> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").
Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy.
> I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming.
If you were not already aware, you might consider reaching out to the Wetlands Water District legal and policy team (https://wwd.ca.gov/), as they helped champion AB 2661:
> “California law AB 2661, enacted in September, authorizes the water district to develop, construct and own solar generation, battery storage and transmission facilities as identified in the plan. The law also requires the district to adopt a community benefits plan with input from local communities, a requirement the district has endorsed. A community benefits plan typically involves payments from a project owner to the neighboring community,” pv magazine writes.
If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.
However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.
> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.
I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.
Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.
often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.
You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.
I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.
There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.
With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.
There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.
Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits.
It might also spur the development of 100% electric Farm vehicles (tractors, planters, combines etc) as the Farm could make it own electricity and not have to pay diesel costs for fueling that. At the extreme, if you have enough 'free power' on your farm you can use it for electrolysis of Ammonia to make nitrates. (fertilizer). That would be because you could make money offsetting the other costs of farming to make your cost of goods lower than your neighbors farm and increase your total $/acre.
So the short summary is "no" is isn't going to change how much food is available. Farmers pick crops all the time that aren't "food" for you, they are exports or added to some other product (corn syrup, cotton), because they are in demand. That balances out by regular market dynamics.
In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
I did some research on this statistic. More than 90% of this is returned to source. So if the power plant is drawing water from a river (or aquifer), it is returned after being used to generate electricity (create steam, turn turbines).
For example, if you have a 1GW coal powerplant on a river, it might draw 4 billion liters of water per day, but will only evaporate about 5-10% of that amount. The rest is returned to the river. Of course, this is much less exciting (click-baity) than writing "41% of US water use is for thermoelectric power plants".
Depends on if they use evaporative cooling or not. But the water returned is warmer which can harm the ecosystem quite a bit, both for power plants and data centers.
Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be higher than it is at the inlet, before it diffuses back into the background. Naturally the way to mitigate this is to pull more water through the cooling system, all of which you're still returning, but then you raise the temperature of twice as much water by half as much temperature, which is what you want since the temperature delta is the concern. Of course, doing this will cause people to accuse you of using more water, even though you're neither consuming the water nor modifying the amount of heat being transferred to the environment.
In addition to that, water has extremely different levels of scarcity depending on what region you're in. Parts of California and Texas have arid climates and extremely limited economical means to source additional fresh water. Areas like the Midwest get dramatically more rainfall and as a result fresh water is not meaningfully scarce there.
>> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
No, not necessary to the same one. Every body of water has a catchment area, and through the bottom parts of some lakes/rivers water sips into the earth, filling underground water levels.
Now, let's say you life on a coast with a regular winds in the ocean direction.
You basin fills with water evaporated by you, your neighbors catchments and – sometimes – ocean (wind doesn't always blow in one direction). But the large percentage of the water you evaporate goes into the ocean.
Let's say 90 percent falls again on your catchment area, 10 percent falls in ocean but is regained through neighbors basins evaporation.
Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.
> Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.
At which point we're back to the quadrillion watt hours of sunlight you get a day, which evaporates such a large amount of water that you have to be doing something pretty dramatic to move the needle. Which thermal power plants and data centers don't, but agriculture? It's pumping trillions of gallons of water out of the ground and into fields in that sun.
The premise of evaporative cooling is that the phase change absorbs an enormous amount of heat and carries it away. The heat is returned when it condenses back into water, so doing it on-site would defeat the purpose.
Hypothetically you could recondense it somewhere else, i.e. get a large land area and then capture the rainfall. Probably the big win there would be to take the water which is currently routed into the ocean from storm drains and recover it instead of doing that with it.
> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entirely depends on the nature of the water source.
The most poignant situation is non-rechargeable aquifers. When water is extracted, the mineral structures collapse and the storage capacity is forever destroyed.
And as the other reply stated, evaporation (as from evaporative cooling) exports water out of a catchment basin so that it can't be used downstream, just as if you pumped it away.
> This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth".
That is actually an important distinction. There are many things for which this is not the case. If you fail to recover the helium extracted with natural gas deposits then it doesn't stay on Earth. If birds eat your crops, you can't undo it. If you burn coal then it turns into CO2 and heat and it's thermodynamically impossible to reverse the process without inputting more useful energy than can be recovered from burning it to begin with (which is why carbon capture is a sham and we instead need to stop burning fossil fuels).
Whereas you can evaporate and recondense the same water an unlimited number of times and whether it's a problem depends not so much on what you're doing as where you got the water to begin with.
I did some research on this matter. There are (at least) two uses for water by data centers. (1) If the data center is in a very low humidity environment, the data center is artificially humidified (is this a real English word?) to reduce the effects of static electricty. (2) Almost all data centers outside of cold regions (northern Europe, etc.) use water for evaporative cooling.
Nobody actually cares about water use. It's a totem for other activism efforts. Data-centre protests aren't about water, they're about wealth inequality and Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg being hated men.
They're about the environment. They're about corruption and local city councils being bought out. They're about white collar crime and all the skirting of regulation these developers are getting away with. They're about the affordability crisis. They're about one more tool that promises a massive concentration of wealth. They're about tools of war that have already resulted in the bombing of an elementary school. They're a backlash to silicon valley ideology. And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.
Right. Big umbrellas seldom achieve policy goals. They’re about mobilising folks for something else. People don’t actually turn out over water. That’s the root of the problem and answer to rayiner’s conundrum.
Farms could double their water usage while datacenters halve theirs; the contours of protest wouldn’t materially change.
If you want to create a political coalition today, and have an AI datacenter being debated near you, rally against it. Like, try to stop it. But if you do doesn’t matter. The coalition is what matters. The datacenter—like the water—isn’t actually what anyone is angry about.
I didn't even mention water waste in my comment yet you out of touch techies managed to return to your industry talking point AND hate on poor people in one go of it.
And yes, despite your industry talking points, water waste is absolutely a major concern. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers (which are over 90% of data centers) allow almost all the water to evaporate. Similarly, about 30-40% of water used in agriculture filter back down to the water table. Agriculture use is also dispersed over large areas whereas data centers draw from a single pipe. Closed loop systems also have their own environmental concerns and need to "bleed the lines" every month or so to get rid of the toxic sludge that builds up. They also use dramatically more electricity which requires a lot of water to generate.
The point being, if you live somewhere where a new data center is getting built, you WILL see a massive spike in your electricity bill. What do you get in return? Sam Altman buying another politician? Another elementary school bombed? I agree that agricultural waste is out of hand but at least people get a tangible benefit out of it.
