[imgabe]

> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document.

Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.

[sxp]

To put this in context, it takes about 1 gallon of water per 1g of almond [1]. And in California's dry climate, this water comes from groundwater that doesn't renew as fast as it's depleted. So the next time someone chastises you for your non-low flow showerhead that uses more than 2 almonds of water per minute, remember to put the numbers in context.

1. Numbers from a pro-almond group: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

[ricardbejarano]

I don't know why, but the fact that a "pro-almond group" exists chuckled me up.

[Ekaros]

There is corruption for everything money touches...

I actually wonder if there is not single moderately sized industry that does not have some interest group...

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Industry advocacy groups ≠ corruption.

They're basically necessary to do business in an advanced society that has rules governing every aspect of life. Those rules (even if good) often have unintended consequences and advocacy groups can help ensure that their industries are considered when rule-making.

[bitmasher9]

Lobbying as practiced by these advocacy groups is basically American flavored corruption. If the system were in place anywhere else we’d call it corruption, but it’s our system so we call it Lobbying.

[array_key_first]

Yes but that ship has sailed, so now you need anti-corruption corruption to hopefully corrupt the corruption so it's less corrupt.

Like, the only reason "almond advocacy" even exists is because dairy and beef are some of the most lobbied and blessed industries in America. They can practically do whatever they want, whenever they want, so fuck you, pal.

[rcpt]

Nah dude look at France and their farm owners

[micromacrofoot]

this assumes that the needs of both the workers and the owners (who pay for the lobbying) are aligned, and they're often not

lobbyists will advocate for taking the water right from under the noses of the workers, and the workers will turn around and praise their employer for maintaining their jobs... it's often some kind of perverse shell game

at the end of the day the owners fly off to wherever with a pile of money and the workers are left without jobs or water — these false dichotomies of "if it weren't for lobbyists all jobs would be regulated away" is often used to disenfranchise people from actually changing these systems

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

This assumes no such thing.

[hydrogen7800]

This sounds a bit sensationalized, and I'm not sure if it's the source from which I originally learned of the issue, but:

>In a series of secret meetings in 1994, the Resnicks seized control of California’s public water supply. Now they’ve built a business empire by selling it back to working people.

https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...

[voakbasda]

When the water wars start, they will be the first against the wall.

[artursapek]

Almond trees are stuck as almond trees forever. They can't switch to something else. Anywhere an investment in something is entrenched like this, you'll find lobbying.

[dylan604]

If there is and you name it, the interest group will be formed.

[mikrl]

Is that the Almond Front of California, or the Californian Almond Front?

[triceratops]

I'd non-ironically join that. Almonds are the bees knees. Almond milk is an atrocity though.

[daedrdev]

Almonds alone are like half of all urban water use in california.

[daedrdev]

More specifically, farming and urban use 50% of the water California gets (river outflows to the sea are the other main place water ends up) Urban use is 10% and farming is 40% of that total water input. Almonds alone are 7% of ALL water, almost as much as the 10% urban.

The level of subsidy the relatively unimportant crops get with their basically free water is astounding, especially considering the high urban prices of water

[Faelon]

Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...

[marcellus23]

I thought the problem is that that growing almonds is usually done in arid regions, so the issue is not that it uses lots of water, but that it uses lots of water in areas that frequently experience droughts. This is an honest question (I truly don't know, although I suspect I can guess): are dairy farms also common in those areas?

[lukeschlather]

Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water.

Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.

[mrguyorama]

The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue.

California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.

And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.

That's insane

Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.

Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.

But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ

The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.

A microcosm of the US problem basically.

[Yeul]

Corporations never want to pay for the problems that they cause. They would rather go bankrupt and start a new company.

[thayne]

World beef production is approx. 60x almond production by mass, and that doesn't include dairy. That isn't the whole story, because cattle use more water than just what is used to grow alfalfa, but you are comparing apples to oranges here.

[rcpt]

You can check the per calorie stats.

Animal agriculture is wildly inefficient and honestly it's not surprising because you have to keep living moving animals around for it.

[lukeschlather]

I was drawing a point of comparison in response to the question about almonds disproportionately using scarce water resources in arid areas, which is a different question from overall water usage. My point was that almond water usage is literally only an issue in California, and that their water usage is not that extreme given the size of the market California serves.

[rcpt]

tbf some of the alfalfa is shipped to China it's not all used on cows here

[HowardStark]

It’s been some years but I recall that at one point probably around 2016-2017, California produced 80% of the world’s almonds. This was notable because at the same time, California was experiencing historic droughts.

