It takes THIS much water to make (insert product here)

In My Humble Opinion
21

Most of you folks are missing the real point.

There is, indeed, plenty of water. Our planet is 3/4 or so water. It’s not going anywhere.

But people, animals, and plants, for the most part, need fresh water. The bulk of the water on earth contains unacceptable amounts of salt (or other unacceptable minerals). And a lot of the fresh water is biologically contaminated. But salt is the biggie.

You can get fresh water from salt water by distillation or other processes (like reverse osmosis). In fact, we rely upon Mother Nature to distill most of our fresh water by distillation through evaporation and precipitation. But there’s only so much of that, and our burgeoning population and industrial civilization is feeling the effects of limitation.

we need lots of fresh water for people, animals, agriculture, and manufacturing. we’re already running some rivers dry. Los Angeles basically stole the water from California’s Central Basin. We’re using up “fossil water” underground in the West of the US, and people have suggested bringing icebergs up to LA to reduce their shortages.

Fresh water is defintely the issue.

at one time, access to potable water affected how many people could live where. Aruba used to have a tiny population because only a relatively small amount of natural fresh water was “processed” by nature. Now Aruba has a huge tourist population, which followed development of a huge industrial population. Both were made possible by massive distillation fresh water plants, which require large inputs of energy. Without this, Aruba would have to go back to a Stone age population density.

Salt Lake City is blessed with a lot of fresh water from snow melt runoff, but most of it was not held in natural reservoirs, and the soil was heavily contaminated by salt from evaporating Lake Bonneville. Today the Salt Lake Valley is lush and green – but it would go back to relatively barren sawgrass fields if it weren’t for the inhabitants watering their lawns daily.

And, as others have noted, it’s all about how much water is where. Los Angeles now supports an enormous population made possible by concentrating as much potable water as possible. Before the diversion of other rivers and suchlike, the LA area was much less lush, supporting a smaller population, with the boom-or-bust cycle of water influx that used to provide fiumaras, and now gives rise top the periodic floods and mudslides that devastate the valleys (alternating with enormous wildfires). LA’s combination of high population density and large agricultural output promise a coming reckoning if not controlled somehow.

22

Nitpick here–Collin County had multiple sources. One of, if not their biggest, source was Lake Texoma, which ended up getting infected with the invasive zebra mussels. This caused a problem because the water intake was on the Oklahoma side of the border, so now the water had to cross the state border, and was shut down for a while because that now caused problems with Federal regs about controlling zebra mussels.

And water “rationing” was really first-world-problems in the sense that the rationing has never really gone beyond stuff like upping enforcement on what days you’re allowed to let the automatic sprinklers water your lawn.

23

Amount of ordinary water needed to fill a vial truthfully marketed as “Virtually certain to contain a molecule once excreted in an eye-tear by Alexander the Great”
— One milligram.

24

True its based on the area where your water is controlled but most western states are controlled at the state level and are having state level rationing. Here is a quick article about California almond farmers and how state level water politics are effecting them.

Here in Colorado the Rio Grande compact and the Colorado river compact both are effecting our ability to refill reservoirs during the high snow fall amounts we’ve seen the last couple of years. That doesn’t lead to rationing today since its a time of plenty but when the droughts return not having full reservoirs will lead us to rationing quicker.

Lack of water is impacting Colorado’s growth plan since the denver water basin is at full utilization and that is where most people are moving too. I know of a new subdivision that was required to truck in all of their water while building a pipeline from another drainage basin. You are correct that a farmer isn’t buying water from the same municipality I am but the decision to give that water to a farmer or a city is what trickles down to water rationing in cities.

To go back to the OP this is also where the knowledge of what you’re buying can make a difference since encouraging farmers to use less water either by methods or crops can allow more water to be fed into the municipality.

25

Note that in many places we are depleting underground fresh water sources (aquifers) that take somewhere between decades or millennia to refresh at unsustainable rates.

The problem with, for example, almonds taking a lot of water to grow is that there is tons of bad pricing and policy around water use, and the result will be short term profit and long term ruin.

We’re planting tons of almond trees in California and using up what is effectively a one-time fresh water resource to keep them alive. When the aquifer runs dry, it doesn’t matter that there’s plenty of salt water in the Pacific Ocean. There’s no economically feasible way to get it to the almond trees. So the trees will die, the farmers will go bankrupt, and we won’t have the aquifer as a buffer against drought because we used it all up to grow very thirsty plants in a semi-desert.

26

Cattle person here.

They often say something like “it takes so many gallons of water or so many pounds of grain or so many acres - to produce a pound of beef”. This is an example of messing with numbers and statistics.

Cattle eat grass in a pasture or hay. Sometimes they eat other things like corn or corn silage or crop residue or other things but I can tell you, they do NOT take food from humans. Hogs can eat even more. Chickens can eat insects.

Also commodity prices for corn and soybeans are very low so often those are fed to animals.

Granted I’m talking about range cattle. Not the intense factory farm operations which I’m against.

As for water, its water from a well, pond, or stream. It’s not municipal water.

27

Not a cattle person, but I thought very few of the millions of cattle are pastured or eat hay. I thought most eat corn, which is grown for the purpose of feeding cattle. So we’re not directly competing for the food, but a vast amount of acreage is devoted to growing cattle feed rather than people food or whatever.

28

Parts of the Ogallala Aquifer have lost over 15 feet of groundwater in the past two decades.

Perhaps you and iamthewalrus(:3= should discuss whether water use can deplete groundwater even if it’s not “municipal” water.

29

It’s a good question. It would be useful to compare a standardized way. But I suspect that a lot of the time the number is contrived. It’s easy to include tangential stuff to bolster a political point.

30

How about we compare the water use of a cattle farm to say a golf course?

31

People, our pets, and cattle, are mostly water. Squeeze them all dry and we’ll have no shortages.

32

The thread is almost defunct, but I decided to lay out some basic figures.

Altogether there are 1.33 billion Gt (gigatons) of water on the planet Earth, but only 33.3 million Gt of that is fresh water. 1 Gt == 1 cubic kilometer.

Of the 33.3 million Gt of freshwater, about 10 million Gt is groundwater, and 23.2 million is in the form of ice (glaciers, ice caps, and 0.28 Gt ground ice and permafrost).

This leaves just 123,000 Gt for liquid freshwater other than groundwater. This water is broken down as follows:
[ul][li] 84,000 Gt — lakes[/li][li] 15,000 Gt — soil moisture[/li][li] 12,000 Gt — atmosphere[/li][li] 10,000 Gt — swamps and marshes[/li][li] 1,000 Gt — rivers[/li][li] 1,000 Gt — living creatures[/li][/ul]
The above figures are derived from a Wikipedia article. Living creatures contain about half as much carbon as water, so the Wiki numbers imply that the total biomass comprises about 500 Gt of carbon. I was relieved when a scientific article gave that figure for the Earth’s biomass!

Of a total living biomass of 550 Gt (of carbon), plants constitute a huge majority with bacteria in a distant 2nd place. Animals altogether have 2 Gt carbon mass, mostly arthropods and fish. Mammals altogether have less than 0.2 Gt, almost all of which is humans and their livestock.

TL;DR: The quantity of groundwater exceeds all the water in humans and their cattle and pets by a factor of about 30 million.