You keep trying to ignore all the points and change it to a topic you think you can win but you're still misinformed on that issue.
>I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.
Pulling myself together here to be as polite as possible but could you perhaps read the quoted text and your own post again and try and square that circle?
Otherwise, are you perhaps in the running for some kind of internet non sequitur award I am unaware of? I would vote for your comment if you simply make me aware of how to do so.
Residential users' water bills aren't (currently) affected by datacenter-related demand, unlike their power bills which are.
The resource contention for water is between datacenters and agribusiness (or other industrial users), not residential users.
Instead of being sarcastic to GP's post, we could try to find a succinct explanation of how water rights are owned/sold/taxed in the US. This seems to be a patchwork quilt by state, county, seniority and related legislation. But anyway, datacenter usage of water isn't impacting residential users' water bills.
Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group.
The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.
I'm all about stomping on the agribusiness water usage and think that whole swathes of agribusiness in CA should get shut down.
However, as I understand it, the alfalfa is a soil restorer that the agribusinesses are going to grow anyway. The question is whether there is any benefit to forcing the agribusinesses plow it under vs exporting it.
They're not going to grow it if they can't sell it, nor are they going to grow it if the water stops being free. We shouldn't be growing alfalfa, for export, in the desert, with free water, and subsidizing the farmers on top of it to encourage even more of it.
It's nothing more than purchasing votes with tax dollars and limited natural resources.
So, yes, the agribusinesses WILL grow that alfalfa even if they can't sell it.
Now, you can factually dispute me since I am by no means a California agribusiness expert. However, it is my understanding that alfalfa is uniquely suited to the soil restoration required for the agribusinesses to cycle their fields more quickly.
It is also my understanding that part of the reason why alfalfa can be shipped so cheaply is because you need to return shipping containers back to origin to ship something else and those containers would be empty otherwise.
So, this is a perfect storm of alfalfa that would be grown anyway only to be plowed under being too expensive to ship except for the fact that the shipping is almost free due to the containers being returned to origin.
But the water. What about the water necessary to "restore the soil". The soil in question of course, was non-productive desert 50 years ago. We are doing input intensive farming in areas where the complex supply chain necessary to support is causing what some people call "externalities". Others, the tragedy of the commons. Well run societies try to use regulation to keep this from happening.
"We shouldn't be growing anything out there." is an argument that the agribusinesses don't want to have.
"We shouldn't be growing alfalfa out there." is a nice distraction argument that the agribusinesses are happy to have because it concedes that we should be farming the area.
They're growing it in the south Central Valley, not the north and not the east mountains. Though assuming you're referring to snowpack in the mountains and not looking to pump the lakes dry its completely dependent on the years precipitation.
Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.
There has been outrage. It's yet another tragedy of the commons.
Water pricing should be revisited to be closer to its true value -- and while food production should be recognized as essential, even that has to be rethought: is growing alfalfa for dairy less vital than growing vegetables? Especially if that dairy is produced and consumed in Saudi Arabia?
The other thing that we should be doing all over is better management of our watersheds so we can try to replenish those aquifers.
The thing about data centers and thermoelectric power plants is that you can make them effectively closed cycle, vs agriculture where that is somewhat intractable.
A town of 1700 people with a rapidly depleting aquifer (600 AF/yr recharge, equal to a single one of those circles) so 1 or 2 farmers with no restrictions on water usage can grow as much alfalfa as they'd like.
Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?
So, the other 25% does not all go to cattle, certainly not California. Some fraction of that alfalfa is exported in containers to China/Japan/Saudi, for their cattle. Doing that from a semi-desert during a declared drought (2020-3) seems like pretty obvious proof that the agricultural cost of water is distorted and too low. If any of that was artesian water, then it's even worse.
I agree that is a big part of the problems we have today. But my best guess is also that the systems/people/companies that tend to abuse their power do know extremely well that the layman cannot fathom the difference between the three.
Unfortunately most people also don't really care until the problems come hitting them so extremely close you have absolutely no coiche to act upon it. Then the massive outrages start. It's a very predictable cycle.
Probably because food and agriculture (in the region that produces a quarter of America’s domestic food supply) are required for life, while data centers aren’t?
Although delicious, alfalfa is not required for life. A lot of it goes to Saudi Arabia, who use it for horses and cattle, as the Saudis banned it domestically for being wasteful for water usage.
It's also grown for the same reason soy is grown. It's a highly effective nitrogen fertilizer for the soil. It's also one of the most digestible and high-protein forages
The claim I was responding to was that alfalfa using 1000x the water of Google data centers was okay because alfalfa is needed for life. My response was not "data centers are needed for life" but "alfalfa is not needed for life."
This quote doesn't do much for me. It is like saying that the insane amounts of corn and soy that US (and Brazil and Canada) farmers produce "is not required for life". If you think a little deeper, it is used to feed livestock, that are used for meat, that are "required for life". (Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that.) For the record, Japan also imports lots of alfalfa from the US. Japan has far more fresh water than it can use, but it doesn't have enough arable land to grow the alfalfa that it needs to feed its livestock.
>Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that.
That part is actually the weakest part of your argument. You are dismissing a valid counterargument before addressing it.
Something being part of a current food production system does not make it a biological necessity. People can live without meat, therefore alfalfa is not "required for life" in the literal sense.
You are also shifting the meaning of "required": from "necessary for humans to survive" to "necessary for maintaining our current livestock industry." Those are very different claims.
Preemptively calling an obvious counterargument "dumb" is not a way to win the argument; it is a way to avoid having it.
Is it rational to dedicate enormous amounts of land, water, and energy to producing animal feed when those same resources could feed more people directly?
Using crops as feed and then eating the animals is an inherently inefficient way of converting resources into food. That may be acceptable when resources are abundant, but it becomes increasingly difficult to justify as we face limits in freshwater, arable land, and ecological capacity. That is the true argument, and what the discussion should be about, not if we can (very obviously) survive without meat.
Japan imports alfalfa because of an expansion of the USJTA in where Japan committed to purchasing $8 billion in US agricultural goods.
South Korea imports alfalfa because of the KORUS FTA removes all duties on forage goods.
China buys alfalfa because of yet another trade deal that was brokered to prevent a trade war from spiraling. Alfalfa hay was explicitly highlighted in the Phase One agreement.