[Faelon]

Yes- about half of the total water siphoned from the Colorado river goes to cows. This number astounded me when I first read it, and I hope it has a similar effect on you. I don't like almond milk, for what it's worth, and I don't think we should ignore plant-based foods with a high climate impact, but animal agriculture is the most environmentally devastating institution we have individual power to transition from. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...

[wongarsu]

GP's point works just as well if you substitute almonds with diary milk or hamburger meat though. The specific water use of almonds is indeed completely tangential

[ilamont]

Account created 10 minutes ago, hitting talking points of the almond growers industry association.

[litenboll]

They are replying to talking points of the dairy industry.

[phs318u]

Even if true, you’ve not countered a single point. Are there un-truths among those points? If so, let’s hear them.

[Faelon]

I've read here for a long time but just made my account because I have been feeling very compelled by the data surrounding the huge economic effects of the animal agriculture industry and how otherwise pro-science and pro-data people find themselves with deeply entrenched unscientific viewpoints. Should I link my Google scholar to prevent people from seeing conspiracies everywhere??

[ribosometronome]

I think the almond talking point takes hold because, like a lot of complaining about LLM usage, large parts of the blame gets directed elsewhere rather than the choices that we're all way more likely to be making and could influence. Like, it's 2025. Even the people most likely to be drinking almond milk have largely moved to oat, whose water usage is great.

[wyre]

Almond's get brought up because it distracts from the fact that beef and dairy milk production uses a lot more water than almonds do.

No one wants to be reminded that their 4 oz burger they had for lunch used 460 gallons of water to produce.

[hgomersall]

Except that almond trees thrive in hot dry climates. Cows thrive in the rain.

[dylan604]

But it's okay. This has been solved very recently as in last week. We are going to now be getting our beef from Argentina. Not only has the prices of beef issue been fixed, it'll also fix the country's water shortage issue as a bonus. /s

[avalys]

“Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant!

[sixo]

Almond milk is an economic substitute for dairy milk, making the comparison appropriate. No need to be dense about it.

[ipsento606]

Almond milk is not dairy milk, but it is absolutely "milk", in the sense of a white liquid derived from plants - a definition that has existed in English for hundreds of years.

The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.

[zemvpferreira]

I don’t drink ‘almond beverage’ but given the amount of uses it has substituting milk (and the amount of people that accept them) it seems like a very relevant comparison. Maybe I’m not sofisticated enough but I’m yet to see a candy corn mlik latte be ordered.

[jodrellblank]

> I’m yet to see a candy corn mlik latte be ordered.

Not exactly the same, but can I interest you in a caramel-waffle-oat-milk latte?

https://mightydrinks.com/cdn/shop/files/Barista-CW.png

[zemvpferreira]

You certainly can sir!

[throwaway-42808]

But that's such a good idea though

[ben_w]

> “Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant!

While almond milk is an incomplete substitute for bovine mammary secretions, it is so much closer than candy corn that it has been used as a substitute for the last 800 or so years, and shared the "milk"-ness in the name before we had an English language:

  The word “milk” has been used since around 1200 AD to refer to plant juices.

- https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...

This makes this use of the word older than English people spelling the thing chickens lay as "eggs" rather than "eyren": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5znvym68k

The Romans called lettuce "lactūca", derived from lac (“milk”), because of the milky fluid in its stalks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lettuce

Similar examples abound.

For example, I grew up in the UK, where a standard Christmas seasonal food is the "mince pie", which is filled with "mincemeat". While this can be (and traditionally was) done with meat derivatives, in practice those sold in my lifetime have been almost entirely vegetarian. The etymology being when "meat" was the broad concept of food in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat

Further examples of this: today we speak of the "flesh" and "skin" of an apple.

Personally, I don't like almond milk. But denying that something which got "milk" in its name due to it's use as a milk-like-thing, before our language evolved from cross-breeding medieval German with medieval French, to argue against someone who said "Insofar as it is used for milk", is a very small nit to be picking.

[AstroBen]

I mean I'm drinking a coffee with almond milk right this second.. which coincidentally replaced the dairy milk

Candy corn in my coffee wouldn't taste anywhere near as good

[827a]

Yes: my understanding is that it’s rather common practice to at least make a best-effort estimation of all these secondary impacts.

It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.

[tracker1]

This also tends to include the rainwater that falls on the ground to grow the grass that cattle eat that would fall on the grass anyway, or that the cow farts aren't really more greenhouse emissions than the grass rotting out over the summer anyway. It's distortive.

IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.

I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"

[827a]

> assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop

My understanding is that the closed-loop systems are rather new; like, "we started using these things in 2024 literally because everyone's been moaning about our AI water usage" new. I'd assume that many new constructions are starting to leverage them, but its not 100%, and existing DCs would be slow to upgrade.

