Latest / Nonsense with cj little and Jeff Parker / Data vs. Dairy: Uncovering the Secret Water Hogs of the Modern World

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Data vs. Dairy: Uncovering the Secret Water Hogs of the Modern World · Nonsense with cj little and Jeff Parker

• 0:00
  Welcome to Nonsense Season 4, Episode 29, our big story.
• 0:02
  I'm Jeff Parker. I'm CJ Little.
• 0:04
  This time we're looking at thirsty industries, the secret
• 0:07
  water hogs of the modern economy.
• 0:09
  Up next, wait data. Centers.
• 0:10
  Well, didn't we already do this episode?
• 0:12
  What sort of are we out of ideas?
• 0:14
  Seven in ten Americans opposed building data centers in their
• 0:16
  local area, and a huge part of that is concern over how much
• 0:19
  water they use. Protesters hold big signs that
• 0:21
  say things like we can't drink data.
• 0:23
  Apparently they can't write data either.
• 0:25
  What do you mean you can't drink data?
• 0:26
  What does that even mean? The big battleground this
• 0:28
  weekend is in Hillsborough, Oregon, where 18 data centers
• 0:30
  are active or under construction.
• 0:32
  In San Gabriel Valley, the city of Industry, California, the
• 0:34
  newly formed No Data Centers SGV Coalition, comprising half a
• 0:38
  dozen local activist groups, is holding coordinated weekend
• 0:41
  rallies and public flyer drops. I swear.
• 0:43
  We just did this episode, but how are they coordinating?
• 0:46
  Are they using, I don't know, computers to coordinate
• 0:48
  corkboard, the local Y corkboard?
• 0:51
  What do? You how much water does big
• 0:53
  corkboard? Use.
• 0:54
  I love how people, they're just like, I want all of the output
• 0:56
  of the thing. I just don't want the thing.
• 0:58
  OK, exactly. I want the data center in
• 1:00
  someone else's yard. Hey.
• 1:01
  Put it in my yard, huh? I want a little latency.
• 1:03
  Get me closer to the data center.
• 1:04
  It sounds lovely. Well, but you understand how it
• 1:06
  works. OK, Manufacturing on tap, the
• 1:08
  hidden water cost of things we consume.
• 1:10
  Let's go. I'm more of a manufacturing
• 1:12
  bottom. Do you know the real problem
• 1:14
  here? The real consumer of water that
• 1:16
  nobody talks about? Yeah, fish.
• 1:17
  Oh sure, fish. Consume a lot of water.
• 1:20
  You got to get rid of the fish. That's the problem.
• 1:23
  Down with big fish Sit. Down with big fish, right?
• 1:25
  Those guys are little water hogs.
• 1:45
  After last week's episode on AI data centers and how much water
• 1:48
  they use, you'd be forgiven if you picture a data center like
• 1:51
  some kind of Mary Poppins steampunk fantasy or something
• 1:53
  out of Steamboat Willie, with enormous plumes of steam now and
• 1:56
  again shooting up here and there, high end of the air
• 1:58
  between the towering mechanical Pistons and massive gears.
• 2:01
  How else could they possibly be using 175 to 250 billion gallons
• 2:06
  of water each year? Look, I'm not one to try to put
• 2:08
  a wet blank in anyone's fetish steampunk data centers.
• 2:12
  Like, wow, polished wood floor. You maybe need to get out and
• 2:15
  touch grass my friend. Everybody's wearing goggles.
• 2:17
  Love it, keep going, just say it slower.
• 2:19
  The number sounds so big and so scary, we thought it needed some
• 2:22
  context. To be clear, this is not to say
• 2:23
  we don't need to be mindful about every gallon of water we
• 2:26
  use. But there are industries that
• 2:28
  use a surprising amount of water to give us common, everyday
• 2:31
  things, and in many cases, these use far more water than data
• 2:34
  centers. I love our pro Data episode.
• 2:36
  We had to prepare separately this week, so I know you have a
• 2:38
  list and I have a list, and I thought it'd be fun to take
• 2:41
  turns to look at everyday things we consume and the quantity of
• 2:43
  water required to produce. Them I just have.
• 2:46
  That's your whole list. We need more than one.
• 2:47
  I really should have read those pre production notes, huh?
• 2:49
  You may. If you want to talk about fish,
• 2:51
  that's fine. You may go first, Sir.
• 2:52
  I yield to the gentleman who brought the Donuts.
• 2:54
  OK, first of all, I feel like I'm trying to pass you in a
• 2:57
  narrow hallway when you say that, but thank you.
• 2:59
  This is context, right? And I feel like we didn't get
• 3:01
  much of a chance to go deep into this last week because we were
• 3:04
  talking about the the water that was consumed.
• 3:06
  But really you need the context for water that's consumed by
• 3:08
  things that are not data centers, correct?
• 3:09
  Just right off the bat, the big one, and this gets a tiny bit of
• 3:12
  press. You see a little bit on the on
• 3:14
  the Tik Toks and the and the Instas is our good friend Corn.
• 3:18
  You see that everywhere. However, when I asked my child
• 3:21
  about his AI use, he said well, yeah, I don't eat corn to make
• 3:24
  up for it. I was like, yeah, no, that's not
• 3:26
  correct. For perspective on this, we're
• 3:28
  generally speaking we believe the average water consumption
• 3:32
  for AI, yes data centers in the US is around 220 ish billion
• 3:38
  gallons of water a year. Sure.
• 3:40
  Currently that number is going to go up, but right now it's
• 3:43
  about 220 billion gallons of water, which is a lot of water.
• 3:46
  That's about how much water my wife drinks before we get in the
• 3:49
  car and go on a road trip. Roughly speaking, it's about
• 3:52
  that much. Let me give this.
• 3:52
  Yeah. According to findings from the
• 3:54
  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and industry
• 3:56
  environmental Trackers, the combined physical water
• 3:58
  footprint for all U.S. data centers hits roughly 228 billion
• 4:02
  gallons annually. That's a lot of.