I would assume because water-wasting concerns are just another tool for the left to use against their political opponents, not an actual concern most of their constituents deeply care about. Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore (I bet those birds covered in oil after spills enjoy it and are a treat to the eye!).
Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.
The opposition against data centers is remarkably both side things. Both MAGA opposes it and progressive opposes it. And no, I do not think maga and progressive are the same, but they do in fact both oppose data centers.
> Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore
What is their actual issue there? They want the electricity to be more expensive? They want the global warming to warm faster?
> Western lefties consider farmers their class allies
Pretty much all American leftists I have ever seen talking about the issue consider farmers to be the core MAGA/Trump constituency. Leftists do NOT consider them allies.
I know plenty of folks who got worked up over the wasteful farming that drains and damages aquifers. much like the penalties that kardashians received when they broke the water usage laws, it amounted to nada.
They do and have been - unfortunately the farms are far from most people and isolated. And in super hot arid areas. Not ideal but many people aren't directly affected
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." [1]
lol, if you bothered to check the reference your “article” stole from, you’d find a medium post that includes ANOTHER link to a follow up medium post entitled, “I was wrong about data center water consumption”
It’s not 6 billion per day. It’s 650 billion per day. In the United States alone.
Thank you for the note. But the article I linked to above relies on the page you linked for the Alfalfa number, not the data center number. The data center number in my article, 6.2 billion gallons annually for Google's data centers, is consistent with Google's numbers elsewhere: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/data-center-water-use-bla...
Also, your correction needs as correction:
> If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated. However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption. If you exclude the water “consumed” by hydroelectric plants via reservoir evaporation, you get something closer to perhaps 275 million gallons per day.1 And if you take into account the fact that lots of data center operators use renewable energy PPAs (mostly from wind and solar sources), my guess is that you get something closer to 200-250 million gallons per day (though I haven’t run a detailed calculation here).
It's not 675 billion gallons a day, it's 675 million, which is about 246 billion gallons a year.
California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]
We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.
There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter.
But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.
I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.
The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.
If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.
If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.
We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.
The hilarity of being post food scarcity when the quality of food in stores has declined precipitously both in terms of nutrient density and taste. Most of the processed food contains high fructose corn syrup, sketchy preservatives, and worse. Even if people think we “succeeded” on this front, the truth is that we have failed. The ultimate consequences of our failure have yet to play out.
I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.
Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.
It is a key component of the first book that basically says, if a corporation can take a short cut to save money, they probably will.
It was framed as the refusal to move the diesel backup at Fukushima nuclear plant to save some money, but it does become a reoccurring theme through out the entire book.
I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out.
I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
not only do they exist, they are by far the more common variant. Whenever you hear about a massive unfunded pension liability it's a defined benefit plan.
>In an aquifer that’s permanently collapsed, artificial recharge—pumping water forcibly back underground—is the only option, according to Shirzaei. That’s expensive and carries the risk of triggering earthquakes.
I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
> does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.
Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.
It has more possible side effects than just earthquakes (not my expertise in a geological stable country). One such side effect of mixing two types of groundwater is the potential to release minerals in the geological medium that can be above beneficial use criteria (and ultimately contaminate the groundwater). There is a USGS program called PHREEQC that is used for this specific type of modelling.
Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.
The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)
Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.
You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?
Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.
Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.
Given enough solar/wind/battery power i do wonder if a desalination plant could run pretty cheaply. A quick chat with ChatGPT tells me it should be feasible. Roughly investing around 1 billion dollars and around 40 million per year for keeping it run producing around 100.000 m³ per year. Cost price of the water would be around $0.20 per m³. Could run for more than 25 years.
I did a little research. Although also not that popular, the one in Carlsbad in San Diego did get built. Matter of timing and costs it seems. Also didn’t help that Poseidon wanted big profit guarantees.
> We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
Correction. It’s the next generations who are insanely fucked. People don’t hope it goes away, they think they won’t be around to see the consequences.
I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.
I don't know why you got downvoted. In any case, this makes "sense", but doesn't make sense in that if we nuke the land in some way, distort it from a peaceful balance, I don't think it is "conserved"
Uh...they're just going to pave it and throw something over it.
Edit-
To be clear maybe not specifically in this case, but "oops we've ruined this ecosystem to the point we can't farm it" rarely ends with "better move down the road and let nature reclaim it". It's a lot more "cool now we can put strip malls/data centers/whatever here"
It’s unlikely strip malls and data centers will be built on the land, but utility solar PV is an acceptable use that requires no water, is beneficial to the local environment, and gives the land 20-30 years to recover from agricultural use.
It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch. Underground water aquifers operate on similar timescales, if they can regenerate at all. The land needs time to recover from the demands of present timeline position humans.
> It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch.
I very much doubt those statements can both be true. It would have to be the case that the amount of time required to deposit one inch of soil is independent of the amount of soil already in place, which seems extremely unlikely.
Planting more PV farms isn't better, it just convolutes the equation and hides the true sources of damage behind things with a less negative image, and would eventually just prove Jevon's law, one way or the other.
Not preceding "using better" with "consuming less" (on a system-wide basis) would get you the same result as going for recycling while forgoing the first R: empty, marketing points in green-coloured font.
It gives the land time to recover and requires nothing from it, nor human labor. All racking and conductors can be removed from the land in the future to return it to its original condition. All components can be recycled today, through metal and ewaste streams. It hides no externalities or harm. It quietly produces energy more efficiently than any crop, with no inputs besides the sun shining.
As my links demonstrate, California plans on developing 21GW of solar on farmland that no longer has water available for it.
Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.
Governments are just a structure for people to coordinate collective action. In democracies, it’s not that distinct from “us all”. We exercise this responsibility through representatives but they are our agents not our rulers. Outcomes depend on our ability to direct them, and the ability of our opponents to do so likewise.
For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.
Funny enough, Las Vegas has been planning for this outcome and won't run out of water. Only agriculture users will be impacted, who consume ~50% of the total annual Colorado River Basin. So, to your point, the ag users responsible for overconsumption for decades will be the ones primarily exposed to the outcome. Municipal water systems will continue to function as they do today with available water reserves and flows.
I would assume that the problem with California aquifer is (mostly) a consequence of its Democratic state government decisions and it is highly unlikely that electing Hilary or Kamala would have prevented it.
I don’t remember Democrat Gavin Newsom calling climate change a hoax?
