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.
A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
111–120 of 183 posts
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#112There 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 i…
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.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#114There 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 i…
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 have stripped out a lot of nuance in how it is portrayed in the book, but I do completely agree with you.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#115There 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 i…
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.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#116California 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…
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.
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#117Why 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 s…
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Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#119Why 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 s…
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…
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).
Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Data-centre protests aren't about water I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.
>>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 comm…
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.