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How the hell do people use that much water? Are they including water consumption needed for the products we use or? Let's say a flush is 8L and the average person flushes 5 times a day, that's 40L. The average person needs about 2L of water a day. Let's say an average shower is 100L. Cleaning dishes at worst is probably like 20L per person without a dishwasher. That's like 160L of water per day and I feel like most of those were over-estimates. How did they get to that number?
Dishwashing is a significant underestimate here, and don't forget hand-washing (before/after bathroom, food, cleaning...).
Plus you missed outdoor and gardening, which would help explain why the Land of the ~~Free~~ Lawns uses more than anybody else.
Ok yeah the second part makes sense, but for the first part I was calculating it based on hand washing, dishwashers would be way less since you have to split the usage per person in the household, which holds for hand washing as well. Idk for other people but when I'm alone I use the dishwasher probably every 3-4th day and for handwashing I'd say 20L is realistic, double it maybe but still isn't that much.
They eat meat.
They use AI.
How much water do you believe AI consumes? The 31 billion land animals we keep in captivity and the crops we grow to feed them dwarf most human water consumption.
https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/
That's a lot, but by some back of the envelope math I calculated that American consumption of cheese alone uses four times that amount in a year.
Based on this, 4 oz of cheese uses 450 liters of water. https://foodprint.org/blog/dairy-water-footprint/
Based on this, the average American consumes 41 lbs of cheese per year. Each lb of cheese uses 1800 liters of water per the above. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183785/per-capita-consumption-of-cheese-in-the-us-since-2000/
That means that each US citizen uses 73,800 liters of water per year on cheese alone.
Multiply that by 340E6, the US population, you get 25 trillion liters of water per year. That's 25 billion cubic meters of water a year.
Not that AI is environmentally friendly by any stretch, but dairy is the equivalent of like, a dozen AI industries all stacked on top of each other. Feel free to check my math and correct me as needed.
For the record, dairy production and consumption has been around for almost all of human civilization. It had time to really embed itself in society, and it served a very real, practical purpose. It kept people alive.
The AI hype has only being going for like a decade and shows no signs of slowing down. Those numbere are literally rookie numbers.
Perhaps there have been times of famine where it kept people alive, but today and throughout most of human history, it's simply killing people. Something like eight of the top ten causes of human death are consequences of diet. The leading cause of all human death goes away completely without consumption of a class of products that includes all dairy. Dairy is not healthy to consume, it is harmful.
Lol okay? I wasn't arguing in favor of the dairy industry at all. I was providing historical context - essentially, I'm warning that we shouldn't let AI go the way of the dairy industry. That is, we shouldn't allow it to grow so massive that it starts having similar effects on the climate.
That being said,
This is just false. Most of human history was famine, compared to the modern day. Food lasted a couple days, at most. Dairy and grain were massive contributors to human flourishing.
It might not be healthy compared to other modern alternatives, but I invite you to find historical alternatives that were at all competitive. People were more likely to own a cow in the middle ages than they were to own land.
Grain lasts years. Starchy tubers (which we are uniquely evolved to consume and what was actually what supported the energy requirements of our large brain in pre-technological times) last all winter, or longer if you don't dig them up. Salt preserves for years. So does pickling. Hell, even dogs are smart enough to preserve food by burying it in an anaerobic environment. A whole lot has to go wrong for the milk from an animal to be the margin by which a person survives, and by that point the animal has probably already been slaughtered. Exceptions like African bushmen who consume blood as a primary staple are quite rare.
Listen - I get it. Dairy is unhealthy in the modern day. The agricultural industry is devastating the planet. There are valid moral frameworks under which any and all animal exploitation is considered abbhorrent and shameful. I'm not arguing against any of that.
But if you want to talk about this, you need to accept that historically, dairy was huge. A whole lot has to go wrong in the modern day for milk to be the margin. But back then, human life was constantly in that margin.
You want to talk about salt? Salt started wars. Salt was such a valuable resource that humans literally killed each other over it, because it could preserve food. You can talk all you want about how easy it is to preserve food, but talk to me when your neighboring countries regularly invade to take it from you.
Every year - every year - humans struggled to survive through the winter. And most required nutrients simply cannot be consumed through grain and tubers alone. Certainly not pre-industrial, pre-enrichment, pre-GMO grains and tubers.
Humans in the modern day are significantly taller than historical humans. Why? Nutrition. Humans literally weren't getting enough nutrition. Constantly.
What sustains through the winter? A cow. It turns those long-lasting grains - even grains we can't eat - into milk and cheese. As a bonus, it also serves as a heat source. Humans would bring their cows into the house over the winter for both to survive.
That is how hard life was. That is how close pre-industrial humans were to death, that they would choose to sleep in a confined space with a giant bag of loud, hot methane.
Every last goddamn calorie, carbohydrate, protein, fat, and vitamin mattered. Dairy changed the course of human civilization. It's silly how modern humans cling to it so tightly - lactose intolerance is so common that it should really be called lactose tolerance - but dairy had very real benefit and value. Animal husbandry was one of the first key technologies required to build stable human settlements.
Edit - not to mention, crops failed all the time. Harvest yields fluctuated significantly, especially before we understood nitrogen fixation, crop rotation, fertilizer quality, etc.
Pre-GMO (the old-school selective breeding kind), wheat was much harder to grow in large quantities, and since they required so much water, droughts were devastating. There were no massive irrigation systems - you literally depended on the rain to survive. Good luck preserving food that you just never had to begin with.
I always find those kinds of numbers difficult because they include rain water in that estimation.
What percentage of the 450 liters of water comes from those different sources? How impactful is a green water footprint vs a blue water footprint vs a gray water footprint? If the 120g of cheese were made from 100% blue water, that would definitely be problematic. But if it were 100% green water, that would most likely be less of an issue.
Next, you have to consider how the water comes into the calculation. Is it just considering the water for feed crops of the water that the cow itself consumes? And if it's feed crops, the type is also important. Some feed is simply the byproduct of crops that are used for human consumption e.g maize only has maybe 10% of its biomass for human consumption. Would simply throwing away the other 90% be considered wasteful or useful? And how does that factor into the water calculation?
And a final point regarding feed, is what kind of feed it is and where it's grown. Feed may not only be byproduct of human comestible crops but also crops that cannot be consumed by humans at all, and they can also grown in places where human comestible crops cannot be grown.
Now you have to compare that water for server farms. I have little knowledge thereof, but my guess is that they don't wait for rain to cool their servers and it probably is more blue water than not. It maybe as entangled and complicated as the source of water for cheese, I don't know.
My point is, it's not an apples to apples comparison. Water consumption doesn't always equal water consumption. To drive the point home, would you consider the water required to raise fish in a landlocked country the same as that of a coastal country?
What is your actual point? "Don't worry about water consumption?"
Yeah but it says "at home" and gives recommendations how you personally can reduce water consumption (like more efficient taps or showerheads), which makes me believe that it's not your entire direct and indirect water consumption (which realistically isn't even relevant for the argument since the water used for crops isn't gonna be getting treated anyway)
The estimations for water required to make meat even include rainwater. As if cows are out standing in the field collecting water through their hooves or something.
The crops are literally standing in a field collecting water through their roots. Sometimes it comes from rain, but an ever-increasing share comes from irrigation. One way or another, that water has to be accounted for. Rainfall is a limited resource in agriculture, like any other source of water. Even entire rivers are often 100% consumed by agriculture.