Jokes aside, I don’t think politicians have anything to do with that. From what I’ve learned droughts in CA are natural part of the cycle and humans just accelerate it. You can’t reverse it because it is nature” you can slow down the acceleration, but then at what cost and why? If we are “all going to die” how does it change if it will happen in 50 years vs 60 years? 60 years of misery or 50 years of normal life.
* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.
* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.
* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.
Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.
>Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Valid pushback! That said going through the MIT study quickly (and I may be wrong, feel free to correct me further) it doesn't seem to include CO2 from overseas shipping of materials and/or finished vehicles, and it also only seems to factor in tailpipe emissions as opposed to emissions from things like tire wear which is notably worse on EVs due to their weight. But again, I'll concede the point anyway.
You could however say exactly what I said about so many other classes of products. Home appliances, electronics, tools, on and on.
That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.
For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
Agriculture is important. Alfafa is important as it feeds most of the animals grown for food and anlso horses etc.
90% of American alfafa is used domestically and only around 3-5% of it is exported.
The problem is California. 31% of California alfafa is exported and this is a state that has declared drought many times before. It’s a water thirsty state with grandfathered Ag water for farmers who essentially export water.
California Ag is the problem. We need agriculture. We need alfalfa. We need to fix CA.
I have been reading articles like this for more than 20 years. Really, it feels like click/rage-bait at this point. The answer is pretty simple: (1) Build desalination plants (Calif already has a few) and (2) switch to more efficient uses of water in agriculture (drip irrigation, that is already widely practiced in water stressed areas of the world). Sure it costs money, but California is insanely rich and can afford to make these changes. For the last 100 years, Calif has been farming on "easy mode". Ok, so now it gets a little bit harder.
> California’s Central Valley, where one-quarter of the food produced in the United States is grown
I am so tired of this quote. It is 25% of total (economic) value, not by calories or volume or weight. This quote is very misleading.
I took an agricultural ecology class in college in the early 90s and the professor predicted this would happen. I'd talk to farmer relatives and they'd get all angry and tell me nobody can tell me what to do on my land. More recently I'd talk to people about this and they'd tell me no way they'd eat less beef or stop drinking almond milk. Humans are idiots.
Unfortunately, determining a sustainable groundwater yield is rarely straightforward. It typically requires extensive long-term monitoring, detailed hydrogeological investigations, and often sophisticated numerical groundwater models to understand aquifer recharge, storage, hydraulic connectivity, and environmental water requirements. These assessments then inform groundwater management areas, allocation limits, and licensing frameworks designed to keep extraction within sustainable bounds.
Even then, there is significant uncertainties. Many sustainable yield estimates are based on historical climate conditions and recharge rates. As rainfall declines and droughts become more frequent or prolonged, aquifer recharge may decrease, reducing the volume of groundwater that can be sustainably extracted. In some regions, the number of licensed users may ultimately exceed future sustainable allocations identified through updated modelling and monitoring. This creates a difficult policy challenge, as regulators may be required to reduce allocations or revoke licences from existing users, often with substantial social, economic and political consequences.
Groundwater management is further complicated by the fact that aquifers are not homogeneous reservoirs. They are complex geological systems, with groundwater availability and flow behaviour controlled by local stratigraphy, structural features, recharge mechanisms, hydraulic connectivity, and ecological dependencies. Effective management therefore requires aquifer-specific assessments rather than broad, one size fits all approaches.
There are probably very few hydrogeologists browsing HN so hello to any colleagues that are out there.
Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_...
> Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually
> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").
Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California
[2] https://www.convertunits.com/from/billion+gallons/to/acre+fo...
[3] "Agrivoltaics as a climate-smart and resilient solution for midday depression in photosynthesis in dryland regions" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1
> I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming.
If you were not already aware, you might consider reaching out to the Wetlands Water District legal and policy team (https://wwd.ca.gov/), as they helped champion AB 2661:
> “California law AB 2661, enacted in September, authorizes the water district to develop, construct and own solar generation, battery storage and transmission facilities as identified in the plan. The law also requires the district to adopt a community benefits plan with input from local communities, a requirement the district has endorsed. A community benefits plan typically involves payments from a project owner to the neighboring community,” pv magazine writes.
to enable https://www.goldenstatecleanenergy.com/valley-clean-infrastr... with details from reporting at https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/03/21-gigawatts-of-solar-f...
Fact sheet: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68b8b921ce5fb0440fdf5...
Totally going to reach out here and see if we can help each other.
If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/22/k...
However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.
> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.
Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.
often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.
You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.
I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.
There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.
With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.
There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.
Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits.
It might also spur the development of 100% electric Farm vehicles (tractors, planters, combines etc) as the Farm could make it own electricity and not have to pay diesel costs for fueling that. At the extreme, if you have enough 'free power' on your farm you can use it for electrolysis of Ammonia to make nitrates. (fertilizer). That would be because you could make money offsetting the other costs of farming to make your cost of goods lower than your neighbors farm and increase your total $/acre.
So the short summary is "no" is isn't going to change how much food is available. Farmers pick crops all the time that aren't "food" for you, they are exports or added to some other product (corn syrup, cotton), because they are in demand. That balances out by regular market dynamics.
Why not both? Agrivoltaics or dual-use solar has farmers putting solar panels on the fields, and sometimes finding it improves their yields!
In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.
Is it just me or do you desperately need electricity to live?
You could only allow the conversion for farms that grow corn for ethanol at first. Isn't that around 10 million hectares on the low estimates?
There’s also the possibility of famine. But hey at least we’d have AI.
For example, if you have a 1GW coal powerplant on a river, it might draw 4 billion liters of water per day, but will only evaporate about 5-10% of that amount. The rest is returned to the river. Of course, this is much less exciting (click-baity) than writing "41% of US water use is for thermoelectric power plants".
Is it different with data centers?
Depends on if they use evaporative cooling or not. But the water returned is warmer which can harm the ecosystem quite a bit, both for power plants and data centers.
Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be higher than it is at the inlet, before it diffuses back into the background. Naturally the way to mitigate this is to pull more water through the cooling system, all of which you're still returning, but then you raise the temperature of twice as much water by half as much temperature, which is what you want since the temperature delta is the concern. Of course, doing this will cause people to accuse you of using more water, even though you're neither consuming the water nor modifying the amount of heat being transferred to the environment.
In addition to that, water has extremely different levels of scarcity depending on what region you're in. Parts of California and Texas have arid climates and extremely limited economical means to source additional fresh water. Areas like the Midwest get dramatically more rainfall and as a result fresh water is not meaningfully scarce there.
>> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
No, not necessary to the same one. Every body of water has a catchment area, and through the bottom parts of some lakes/rivers water sips into the earth, filling underground water levels.
Now, let's say you life on a coast with a regular winds in the ocean direction.
You basin fills with water evaporated by you, your neighbors catchments and – sometimes – ocean (wind doesn't always blow in one direction). But the large percentage of the water you evaporate goes into the ocean. Let's say 90 percent falls again on your catchment area, 10 percent falls in ocean but is regained through neighbors basins evaporation.
Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.
> Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.
At which point we're back to the quadrillion watt hours of sunlight you get a day, which evaporates such a large amount of water that you have to be doing something pretty dramatic to move the needle. Which thermal power plants and data centers don't, but agriculture? It's pumping trillions of gallons of water out of the ground and into fields in that sun.
Why can't they condense the vapor on site? Or simply use closed cooling loops? Would it be that much more expensive?
The premise of evaporative cooling is that the phase change absorbs an enormous amount of heat and carries it away. The heat is returned when it condenses back into water, so doing it on-site would defeat the purpose.
Hypothetically you could recondense it somewhere else, i.e. get a large land area and then capture the rainfall. Probably the big win there would be to take the water which is currently routed into the ocean from storm drains and recover it instead of doing that with it.
> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.
This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entirely depends on the nature of the water source.
The most poignant situation is non-rechargeable aquifers. When water is extracted, the mineral structures collapse and the storage capacity is forever destroyed.
And as the other reply stated, evaporation (as from evaporative cooling) exports water out of a catchment basin so that it can't be used downstream, just as if you pumped it away.
> This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth".
That is actually an important distinction. There are many things for which this is not the case. If you fail to recover the helium extracted with natural gas deposits then it doesn't stay on Earth. If birds eat your crops, you can't undo it. If you burn coal then it turns into CO2 and heat and it's thermodynamically impossible to reverse the process without inputting more useful energy than can be recovered from burning it to begin with (which is why carbon capture is a sham and we instead need to stop burning fossil fuels).
Whereas you can evaporate and recondense the same water an unlimited number of times and whether it's a problem depends not so much on what you're doing as where you got the water to begin with.
That's a good point, and good examples. I'd compare the destruction of aquifers (some of them anyway) as akin to those things.
I did some research on this matter. There are (at least) two uses for water by data centers. (1) If the data center is in a very low humidity environment, the data center is artificially humidified (is this a real English word?) to reduce the effects of static electricty. (2) Almost all data centers outside of cold regions (northern Europe, etc.) use water for evaporative cooling.
humidified
Yes, a real English word.
Machines that humidify air are called ... humidifiers.
(There are also dehumidifiers.)
Most rivers drain into Oceans while some do drain into inland lakes.
Nobody actually cares about water use. It's a totem for other activism efforts. Data-centre protests aren't about water, they're about wealth inequality and Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg being hated men.
They're about the environment. They're about corruption and local city councils being bought out. They're about white collar crime and all the skirting of regulation these developers are getting away with. They're about the affordability crisis. They're about one more tool that promises a massive concentration of wealth. They're about tools of war that have already resulted in the bombing of an elementary school. They're a backlash to silicon valley ideology. And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.
Right. Big umbrellas seldom achieve policy goals. They’re about mobilising folks for something else. People don’t actually turn out over water. That’s the root of the problem and answer to rayiner’s conundrum.
Farms could double their water usage while datacenters halve theirs; the contours of protest wouldn’t materially change.
If you want to create a political coalition today, and have an AI datacenter being debated near you, rally against it. Like, try to stop it. But if you do doesn’t matter. The coalition is what matters. The datacenter—like the water—isn’t actually what anyone is angry about.
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I didn't even mention water waste in my comment yet you out of touch techies managed to return to your industry talking point AND hate on poor people in one go of it.
And yes, despite your industry talking points, water waste is absolutely a major concern. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers (which are over 90% of data centers) allow almost all the water to evaporate. Similarly, about 30-40% of water used in agriculture filter back down to the water table. Agriculture use is also dispersed over large areas whereas data centers draw from a single pipe. Closed loop systems also have their own environmental concerns and need to "bleed the lines" every month or so to get rid of the toxic sludge that builds up. They also use dramatically more electricity which requires a lot of water to generate.
The point being, if you live somewhere where a new data center is getting built, you WILL see a massive spike in your electricity bill. What do you get in return? Sam Altman buying another politician? Another elementary school bombed? I agree that agricultural waste is out of hand but at least people get a tangible benefit out of it.
You keep trying to ignore all the points and change it to a topic you think you can win but you're still misinformed on that issue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
What makes you think rayiner is a techie?
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>Data-centre protests aren't about water
I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.
> suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ
I suspect they’re more concerned about “rising electricity cost[s] and air-noise pollution.”
>>Data-centre protests aren't about water
>I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.
Pulling myself together here to be as polite as possible but could you perhaps read the quoted text and your own post again and try and square that circle?
Otherwise, are you perhaps in the running for some kind of internet non sequitur award I am unaware of? I would vote for your comment if you simply make me aware of how to do so.
Residential users' water bills aren't (currently) affected by datacenter-related demand, unlike their power bills which are.
The resource contention for water is between datacenters and agribusiness (or other industrial users), not residential users.
Instead of being sarcastic to GP's post, we could try to find a succinct explanation of how water rights are owned/sold/taxed in the US. This seems to be a patchwork quilt by state, county, seniority and related legislation. But anyway, datacenter usage of water isn't impacting residential users' water bills.
Doesnt that mean that the statement "Datacenter protests arent about water" is correct?
Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group.
The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.
The necessity of alfalfa exports from water-scarce US states is certainly not obvious. Why do you believe this is essential?
I'm all about stomping on the agribusiness water usage and think that whole swathes of agribusiness in CA should get shut down.
However, as I understand it, the alfalfa is a soil restorer that the agribusinesses are going to grow anyway. The question is whether there is any benefit to forcing the agribusinesses plow it under vs exporting it.
They're not going to grow it if they can't sell it, nor are they going to grow it if the water stops being free. We shouldn't be growing alfalfa, for export, in the desert, with free water, and subsidizing the farmers on top of it to encourage even more of it.
It's nothing more than purchasing votes with tax dollars and limited natural resources.
Please reread my statement:
> the alfalfa is a soil restorer
So, yes, the agribusinesses WILL grow that alfalfa even if they can't sell it.
