u/JournalistFormal1964

When an AI-generated image appears on social media, outrage is swift. Users demand regulations, share alarming claims about “10 gallons per image” water consumption, and express moral outrage.
Yet these same critics have already used AI hundreds of times that day without noticing.
Before finishing morning coffee, the average American interacts with AI dozens of times: credit card fraud detection, email spam filtering, social media content curation, GPS navigation, appointment scheduling, loan approvals, investment management, streaming recommendations, and voice authentication. By conservative estimates, Americans use AI-powered systems hundreds of times daily—almost all invisibly embedded in routine commerce and convenience.

The disconnect is stark. AI fraud detection systems analyze your credit card transaction in milliseconds. AI algorithms screen and rank every social media post you see. Machine learning models refine weather forecasts and optimize delivery routes. Yet only the visible image triggers moral outrage.
This selective environmental consciousness reveals how Americans understand AI: not as the invisible infrastructure powering modern commerce, but as a visible technology choice—one we simultaneously depend on and denounce.

What Companies Are Actually Doing
The corporate adoption of AI tells the real story of the technology’s integration into everyday life. Nearly 80% of businesses globally are using AI in some capacity in 2024. In North America, the numbers are even higher: Organizations in North America are witnessing the highest AI adoption percentage, which increased to 82% in 2024.

More dramatically, 92% of Fortune 500 companies now use ChatGPT, and more than 7 million enterprise workplace seats are active—a 9x increase year-over-year.

By industry, the adoption patterns are striking:
About 63% of companies use GenAI to write text content, 36% to generate images, and 27% to assist with coding. But these numbers only capture intentional generative AI use. The real adoption is much higher when including machine learning for transactions, analytics, and customer service.

In specific sectors:
• Retail & E-commerce: Customer service has seen an explosive growth in AI adoption, increasing by over 2000% since January of 2025. AI now screens every chat inquiry, powers recommendation engines, manages inventory, and optimizes pricing in real-time. Walmart and Amazon are the largest retail users of AI from self checkout analytics to credit card processing and even messaging targeted to consumers online. 
• Finance: Every major bank uses AI for fraud detection, credit scoring, and algorithmic trading. When you approve a loan online or check your credit score, AI has already evaluated you through multiple models.
• Healthcare: In 2025, 31% of individual legal professionals reported using generative AI at work. While legal-specific, this illustrates professional adoption. Healthcare adds diagnostic AI, appointment scheduling, and insurance processing and screening.
• Manufacturing: In 2025, 51% of manufacturers reported using AI in some form, with AI most often applied in marketing and sales (27.11%) and production processes (26.23%).>
• Logistics & Delivery: Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and every major shipping company use AI for route optimization, package sorting, demand forecasting, and warehouse robotics and AI for customer service tracking updates. Click on that tracking number and AI engine helped provide the status result. 

The reality: Americans interact with AI-powered business systems far more than they interact with visible generative AI tools. Yet the social media image generates the outrage, the hypocrisy is astounding. 

The Water Reality: What Actually Uses Massive Amounts

Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes quantifiable. Americans express alarm over AI’s water consumption while remaining silent about industries consuming orders of magnitude more water.

The real water-intensive industries:
Agriculture dwarfs everything else. In 2015, agriculture pulled 118 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation.

Growing corn, raising cattle and irrigating soybeans sit at the top of the chart, and most of that water exits through the crops and livestock themselves rather than flowing back to a river.

To put this in perspective: US corn farming uses more water in a single day than every American data center consumes directly in a year.

Thermoelectric power generation is the second largest consumer. Power plants pulled 133 billion gallons per day. Note that power plants withdraw enormous volumes of water to cool steam turbines.

Industrial manufacturing follows:
• Forest product manufacturing in the US uses around 4 billion gallons of water a day.>
• Steelmaking uses around 1.8 billion gallons per day.
• Crude oil refining uses around 270 million gallons a day.
• Semiconductor manufacturing uses around 80 million gallons a day.
Recreational use is often overlooked:
• U.S. golf courses use 2 billion gallons daily.
• Residential lawns consume 9 billion gallons.
Data centers, by contrast: All U.S. data centers combined use approximately 50 million gallons per day for on-site cooling. AI represents roughly 15-20% of data center energy, suggesting ~10 million gallons daily for AI specifically.