• 4:03
  Water, right. I mean, that's a good amount of
• 4:05
  water, yeah. For perspective, I want to think
• 4:07
  about these other consumers of water in terms of that AI data
• 4:11
  center footprint. Yeah, that's a way to sort of
• 4:13
  normalize it. Corn globally is somewhere
• 4:15
  between 180 and 200 trillion gallons of water each year.
• 4:21
  Wait until your corn starts making AI data requests.
• 4:24
  That's globally. Let's just talk about in the US.
• 4:27
  In the US alone, you're talking about somewhere between 55 and
• 4:31
  60 trillion gallons of water a year.
• 4:34
  You're saying that's more than data centers use?
• 4:35
  It's a touch more. So that's a 270 times the amount
• 4:40
  of water consumed for AI data center.
• 4:42
  Yeah, about 40% ish of the corn we grow in the US, yes, is just
• 4:46
  used for fuel ethanol, right? It's your, it's your ethanol,
• 4:48
  it's your, it's your biofuel alternative.
• 4:50
  So that's roughly 23 trillion gallons of water just goes to
• 4:55
  corn fuel production. Another 40% just goes to feeding
• 4:58
  livestock. So right there, that's a roughly
• 5:00
  80% of all the corn that we grow.
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  So 80% of that 55 ish trillion gallons of water just goes to
• 5:09
  yeah, fuel production and to feed livestock.
• 5:11
  What we actually eat here as human food, industrial goods, is
• 5:14
  less than 10% now. Also, I'm giving you a total
• 5:16
  water number. This is total water, including
• 5:18
  rainfall. Doesn't matter if it's rainfall,
• 5:20
  it would have gone down to the rain exactly.
• 5:22
  Instead, it goes into the corn. It'd go into the watershed.
• 5:24
  It would go so. So you have.
• 5:25
  Uses water use. You have to consider.
• 5:26
  That not that water that is not processed is not cheaper water.
• 5:29
  It is, but it is Stillwater. Yes, SO270X in the USA.
• 5:33
  Corn is the one that everybody, That's the meme one.
• 5:36
  That's the one everybody talks about.
• 5:37
  A single avocado requires about 60 to 70 gallons of water to
• 5:40
  grow. A single avocado.
• 5:41
  A single avocado, that's a lot of water.
• 5:43
  A single slice of cheese pizza. Yeah, 3, 130 gallons of water
• 5:46
  to. Produce what?
• 5:47
  No, mostly to feed the dairy cows and irrigate the wheat.
• 5:50
  Fields. I would have taken the under on
• 5:51
  that. Bed A bottle of wine takes
• 5:53
  around 87 gallons of water to grow and processing enough
• 5:55
  grapes to fill a single 750 milliliter bottle of.
• 5:58
  Wine. But wait, that strikes 80. 7
• 6:00
  gallons for a little bottle of wine The.
• 6:02
  Thing that is mainly water is only 87 gallons only right?
• 6:07
  The cheese pizza is 300 gallons of.
• 6:10
  Water. A single egg, 53 gallons of
• 6:12
  water. Wow, that's a big egg.
• 6:14
  Almost entirely because of the grain required to.
• 6:17
  Feed the chickens. Interesting.
• 6:19
  A single diaper takes 144 gallons of water to produce.
• 6:22
  And my kids can put that much into it.
• 6:25
  Well, I hope your kids at this age are not using diapers.
• 6:27
  Very good kidneys. That's amazing.
• 6:29
  This sounds that positively efficient.
• 6:31
  A single beer takes about 20 gallons of water.
• 6:33
  OK, well, it's better than the wine.
• 6:34
  Because of the barley and the hop.
• 6:35
  So it is much better than the wine, yeah.
• 6:37
  So wait. So wait, your point is if you
• 6:38
  want to conserve water, ditch that slice of pizza, Just drink
• 6:41
  another beer. Is that your point?
• 6:42
  Yes, that's my. That's precisely.
• 6:44
  Who's going to go swimming? So to speak.
• 6:48
  A plastic water bottle. You know those plastic water
• 6:50
  bottles you you get everywhere? Oh, the bane of my existence it.
• 6:53
  Takes three times more water to manufacture the plastic water
• 6:56
  bottle than it actually takes to fill it up.
• 6:58
  The water inside it, yeah, just stop drinking water out of
• 7:01
  plastic bottles. Like why we are doing this?
• 7:03
  Well, because if you're you're in a sporting event or
• 7:05
  something, it's a very convenient way to get water.
• 7:07
  But if you can, you can get them out of the aluminum bottle,
• 7:09
  which is a much better one. 100% recyclable.
• 7:11
  To have them, yes, 100. Percent, as opposed to roughly
• 7:13
  0% recycle. That's true.
• 7:14
  Corn is the one that everybody talks about producing 1 gallon
• 7:17
  of corn based ethanol. Biofuel requires anywhere from
• 7:19
  10 to 100 gallons of water for crop irrigation, prompting
• 7:22
  debates over how green exactly is ethanol.
• 7:24
  Not great, as it turns out. So anyway, so that's corn and it
• 7:27
  is. It's the big heavyweight of the
• 7:29
  water consumption, I believe. You look at a standard 8 oz cup
• 7:32
  of coffee and you say 8 ounces of liquid, right?
• 7:34
  Well, I'm not a heathen, I use the metric system, but for sure.
• 7:37
  It takes 37 gallons of water to make your little cup of coffee.
• 7:42
  If you're a heavy coffee drinker down 3 cups a day, you're a
• 7:44
  coffee habit alone and consumes over 40,000 gallons of water
• 7:47
  every year. All right, so coffee.
• 7:48
  And the issue is agricultural growth.
• 7:50
  Coffee beans are actually the seeds of berries that grow on
• 7:52
  tropical Evergreen shrubs. These plants thrive on warm and
• 7:55
  humid, Yeah, Equatorial climates.
• 7:57
  Yep. When the regions rely on
• 7:58
  rainfall and massive percentage of global coffee plantations
• 8:00
  utilize intensive overhead irrigation systems that maximize
• 8:03
  crop yield. I know that keep the soil
• 8:04
  perfectly damp. It takes a ton of water just to
• 8:07
  keep the tree alive long enough to produce a harvestable yield.
