- cross-posted to:
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morethanmeatstheeye.substack.com
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Bad comparison. We need food to survive. We don’t “need” AI for anything.
While there could and should be agriculture changes to reduce water consumption, we cannot just stop producing food and be fine.
That’s a fairly reductionist take from your side.
Did you even look at the article? I’m not trying to defend AI, but it’s currently somewhere between 0.31% (2023) and 0.98% (projected for 2030) of freshwater use in the USA. Animal agriculture is at 40.60%. Plants for immediate human consumption are at 23%.
Combined with the fact, that meat is less efficient in converting farmed area or water to calories (In the USA 72% of calories are provided by plants, the remaining 28% are some form of animal product), this should also give you the answer for “why not go into any of the other water intensive crops we grow in the wrong place”, which you asked in this thread.
Put all this together with the rising per capita meat consumption world wide and you see why we have a problem. In the USA most aquifers are drying up, including some very important ones for agriculture. And that problem has existed before data centers sprung up everywhere.
And yes, we could and should change agriculture to reduce water consumption - by reducing animal farming. In the best case getting rid of it. Even with people that can’t survive on a plant based diet, which I would expect to be very few, we could reduce animal agriculture to close to 0 compared to our current level.
And this is only talking about the water usage of animal products.
And the best part - it doesn’t cost anything. On the contrary, it would be cheaper. It doesn’t even require new technologies! Going vegan is degrowth in action.
We do need food to survive. We don’t need meat though.
I won’t survive a life without meat, not physically but mentally.
We won’t survive a life with meat if it continues like this. Physically, not mentally.
Skill issue. Learn to cook better.
I guess I’ll try…
If you haven’t tried them, I can strongly recommend the modern plant based meat alternatives now on the market, such as Impossible and Beyond (usually found in the freezer section of the grocery store). An impossible burger in an air fryer is, IMHO, as good or better than an animal beef burger, and that’s coming from someone who was a heavy meat eater for most of their life.
I’ve been able to cook all of the meals I grew up with, such as tacos, beef stroganoff, lasagna, steaks (Meati brand mushroom based steaks are excellent), stuffed peppers, shepherd’s pie, chili etc, all with those alternative meats, and no one would even be able to tell it’s not ‘real’ meat.
These new alternatives make it basically trivial to give up red meat, since you’re not sacrificing any recipes or flavors, just buying a different package at the store and cooking as you normally would, since they’re drop-in replacements.
Not a massive fan over the fake meats, but if it works for you go ahead.
I would rather just eat some veg.
You don’t need meat. Not everyone has the dietary ability to get all their nutrients from plant matter, so yeah some of us do.
And while you’re starting this from a ban meat standpoint, why not go into any of the other water intensive crops we grow in the wrong place?
And while you’re starting this from a ban meat standpoint, why not go into any of the other water intensive crops we grow in the wrong place?
The majority of crops are grown to feed animals that will later be slaughtered. If we stopped raising and killing them, or at least reduced the amount so as to only feed those who aren’t capable of getting nutrients from plants, we’d also grow less crops.
Not everyone has the dietary ability to get all their nutrients from plant matter, so yeah some of us do.
This is only really some extremely rare cases of disorders, and is hardly relevant in the greater discussion
Hardly relevant to you.
You don’t need to eat corpses, stop being silly… and gross.
Not everyone has the dietary ability to get all their nutrients from plant matter
What are you referring to? Because according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada, properly planned vegan diets are appropriate for all life stages, including pregnancy and lactation.
Crohns makes it pretty rough to go full plant, as do other allergy/immune issues.
There are options between what we do now and ban all animal agriculture. To say some tiny edge case is a reason to do nothing would be insanity.
Animal consumption globally could be more than halved easily.
Where did I say do nothing? I simply said that it’s a bad case to compare two things that are not of equal necessity (one being required for at least the sliver, one not being required at all but which is trying to expand rapidly).