The disparity is stunning. Americans anxiously debate AI’s water footprint while maintaining manicured lawns that consume 900 times more water than all AI data centers combined.
Why the Selective Outrage?

Nobody protests outside a corn processing plant or demands regulations on golf course irrigation.
The water footprint of livestock production—vastly larger than AI’s—barely registers in public discourse.
The issue is visibility combined with novelty. The “10 gallons per image” figure appears to be viral misinformation without academic backing.

Once this false claim entered public consciousness, it shaped perception regardless of fact.

Established technologies receive moral acceptance through familiarity. We’ve normalized agriculture and power generation. AI, being new, triggers fear and scrutiny that older, larger polluters never faced.

The Uncomfortable Reality
To be clear, AI’s water consumption isn’t irrelevant. Unlike carbon, water impacts are local and depend on basin-level scarcity. Many data centers are in water-stressed regions, competing with agricultural and residential use. Data centers in Arizona or Nevada present genuine challenges to local water supplies.

But the contradiction deserves examination. Americans don’t actually oppose AI—we depend on it constantly, have organized financial and commercial systems around it, and use it hundreds of times daily.

What we oppose is visibility. We’re comfortable with invisible algorithms powering credit card swipes, social media feeds, and financial decisions. Yet an AI-generated image triggers environmental outrage—despite consuming far less water than maintaining residential lawns.
This selective concern reveals more about psychology than environmental science.
Meaningful policy and meaningful debate requires proportional concern matched to actual impact, not panic over novelty. Know the facts! 

Data Sources

1. Qualtrics - “How Businesses Are Using AI in 2025” (January 13, 2026)
2. SellersCommerce - “How Many Companies Use AI?” (December 16, 2025)
3. McKinsey/Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2025
4. Aristek Systems - “AI 2025 Statistics: Where Companies Stand and What Comes Next” (November 7, 2025)
5. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - U.S. Data Center Water Consumption Analysis (2023-2024)
6. Orennia - “Which Industries Use the Most Water in America” (3 weeks ago)
7. Orennia - “Visualizing US Water Use by Sector” (3 weeks ago)
8. Understanding Your AI - “Does AI Really Use 10 Gallons of Water Per Image?” (February 4, 2026)
9. United Nations University - “Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions” (June 8, 2026)
10. Brian Potter - “How Does the US Use Water?” (September 14, 2025)
11. Expert Assessment - “The Systemic Environmental Risks of Artificial Intelligence” (arxiv.org)
12. The Conversation - “AI has a hidden water cost − here’s how to calculate yours” (September 1, 2025)
13. U.S. Geological Survey - Water Use in the United States
14. Carnegie Mellon University - Industrial Water Consumption Analysis

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Did you know Independent Voters and DTS voters are one of the largest and fastest growing voting blocks in the state but have the lowest voter turnout. This primary election Independents and DTS voters have a voice, they can go to New York Avenue daily now till May 30th, they can request the Republican Ballot and for the first time ever vote in the Republican primary for sheriff, county commissioner or judge etc. So far independent voters have turned out in low numbers. Let's change that in Otero County.

Go and vote this week in the primary, tell them Grace sent you!

Also if you are not registered you may register and vote the same day! Let's get the young people to the polls and vote early this primary election!

Oh and if you haven't signed the petition for Grace to participate in the November primary please do so today and forward this message to your social media friends and have them sign please. We need choices on the November ballot, help make Grace's name be a reality on the November ballot by signing my nomination petition below...

https://www.electronicpetitions.elections.sos.nm.gov/voter-verification

#graceforneighbors #GraceForThePeople #gracedistrict51 #powerofindependentvoters

The Pentagon released 162 classified UFO files this morning. The trail they trace — Trinity, White Sands, Holloman, Roswell — runs straight through the desert outside your door. On May 16, Larry Sheffield’s The Cosmic Trigger brings the full story home to the Flickinger Center.