• 8:10
  Do you have to water the the cats that eat the coffee and
• 8:13
  then poop it out? That's the only coffee I use
• 8:14
  these days, so. Disgusting.
• 8:16
  Once the coffee cherries are picked, the outer fruit must be
• 8:18
  stripped away to get them to the bean inside.
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  The most popular commercial method is wet processing.
• 8:22
  The cherries are dumped into massive roaring flumes of water,
• 8:25
  flowing where they are mechanically pulp fermented in
• 8:28
  giant water vats for up to 48 hours and then continually
• 8:30
  washed with high pressure streams to remove the sticky
• 8:33
  mucilage. Oh man.
• 8:34
  I love me a big bowl of mucilage.
• 8:37
  You know it goes well with coffee, Little.
• 8:38
  Mucilage on the side. Little coffee, yogurt, mucilage.
• 8:40
  Yeah, it's great. Coffee industry's annual water
• 8:43
  footprint. Oh boy, here comes.
• 8:44
  Humans are consuming 2.25 billion cups of coffee every
• 8:48
  single. Day 2.5 billion cups of coffee a
• 8:51
  day. I mean, I guess that makes
• 8:53
  sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:54
  That's a lot of coffee. So the annual total for the
• 8:56
  global coffee industry is approximately 30.4 trillion
• 8:59
  gallons per year of water every single year.
• 9:01
  That's a lot of water that's right up there with.
• 9:03
  Corn. So we talk about 175 to 250
• 9:05
  billion gallons of water a year to power the future of human
• 9:07
  intelligence. But to power our own human
• 9:09
  intelligence in the morning? 30.4 trillion gallons per year.
• 9:13
  That's a lot of water. That means the water used to
• 9:14
  grow and process says the morning coffee could keep every
• 9:17
  AI data center on the planet cooled and running for the next
• 9:20
  120. Years.
• 9:21
  Well, sure, it's all fine and dandy until the AI starts
• 9:23
  drinking coffee. Then what?
• 9:25
  Then what happens? I'd like my AI to be a little
• 9:27
  more unhinged. That's a lot of water.
• 9:29
  OK, so corn and coffee. Are big users?
• 9:32
  What do you got next? What's?
• 9:33
  Next. Well, I can't compete with that.
• 9:34
  I didn't think it was going to be that kind of show.
• 9:36
  This one kind of surprised me until I thought about it for a
• 9:39
  moment. But swimming pools?
• 9:41
  Oh, for sure, but not. Because you got to fill.
• 9:44
  Them it's a giant open cup of water.
• 9:46
  Of course half of it's going to be evaporating.
• 9:48
  Yes, probably. Your costs are not even filling
• 9:50
  the things up. It's probably a whole swimming
• 9:52
  pool full of water every year. So you're right.
• 9:54
  So you clearly, I mean, living in Southern California and being
• 9:56
  a pool owner, you, you, you get to know these things.
• 9:58
  Start with how many pools are there in the US?
• 10:00
  Roughly speaking, how many pools do you think there are in the
• 10:03
  United States? 10 million, I have no idea.
• 10:05
  Did you? Look at my notes.
• 10:06
  I don't have your notes. This is my favorite.
• 10:07
  Guessing how many is I love when I.
• 10:08
  Ask you a question and you're like, I have no idea.
• 10:10
  And then you're like, let me guess the number to within 3
• 10:12
  decimals and then I'm like OK, great.
• 10:14
  Yes, there are 10.7 million. Yeah, I had to go one more
• 10:18
  digit. So closer to 11.
• 10:19
  Sure. Let's pretend like you were
• 10:20
  wrong. A lot of pools, yes, Kreskin,
• 10:23
  there are over 10 million pools in the US, which which I think
• 10:26
  is a lot of pools. Yeah, the split in that, by the
• 10:28
  way, 60% of those are residential, sort of in ground
• 10:30
  pools, 40% of them are above ground pools.
• 10:32
  And then you've got a small number of what we call
• 10:34
  commercial or public pools, right, hotels or yeah, municipal
• 10:36
  parks, things like that. The average consumption really
• 10:38
  isn't filling the pool. This is the part that I think
• 10:41
  most people don't appreciate. But it's all evaporation.
• 10:43
  Yeah, sure. Right.
• 10:43
  Water that's been evaporated maybe splashed out.
• 10:45
  Or whatnot. I know because my pool gets
• 10:47
  refilled twice a week when the pool guy comes and he's
• 10:50
  constantly having to add water to that.
• 10:51
  Thing so the EPA estimates that an average sized uncovered
• 10:56
  residential backyard pool, which with the vast majority of these
• 10:59
  10 millionaire right, sure, sure.
• 11:00
  Over 10 million of them are exactly that.
• 11:02
  You're talking about roughly 500 square feet of surface area on
• 11:05
  the top of the pool and that they're losing somewhere
• 11:07
  depending on your location, between 12 and 31,000 gallons of
• 11:11
  water a year. Wow.
• 11:13
  Pools that are in like places like California or Arizona,
• 11:16
  Nevada, where it's very hot and it's very air.
• 11:18
  Losing even more. Well, that's where you need the
• 11:19
  pools, yeah. You're losing even even more.
• 11:21
  So you're talking about 30,000 gallons plus per year in
• 11:24
  evaporation. That's.
• 11:24
  Got to be where the majority of the pools are.
• 11:26
  Absolutely. You're not going to have a bunch
• 11:27
  of Pennsylvania and it's no why why it's cold Iceland.
• 11:30
  They don't have that many pools. So you add this all up and you
• 11:33
  go, well, OK, well, we take all these pools and, and, and let's
• 11:35
  do some math. You end up somewhere in the
• 11:37
  neighborhood between 170 and 200 billion gallons of water a year.
• 11:42
  Just in the US, yes, That's lost to evaporation.
• 11:44
  So basically 1 yes. All of the US data centers
• 11:47
  combined exactly. You're you're somewhere between
• 11:49
  90 to 100% of the consumption of of the current AI data center
• 11:53
  footprint in the US. You can actually as a pool
• 11:55
  owner, you can affect change here very easily.
