I don’t mean to sound tone deaf at all but what is the water situation in Guayama Puerto Rico ? We’re staying from sept 7-15th and my host is very vague with the water situation at the place we have rented.. does anybody know what that area is looking like water wise?? Is it worth it to cancel this trip we have coming up ? Thank you in advance ):
Sources (so you don't have to take my word for it):
Caveat: water footprints use the Mekonnen & Hoekstra dataset (1996–2005 baseline) as standard. Absolute liters may be somewhat lower today with improved yields and irrigation, but the relative comparisons hold, which is the whole point. I'm using it because it's still the most-cited work for the green/blue/grey water-footprint split in the field. No one has since redone a comparably comprehensive global, crop-by-crop accounting with that three-way breakdown, so newer studies (e.g., Poore & Nemecek 2018) corroborate the ranking but don't replace it.
The most common criticisms of AI include emissions, humming noise near data centers, muddy water runoff, and critics’ favorite: water usage! This post takes a closer look at the nuances of water usage because it's the one that's gone most viral ("every ChatGPT query drinks a bottle of water!"), it's the one people repeat most confidently.
Look at the charts. All of ChatGPT for a year uses about 0.018 trillion liters of water. Now find it on the chart. You basically can't; it's the sliver you need a magnifying glass to see. This isn’t "food uses somewhat more." It's four to five orders of magnitude. This got me really, really curious about water, and here's my takeaway from two days of research on this topic.
Water is a more nuanced issue than a single chart can capture.
Nuance 1: Water isn't one big shared tank.
The most important caveat is also the one that's easiest to miss. When I say "food uses far more water than AI," that does not mean you could shut down a wheat field and pipe the savings to a data center. Water is local. Shutting down a data center in the US will not help restore Punjab's groundwater reserves.
Nuance 2: Not all water is equal
Take millets like bajra or ragi. By total water, they look surprisingly thirsty, consuming ~4,500 liters per kilo, higher than rice! This might make them seem like a bad deal. But nearly all of that is green water: rain, rain that fell anyway. So when talking about water consumption statistics, you should look at blue water consumption instead; and when we look at blue water consumption, in the 2nd chart, AI still looks like a rounding error compared with food systems. AI doesn't use any green water, and there is no data on how much grey water it needs.
Nuance 3: Where the water is drawn from matters more than how much.
A liter isn't a liter. Pulling a liter from a stressed aquifer in a drought-prone region is a real loss; using a liter from a rain-fed, fast-replenishing watershed barely registers. This is the one place where the AI critics have a real point. A single data center can draw heavily on one local municipal supply, all at once, sometimes in an already water-stressed area. But notice what this means for the fix: if a data center's water problem is fundamentally local, then siting it in a water-rich region largely dissolves the problem.
However, water-rich isn't a free pass on everything. We also need to focus on the seasonality of water availability. Also, when looking for a site for an AI data center, you also need to look at whether cheap and clean electricity is available.
Nuance 4: "Per kilo" and "in total" tell opposite stories, and both are true.
If you looked at the per-serving chart, you saw meat sitting way out at the top; beef and mutton are far thirstier per kilo than any grain. But on the whole-industry chart, cereals use more total water than meat.
It's efficient and expected that staples dominate total water, because they should: they deliver most of the world's calories, and per calorie they're far more water-efficient than meat. So the big cereal total is largely "water well spent". It's feeding people. The problem isn't the total; it's which kind of water and which crop. This is where blue water matters again:
Rice and wheat are the biggest blue-water (irrigation/groundwater) draws on the planet (Wheat uses ~270 trillion L of blue water annually, and Rice uses ~240 trillion L of blue water annually). For example, in India, rice + wheat are the crops actually draining aquifers. So on the metric that matters for scarcity, cereals genuinely are a bigger problem than the per-100g numbers suggest, not because we eat too much cereal, but because we grow the thirstiest cereals (rice) in the most water-stressed places using the most wasteful method (flood irrigation). So here's the thing: fixing even a slice of that (shifting some rice to millets, drip irrigation instead of flooding, cutting food waste) would save more freshwater than switching off every data center on Earth, several times over!
None of this means AI gets a free pass, or that you can't criticize it. Criticize it on energy, on emissions, on labor. But when talking about water, focus on food systems rather than AI, because AI companies have an incentive to become cleaner, whereas we pay little attention to food systems!
Serious environmentalists should be ready for serious lifestyle changes. Using AI for making memes is irresponsible, but consuming meat and dairy is far more irresponsible, because when you look at GHG emissions per 1000 kcal, land use per 1000 kcal, and land use per 100 g protein in Poore & Nemecek 2018, you will realize that these foods truly do not belong on our plate.
Changing your lifestyle requires changing yourself, as AP says, “actor is the action”!
What changes have you made in your lifestyle after listening to AP?
What changes have you made because you were concerned for the environment?
What is one change you know you should make, but haven’t because it would mean giving up some comfort?
Indiana is underwater during each flash floods. The most recent directory that hit Indiana could have easily hit Illinois. What are your state Senators and local government doing to support these problems?
why do we spend so much money drilling wells for people in other countries and ignore the people who are in this country (USA) that have no water...
Marietta, Ohio, a historic city along the Ohio River, has become an unwitting hub for interstate fracking wastewater disposal, with hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive brine pumped underground into more than 240 permitted injection wells statewide, far more than neighboring Pennsylvania’s 19 or West Virginia’s few dozen. Pennsylvania alone exported roughly three-quarters of its fracking brine needing permanent disposal to Ohio last year, and rural Washington County, home to Marietta, saw 59 percent of the 562 million gallons of waste injected under it over the past two years come from out of state. Ohio’s status as a dumping ground traces back to a decades-old federal decision allowing the state to self-regulate its injection wells long before fracking existed, making it easier to drill wells there than in states with federal oversight.
The wastewater isn’t staying underground as intended. Bob Wilson, who owns traditional oil and gas wells outside Marietta, has watched brine erupt from his own wells, telling reporters, “There should not be any water here at all,” while noting pressure readings higher than he’d ever seen, and he’s now suing several injection well companies after losing wells to the intrusions. Geologist David Jeffery of Marietta College said the flooded wells show brine is “migrating” through underground rock formations, a danger compounded by as many as 66,000 undocumented old oil and gas wells scattered across Ohio that could serve as unknown conduits for contamination. Cory Haydocy, former executive director of the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission, said, “The state and industry have possessed definitive proof for years that these injection wells were threatening the surrounding geology,” after the commission “explicitly confirmed” underground migration back in 2024.
The stakes are especially high because four injection wells within two miles of Marietta’s drinking water source have taken in wastewater from Pennsylvania fracking sites with median radium-226 levels ranging from 428 to 1,800 times the EPA’s drinking water standard, prompting City Council President Susan Vessels to warn, “If we get anything nuclear in our water, that’s it. We’re done.” After the state approved a fifth and sixth injection well near the city, officials declared an emergency last year, citing brine “regularly migrating to the surface” and seismic activity in Washington County that had increased nearly 20-fold since 2023, evidence they said showed underground rock formations were “moving and likely fracturing.” Marietta and eight other local water authorities have since called for a moratorium on new wells and a halt to injection within six miles of the aquifer, while a lawsuit from Buckeye Environmental Network and Earthjustice challenges permits issued to DeepRock Disposal Solutions, the company behind several proposed wells; in July, regulators shut down four injection wells in the county, including one owned by DeepRock, after determining nearby high pressures at wells like Wilson’s “could only be caused by nearby injection wells.”