[ponow]

Categorical rejection of alternatives is premature without context.

[triceratops]

> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate?

Beef too. It uses the same amount of water but people eat 30x as much annually.

[rtaylorgarlock]

And cheaper cow production, focused on grain-feeding, uses even more water than grass feeding; after spending a month in Switzerland, it's wild to see how addicted we Americans are to cheap beef.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

We need our protein or we will die immediately.

[nradov]

Ha ha, but seriously unlike other nutrients the human body can't really store protein reserves for any length of time. So you do need to keep taking in quite a bit every day or the body will break down muscle in order to sustain other tissues.

https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick3/

The protein doesn't necessarily have to come from beef, although that is one of the highest quality sources in terms of digestibility (for most people) and essential amino acid balance.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

You need protein for sure. But unless you want to win Mr Universe you will probably get enough through regular nutrition. And there are a lot of other things besides protein you need in your food. The current “Protein in everything” trend is just a fad created by industry

[nradov]

How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above?

It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.

[triceratops]

Do we need beef protein? What's wrong with chicken or eggs or beans?

And also, what? You'll die if you don't eat meat today? Because that's what "immediately" means. That's news to all the world's vegetarians.

[artursapek]

Yeah people who eat beef are actually healthier than vegetarians.

[ben_w]

The difference in life expectancy between the USA (where beef is heavily consumed) and India (where you may get lynched on suspicion of eating it) is 78.39 - 72 = 6.39 years at birth.

Most people attribute this difference to the GDP/capita ($89,600 vs. $12,132 PPP) or the number of doctors per capita (36.082 vs. 7.265 per 10k), not the diet.

[Faelon]

This stands against the evidence. Beef is causally linked with the largest killers of Americans, including heart diabetes, diabetes, and obesity in general. "a mostly plant-based diet could prevent approximately 11 million deaths per year globally, and could sustainably produce enough food for the planet’s growing population without further damage to the environment." A "Mediterranean diet" is more healthy than the average American diet because it is more plant-based. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01406... https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/with-a-little-planning-v...

[triceratops]

Define "healthier".

[litenboll]

Source?

[lotsofpulp]

I wonder if cow milk products would be more expensive if people ate less beef.

Presumably, after a cow is done being used for milk, it can then be sold for meat.

[wikibob]

Dairy cows don’t taste good. They’re used for the bottom of the barrel low grade ground meat. Think dog food.

[bryanlarsen]

Old cows are generally very flavorful. They're more beefy and gamy than the young cattle we're used to eating. They're also stringy and tough.

So you wouldn't want an old cow steak, but a stew or burger made from an old cow can be awesome.

[christophilus]

I guess it depends. I have a friend who has dairy cows, grass-fed, very well cared for. He names each one and hates to slaughter them, but when they are done producing, he does take them to the slaughter house. I bought a quarter of a cow from him a few years back, and it was excellent. It did have a hint of gaminess redolent of venison or lamb, but it was delicious.

[voakbasda]

You are misinformed. I regularly eat our retired dairy cows. They taste absolutely excellent, but they were raised on pasture and ate top quality feed.

Dairy cows from commercial confinement dairies are a different matter. They eat almost exclusively grain and develop horrible health problems.

Yet the same can be said of any meat produced in a CAFO, when compared to that produced on most small farms. Garbage in, garbage out.

[davidw]

My guess is that they have specialized breeds and how they're raised and fed and such, so that dairy cattle wouldn't make for good beef and vice versa. They probably do use them somehow, but maybe for dog food or some similar use.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

"It's wild to see how Americans are able to procure an extremely high quality protein source inexpensively"

[fainpul]

It's pretty easy if you don't care about animal welfare and environmental issues. As soon as you care, prices go up steeply.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

American cows lead very good lives, up to including death. Better than pretty much any mammal on earth except for humans and 1st world pets.

[pas]

without paying now for the externalities of its production

[jspiral]

how dare you, he spent a whole month in switzerland. what an exalted being

[macinjosh]

Beef is more nutrient efficient though and has better macros for human consumption. It has 4 times more protein, less fat, and no carbs. Seems to me at least Americans could do well to eat more beef and less products created from processed almonds mixed with refined vegetable oils and sugar.

Beef and milk are harvested ready to eat. Vegan substitutes are all highly processed. Processed food consumption is associated with greater cancer and diabetes risk.

[triceratops]

> It has 4 times more protein, less fat, and no carbs

Compared to an almond? Who the fuck eats almond steaks? It's a nonsensical comparison. If you want less fat and more protein per calorie, chicken beats beef. Chicken also has a lower water and carbon footprint.