• 11:58
  All you have to do is cover your pool.
• 11:59
  If you cover your pool, you will see a 90 to 95% drop in
• 12:04
  evaporation. Sure.
• 12:05
  Well, I know most people don't think of it that way.
• 12:06
  You're making your pool effectively into a giant water
• 12:08
  balloon. Yes, but what even is more
• 12:10
  important? I didn't know this until I
• 12:11
  became a pool owner. I I'm, I knew the parts of the
• 12:14
  physics, but I didn't piece them together.
• 12:15
  The majority of your heat loss is from evaporation.
• 12:18
  Yeah, of course. It's actually not from it just
• 12:20
  being cool overnight. It's from the evaporation
• 12:22
  because the state change of the water.
• 12:24
  Heats getting away takes a. Ton of energy.
• 12:26
  So if you want to have a warmer pool, you can put a cover on it
• 12:28
  not because the cover somehow magnifies the light or does some
• 12:31
  magic. It just keeps evaporation from
• 12:33
  happening. And if you can keep evaporation
• 12:34
  from happening, you can, one, save a ton of water and two,
• 12:36
  keep your pool much warmer. My point here on on this is
• 12:39
  pools do use a lot of water, right?
• 12:40
  A data center's worth of water in the US Yeah.
• 12:42
  And that if you want to change that, if you want to reduce your
• 12:45
  water bill, make it better, just cover it.
• 12:46
  That's all you got. To do the ultimate water hog is
• 12:49
  past your grass. The single largest irrigated
• 12:51
  crop in the United States by land area isn't corn or wheat.
• 12:54
  It's lawn grass and alfalfa swallowing billions of gallons a
• 12:58
  day purely to keep cattle feed plots hydrated.
• 13:01
  This is why 1 hamburger takes 660 gallons of water to make.
• 13:05
  Wow, how much? 660 gallons.
• 13:08
  Per hamburger for one hamburger. That's what I'm saying.
• 13:11
  I will have the soup, Sir. There you go.
• 13:15
  Divides into 3 categories is green water, that's rainwater
• 13:18
  that grows the pasture grass, blue water which is surface and
• 13:20
  groundwater used for drinking and irrigation, and Gray water
• 13:23
  which is what you need to dilute the agricultural.
• 13:25
  Runoff. I don't know.
• 13:26
  Waters were so colorful. Beef baby.
• 13:28
  I do love me some beef. And that breaks down to to
• 13:30
  basically 95 to 98% of the footprint is the feed growing.
• 13:33
  That feed is is incredibly water intensive.
• 13:36
  The cows themselves, actually the amount that they drink and
• 13:39
  the amount that you might wash them, 1 to 2% of the water use
• 13:42
  processing the beef for the packing plant is less than 1% of
• 13:44
  the water you use. But you can't have the beef
• 13:46
  without the fee. No, you sure can't.
• 13:47
  Wow. It averages out to about 1800 to
• 13:49
  2000 gallons of water per pound of beef bottled water.
• 13:52
  And then you chop that into a quarter pound hamburger Patty
• 13:55
  and you end up with 660 gallons. That makes total sense in the
• 13:58
  United. States US beef production
• 14:00
  consumes approximately 21.2 trillion gallons of water
• 14:04
  annually. 21 trillion gallons of water.
• 14:07
  It accounts for 9% of all annual freshwater withdrawals.
• 14:10
  That's a lot of water. The inefficiency is of course
• 14:12
  would be if you have to grow it twice, what?
• 14:13
  Does that mean if you have to grow it twice?
• 14:15
  First you have to grow it as cattle.
• 14:16
  Feed Yeah. What's this loss?
• 14:17
  What's the? Second thing then you have to
• 14:18
  grow it as a cow. Oh I see.
• 14:19
  So it's really inefficient. Yeah, sure, there's no path
• 14:22
  around that. There's.
• 14:23
  No way around it. You're right.
• 14:24
  There's no way around it. If you want to, if you want to
• 14:25
  have animal flesh, you're going to grow it twice.
• 14:27
  You got to feed the animal. So American cattle agriculture
• 14:29
  uses roughly 100 times more water than the entire global
• 14:32
  data center network. That's insane.
• 14:35
  Yeah, that's beef. OK, so if you're out there
• 14:37
  holding a sign that says no data Centers for SGV or whatever in
• 14:41
  the hell your your signs says. Gabriel Valley, Maybe you.
• 14:46
  You're. Going to skip the hamburger?
• 14:47
  That a bad idea. Day, you probably had more
• 14:50
  impact on that than anything else.
• 14:52
  My kids avoiding corn. I've heard for their anti corn.
• 14:56
  Your turn, Sir. OK.
• 14:58
  So beef is super interesting. This is kind of loosely related
• 15:03
  golf courses, of course, right? Municipal golf courses are the
• 15:06
  bane of my existence. The fact that you take all this
• 15:09
  acreage, you water it, you maintain it, you groom it, all
• 15:12
  this stuff so that how many people you got foursomes and
• 15:15
  how, how frequently could you set a foursome off to play golf?
• 15:18
  It's a tiny number of people who you're entertaining.
• 15:20
  Your entire municipality is paying so you can entertain this
• 15:24
  very small number of people. Absolutely.
• 15:26
  If you had to guess, how much water do you think all golf
• 15:28
  courses in the US consume? Rough numbers 75 gazillion
• 15:33
  pounds. 75 hot tubs. 75 Korean bath house hot tubs.
• 15:38
  Since we're both refusing to use the metric system on this
• 15:41
  episode, 5, it's gotta be it's gotta be easily 4 trillion data
• 15:45
  centers. It's if you it's a cumulative
• 15:47
  amount of data centers. It's it's just over half a
• 15:49
  trillion gallons of water. It's 530 billion gallons of
• 15:53
  water and just for golf. Just for golf.
• 15:55
  Golf a good walk. Spoiled it is.
• 15:58
  That's about. 1 1/2 billion gallons of water per day just go
• 16:03
  to golf courses. Yeah.
• 16:04
  What is different about? This They're pretty.
