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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
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
Million, billion, and trillion sadly sound kind of the same when you talk about it.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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!
You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
> 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?
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.
Digging lots of tunnels to store rain will be maybe required. Fortunately is a solved technological problem. It just will be really expensive.
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
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.
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 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.