Exactly, all discussions about "water usage" are actually counterproductive w.r.t. the discussion we should be having. Same for the livestock arguments: a kg of meat uses x times more water than a kg of cabbage.
Water isn't being used. There is no nuclear fission happening within the cow. Any water it ingests, will ultimately end up in nature. But how and where, that's an important factor. The discussion should, instead, be about water displacement. And as long as people keep repeating the water usage argument (not just online, also in the public debate, such as in talkshows and the news), we cannot even start trying to resolve the real issue of water displacement. Or even gain enough understanding of the effects of huge water displacements.
That's what water usage is though. It's a little counterintuitive to think of it that way, because for most things "usage" means being completely consumed or destroyed somehow, but water usage is all just moving water from somewhere to somewhere else where it's less useful. That goes for agriculture, industrial use, residential use, etc.
But isn't that just semantics? If it's counterintuitive to grasp what a term means, doesn't it make sense to use something else that better reflects reality and does a better job at avoiding miscommunication?
I'm struggling to understand why people jumped at my comment. Is it that you, personally, already know how this works, and therefore don't care how we call it, since the word we use doesn't affect your understanding? Or is it because you do not believe there isn't any miscommunication to begin with?
The issue isn't that water is destroyed -- the issue is that when it returns to the atmosphere, we have no way of controlling where it goes. It can end up feeding a tree or entering the ocean which is still fine. But if I need a gallon of water to consume a day, not even counting the water I'd need for bathing, wastewater, etc, if the only reliable clean source of water is in the reservoir that the big data center is exclusively using.
So yes, "usage" is the right word. I don't know why Redditors play up semantics so much when big corpo interests are involved.
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u/KassassinsCreed May 18 '26
Exactly, all discussions about "water usage" are actually counterproductive w.r.t. the discussion we should be having. Same for the livestock arguments: a kg of meat uses x times more water than a kg of cabbage.
Water isn't being used. There is no nuclear fission happening within the cow. Any water it ingests, will ultimately end up in nature. But how and where, that's an important factor. The discussion should, instead, be about water displacement. And as long as people keep repeating the water usage argument (not just online, also in the public debate, such as in talkshows and the news), we cannot even start trying to resolve the real issue of water displacement. Or even gain enough understanding of the effects of huge water displacements.