Now, you can factually dispute me since I am by no means a California agribusiness expert. However, it is my understanding that alfalfa is uniquely suited to the soil restoration required for the agribusinesses to cycle their fields more quickly.
It is also my understanding that part of the reason why alfalfa can be shipped so cheaply is because you need to return shipping containers back to origin to ship something else and those containers would be empty otherwise.
So, this is a perfect storm of alfalfa that would be grown anyway only to be plowed under being too expensive to ship except for the fact that the shipping is almost free due to the containers being returned to origin.
But the water. What about the water necessary to "restore the soil". The soil in question of course, was non-productive desert 50 years ago. We are doing input intensive farming in areas where the complex supply chain necessary to support is causing what some people call "externalities". Others, the tragedy of the commons. Well run societies try to use regulation to keep this from happening.
Those are two different and separate arguments.
"We shouldn't be growing anything out there." is an argument that the agribusinesses don't want to have.
"We shouldn't be growing alfalfa out there." is a nice distraction argument that the agribusinesses are happy to have because it concedes that we should be farming the area.
Arizona...
https://floodlightnews.org/saudi-owned-corporate-farms-are-d...
California for one.
California is not water-scarce. It has plenty of water in the north and mountains to the east.
They're growing it in the south Central Valley, not the north and not the east mountains. Though assuming you're referring to snowpack in the mountains and not looking to pump the lakes dry its completely dependent on the years precipitation.
Utah
California farms some very non-essential things like Pistachios, that take insane amounts of water to grow. In what's effectively a desert.
Yes, and during the declared drought of 2020-3.
Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.
It benefits whoever has the water rights since they're effectively able to export something that they're not paying the externalities on.
That’s the joke. We are literally letting those growers export our water and put the profit in their own pockets and at the public’s expense.
Shipped to countries that have banned the growing of the crop because of water concerns
Even worse: this is going to cattle farms that are responsible for considerable amount of methane emissions contributing to global warming.
There has been outrage. It's yet another tragedy of the commons.
Water pricing should be revisited to be closer to its true value -- and while food production should be recognized as essential, even that has to be rethought: is growing alfalfa for dairy less vital than growing vegetables? Especially if that dairy is produced and consumed in Saudi Arabia?
The other thing that we should be doing all over is better management of our watersheds so we can try to replenish those aquifers.
The thing about data centers and thermoelectric power plants is that you can make them effectively closed cycle, vs agriculture where that is somewhat intractable.
Not saying that is true today though.
California water policy vs other western states in one image:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sandy+Valley,+NV+89019/@35...
A town of 1700 people with a rapidly depleting aquifer (600 AF/yr recharge, equal to a single one of those circles) so 1 or 2 farmers with no restrictions on water usage can grow as much alfalfa as they'd like.
Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?
So, the other 25% does not all go to cattle, certainly not California. Some fraction of that alfalfa is exported in containers to China/Japan/Saudi, for their cattle. Doing that from a semi-desert during a declared drought (2020-3) seems like pretty obvious proof that the agricultural cost of water is distorted and too low. If any of that was artesian water, then it's even worse.
When I try to find out what % of California's alfalfa production is exported, I get conflicting numbers, some as high as 38%, some much lower.
Million, billion, and trillion sadly sound kind of the same when you talk about it.
I agree that is a big part of the problems we have today. But my best guess is also that the systems/people/companies that tend to abuse their power do know extremely well that the layman cannot fathom the difference between the three.
Unfortunately most people also don't really care until the problems come hitting them so extremely close you have absolutely no coiche to act upon it. Then the massive outrages start. It's a very predictable cycle.
> Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers
Agriculture produces food.
Probably because food and agriculture (in the region that produces a quarter of America’s domestic food supply) are required for life, while data centers aren’t?
Although delicious, alfalfa is not required for life. A lot of it goes to Saudi Arabia, who use it for horses and cattle, as the Saudis banned it domestically for being wasteful for water usage.
It's also grown for the same reason soy is grown. It's a highly effective nitrogen fertilizer for the soil. It's also one of the most digestible and high-protein forages
And data centers are required for life?
The claim I was responding to was that alfalfa using 1000x the water of Google data centers was okay because alfalfa is needed for life. My response was not "data centers are needed for life" but "alfalfa is not needed for life."
>Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that.
That part is actually the weakest part of your argument. You are dismissing a valid counterargument before addressing it.
Something being part of a current food production system does not make it a biological necessity. People can live without meat, therefore alfalfa is not "required for life" in the literal sense.
You are also shifting the meaning of "required": from "necessary for humans to survive" to "necessary for maintaining our current livestock industry." Those are very different claims.
Preemptively calling an obvious counterargument "dumb" is not a way to win the argument; it is a way to avoid having it.
Is it rational to dedicate enormous amounts of land, water, and energy to producing animal feed when those same resources could feed more people directly?
Using crops as feed and then eating the animals is an inherently inefficient way of converting resources into food. That may be acceptable when resources are abundant, but it becomes increasingly difficult to justify as we face limits in freshwater, arable land, and ecological capacity. That is the true argument, and what the discussion should be about, not if we can (very obviously) survive without meat.
Japan imports alfalfa because of an expansion of the USJTA in where Japan committed to purchasing $8 billion in US agricultural goods.
South Korea imports alfalfa because of the KORUS FTA removes all duties on forage goods.
China buys alfalfa because of yet another trade deal that was brokered to prevent a trade war from spiraling. Alfalfa hay was explicitly highlighted in the Phase One agreement.
I would assume because water-wasting concerns are just another tool for the left to use against their political opponents, not an actual concern most of their constituents deeply care about. Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore (I bet those birds covered in oil after spills enjoy it and are a treat to the eye!).
Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.
The opposition against data centers is remarkably both side things. Both MAGA opposes it and progressive opposes it. And no, I do not think maga and progressive are the same, but they do in fact both oppose data centers.
> Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore
What is their actual issue there? They want the electricity to be more expensive? They want the global warming to warm faster?
> Western lefties consider farmers their class allies
Pretty much all American leftists I have ever seen talking about the issue consider farmers to be the core MAGA/Trump constituency. Leftists do NOT consider them allies.
I know plenty of folks who got worked up over the wasteful farming that drains and damages aquifers. much like the penalties that kardashians received when they broke the water usage laws, it amounted to nada.
They do and have been - unfortunately the farms are far from most people and isolated. And in super hot arid areas. Not ideal but many people aren't directly affected
84.1% of people have <115 IQ. The minimum required to critically think about the modern world and affect its function.
With AI that minimum is expected to increase.
