I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
You are kinda missing the point.
It’s not about how energy efficient or inefficient a single ChatGPT prompt is.
It’s that A/C is arguably more important to an individual than your ability to use AI. But while the government asking people to reduce AC usage is not new, AI is.
So we’re introducing new and unnecessary ways to draw power while asking people to tolerate higher temperatures within their homes.
My personal take is that we should be investing in nuclear power so we continue evolving as a society. But I guess we can hold back progress in the name of puttering along with other technology as the world slowly burns and people cook inside their homes
I don’t like that first article, it gives contradicting information about the energy usage per image, saying 0.29kWh/image then saying 0.29kWh/1000 images.
The article is way, waaaaaaay off. My PC generates images at a rate of about one per second (SDXL Turbo) with an Nvidia 4060 Ti which uses 160W (~12W when idle). Let’s assume I have it generate images constantly for one hour:
- 3,600 images per 0.16kWh
- About 22,500 images per hour.
In other words, generating a single image is a trivial amount of power.
How are you able to generate images so quickly? When I tried to run Stable Diffusion on my nominally comparable GPU (RX6800M, similar to 6700XT, 12GB VRAM), it took over a minute to get halfway to generating a medium sized image before my entire computer crashed.
SDXL Turbo I guess. This needs only one diffusion pass per image, while SD 1.5 needs 8 for most images.
Good point. I just tried it on my M1 macbook with 16 gb ram to get better data (but used SD 1.5 though). It took roughly 2 minutes to create an image at roughly full power load (which I would conservatively assume to be roughly identical to the 96 Watt max load of my power adapater.). So i’s 3.2 watt hours per image (with my inefficient setup)
Nothing about that sounds reasonable.
At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
My guy. That is over 15 years of daily driving and the occasional long haul trip, 1.5x the average lifespan of an EV. Consumed in under 2 years. For ONE iteration of ONE AI model. Nevermind how many thousands of people are running that “light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes” every second, with the vast majority of what it spits out not even being used for anything of value except to tell the prompt writer what they need to tweak in order to get their perfect anime waifu out of it.
Still not much on an industrial scale. For example, you can compare it to the aviation industry. There are roughly 550 transatlantic flights per day and each one consumes about 5000kg of fuel per hour for 6 to 10 hours straight. A kg of jet A1 has roughly 11 kWh. So a single transatlantic flight consumes roughly 385,000 kWh of energy. So training one model still consumes a lot less energy than a single one of the 550 transatlantic flights daily.
Not sure why people rip on commercial air travel so much.
Some “back of the napkin math here”.
A380 can hold 84,545 gallons of fuel, and has a range of 9200 miles, giving it a fuel economy of roughly 0.1MPG…
Except it can carry 853 people at a time. At 1/3rd capacity, it exceeds the average fuel economy per person per mile than a car with a single person in it in the US. (26mpg). At full capacity it’s around 85 mpg/person.
Oh good job, you found another thing we need to reduce!
Okay, but corpos aren’t training one model and being done with it. They’re training thousands of models, tweaking hyperparameters to find the correct fine tuning needed.
Also, putting the scale at 180,000 miles of driving makes it sound more insane to me. The earth is like 25,000 miles. If you could drive on the ocean, you could circumnavigate the globe seven times over!
Yeah but only with a fairly efficient EV in the TESLA model 3 class. With a typical gasoline car you’d be closer to only one and half circumnaviagtions with 45.000 kWh. The average american car can apparently drive 25 Miles per Gallon. A gallon of gas has roughly 33 kWh of energy in it. That’s only 34090 miles on the energy used train stable diffusion.
You aren’t making it sound bettter 34,000 miles is still a lot of miles.
That’s a fraction of the life of a single car, for an AI model used by millions of people. AI isn’t that big of an energy consumer if done right it seems. Look at how much energy data centers used before the AI shenanigans, or how much Bitcoin uses.
Interesting statistics on this (mind you, this is all from quick Google searches because I was curious). Data centers use about 90 billion kWh of power a year globally (which seems to include servers, cooling, and all the misc energy usage) while AC use is about 250 billion kWh per year globally.
Of that 90 billion kWh a year, I have no clue how much of it is used on AI (and how much AI is going to increase that number in the future) but it seems like, today at least, AC usage puts a lot more stress on the power grid than data centers do.
You also have to account for how that power is used. Data centers will use a pretty consistent amount all year long where AC usage spikes when needed hitting the grid with huge loads all at once.
I think (mostly based on articles like this one that I’ve been finding) that we aren’t seeing really how much energy they’re using and how quickly they’re growing in consumption.
