Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by doh 3420 days ago
It's actually not false. If you read the article you posted, you will see that half of the water is used for environmental uses. That means is not used by humans, but "let go".

So if you sum the rest, agriculture does use 80% of the water used by humans.
1 comments
WillPostForFood 3419 days ago
Directing water to a tree to grow almonds, and directing it to a stream to support the delta smelt are both human directed usages. You can't just count the usages you don't like to make the number look big.
link
doh 3419 days ago
If you're looking at it this way, that every single stream is managed, then yes, you're right. I rather think that we develop only the water sources that make the most sense and leave the rest be.

This way we could talk about the incredible amounts of gold that is diluted in oceans that we could harvest "anytime" [0]. It's around 21x more than humans mined in the whole history.

[0] http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html

link