• 16:06
  Sure. What is different about this
• 16:07
  than some of the other ones we've talked about previously is
• 16:10
  that most of this water comes from sources that are otherwise
• 16:14
  close to to human home. Meaning sure, sure.
• 16:17
  A lot of it comes from from ground wells.
• 16:18
  Yeah, you have some of these places, about a third of them, a
• 16:20
  little less than 1/3 of them have on site lakes or pons they
• 16:23
  can pull from. They do use wastewater.
• 16:25
  About 20 percent of the golf courses in the US use treated
• 16:28
  wastewater, grey water that you can use to to navigate.
• 16:30
  But then you still have over 10% of it that just comes from tap
• 16:33
  water, just municipal tap water, which.
• 16:35
  Is the most expensive form of water 'cause it's so processed
• 16:37
  that's. 53 billion gallons of water that we have processed
• 16:40
  that we're now dumping on golf courses.
• 16:42
  The whole idea of a lawn, Do you do you know how lawns came to
• 16:44
  be? No.
• 16:45
  Was just showing off how wealthy you were.
• 16:47
  Oh, yeah, yeah. You could actually earn property
• 16:49
  that wasn't productive that yeah, that's how rich.
• 16:51
  You were exactly Yeah, that then requires work.
• 16:54
  In the past 20 ish years, golf course water usage has dropped
• 16:58
  by about 30%. Yeah.
• 16:59
  So that's great. Like we've we've wound the
• 17:01
  number down, but it's still 530 billion gallons a year.
• 17:05
  You know, we're giving these normalization in these big
• 17:07
  numbers. But that average golf course
• 17:09
  your your typical consumption that you're seeing on a per golf
• 17:12
  course basis, you're talking around 300,000 gallons of water
• 17:16
  per day on a typical golf course.
• 17:18
  That equates to over 2.3 million ChatGPT queries.
• 17:23
  Yeah, for one golf course. And most of my quarries are
• 17:26
  going to be. What other excuses can I come up
• 17:28
  with on why I don't want to go golfing with my friends?
• 17:30
  And to not go golfing. So if you get rid of the golf
• 17:33
  course, you would save all the water on both sides.
• 17:36
  Really. That's quarries.
• 17:37
  You can save. Oh, man.
• 17:39
  Yeah. Anyway, so that's, that's golf
• 17:40
  courses, right? And that's a that is a real
• 17:42
  number. What else?
• 17:43
  You got Oz for Oz. Chocolate has the highest
• 17:45
  virtual water footprint of any commercial food item on the
• 17:48
  planet. Great, easily beating out coffee
• 17:50
  and. Beef rates OK, so so far we have
• 17:53
  thrown coffee, beef and now chocolate under the bus and golf
• 17:56
  courses. All the good stuff.
• 17:57
  Great end of. Days A bar of chocolate takes
• 17:58
  450 gallons of water. A standard 3 1/2 ounce, 100 gram
• 18:02
  bar of chocolate requires approximately 450 gallons of
• 18:05
  water to produce. That's enough water to fill up
• 18:07
  10 entire bathtubs to the brim for a single small candy bar.
• 18:11
  How many? I'm sorry, Wait, how many
• 18:12
  waterbeds would that be? Anything but the metric system,
• 18:16
  as always. Some random.
• 18:18
  Cacao beans are the seeds of the fruit grown on the cacao trees.
• 18:20
  These trees only grow in a narrow band around the equator,
• 18:23
  primarily in West Africa. They're incredibly fragile.
• 18:25
  They require near constant tropical environment, consuming
• 18:28
  up to 27,000 liters of water per kilogram of beans harvested.
• 18:32
  Yeah, because they sweat out moisture rapidly in the
• 18:34
  Equatorial heat. They require a massive, nonstop
• 18:37
  rainfall or heavy automated agricultural irrigation to stay
• 18:40
  alive. That's a lot.
• 18:41
  So a chocolate bar on the order of 400 ish gallons of water for
• 18:45
  one chocolate. 450 gallons of water.
• 18:47
  So it's it's about a hamburger worth their annual.
• 18:49
  Footprint, the chocolate industry.
• 18:51
  You ready for this? Yeah, go ahead.
• 18:52
  The annual total for the chocolate industry?
• 18:54
  They consume 41.7 trillion gallons of water every single
• 18:58
  year. OK.
• 18:59
  Clearly I didn't get the memo because you're doing all yours
• 19:01
  in the trillions and mine are only in the billions.
• 19:04
  I can barely my little golf course.
• 19:06
  It's like, oh, it's 2X the data center footprint and you're like
• 19:08
  hold my beer, here's another trillionaire for you.
• 19:10
  The. Water used to grow and
• 19:12
  manufacture our chocolate bars every single year could keep
• 19:14
  every AI data center on Earth perfectly cooled and running for
• 19:18
  the next 160 years. What if I just cut out all my
• 19:20
  chocolate covered hamburgers? That would really save some.
• 19:23
  And I only eat at the golf course.
• 19:25
  Your turn, Sir. OK, this is loosely related to
• 19:27
  chocolate, cause the only thing worse than that chocolate bar
• 19:30
  that you're eating from a water perspective is the chocolate bar
• 19:33
  with almonds in it. Oh.
• 19:34
  Almonds. Oh, for sure.
• 19:35
  Almonds, as it turns out, are extremely thirsty.
• 19:38
  Depends where you. Grow them, but yes.
• 19:40
  Constantly dehydro. Well, most of them.
• 19:41
  We grow in fairly arid areas, so they end up taking a decent
• 19:44
  amount of water. In the US alone, it's over a
• 19:48
  trillion gallons of water. Irrigated water?
• 19:50
  Yeah. Just for almonds.
• 19:51
  Yeah. California grows virtually all
• 19:53
  of them. This is really a California
• 19:54
  problem. 80% of the almond supply in the world comes from
• 19:57
  California. In the hot Central Valley of
• 19:59
  California, too. It's in like the hottest parts
• 20:01
  of California. If you think about a single
• 20:04
  almond, do you want to guess you may actually know the answer to
• 20:05
  this 'cause you're you're pretty learned yes How much water do
• 20:08
  you need to grow a single almond well, the.