80 degrees with your windows open and a slight breeze is nicer than 70 degrees with them all shut
To paraphrase another Twitter post, “AI uses the same amount of power per day as Guatemala for the sole purpose of making kinda acceptable slide decks for consultants to use when telling other corporate types how many people to fire”
Can we stop with the AI misinformation? AI is not slurping up consumer power. All major tech companies use privately generated, non-consumer power.
It’s bitcoin. Bitcoin is still causing these power grid issues, and has been causing them since 2019.
That power and HVAC in those data centers is still being used though, regardless of if it’s from the same supply consumers would use
It’s from solar and wind power. It’s not the same thing.
How does this work exactly?
They buy power plants and run it themselves. It improves reliability. For example, Google owns its own solar and wind farms.
People are downvoting because they want to hate AI. And hating AI is valid. There are many reasons not to like AI. Environmental and power reasons are not one of them.
But they are probably still using the power grid in cases where there is no wind or sun for their wind and solar farms, right?
Okay, but like… can I see it?
2 more than the Total Recall lady.
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
slap the two together and have fun
Will this work on a Radeon 760M? I couldn’t find instructions for that.
Just install automatic.
Seems a shame to slurp all that power and then keep the titties to yourself.
Kinda wish the people I rent from would do this. They keep theirs at like 65 and I’ve been freezing my nuts off in their basement all summer. It’s their house and they deserve to be comfortable in it but damn. It’s a good excuse to keep active I guess.
79 °F (26 °C)?! That’s the unbearable temperature you need the AC for. If that was the limit, there’d be no point in having it, at least where I am. 20 °C (68 °F) is room temp and comfortable, although I’d prefer 18 °C (64 °F).
Where i live in central Europe most houses dont have ACs and 20 years ago during the hottest times of summer you’d reach that indoors with keeping blinds shut and airing out at night. Nowadays 30°C+ indoors as hottest summer temperatures is pretty common. At 26°C you can still function somewhat. Especially when you are used to these temperatures it is still fine for office work.
79F is a cool summer day in my part of the US.
That’s the low during summer.
I prefer it colder when I sleep, but am usually comfortable up until about 72°F (22°C) during the day. But I live in the Southeastern US, so hot (and humid) is something you adapt to.
Outside, it’s currently 93°F (~34°C), humidity of 55% and the “feels like temp” is 105°F (40.6°C). We’re under a heat advisory until 19:00, which is common in the summer
Unfortunately… the new place I’m renting has an A/C that can’t keep up. Sometimes, it’ll reach 79°F (26°C) with the A/C just running up my electric bill non-stop. It’s somehow bearable though, and doesn’t feel as hot as I would expect, so that’s good. Blackout curtains, some fans, and a portable A/C in one room if you need to cool back down (like after a shower); it’s manageable/comfortable enough, until we can find something else.
It’s not my preference, but I guess being acclimated to the heat down here at least helps a bit. Can’t wait to move somewhere a little more arid, maybe with a true 4 seasons kind of weather
Why would you need to cool down after a shower? Showers have usually have the possibility to dispense cold water.
79 is where I set my air to be when it’s 105 outside. Gawd I wish it was 79 outside.
My electricity company says 76 is a good target, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. If sedentary, it actually feels a little cold. People acclimate to their local climate (last summer, daily highs were 100-110 for something like 3 months straight where I live).
God I hate global warming. 76 °F (24.5 °C) would traditionally be the hottest summer temp overall. Now we get above 30 sometimes even here in Scandinavia, and it’s absolutely unbearable when you’re not used to it.
No, that’s the temp they recommend to set the AC too in order to save power.
And I’m saying it’s insane that that’s where we’re at.
It was near 100 °F across most of the US last week lol
Holy shit! That’s insane!
Yeah it’s a really good thing global warming is a liberal conspiracy, otherwise I’d be starting to get reallllll nervous right now.
My balls would freeze off in 18C mate what the hell
26 is okay, 30+ is hot
We have different origins, I guess.
I’m built for the artic, I run a window a/c at night set at 62 even though we have central air, and I use it in the winter too. I work too hard to be uncomfortable in my home.
I feel you. We don’t have AC, but have the bedroom window open at night from April and a fan on all night from May.
In the Caribbean, people laugh at you if it’s 26C and you turn a fan on.
But that’s where it’s hot to slightly cool for the entire year. You can get used to that. Where I live, it can go anywhere from 35C to -17C throughout the year. As soon as you’re used to one extreme, it’s over and you head towards the other extreme.
The problems start when you don’t get a stable enough period of either to acclimate
I guess it would depend of humidity level. I lucky enough to not have very humid warmer temperature where I am, but I could imagine how it could be a problem in other part of the world.