> Vegan substitutes are all highly processed

Beans aren't "highly processed". Learn to cook and you'll understand that there are options besides processed food for vegetarians and vegans.

[WolfeReader]

Factory-farmed beef is the worst source of pollution in the food industry. We definitely need less of that.

[mikkupikku]

"Factory-farmed beef" doesn't even exist. All cows get raised in fields for their first 12-18 months. The ""factory-farming"" is just a feed lot they get taken to for 3-6 months to eat grain before slaughter.

If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.

[triceratops]

You've never heard of free-range chickens?

I agree pigs are raised in abominable conditions.

[mikkupikku]

Not all pigs and chickens are "factory farmed" but most are. And unlike cows, the term is relatively meaningful and descriptive when applied to the way those are raised. Bro heard about how pigs and chickens get raised in tiny cages never seeing the light of day then assumed that's how it works for cows too, which he now realizes isn't the case because I shamed him into looking it up.

[wyre]

You're going to have to cite strong sources or else this is either heavy cope or straight-up denial.

It is inconceivable that American's consume as much beef as they do, yet production has been able to scale without resorting to factory-farming. Every other commodity food is factory farmed. It's asinine to think beef is immune to that.

[mikkupikku]

Bro, get out of the city or just look at a map, America is absolutely enormous. There is no shortage of land to let cows graze on. Feedlots for cattle aren't even necessary at all, they're only used to increase profit.

What's really asinine is that you have such strong opinions about a subject you know nothing about and demand that other people do research for you.

[gruez]

Pork and chicken have better feed conversion ratios and water consumption

[bryanlarsen]

Cattle water consumption should be meaningless. If a cow is drinking water from a surface water source and breathing/sweating/peeing it out in a pasture, that's the same process that would be happening if humans didn't exist.

It isn't meaningless due to industrial farming. Chickens and pigs are even more likely to be industrially farmed than cattle are.

If we lowered our meat consumption by about 90% then we wouldn't need to industrially farm meat and the 10% would be much more ecologically justifiable.

Then the problem is that the soy we've replaced our meat with is industrially farmed...

[hansvm]

The problem is the assumption that cows (and other similarly intensive animals) would exist in the same quantity. You'd expect something like 5x less cow-like biomass without people intervening.

[triceratops]

If humans didn't farm them there'd be far fewer cows alive and drinking water.

[bryanlarsen]

And far more bison. Not the same, but similar.

[macinjosh]

ok!

[AstroBen]

I highly recommend you read up on the actual research of what you're talking about. It points to the exact opposite of basically every sentence you wrote

[Faelon]

Not all processed foods are created equal. Almost all of the elevated health risk from processed foods comes from processed meats and sugary drinks. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/well/eat/ultraprocessed-f... Whole grain breads are ultra-processed, and I don't think many are arguing against those. Beef has absolutely devastating effects on human health including elevated cancer risk, diabetes risk, dramatically higher incidences of heart disease (the greatest killer of Americans). Plant-based substitutes are scientifically shown to lead to better outcomes. Better yet, soy based whole foods are excellent for human health, contrary to the bro-science talking points. Turns out, beans are good for you! https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/the-bottom-line-on-ultra-proce... https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/health-benefits-soy

This book is science, front to back, cementing the idea that animal products are not ideal for human health. https://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/16...

[xboxnolifes]

Only 30x? Y'all eat a lot of almonds.

[raxxorraxor]

At least that is generally the case for calculating the ecological footprint of a person.

I am critical of this metric though, since the water isn't really lost in many cases. Especially if datacenters use water never meant for consumption.

If you look at it as a power generation problem it become much more plastic. That is of course as long as the water doesn't get expended in regions that lack it.

Although if you want to compare datacenter usage to agriculture, you could say that one is more essential than the other. Even if modern agriculture is a high tech industry that uses datacenters.

[LPisGood]

I generally find criticism of water waste misplaced. Water’s lifecycle is cyclic. The water isn’t lost unless it is being salted or otherwise poisoned.

The real waste is the energy required to produce, clean, and transport the water that is being “wasted.”

[pas]

aquifers deplete, the water table lowers, wells dry up

sustainability, availability and maximum marginal price matters, just as with electric power generation

[chemotaxis]

Depletion of local water resources is a good thing to measure. But by and large, this is not what we're measuring. Instead, we're coming up with absurd statistics that imply any water put to beneficial use just disappears forever.

If your tap water comes from a river and flows back to a river, leaving it running mostly just wastes energy.