• 20:10
  Thing everybody always says was a single A single almond is a
• 20:13
  gallon of water, but it's not true.
• 20:14
  It's actually closer to 1.7 gallons of water per almond.
• 20:18
  If you bake everything in, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I
• 20:20
  think that's right. I think that is the more
• 20:21
  normalized number. That one almond that you eat
• 20:24
  from a water perspective is worth about 8 GPT 4 queries.
• 20:29
  Here's the cool thing. You have a nice bar of
• 20:31
  chocolate. It's got some almonds in it.
• 20:32
  The almonds are the are the lesser water users of that bar
• 20:36
  of chocolate. You're getting multiple pieces
• 20:38
  like that one almond is getting split across multiple pieces
• 20:41
  inside the chocolate bar. So yeah, I believe that to be
• 20:43
  true. But if you have an almond bar
• 20:44
  that's covered in chocolate, then that one would be the other
• 20:46
  way around. Something interesting to note
• 20:48
  about the almonds is, you know we eat the nut on the inside,
• 20:52
  right? Yeah, sure.
• 20:52
  But there's this fuzzy outer layer in the US again, where
• 20:55
  where 80% of of the almonds on the planet come from.
• 20:59
  Those harvested holes, the holes that are that are around the
• 21:02
  sort of fuzzy outer layer that's around the almond inside, we
• 21:05
  actually harvest those and they offset things like alfalfa,
• 21:09
  which saves us roughly speaking, 440 billion gallons of water
• 21:14
  elsewhere. Because we're feeding them to
• 21:15
  cows. Because we feed the husks to the
• 21:17
  to the livestock. Yeah.
• 21:18
  Most farms in California, which again is most of the the almonds
• 21:21
  grow in the world, have transitioned to microdrip
• 21:23
  irrigation. And they use like automated soil
• 21:26
  moisture sensors to just make sure they don't overwater.
• 21:28
  As opposed to the other one, which is called flood
• 21:30
  irrigation, which is how we traditionally have.
• 21:33
  Exactly. So we believe that we've reduced
• 21:35
  water usage over the past 30 ish years by almost a third just for
• 21:39
  almonds, which is pretty impressive.
• 21:40
  Pretty good. That's pretty.
• 21:41
  Good. Pull the third out.
• 21:41
  Yeah. What?
• 21:42
  What else do you have? One bowl of rice.
• 21:44
  You ready for this? Oh wow.
• 21:45
  Yeah, go for it. Yeah, we have a nice bowl of
• 21:46
  rice. You have a nice bowl of rice
• 21:47
  with your meal. Oh man, I.
• 21:48
  Love me some rice. And grit Better than good rice.
• 21:50
  Right. It grows in water.
• 21:51
  It's like fish. Rice is the fish of the
• 21:53
  vegetable. Rice.
• 21:54
  Rice is the. Grain World, yeah.
• 21:56
  One bowl of rice takes 50 gallons of water.
• 21:58
  Wow. Yeah.
• 21:59
  Really. Yeah, that's a lot of water.
• 22:00
  For rice, that's before you put water in it so you can cook it.
• 22:03
  You sort of think of rice as being like, oh, it's the beige
• 22:06
  food. Like it can't use that much of
• 22:07
  anything. It's just, Oh no, it's.
• 22:09
  Delicious. Oh, it is delicious.
• 22:10
  I'm not saying it's delicious, but it's just sort of like you
• 22:12
  wouldn't think of it as using a lot of water.
• 22:13
  That's a lot of water. Standard cooked bowl of rice
• 22:15
  contains roughly 3 ounces of dry rice.
• 22:17
  Producing that single serving requires approximately 50
• 22:20
  gallons of water. If you scaled it up for a family
• 22:22
  dinner, 1 LB of white rice. Rice requires about 1136 gallons
• 22:26
  of water to produce. Wow.
• 22:27
  And the reason is because how it's traditionally farmed, which
• 22:30
  is continuous flooding, just constant.
• 22:32
  Flooding, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I think a lot of those
• 22:34
  are irrigation water too. They use well water, but a lot
• 22:36
  of it's irrigation water and a lot.
• 22:37
  Of that is because weeds can't survive underwater.
• 22:39
  So yeah, it goes off all the weeds cause rice loves fine
• 22:42
  underwater. No expensive chemicals.
• 22:44
  The rice doesn't care. Yeah, exactly.
• 22:45
  Yeah, the rice doesn't really care.
• 22:46
  It'll grow wherever it's it's pretty Hardy, but you, you end
• 22:49
  up not. It's like a natural herbicide,
• 22:52
  effectively like it's a natural. Weed killer and the weeds are
• 22:54
  the least of your worries because there's something in the
• 22:56
  paddies in the Paddy water, which is called night soil.
• 22:59
  Do you know what that is? Oh.
• 23:00
  I remember. Reading about this, you may not
• 23:02
  want to know. It's not.
• 23:03
  You may not want to think about it.
• 23:04
  No, no, it's not good. It's the guy who's standing in
• 23:06
  the Paddy. Yeah, I think he has to do when
• 23:08
  no one's watching. Wait.
• 23:09
  And he does it into the water. What that makes the rice that
• 23:12
  you eat, huh? Oh, yeah, There's no outhouse
• 23:14
  next to the Patty. Wait, he's.
• 23:15
  Pooping in the rice water? What?
• 23:17
  And we just call that night soil.
• 23:18
  We just have a name for it to make it go.
• 23:20
  Away in Canada, all our Shoresies listeners will know
• 23:22
  that that's called called an Aqua dump, but apparently there
• 23:25
  they call it something different so.
• 23:28
  I like it. By the way, those rice paddies
• 23:30
  are constantly leaking. The International Rice Research
• 23:33
  Institute notes that after every pound of rice harvested,
• 23:35
  thousands of liters of water are lost due to evaporation and
• 23:38
  massive amounts lost to seepage and percolation draining down
• 23:42
  the soil. So like maybe in addition to the
• 23:44
  organic label, can we get the non Aqua dump label?