I, for one, welcome our hot, five-titty future
I’ve got solar panels and AC. I’m keeping the house at meat locker freezing while staying within the solar panel production. Might as well use the power when it’s there.
Some people will complain about using AC in general. They can sweat all they want - I’m keeping cool.
That’s ok as long as your solar panels also provide all your needs so you don’t have to put load on the grid that could be put on your solar setup otherwise (if you’re in a sector that’s currently under alert).
If everyone had solar panels and thought like you, we’d still have globe warming
Energy is heat. There’s no such thing as cold, just lack of heat.
Trapping sun rays then releasing hot air warms the planet. That’s what your system is doing. Removing heat from your house and putting it outside while your electric motor throws out extra heat.
It just doesn’t have the air pollution that burning coal or gas does.
I am, in fact, quite aware of how air conditioners work :D A lot of devices work like this; it’s why a refrigerator and freezer generate heat. And why things like a slushy machine are real power hogs. Basically, anything that gets things cool will generate heat elsewhere.
Thing is, a refrigerator and freezer are very much needed in daily life. An air conditioner thankfully isn’t - yet. But on days where we have 25+ celsius, the aircon is the difference between being sweaty, irritable, unproductive and with poor sleep or… perfectly comfortable. So, we choose to not be miserable. It keeps me sane during heatwaves.
But yes, absolutely nobody should own one. And I highly encourage everybody else not to get one. I’m keeping mine though.
That light was already going to turn into heat. That’s where basically everything but nuclear power came from.
Unless you have actual, credible researched math on the climate impact we’re all going to ignore you.
In total approximately 70% of incoming radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface while around 30% is reflected back to space and does not heat the surface. The Earth radiates energy at wavelengths much longer than the Sun because it is colder
https://wmo.int/suns-impact-earth#:~:text=In total approximately 70%25 of,Sun because it is colder.
No, the energy captured by solar panels wasn’t already going to turn into heat to be released and trapped by earth’s atmosphere.
Can’t sell your excess power to the grid?
They’re making that increasingly difficult. Basically, as more and more people get solar it becomes economically impossible to maintain the grid with millions of people being paid to connect to it.
The result is a higher and higher percentage of your power bill not be for “use” but for some other bullshit.
Because of the crazy power rate spikes during one of the Texas freezes, my power bill gets like a bunch added to it as a recovery fee for like the next 15 years. Then there’s the connection fee, maintenance fee, etc. My bill is like $300-400 a month before the first milliwatt is calculated, which makes solar less-viable. I’m paying a huge power bill no matter what (illegal to disconnect from the grid entirely), so payments towards a $50,000 solar setup would just make it more expensive.
I might save 20-40 bucks on my electric bill, but the extra $250 in payments for solar would kill that.
Yeah that’s been an anticipated problem, since home solar is essentially a lost customer for the utility, but infrastructure maintenance costs don’t change. Honestly the power grid shouldn’t be a commercial enterprise, even if it’s under shit tons of regulation. It’s so absurdly critical to society we should have nationalized the power companies a long time ago.
Yeah… Right now California residents are paying massively inflated rates because the utility board decided that PG&E, a company that is literally a convicted killer, can pass the cost of the fines on to customers.
Kind of like our railroads? Or the internet?
Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.
Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.
For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)
How big is your solar panel set up? I’ve been thinking of getting one of those solar generators, the smaller ones, and just using as much a/c as I can power with that. It probably wouldn’t last too long, right? I’d need a bigger set up?
We’ve got nine panels on the south facing roof. Right now, reasonably sunny day, they produce about 3.6 -3.7 Kw. That amply covers the power consumption of one of the two LG aircons we have. Those take about 2.5 kW. We usually just run one, depending on outside temp.
I’m not really familiar with solar generators in general, but that feels like you’d need a pretty beefy one to keep an AC powered.
You’d be surprised. A little window rattler AC could be powered by such a setup - ie I have a 1.6kw cooling A/C with an input rating of 490W, I’ve measured it to be around that. That will cool a bedroom somewhat. The issue will be the surge power when the compressor kicks in, so maybe add 50%.
ngl, this is my lifelong goal. Have a house and being able to install and own green technology. Too bad that’s mostly out of reach for anyone born in the 90’s.
I specifically asked for five pictures of girls with one tit. No wonder the usage is so high!
Are they sharing the same tit?
Optimally, yes.
Whoa!
The working class got screwed over? I’m shocked!
you can say tits online
Momma says you can’t
That’s it momma and I are going for a long train ride
Momma says trains are the devul
And if you are going to censor it don’t censor one letter with a line that looks like the letter.
Police!
The various platforms with their various advertiser-friendly stances have all but maimed the english language. Had someone I know talking about a death in their family and they legit said “unalive” once without realizing it.
