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Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

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Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#141

Post by shagie »

astroflection wrote: post #24

I am assuming the 7.7 billion gallons(29b liters) a year is all surface water. It better be. It would be hideously irresponsible to use any ground water for cooling their data centers.

https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-cen...

> The company has negotiated a pair of agreements with The Dalles city officials that would significantly reduce property taxes Google must pay on the new development and secure for the company the water it needs for its expanded operations.

> The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting.

> ...

> “Without this agreement, [Google] or any other industry could use those wells as they wanted just as the aluminum plant previously did,” Anderson, the public works director, told the Council.

> Anderson said the amount of water that can be withdrawn from The Dalles groundwater aquifer annually without causing a decline is 5,500 acre-feet per year. Only about 1,800 acre-feet per year are being drawn out of the aquifer currently.

---

Most surface water has a "you can't drain this" compact. For example, the Great Lakes compact - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

Part of the sticking point for the Foxconn mess in Wisconsin was the water use within the watershed of the Great Lakes. https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-wat...

Microsoft's plan use: https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-ga...

> The data obtained by WPR from the city shows the first phase of Microsoft’s data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. Under subsequent phases, the campus would use a peak of 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons annually.

https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-... shows the demand and discharge request.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#143

Post by micromacrofoot »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #105
Ekaros wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#144

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #143
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This assumes no such thing.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#145

Post by thayne »

lukeschlather wrote: post #89
marcellus23 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 consumpti…

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.

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#146

Post by Chris2048 »

meroes wrote: post #118
Chris2048 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss a /s tag here?

It’s one of the things I noticed in France and Italy. Like after a few days you notice the mens’ silhouettes are alien. Not in a bad way, but noticeable.

But due to lack of protein, vs less fat and sugar? I'm sure minus the fat, many American men would also lack muscle.

That said, Italy and France are known for smoking a lot, which supresses the appetite. Your original observation was swiss though (land of milk, chocolate and cheese)?

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#149

Post by Faelon »

artursapek wrote: post #110
triceratops wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah people who eat beef are actually healthier than vegetarians.

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...

Re: Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret

#150

Post by hansvm »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #82
gruez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pork and chicken have better feed conversion ratios and water consumption

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…

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.
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