The immense amount of CO2 isn't also doing wonders on our brains.
Lead and cadmium in food caused by cheap fuel and roads closer to farms is also negatively affecting population IQ.
Then there’s the internet.
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." [1]
[1]: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/wilensky.ht...
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lol, if you bothered to check the reference your “article” stole from, you’d find a medium post that includes ANOTHER link to a follow up medium post entitled, “I was wrong about data center water consumption”
It’s not 6 billion per day. It’s 650 billion per day. In the United States alone.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
lol
Thank you for the note. But the article I linked to above relies on the page you linked for the Alfalfa number, not the data center number. The data center number in my article, 6.2 billion gallons annually for Google's data centers, is consistent with Google's numbers elsewhere: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/data-center-water-use-bla...
Also, your correction needs as correction:
> If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated. However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption. If you exclude the water “consumed” by hydroelectric plants via reservoir evaporation, you get something closer to perhaps 275 million gallons per day.1 And if you take into account the fact that lots of data center operators use renewable energy PPAs (mostly from wind and solar sources), my guess is that you get something closer to 200-250 million gallons per day (though I haven’t run a detailed calculation here).
It's not 675 billion gallons a day, it's 675 million, which is about 246 billion gallons a year.
California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]
We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.
[1]: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/prog...
[2]: https://archive.gov.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2015/04/01/news1891...
I expect the people will realize how easy it is to disable agriculture pumps, located in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to protect them.
When the law fails to protect the people, they will eventually do what it takes to protect themselves.
When water is outlawed, only outlaws will have water.
There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter.
But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.
I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.
The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.
If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.
If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.
We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.
The hilarity of being post food scarcity when the quality of food in stores has declined precipitously both in terms of nutrient density and taste. Most of the processed food contains high fructose corn syrup, sketchy preservatives, and worse. Even if people think we “succeeded” on this front, the truth is that we have failed. The ultimate consequences of our failure have yet to play out.
Both are true: modern food systems can improve availability and shelf-stability while still degrading average nutritional quality.
I have stripped out a lot of nuance in how it is portrayed in the book, but I do completely agree with you.
I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.
Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.
Exactly. It’s been done to enable luxury.
It is a key component of the first book that basically says, if a corporation can take a short cut to save money, they probably will.
It was framed as the refusal to move the diesel backup at Fukushima nuclear plant to save some money, but it does become a reoccurring theme through out the entire book.
Quite true.
Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.
Why would any of us care what people 200 or 500 years in the future think of us?
Peak irrelevance.
That is a much broader question, as I stated with the idea of legacy.
The whole do things to help others even if you do not directly see the benefit. The broader sense of altruism that many tend enact.
I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out.
I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out.
Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
> Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
Literally defined contribution [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defined_contribution_plan
401ks don’t guarantee results for a given amount of input, and people still stuff away lots into them?
The tax code is also really powerful in sending money to certain products
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It’s called a defined contribution pension as opposed to a defined benefit pension. They exist.
not only do they exist, they are by far the more common variant. Whenever you hear about a massive unfunded pension liability it's a defined benefit plan.
>In an aquifer that’s permanently collapsed, artificial recharge—pumping water forcibly back underground—is the only option, according to Shirzaei. That’s expensive and carries the risk of triggering earthquakes.
I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
> does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00137...
Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.
It has more possible side effects than just earthquakes (not my expertise in a geological stable country). One such side effect of mixing two types of groundwater is the potential to release minerals in the geological medium that can be above beneficial use criteria (and ultimately contaminate the groundwater). There is a USGS program called PHREEQC that is used for this specific type of modelling.
As the Super El-Nino is at its peak, South India is facing an acute water crisis
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cauvery-water-managem...
#SaveWater #SaveElectricity #SaveFuel
Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.
The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)
+1 for moving water from wet areas to dry areas. But desalination plants comes at a huge cost.
Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.
You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?
Access to resources that are used in prodigious volumes, like fresh water, seems like a good place to draw the line.
Who cares there is so much more to exploit. For example no-one has yet moved massive freshwater icebergs by boat, and its up for grabs!
Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.
Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.
Given enough solar/wind/battery power i do wonder if a desalination plant could run pretty cheaply. A quick chat with ChatGPT tells me it should be feasible. Roughly investing around 1 billion dollars and around 40 million per year for keeping it run producing around 100.000 m³ per year. Cost price of the water would be around $0.20 per m³. Could run for more than 25 years.
They are not popular. See the canceled Poseidon facility in Huntington Beach.
I did a little research. Although also not that popular, the one in Carlsbad in San Diego did get built. Matter of timing and costs it seems. Also didn’t help that Poseidon wanted big profit guarantees.
How bout a really big iceberg chunk, like massive. There has to be a trade-off at some size.
Also nice reference and funny in probably most ways to think about it thanks for a laugh :D
You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
> You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.
And the same is true for global carbon-related climate change, for which the real bill will become increasingly due over the next 10 years.
We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
> We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
Correction. It’s the next generations who are insanely fucked. People don’t hope it goes away, they think they won’t be around to see the consequences.
Mother Nature has always been historically very considerate with regards to our schedules.
I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.
https://uttoncenter.unm.edu/resources/2026-06-1-update-paper...
https://www.organicproducenetwork.com/organic-growers/califo...
Sci-fi brings us some optimism on that front. You can build out Brawndo distribution pipes overland.
? The land isn't conserved if you can't use it?
The land is conserved by not being farmed.
https://www.tuletrust.org/land-fallowing-program
Conservation is basically defined as being unused by humans.
I don't know why you got downvoted. In any case, this makes "sense", but doesn't make sense in that if we nuke the land in some way, distort it from a peaceful balance, I don't think it is "conserved"
Uh...they're just going to pave it and throw something over it.
Edit- To be clear maybe not specifically in this case, but "oops we've ruined this ecosystem to the point we can't farm it" rarely ends with "better move down the road and let nature reclaim it". It's a lot more "cool now we can put strip malls/data centers/whatever here"
It’s unlikely strip malls and data centers will be built on the land, but utility solar PV is an acceptable use that requires no water, is beneficial to the local environment, and gives the land 20-30 years to recover from agricultural use.
It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch. Underground water aquifers operate on similar timescales, if they can regenerate at all. The land needs time to recover from the demands of present timeline position humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/03/21-gigawatts-of-solar-f...
https://www.goldenstatecleanenergy.com/valley-clean-infrastr...
