There are a lot of dumb political discourses but this is one of the dumbest in years. It's puzzling to me how water got latched onto instead of, say, energy or rare earths.

It’s all of these things. People want water for humans, not technology of questionable utility. They also don’t want their power bill going up due to dramatically increased demand from the data centers.

Is this a yes-and kind of thing or a no-but? I'm asking because maybe water serves as a good indicator for the other resource consumption issues around data-centers. Most of the water issues are are directly related to the energy and rare-earth issues you're talking about. This paper covers the scope of energy, consumption, and downstream water usage for servers:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499

So yeah, I don't think water is a red herring but more like a canary.

It's astroturfed, as is most memetic outrage that makes no logical sense

It's more tangible for people, if they would give up golf or eat less red meat, it crusade about those activities, they could do more for mother earth

It's almost as if there are some very powerful forces that want to discredit political dissent.