By criticising the idea of reducing animal consumption it certainly sounds like you support either eating as much as we do now or even more.
We don’t need to eat dead bodies to survive.
We don’t need to accept ai either.
For a ‘superior species’ we sure are f*cking this all up.
You will live without steak though.
It’s apparent that the datacenters aren’t the big thief when it comes to water, but I guess the quick growth of them and sometimes environmental disregard has led to local problems in certain places. And since there are so many reasons to dislike the AI boom it’s probably easy to magnify the issues of your enemy.
AI and the companies that push it are bad in a multitude of ways, which can also be said about the meat industry and a lot of other industries many people use daily. It doesn’t mean everyone should quit everything but at least try and be aware of how your choices affect the planet and do your best to tread lightly.
It’s both, dumbass.
Are you guys even reading the article? Saying “it’s both” when there is a factor of 130 between the two is just disregarding the actual problem.
To say it’s both is like giving equal blame to my garden beetroot farm.
There’s a vast difference between your garden beetroot farm and the animal agriculture industry.
Yes, that was my point.
You know what’s a bigger waste than all of that? Lawns. The amount of water we waste on lawns is ridiculous. The amount of prairies and grasslands destroyed for agriculture, golf, and lawns is also more horrifying than the water usage. Yeah, ai is totally useless, but it’s like putting out a spark, while the house is on fire.
[Sorry for the long response. I’m sure you meant well, but this felt like what-aboutism, and then caught my interest. Don’t talk to me when I’m crossing streets.]
Do you have a source on the lawn-part? Because it sounds highly unlikely that even the USA is using more water on watering lawns than on farming.
However it turns out it is hard to find data on that, especially since the way different studies attribute water usage differs quite a lot.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1441/circ1441.pdf - this one completely separates irrigation and livestock water usage, making livestock using only one percent of water usage (i.e. only the water the animals drink). Also the usage by category in the overview is not consumptive use, but generally used water (they could explain that one a bit better). This causes thermoeletric power to account for 41% water use overall, despite only using 4.31 BGal/day consumptive, whereas irrigation uses 73.2 BGal/day consumptive and is attributed with 37%.
So those numbers are difficult to compare. Turns out water use != water use. However I’d argue, that people would rather agree, that the kind of water “consumed” by growing plants is more permanent than water being “consumed” by cooling power plants, where most of the water is put back into the water cycle.
To get back to your point about lawns, the above study includes watering lawns in domestic usage, which is 1% of all fresh water use in the USA. So even if 100% of that is “consumptive use” and only for lawns, it wouldn’t really make a dent if we got rid of it (not saying that lawns are fine, but when comparing it to animal farming, it’s negligible). Then again, the irrigation category in the study includes “irrigation of golf courses, parks, nurseries, turf farms, cemeteries, and other self-supplied landscape-watering uses […] in the estimates”, but doesn’t specify it further.
The only other numbers I could find on the fly are for golf courses from the USGA which puts golf course water use at roughly 2 BGal/day. That’s somewhat putting it into perspective - it’s not nothing, but still far less than agriculture.
The lawn stat I’ve always heard was similar, but for specifically treated drinking water.
Farming water is basically always just well water fed directly into pivots.
The posted article has several interesting studies about the meat industry, but none about AI, and there are plenty. I think it’s a pitty.
The main (only I think?) “study” about AI and water consumption comes from another substack article, in which are presented all the data of the study the author is trying to refute, but there are no sources on where he gets any of his numbers. One could say that, at best, he makes some personal rough estimates that come from the top of his head, or something. Using something like that as a reference to argue that AI doesn’t really use that much water doesn’t make any sense to me.
Then we get the charts and they are all all over the place. In the first chart, according to what is writen just bellow it, are compared for some reason, data about AI for 2025, with food figures for 1996-2005, and for animal farms it’s for 2011 & 2012. This is all over the place.
Anyways, I could go on, but I think my point was clear.
