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eru 7 months ago

What's meaningfully wasteful depends entirely where and when you are, and how plentiful water is locally at the moment.

hooverd 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

I think most people take showers but most people don't irrigate their fields.

eru 7 months ago | parent [-]

Most people consume produce from irrigated fields. So it depends on how you want to allocate the consumption: to farmers or consumers? (It's just an accounting question.)

hooverd 7 months ago | parent [-]

I'm convinced there's a pareto distribution of crop water usage. We're depleting our aquifers to grow sileage crops and almonds (which aren't even that good).

eru 7 months ago | parent [-]

Different things happen in different parts of the globe, and water is a fairly local issue.

You are right that me consuming almonds in Singapore can indirectly cause trouble in California, where they grow the almonds. But the well-known solution to that is proper water rights trading, like they do in Australia in water challenged areas.

bayindirh 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think so. Just because you're not in a water-stressed place doesn't make you eligible to keep taps open 24/7.

This mentality is what brought us to today.

samatman 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

Of course it does.

The Great Lakes have 1/5th of the world's freshwater. Absolutely enormous volumes of that water run out the St. Lawrence into the sea, continually, all the time.

I don't have any reason to leave my taps open all the time, and my water is metered so I would pay for such profligacy in money I could put to some useful purpose.

But I can certainly do it without creating any meaningful environmental stress. This would just briefly divert it from its destiny in the Atlantic.

bayindirh 7 months ago | parent [-]

Just because you live near a lucky point on earth, thinking that everyone has the same luxury is a bit absurd.

I traveled through Mongolia for a week. Every camp we stayed had a water tank, and water use was extremely constrained. Same for electricity and heat.

Your position is akin to getting power from the first distribution point near a nuclear power plant and saying that electricity is indeed infinite for everyone on the planet.

Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury. I have shared a couple of maps down there. Maybe you should give them a look about our planet's state.

seryoiupfurds 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

They didn't say anything about thinking that everyone has the same luxury.

How does diverting an infinitesimal fraction of the water flowing from the Great Lakes affect the water supply at a camp in Mongolia?

eru 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury.

If my local water supplier would offer the option to pre-pay, I might take it. I don't think it would change anything about how I use my water, if the price stayed the same.

(I am pre-paying for my mobile broadband, and I don't notice me using it any different than people who post-pay.)

eru 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Who is 'us' and what do you mean by 'today'? And what do you mean by 'eligible'?

In most places I've been to, you just pay your water bill, and then you can leave your taps running.

It's about as productive as buying bread just to toss it in the trash, of course.

bayindirh 7 months ago | parent [-]

us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.

IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?

[0]: https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country (This is decade old, we're worse now)

[1]: https://riskfilter.org/water/explore/map

If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.

eru 7 months ago | parent [-]

How would conserving water in, say, Germany help with water stress in Australia?

7 months ago | parent [-]
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