing [0].
Now I'm curious how many seats in Estado Mexico's assembly are within the CDMX metro and how many are not. If majority of them aren't within the CDMX metro then it's the classic democracy dilemma you see in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, etc as well.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2024/11/26/mexico-water-crisis-claudia...
But American sewage systems are also functional and maintained/upgraded.
I'm not sure how DPW-style work is funded or managed at the municipality level in MX.
That said, now I'm curious about how public funds are disbursed to localities. How do local municipalities and unincorporated areas get services funded in Mexico?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
Thermoelectric power plants—including coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants—boil water to create steam, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity. Cooling water is passed through the steam leaving the turbine to cool and condense the steam. This step reduces the steam's exit pressure and recaptures its heat, which is then used to preheat fluid entering the boiler.
U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
The reason why 1st world cities look "cleaner" is because every single sq inch is either paved or turfed with grass.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
Thanks so much for reading!
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)
1. Being RSS-compatible would unbundle the editorial and art from the design. I wish RSS readers and aggregators would support our builds, but they do not. We do produce newsletters (currently through Substack) that do/would, but those are very different editorial products.
2. I understand this critique. We have outgrown this build, and are looking to develop a new website this year. It was good when we were starting out, but it doesn't serve our readership well anymore -- as you're pointing out!
With that being said, I understand your perspective. I’ve grappled with this myself. Please note that having RSS does not mandate that there’s content attached to each entry. It can “just” be a title, date, stable id like your slug, and a link. That way, if you insist on directing visitors to your own site, that can be done, while still allowing the reader to get updates in their reader.
I can assure you that if you add an RSS feed, I will regularly consume your content. If you don’t, I won’t even know it exists. For all the faults of legacy media, attaining readership is not one of them. They’d all remove RSS feeds in an instant if they could without loosing readers.
Wouldn't want to read this on a phone though I tell you hwhat.
It does have an unneeded text-scrolling-up effect, and breaks reader view which means they're doing something sinister, but at least reader view isn't actually necessary in this one for the way it looks
Most decently designed sites know how to respond to different screen sizes.
Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
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It's like a 0.1% damage over time effect. A few days drinking it? Fine. A few weeks? Still fine. Months? I started feeling just a bit more sick until I cut it out for filtered water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan
>Mexico City was built on top of what used to be a large body of water, which would make its water shortage appear ironic if it wasn’t so tragic. In the early 1300s, the Mexica (or Aztecs) settled on an island in the middle of what used to be a huge lake called Texcoco, the largest among five intertwined lakes.
But after the arrival of the Spaniards, the city started to expand, and the urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up. By the early 20th century, the rivers feeding the once-rich lake zone were put into pipelines to make way for motor vehicles. Very little is left of the lakes, while the rivers have become practically invisible.
More reading for anyone interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexico_City#Floodin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco#Artificial_draina... https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2022/09/mexico-citys-desage-of-160...
It is at the root of the problem. Coca Cola is the most known absurd operator of this industry. National water is too cheap and used by private company for nearly nothing. Vicente Fox was a president of Coca Cola company in Mexico before becoming the president of Mexico, you can guess the « colonisation » was easier by that. (Coca Cola isn't alone, it is just the most known, Danone, the French company is also plundering Mexico water for example, AI datacenter too, ...).
Coca cola is known to be responsible for the drying of Monterrey and San Cristobal de Las Casas.
When I look at the pictures, I see most people are overweight (some are outright fat and obese). Is that just by accident on these particular pictures with a tiny sample size? Or is that a problem in Mexico?
I'm from Europe and when I think about Mexico, I do not have overweight people in my mind, instead a relatively healthy diet of local produce. Is that a misconception?
Thanks for sharing
It cost around 10 pesos (50 cents) to fill a 19 liter (5 gallon) jug. That’s cheaper than a single 12oz can of coca cola
"A key reason for the rise in consumption is its availability and, in many cases, its lower cost compared to drinking water. In many rural communities in Chiapas, access to safe drinking water is limited, local stores are well-stocked with Coca-Cola, and the company's marketing campaigns have ensured that the drink is always within everyone's reach."
Or has all science been defunded at this point?
https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
I know some US warships have massive desalination plants onboard, are they nuclear powered? Can we use the new micro-nuclear-reactors to power those for cities?
Is this using "need" to only mean "there is no possible alternative in any design"?
Your statement -implies- datacenters don't use water for cooling or, if they do, it isn't enough to cause any problem.
How do you square this with the fact that lots of datacenters DO use water for cooling? Yes, if water was prohibitively expensive businesses would find alternatives - that's what prohibitively expensive means so I'm not adding anything more than a tautology here.
Similarly does your claim that at worst this is a mispricing of water mean that they DO use water and it drives the cost up? Isn't that the point here, that businesses driving up the cost of water is bad for the people that also need (your definition of "need" above) water?
I would think they only need cheap electricity, connectivity and in the case of Mexico, far away from seismic activity.
Your claim is that increasing the price of a basic utility by several hundred percent to prevent a company from using a huge amount of it is a fake problem? That sounds like complete bullshit to me, and I don't even live in a city that's collapsing into the ground due to aquifer overuse.
And there’s no reason you have to charge industrial users of water less than residential users if the real price (meaning the cost to replace that water) is higher than the residential price. 0.6¢/gallon is less than I pay and I live in a wet city. I pay about 2¢/gallon. So for industrial electricity rates of 5-7¢/kWh, A/C is approximately a wash vs using residential water for cooling.
Cool story. But every human needs water, and no data center needs water. Why should every person have to pay more to live just to prevent Amazon from breaking the world for a tiny increase in profits?
Good faith engagement on this topic probably requires thinking for 5 seconds if the objection you raised isn’t easily addressed by common methods already.
Additionally, industrial/industrial-scale-agricultural uses of water are almost always more sensitive to water prices. An incredibly poor population would benefit from the tax revenues and jobs offered by companies moving in.
Desalination also doesn't help inland areas like Mexico city, as there'd also be large costs to pump the water from the coasts - Mexico City is 2200m above sea level.
The only nuclear powered surface vessels left in the US fleet are the Aircraft Super-carriers, and their water is created for supporting itself - ~5-6K sailors and any that's needed for operations (cleaning, steam launchers on the Nimitz, etc).
Nuclear micro-reactors are still a ways away and are probably not a viable option for developing countries - Mexico currently has only one nuclear power plant. There is probably a future for nuclear powered desalination for coastal cities in arid areas, but it won't help everywhere.
If climate change continues and water becomes something to fight over like oil was in the 20th century, then we may finally see traction on both fronts.
Renewables should still be competitive in certain cases, though.
It's basically a non-starter at agricultural scale. It's suitable only for small amounts of drinking water.
While desalination is unquestionably a good solution to combat the overconsmption of water in many places, aqueducts from desaliatnion plants on the sea coast to Mexico City would be extremely expensive. And you'll have to figure out what to do with the salt brine.
Terrible craftmansship in the HTML/CSS department.
What exactly are you calling terrible?