• 23:46
  Like is there a like, is there like a Trader Joe's house brand
• 23:50
  or like we promise there's no pooping in the water?
• 23:52
  Is that a thing? I don't think you can promise
• 23:54
  that. I think that's how most of rice
• 23:55
  is made. I mean, I guess it's a nitrogen
• 23:57
  source. I did not wake up this morning
• 23:59
  thinking I was going to be defending the guy pooping in the
• 24:01
  rice paddies, but but here we are.
• 24:02
  Well, we are throwing poop on all of our plants to get them to
• 24:05
  grow and grow well. That's what I mean.
• 24:07
  It's just the difference. We just passed.
• 24:08
  Them for a few more sets of kidneys.
• 24:10
  They're just not always human kidneys we're getting them from.
• 24:13
  We like to use the creatures without thumbs to do all of our
• 24:16
  poop processing before it gets to us.
• 24:18
  Globally, the rice industry consumes roughly 227 trillion
• 24:21
  gallons of water annually. Listen to this number.
• 24:24
  Again, 227 trillion gallons gallons of water annually?
• 24:28
  That is a lot of water. Rice cultivation alone guzzles
• 24:31
  down 40 to 43% of the world's total irrigation water.
• 24:35
  Wait, what? They account for 1/4 to 1/3 of
• 24:38
  all global freshwater withdrawals across all human
• 24:42
  activities combined. Wait, 25% of all freshwater
• 24:45
  withdrawals go to rice one? 12:45 Third yes.
• 24:49
  Holy cow. So it might be higher than 25%,
• 24:52
  sure. I'm just trying to like process.
• 24:55
  If you told me 5% of all water went to rice, I'd still be
• 24:58
  gobsmacked. Of course, of course.
• 25:00
  That's insane. That means the water used to
• 25:02
  grow the world's rice for just 12 hours.
• 25:05
  All the water used to grow rice were just 12 hours globally.
• 25:09
  Yeah, could power every single AI data center on Earth for an
• 25:14
  entire year. So what you're saying is the
• 25:17
  next time I go work at one of these AI data centers, I need to
• 25:20
  order the rice bowl with extra beef and almonds on top and just
• 25:24
  get my massive footprint of water usage that is bananas.
• 25:28
  Alright, we have to get out of quickly before we do.
• 25:30
  Have you seen it read anything good this last week?
• 25:32
  I I, I wanted to do something that was water specific.
• 25:35
  And of course I go to Chinatown 'cause it's a fantastic film and
• 25:38
  I love Nicholson, but we've already recommended that not too
• 25:41
  long ago. So instead, my recommendation is
• 25:44
  really a great film I suspect most folks don't even know
• 25:46
  about, let alone have seen, is this dock that was called
• 25:49
  Bottled Life, Nestle's business with water.
• 25:52
  Yeah. Have you seen this?
• 25:53
  I have not seen the dock that we used to drive by Nestle's
• 25:55
  headquarters all the time. It's really good.
• 25:57
  So this is effectively how they turn turned water into a billion
• 26:01
  dollar business, specifically bottled water.
• 26:03
  Yes, bottled. Water buying, water rights to
• 26:06
  rivers and things, yeah. This is really more of like an
• 26:09
  expose because big surprise, Nestle didn't want to cooperate.
• 26:13
  They didn't, like, work with the film makers.
• 26:15
  So the documentary, of course, sort of plays out more like a
• 26:17
  real world corporate thriller, Right.
• 26:19
  That's how they put it together. And it.
• 26:20
  It tracks the company's aggressive legal and PR
• 26:22
  maneuvers to lock down local water rights.
• 26:25
  Yeah. All over the globe.
• 26:26
  This is not AUS problem. This is a global problem.
• 26:29
  What I love about it is that it exposes this asymmetry of
• 26:32
  industrial water consumption, detailing really how beverage
• 26:35
  giants slip into vulnerable, drought prone communities.
• 26:39
  Yeah. Anywhere from like rural Maine
• 26:40
  to the struggling villages in Pakistan again, global problem
• 26:43
  to pump out millions of gallons of water groundwater for
• 26:46
  virtually no cost like a you can't really call it a nominal
• 26:50
  fee. They package it up, they throw
• 26:51
  it in plastic and they sell it back to the public at a roughly
• 26:54
  speaking, 10,000 X markup A5 order of magnitude increase in
• 26:58
  price for water. Sure it highlights this is what
• 27:01
  got it the most sort of press when this when this came out.
• 27:03
  It highlights the philosophy of Nestle's former CEO who
• 27:06
  suggested, with a straight face mind you, that the view of water
• 27:10
  is a basic human right was a quote extreme position, which
• 27:13
  terrible. I kind of find incredible to
• 27:16
  think of water as a human right as an extreme positions.
• 27:19
  It's super sharp. It's infuriating to watch.
• 27:22
  It will definitely shape your view of water consumption, but
• 27:25
  it illustrates the commercial beverage industries, how it just
• 27:28
  dwarfs modern tech data centers and it's aggressive capture of
• 27:31
  local water supply right. This is just selling it back to
• 27:34
  people to drink and it breaks my brain.
• 27:36
  I despise bottled water, not in because of the water
• 27:38
  consumption, the waste that you generate, the plastic bottles
• 27:41
  like you said earlier, sure plastic bottles are three to 1.
• 27:43
  The water that you're consuming, I mean three times amount of
• 27:45
  water make the bottle that you end up just throwing away right
• 27:48
  after like 10 seconds of utilization.
• 27:50
  And yet, if I'm thirsty and I'm at the Mama center, I will go
• 27:52
  buy a bottle of water. Literally almost every time I go
• 27:55
  I buy at least. One, every family member in my
• 27:57
  home has a stainless steel water bottle that goes everywhere we
• 28:00
  go and we consume water yeah through that bottle.
• 28:03
  And very rarely do we use a plus 1/4 bottle.
• 28:06
  So anyway, it's a great film. It's bottled life, Nestle's
• 28:08
  business with water. It's from 2012.
• 28:10
  It's absolutely worth watching. And if you're interested in
• 28:12
  this, this water substitute, I think you'll love it.
