A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.

I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.

There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.

With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.

There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.

The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be higher than it is at the inlet, before it diffuses back into the background. Naturally the way to mitigate this is to pull more water through the cooling system, all of which you're still returning, but then you raise the temperature of twice as much water by half as much temperature, which is what you want since the temperature delta is the concern. Of course, doing this will cause people to accuse you of using more water, even though you're neither consuming the water nor modifying the amount of heat being transferred to the environment.

In addition to that, water has extremely different levels of scarcity depending on what region you're in. Parts of California and Texas have arid climates and extremely limited economical means to source additional fresh water. Areas like the Midwest get dramatically more rainfall and as a result fresh water is not meaningfully scarce there.

Yes, a real English word.

Machines that humidify air are called ... humidifiers.

(There are also dehumidifiers.)

And yes, despite your industry talking points, water waste is absolutely a major concern. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers (which are over 90% of data centers) allow almost all the water to evaporate. Similarly, about 30-40% of water used in agriculture filter back down to the water table. Agriculture use is also dispersed over large areas whereas data centers draw from a single pipe. Closed loop systems also have their own environmental concerns and need to "bleed the lines" every month or so to get rid of the toxic sludge that builds up. They also use dramatically more electricity which requires a lot of water to generate.

The point being, if you live somewhere where a new data center is getting built, you WILL see a massive spike in your electricity bill. What do you get in return? Sam Altman buying another politician? Another elementary school bombed? I agree that agricultural waste is out of hand but at least people get a tangible benefit out of it.

You keep trying to ignore all the points and change it to a topic you think you can win but you're still misinformed on that issue.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...

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.

It's nothing more than purchasing votes with tax dollars and limited natural resources.

https://floodlightnews.org/saudi-owned-corporate-farms-are-d...

That part is actually the weakest part of your argument. You are dismissing a valid counterargument before addressing it.

Something being part of a current food production system does not make it a biological necessity. People can live without meat, therefore alfalfa is not "required for life" in the literal sense.

You are also shifting the meaning of "required": from "necessary for humans to survive" to "necessary for maintaining our current livestock industry." Those are very different claims.

Preemptively calling an obvious counterargument "dumb" is not a way to win the argument; it is a way to avoid having it.

Is it rational to dedicate enormous amounts of land, water, and energy to producing animal feed when those same resources could feed more people directly?

Using crops as feed and then eating the animals is an inherently inefficient way of converting resources into food. That may be acceptable when resources are abundant, but it becomes increasingly difficult to justify as we face limits in freshwater, arable land, and ecological capacity. That is the true argument, and what the discussion should be about, not if we can (very obviously) survive without meat.

South Korea imports alfalfa because of the KORUS FTA removes all duties on forage goods.

China buys alfalfa because of yet another trade deal that was brokered to prevent a trade war from spiraling. Alfalfa hay was explicitly highlighted in the Phase One agreement.

[1]: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/wilensky.ht...

Edit- To be clear maybe not specifically in this case, but "oops we've ruined this ecosystem to the point we can't farm it" rarely ends with "better move down the road and let nature reclaim it". It's a lot more "cool now we can put strip malls/data centers/whatever here"

>Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)

This is not correct at all...

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini... one source of many. Also local pollution is reduced, e.g. nox and particles.