[jasonlotito]

We can. We do. It depends on what you are trying to count. If you think there is a single number that will answer everything, no. Are you going to include all the water ancestors used? After all, without that water, I wouldn't be here.

You seem to think there is only one way to count. That's completely wrong. The important thing is whether you are clear about what you are counting and why.

Your comment is odd. But let me be the first to give you permission to count things how you want. Just make sure you explain the criteria and reasoning. Have a good day.

[imgabe]

There is an honest way to count and that is to count the water directly used by the person or process in question. There are many other ways to count to make big scary number for clickbait article. I suppose we could also count all the water used by data center employees to take showers as "data center water usage" but that is dishonest. Those are people who exist and they are going to take showers whether they work at the data center or not.

Likewise, the power company is going to generate electricity regardless of whether a data center is there or not. The power company has various means of generating electricity available which use more or less water. The amount of water used in generating electricity is attributed to the power company, not the data center.

[iepathos]

Kind of surprised I have to point this out. Power companies do not generate the same amount of power regardless of whether that power would be consumed on their grid or not. They increase generation based on demand. Whether that power comes from high water consumption generation is based on location which determines which power sources are available in the local grid. A major part of why indirect water consumption from power generation is included in the standard WUEsource - water usage effectiveness metric - is because it makes it clear what the impact will be when assessing data center location and size. In other words, it's important to choose locations near power generation that doesn't consume water heavily. Yes, the amount of water used in generating electricity and the efficiency there is controlled power companies choices for power generation at their locations. Data centers control the location they are built in and without an estimate of indirect water usage they cannot strategize locations with lower environmental impact.

Contrary to your belief that it is about clickbait, it's actually just about how to accurately evaluate environmental impact of data centers backed by science and basic logic.

[imgabe]

A power company builds a generation plant of a certain size. That plant is going to run whether there is a data center or not. Maybe there is some incremental additional water usage if it is running at 85% capacity instead of 75% capacity but this is probably marginal compared to the plant running or not running at all.

Depending on the method of power generation, it might also need a certain consistent base load to run most efficiently, so adding in a data center that will be a consistent load running 24/7 could actually increase the efficiency.

[jppittma]

That's a fair point. If you want to calculate the real total water usage of any person, you must first invent the universe. You have to cut it off somewhere.

[Chris2048]

What does that mean though: "water used"? The only actual use of "water" is an E = mC^2 conversion to raw energy, or a chemical/location change such that it's locked-up/removed from availability permanently.

The water normally continues to exist, so presumably it's some other resource we are using. This may seem pedantic but it's not - raw groundwater, or unprocessed grey water is not potable as in "water a person uses" for drinking, which is a subset of the water a person uses overall (directly in showers etc, or by proxy in bought products, building materials etc).

In each case, water is more of a "carrier" for some other resource or property. If in CA the almonds go through a lot of water (is this due to perspiration? i.e. their cooling mechanism?), the water will still create clouds that I presume increases rainfall elsewhere? In fact, the water now holds more energy (from solar) that might be useful somehow.

Similar comments around "land usage", entirely depends on opportunity loss otherwise.

[elygre]

It sounds like we know the water usage for growing almonds.

It feels reasonable that we should have the same detail of information for data centers.

[didibus]

I find this loses the point, because agriculture is essential. If we preserve water it's because we want to keep enough of it for essentials like agriculture and such. Not that agricultural practices shouldn't better conserve water, but it's the usage of water for non-essential things that I think most people find wasteful.

[CamperBob2]

It's not essential that almonds be grown in California.

[whatever1]

Like the emissions we can have various scopes and different targets per scope.

[thayne]

Does Amazon control the generation of this electricity? If so, then I definitely think it should be included, because it is something that Amazon has control over, and could possibly reduce water use.

If it is the power company, then the relevant metric is the amount of power consumed, as it would be up to the power company to find a more water-efficient way to produce power.

[RA_Fisher]

> are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate?

That’s a good idea. Like nutrition facts but for everyday economic climate decisions.

[rcpt]

Knee jerk reaction for me every time I see "almonds"

One gallon of cow milk uses more water than one gallon of almond milk.

[Clent]

Almond milk is 2% almond. Cow milk is 100% cow milk.

An gallon of raw almonds requires a massive amount of water.

Using numbers to create illusions of comparison is the marketing equivalent of parsley in your tooth.

[yapyap]

> Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use

Will it though

[amelius]

OK but rain water != tap water.

[CGMthrowaway]

It's not rainwater. (it's not tapwater either)

[Finnucane]

I'd rather have the almonds than another data center.

[user3939382]

Oh right are almonds actively extracting money from you because their business model is exploitative?