Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
How much water do you believe AI consumes? The 31 billion land animals we keep in captivity and the crops we grow to feed them dwarf most human water consumption.
https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/
That’s a lot, but by some back of the envelope math I calculated that American consumption of cheese alone uses four times that amount in a year.
Based on this, 4 oz of cheese uses 450 liters of water. https://foodprint.org/blog/dairy-water-footprint/
Based on this, the average American consumes 41 lbs of cheese per year. Each lb of cheese uses 1800 liters of water per the above. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183785/per-capita-consumption-of-cheese-in-the-us-since-2000/
That means that each US citizen uses 73,800 liters of water per year on cheese alone.
Multiply that by 340E6, the US population, you get 25 trillion liters of water per year. That’s 25 billion cubic meters of water a year.
Not that AI is environmentally friendly by any stretch, but dairy is the equivalent of like, a dozen AI industries all stacked on top of each other. Feel free to check my math and correct me as needed.
For the record, dairy production and consumption has been around for almost all of human civilization. It had time to really embed itself in society, and it served a very real, practical purpose. It kept people alive.
The AI hype has only being going for like a decade and shows no signs of slowing down. Those numbere are literally rookie numbers.
Perhaps there have been times of famine where it kept people alive, but today and throughout most of human history, it’s simply killing people. Something like eight of the top ten causes of human death are consequences of diet. The leading cause of all human death goes away completely without consumption of a class of products that includes all dairy. Dairy is not healthy to consume, it is harmful.
I always find those kinds of numbers difficult because they include rain water in that estimation.
What percentage of the 450 liters of water comes from those different sources? How impactful is a green water footprint vs a blue water footprint vs a gray water footprint? If the 120g of cheese were made from 100% blue water, that would definitely be problematic. But if it were 100% green water, that would most likely be less of an issue.
Next, you have to consider how the water comes into the calculation. Is it just considering the water for feed crops of the water that the cow itself consumes? And if it’s feed crops, the type is also important. Some feed is simply the byproduct of crops that are used for human consumption e.g maize only has maybe 10% of its biomass for human consumption. Would simply throwing away the other 90% be considered wasteful or useful? And how does that factor into the water calculation?
And a final point regarding feed, is what kind of feed it is and where it’s grown. Feed may not only be byproduct of human comestible crops but also crops that cannot be consumed by humans at all, and they can also grown in places where human comestible crops cannot be grown.
Now you have to compare that water for server farms. I have little knowledge thereof, but my guess is that they don’t wait for rain to cool their servers and it probably is more blue water than not. It maybe as entangled and complicated as the source of water for cheese, I don’t know.
My point is, it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Water consumption doesn’t always equal water consumption. To drive the point home, would you consider the water required to raise fish in a landlocked country the same as that of a coastal country?
What is your actual point? “Don’t worry about water consumption?”