• 28:14
  How about you? I will watch that, but my blood
• 28:15
  pressure is high enough. Mine is 1940's The Grapes of
• 28:18
  Wrath. Driven from their Oklahoma farm
• 28:20
  by a catastrophic drought from the choking storms of the Dust
• 28:23
  Bowl, the Jode family packs into a dilapidated truck to seek
• 28:26
  survival in California. Big surprise on them.
• 28:28
  California's got a drought. Directed by John Fordon starring
• 28:31
  Henry Fonda as the defiant Tom Jode alongside Jane Darwell is
• 28:34
  the fiercely resilient Ma Joad. What an amazing performance.
• 28:37
  The film chronicles their harrowing descent into corporate
• 28:40
  exploitation, poverty and police brutality after nature forces
• 28:44
  them off their land. The Grapes of Wrath is a
• 28:46
  cinematic landmark because it shattered Hollywood's escapist
• 28:49
  mold. Filmed with gritty realism by
• 28:50
  legendary cinematographer Greg Toland, it was the first major
• 28:54
  studio picture to directly attack unregulated capitalism
• 28:57
  and champion workers rights. It remains an enduring
• 29:00
  masterpiece of social protest and human dignity.
• 29:03
  Henry Fonda's legendary portrayal of Tom Jode is amazing
• 29:06
  not to be missed. The Grapes of Wrath available
• 29:08
  for streaming now everywhere. Now can people get that or is it
• 29:11
  still only in theaters? From the 1940s.
• 29:14
  I love how. Recent you went, you went back
• 29:15
  to 1940s. Such a good film.
• 29:18
  I've never seen it. Is it really that?
• 29:20
  Is it worth going and watching? Oh, so it's 100%.
• 29:23
  There are some old films that are just that just completely
• 29:26
  hold up and and Henry Fonda's performance in this thing is
• 29:29
  outstanding. Jane Darwell as Ma Jode is just
• 29:32
  ridiculously good. It's a great movie.
• 29:34
  First of all, I love the name Majo.
• 29:36
  That's. And by the way, didn't win Best
• 29:37
  picture I. Was gonna say it didn't win Best
• 29:39
  picture. What did it lose to Rebecca?
• 29:40
  Well, yeah, I. Think it's a better picture than
• 29:42
  Rebecca. I like Rebecca a lot.
• 29:43
  Ohh yeah. They're both really good films.
• 29:45
  Yeah. How do you, I mean Hitchcock?
• 29:47
  I will jump in my time machine and check that out.
• 29:50
  You can stream it, it's OK. You don't have to see it in the
• 29:52
  theater. It's the can you stream black
• 29:53
  and white movies? I thought they just failed.
• 29:55
  Don't they have to be in color? That is the episode.
• 29:58
  So confused. Thank you for joining us for all
• 29:59
  this nonsense. It's really terrible podcast
• 30:01
  from our awful company. This is on the web, but nonsense
• 30:04
  dot productions. I'm CJ Little.
• 30:05
  I'm Jeff Parker. If you like this program, please
• 30:07
  follow Donald, subscribe and like at Apple Podcast, YouTube
• 30:09
  Music, Amazon Music, Antenna Pod, iHeartRadio, Spotify, My
• 30:13
  favorite Overcast wherever may get your podcast.
• 30:15
  From it's the guesswork nonsense.
• 30:17
  Uses Open Weather Map delivering hyperlocal, pinpoint accurate
• 30:20
  weather data that keeps your apps moving at the speed of
• 30:22
  life. We didn't start the music.
• 30:23
  Driven by global radar satellites and a massive network
• 30:26
  of over 200,000 stations, it's the undisputed gold standard
• 30:29
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• 30:32
  updates, hypergranular hourly forecasts, or decades of deep
• 30:35
  historical climate archives, Open Weather Map couldn't be
• 30:38
  more simple. Check it out.
• 30:39
  In fact, I just use Open Weather Map to make a weather app that's
• 30:41
  extremely fast to navigate at weatherdaddy dot app.
• 30:44
  Oh that's the one I got through from your Only Fans page.
• 30:46
  Is that right where you only just talk about weather with
• 30:48
  your shoes off? That's it.
• 30:49
  Yeah, that's the. 1 Daddy, I'll tell you folks, it's the best
• 30:52
  995 I spend every month. It's free.
• 30:54
  Yeah, but Jeff, how much water did you use making that app?
• 30:57
  That's really the question. I'd like to know you used a lot
• 30:59
  of AI know you ate a. Hamburger.
• 31:01
  It was 2 hours. I like thinking about all my
• 31:03
  activities just measured in water use, where I'm like, well,
• 31:05
  I ate a hamburger. I had two cups of coffee.
• 31:07
  Sure, we'll be here every Tuesday and Thursday mornings,
• 31:09
  except not next Tuesday for more nonsense.
• 31:11
  Most months we're here every Tuesday and Thursday mornings
• 31:13
  except for May. But as soon as June gets here,
• 31:15
  we might be here Tuesday and Thursdays, but certainly
• 31:18
  Thursdays. Unless Jeff has a game
• 31:19
  somewhere. But exactly Tuesdays and
• 31:21
  Thursdays. Say please join us.
• 31:22
  Please join us. You know another big one that we
• 31:37
  don't talk about because the mainstream media won't cover it?
• 31:39
  Icebergs. Icebergs use a lot of water.
• 31:42
  Nobody complaints about icebergs.
• 31:43
  They do. Do they add any value
• 31:45
  whatsoever? No.
• 31:47
  All it does is keep me from having waterfront property.
• 31:49
  Reflection. Actually, yes, they.
• 31:51
  All right, so they. Contributed an enormous amount,
• 31:54
  OK. Sure.
• 31:56
  You take away the icebergs and you get a much hotter plan and.
• 31:59
  We all die. I don't know what they do.
• 32:00
  They take down ships, that's what they do.
• 32:02
  Well they took down 1 ship. Yeah.
• 32:03
  I don't think they take down modern.
• 32:04
  Ships. I also bet Penguins use a lot of
• 32:06
  water.