ALAMOGORDO TOWN NEWS EXCLUSIVE · MAY 8, 2026  — the Trump administration did something no administration before it had done. The Pentagon released 162 classified files on unidentified aerial phenomena: photographs, infrared videos, diplomatic cables, military incident reports, and Apollo mission transcripts. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called them documents “hidden behind classifications” for too long. President Trump directed the Secretary of War and intelligence agencies to release everything connected to “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects.” The American people, the White House declared, could now “decide for themselves.”

Alamogordo residents already decided — decades ago. Because the story inside those 162 files doesn’t begin in Washington. It begins here. In our desert. Over our airbase. Above the same white sands where America detonated the first atomic bomb and fired the first captured German rockets into the sky. The government’s UFO story and Alamogordo’s story are not parallel histories. They are the same history.
And on Saturday, May 16 at 6:00 PM, at the Flickinger Center for Performing Arts, award-winning filmmaker Larry L. Sheffield will make that case on the big screen with his new documentary, The Cosmic Trigger — a film years in the making that arrives on the most consequential week in UFO disclosure history.

WHAT WASHINGTON RELEASED THIS MORNING
The 162 files — posted to a new Pentagon UAP portal — span from 1947 to late 2025, drawing from the FBI, Department of Defense, NASA, and State Department. They include infrared footage of glowing orbs over the western United States splitting into multiple objects. An FBI composite sketch of a bronze metallic ellipsoid that materialized from a bright light in the sky. Apollo 17 mission transcripts in which astronauts describe strange objects drifting past the spacecraft. Diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world reporting aerial encounters by foreign pilots and military personnel.
None of it confirms extraterrestrial contact. The Pentagon included a disclaimer noting that report language reflects the “subjective interpretation” of the individual writers. Critics called the release a political distraction. Believers called it a breakthrough.
What it unquestionably is: the first time the United States government has acknowledged, in one sweeping public release, that it has been collecting, classifying, and sitting on UAP reports for eighty years. That admission alone rewrites the official record. And that official record runs straight through Otero County.

THE ROSWELL CONNECTION NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
The newly released files include documents tied to the 1947 Roswell incident — America’s most famous UFO case, and the one event that convinced millions the government was hiding something. An FBI memo in today’s release describes a call from a major at Roswell Army Air Field reporting that “an object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered” near the base.
What the Roswell mythology has always obscured is where that object actually came from. The Air Force’s own investigation concluded the debris was from Project Mogul — a classified program using high-altitude balloons to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Project Mogul Flight No. 4 was launched on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo Army Air Field — the installation that became Holloman Air Force Base. The balloons drifted northeast. The debris landed near Roswell. The most famous UFO incident in history began in our backyard.

Alamogordo was at the center of the Roswell story before Roswell was a story.
Enigma Labs, a modern UAP reporting platform, shows 107 sightings logged from Alamogordo — fourth highest in New Mexico. The Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, once headquartered here, compiled tens of thousands of case files dating to 1947. This community has never been on the edge of the UFO story. It has always been at the center of it.
“The desert was the birthplace of the atomic age. It may also have been the birthplace of the first encounters from another world.”

— The Cosmic Trigger, Official Synopsis
THE HOLLOMAN FILES WASHINGTON STILL WON'T TOUCH
Today’s release does not include the files Alamogordo residents have been waiting for. The 1964 Holloman landing — arguably the most explosive UFO claim tied to any active U.S. military base — remains unaddressed in the documents made public this morning.
The account has circulated among serious researchers for fifty years: three disc-shaped craft descended toward Holloman Air Force Base, one touched down on the tarmac, and non-human entities emerged to meet Air Force and CIA personnel in what witnesses described as a pre-arranged encounter. The incident was reportedly filmed by military cameras. The footage has never been released.
Filmmaker Robert Emenegger claimed in his 1974 documentary UFOs: Past, Present, and Futurethat the Defense Department promised him authentic Holloman landing footage — then substituted a redacted version at the last moment. Some analysts have noted the encounter bears striking similarities to the finale of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The files remain classified.
That gap — between what today’s release contains and what it doesn’t — is precisely the territory The Cosmic Trigger explores. Sheffield’s film examines the twelve-year surge of documented UAP activity over White Sands, Holloman, and Los Alamos between 1945 and 1957, logged by the scientists, engineers, and military personnel building the most powerful weapons program in human history. Their reports were real. Their credentials were unimpeachable. And for decades, those reports went nowhere.