> It takes 600 to 3,000 years for 6 inches of topsoil to develop naturally, as it generally requires 100 to 500 years to form just a single inch.
I very much doubt those statements can both be true. It would have to be the case that the amount of time required to deposit one inch of soil is independent of the amount of soil already in place, which seems extremely unlikely.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0454h/report.pdf (page 5, Start at “Introduction”)
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1123462 (“It also takes around a thousand years to create just a few centimetres of topsoil and to help land restoration.”)
Planting more PV farms isn't better, it just convolutes the equation and hides the true sources of damage behind things with a less negative image, and would eventually just prove Jevon's law, one way or the other.
Not preceding "using better" with "consuming less" (on a system-wide basis) would get you the same result as going for recycling while forgoing the first R: empty, marketing points in green-coloured font.
It gives the land time to recover and requires nothing from it, nor human labor. All racking and conductors can be removed from the land in the future to return it to its original condition. All components can be recycled today, through metal and ewaste streams. It hides no externalities or harm. It quietly produces energy more efficiently than any crop, with no inputs besides the sun shining.
As my links demonstrate, California plans on developing 21GW of solar on farmland that no longer has water available for it.
Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.
Governments are just a structure for people to coordinate collective action. In democracies, it’s not that distinct from “us all”. We exercise this responsibility through representatives but they are our agents not our rulers. Outcomes depend on our ability to direct them, and the ability of our opponents to do so likewise.
For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.
Funny enough, Las Vegas has been planning for this outcome and won't run out of water. Only agriculture users will be impacted, who consume ~50% of the total annual Colorado River Basin. So, to your point, the ag users responsible for overconsumption for decades will be the ones primarily exposed to the outcome. Municipal water systems will continue to function as they do today with available water reserves and flows.
Thank you for posting that, saved me from doing so.
Ignorance and stupidity are the greatest threats to human survival - but perhaps it's for the best.
What can you realistically do?
Start by not electing a pedophile who calls climate change a hoax
I would assume that the problem with California aquifer is (mostly) a consequence of its Democratic state government decisions and it is highly unlikely that electing Hilary or Kamala would have prevented it.
I don’t remember Democrat Gavin Newsom calling climate change a hoax? Jokes aside, I don’t think politicians have anything to do with that. From what I’ve learned droughts in CA are natural part of the cycle and humans just accelerate it. You can’t reverse it because it is nature” you can slow down the acceleration, but then at what cost and why? If we are “all going to die” how does it change if it will happen in 50 years vs 60 years? 60 years of misery or 50 years of normal life.
Right?! Like there’s so much you can do.
* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.
* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.
* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.
Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.
I agree but
>Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)
This is not correct at all...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini... one source of many. Also local pollution is reduced, e.g. nox and particles.
Valid pushback! That said going through the MIT study quickly (and I may be wrong, feel free to correct me further) it doesn't seem to include CO2 from overseas shipping of materials and/or finished vehicles, and it also only seems to factor in tailpipe emissions as opposed to emissions from things like tire wear which is notably worse on EVs due to their weight. But again, I'll concede the point anyway.
You could however say exactly what I said about so many other classes of products. Home appliances, electronics, tools, on and on.
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> The only way to know for sure whether permanent compaction has occurred is through expensive core samples or other measurements at depth
Wouldn't it be for rain to fall and the aquifer's levels to rebound less than expected?
That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.
Yes, looks like they are acting like a sponge whose efficiency to retain water decreases as time passes.
it's time to re-read "The water knife " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife - but this time as a manual, not a fiction.
Digging lots of tunnels to store rain will be maybe required. Fortunately is a solved technological problem. It just will be really expensive.
For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
Agriculture is important. Alfafa is important as it feeds most of the animals grown for food and anlso horses etc.
90% of American alfafa is used domestically and only around 3-5% of it is exported.
The problem is California. 31% of California alfafa is exported and this is a state that has declared drought many times before. It’s a water thirsty state with grandfathered Ag water for farmers who essentially export water.
California Ag is the problem. We need agriculture. We need alfalfa. We need to fix CA.
I have been reading articles like this for more than 20 years. Really, it feels like click/rage-bait at this point. The answer is pretty simple: (1) Build desalination plants (Calif already has a few) and (2) switch to more efficient uses of water in agriculture (drip irrigation, that is already widely practiced in water stressed areas of the world). Sure it costs money, but California is insanely rich and can afford to make these changes. For the last 100 years, Calif has been farming on "easy mode". Ok, so now it gets a little bit harder.
I am so tired of this quote. It is 25% of total (economic) value, not by calories or volume or weight. This quote is very misleading.It's not even misleading, it's just a lie. There's no way to interpret it correctly from the words.
I took an agricultural ecology class in college in the early 90s and the professor predicted this would happen. I'd talk to farmer relatives and they'd get all angry and tell me nobody can tell me what to do on my land. More recently I'd talk to people about this and they'd tell me no way they'd eat less beef or stop drinking almond milk. Humans are idiots.
"Farmers" in California are increasingly a few mega-businesses, with all the downside that comes with that.
There were the usual signs blasting Newsom and Pelosi for "stealing" valuable water when half the central valley was underwater.
Capitalism, Comrade!
Unfortunately, determining a sustainable groundwater yield is rarely straightforward. It typically requires extensive long-term monitoring, detailed hydrogeological investigations, and often sophisticated numerical groundwater models to understand aquifer recharge, storage, hydraulic connectivity, and environmental water requirements. These assessments then inform groundwater management areas, allocation limits, and licensing frameworks designed to keep extraction within sustainable bounds.
Even then, there is significant uncertainties. Many sustainable yield estimates are based on historical climate conditions and recharge rates. As rainfall declines and droughts become more frequent or prolonged, aquifer recharge may decrease, reducing the volume of groundwater that can be sustainably extracted. In some regions, the number of licensed users may ultimately exceed future sustainable allocations identified through updated modelling and monitoring. This creates a difficult policy challenge, as regulators may be required to reduce allocations or revoke licences from existing users, often with substantial social, economic and political consequences.
Groundwater management is further complicated by the fact that aquifers are not homogeneous reservoirs. They are complex geological systems, with groundwater availability and flow behaviour controlled by local stratigraphy, structural features, recharge mechanisms, hydraulic connectivity, and ecological dependencies. Effective management therefore requires aquifer-specific assessments rather than broad, one size fits all approaches.
There are probably very few hydrogeologists browsing HN so hello to any colleagues that are out there.
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Anyone can post stories to HN.