THE FILM — AND WHY NOW
Sheffield’s career spans 33 national and international film festival awards and a body of work rooted in this specific landscape — Alamogordo: Center of the World – Trinity 1945, The Atomic Rocketeer, Oppenheimer After Trinity. He is not an outside filmmaker parachuting into New Mexico’s history. He is the filmmaker who has spent years excavating it.
The Cosmic Trigger opens its premiere weekend in Los Alamos on Friday, May 8 at SALA Los Alamos Event Center — the same day the federal government made its most significant UFO disclosure in history. Sheffield joined audiences for live Q&A sessions on both Friday night and Saturday, May 9, with screenings at 1:00 PM and 7:00 PM.
The Alamogordo premiere follows on Saturday, May 16 at 6:00 PM at the Flickinger Center for Performing Arts — in the city where the story of America’s atomic frontier, and the unexplained phenomena that shadowed it, actually began.
Washington spent eighty years deciding what the public was allowed to know. Sheffield spent years deciding how to tell the truth. On May 16, Alamogordo gets to see what that looks like.


Only 1 percent of the mercury in the Dunn Solar Telescope leaked on Jan. 5, none of it outside the building to endanger the forest or nearby communities.
These and other details come from a National Science Foundation notice of a sole-source Federal contract awarded to a New York-based company, Thornton Tomasetti, for mercury removal and remediation services. With a motto of “When others say No, we say ‘Here’s How’,” it specializes in difficult engineering projects. Thornton Tomasetti was selected because of their forensic investigation into the 2021 collapse of the 1,000-foot-wide Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico and other work at heights and on large structures.
The one-year, $320,000 contract was awarded on March 20, but the Federal System for Acquisition Management (SAM) did not publish the notice until April 30. The contract itself is not published as it contains “Controlled Unclassified Information,” a measure used to protect information proprietary to a contractor.
The NSF notice was a “Justification and Approval” explaining why Thornton Tomasetti received the contract without the usualrequest for proposals. NSF justified it because of “The immediate need to assess and stabilize the structure and prevent a catastrophic mercury release … .”
The concept of mercury bearings dates from 1825 when Augustin Fresnel, a French scientist, proposed it as a way to provide smooth, rapid rotation of the flat, lightweight lenses he invented for lighthouses. The first such use was in 1892. Several large astronomy telescopes have used mercury bearings since then.
The Dunn rides on two mercury bearings at 30 and 70 feet above the observing floor to ensure smooth rotation of the 200-ton telescope. Another bearing, at the bottom of the telescope barrel, about 200 feet underground, stabilizes the base of the telescope but is not involved in the leak. The Dunn bearings hold about160 gallons — 18,000 pounds — of mercury.
According to the notice, a weld between a valve and the bottom of a bearing cracked. The exact cause remains unknown. Mercury corrodes many metals, but iron and steel are resistant, and the telescope is 57 years old.
A hazmat team removed and disposed about 186 lbs., equivalent to 1.6 gallons, of mercury by Jan. 15 and identified the source the next day. The leak stopped although the crack has not been sealed, and a container was placed under it, so NSF considers the situation to be active. NSF mentions mercury only reaching the main floor.
“[T]he concern is that the crack may widen suddenly,” NSF wrote, “or that additional undetected structural failures may occur, causing a catastrophic leak in which a portion or all the mercury in the bearing could be released in a very short time [~5 minutes] from a great height.”
Given various risks, NSF stated, all the mercury will be removedand render the Dunn inoperable in its original form.
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The author is a veteran science writer and former education officer at Sunspot.