I know people who go by nicknames in some places because their name is apparently censored.
I think a lot about Nassa being censored to N***a in some game lol.
You can’t, many social media now has OCR that read text from image and if it discovers no no words, it’ll censor the post
Ahh yes, you can’t ever use swear words and eurasia has always been at war with eastasia.
tots online
Dammit! It doesn’t work. They lied to me.
But “you can’t see tits on the radio”
You cant see fucking anything on the radio me thinks
Depends. I just asked my wife to put her tits on our radio, and she was nice enough to do so, but now she’s wondering what the hell I’m looking at on the internet, but I CAN see tits on the radio.
I appreciate the play on words. I was referencing a song, but now I can only see someone (literally) resting their tits on a radio… and it’s a pretty funny image lol
I can’t see the image. My instance must be broken.
Fortunately my wife is a good sport about these kind of things. She’s used to my odd requests after all this time.
Perhaps if there was a lot less asphalt and concrete and more shade trees and grass, it might be a bit cooler and more comfortable?
Yah that would help somewhat.
But here’s the problem. Carbon Dioxide is like three springly balls stuck together when most other molecules in the air have two springy balls stuck together.
The more springy balls are in the air, the more they can absorb the wiggles from sunlight, and then even when the sun isn’t shining them springs are still wiggling, releasing that wiggle into other molecules and objects slowly, at a rate much higher than if it were more nitrogen or oxygen. Our biggest problem here is one as simple as slinky-physics. We have too many springy balls wiggling in the sky, wiggling too hard and making everything wiggle more.
Does this mean that the global warming potential of gaseous polyethylene (plastic) is something stupidly high? Even Methane (4 springy balls radiating from 1 bigger ball) has a way higher (28:1) global warming potential than Carbon Dioxide.
I haven’t read about gaseous forms of plastics in the air specifically, so it’s probably not as much of a major problem as the larger greenhouse gasses, like yes, chemicals that have many more “springy balls” like Methane that are being released as the climate warms, increasing the rate at which the globe heats. The permafrost and arctic ice has massive amounts of trapped methane that is currently being released in large explosions turning areas of the arctic circle into moonscapes of craters.
The way you were able to put it so simply makes me really wish that explanation was correct, but unfortunately it is not.
It’s more along the lines of:
- All things shine away their hot, as long as they are at least a little bit hot.
- You know the sun shines, but actually the earth shines too.
- Actually, you shine too. (That’s why you can be seen on an infrared camera.)
- The hotter a thing is, the harder it shines.
- The sun is really hot so it shines really hard.
- The earth is much less hot, and shines way, way less.
- The earth gets more hot from catching the shine from the sun, and less hot from shining itself.
- When the hot coming in from the sunshine is the same as the hot going out from the earthshine, the earth says the same hot.
- When the hot coming in from the sunshine is more than the hot going out from the earthshine, the earth gets more hot.
- And as the earth gets more hot, its earthshine becomes harder, until it’s the same as the sunshine again.
- For the earthshine to take the hot away from the earth, it has to actually get to space.
- Otherwise it’s like the earth shines on its own air, and the hot remains basically on (or around) the earth.
- CO2 stops some parts of the earthshine from reaching space.
- This part of the earthshine, when it starts from the ground, basically never gets to space.
- It can only get to space from really high up, where there is not so much CO2 in the way.
- But really high up is also colder, so the earthshine is less (because hotter things shine harder).
- The more CO2 there is, the higher up we have to go, the colder it is there, the weaker that part of the earthshine is.
- And when the earthshine gets weaker, the actual earth has to be hotter to shine out as much hot as is coming in from the sunshine. Which is why CO2 makes the earth more hot.
I try to explain to people in simplified ways, it’s pure pedantry at best or totally confusing at worst to the average person if the heat that CO2 is storing is coming from the sun directly, or the heat being reflected back into space, either way the mechanical idea is the same, that CO2 stores energy.
Not really. CO2 is effectively a thermal blanket. It traps your radiant heat. The environmental heat still affects you, additively.
The only real difference is that people also generate their own heat instead of just storing it. But you could say a thermal blanket on a snake and have the same effect.Not really.
Yes really.
You’re right, it’s a thermal blanket but it also absorbs and holds more heat energy more efficiently than other molecules because infrared radiation can actually be absorbed by CO2, this isn’t a fringe interpretation, but I do get that there are alternative interpretations of the processes. I just don’t care to try to explain the nuance and details to average laypersons.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-carbon-dioxide-capture-more-heat-than-oxygen
I was saying that it’s not really confusing… And then used the thermal blanket analogy to try and give an example.
How do I know this isn’t that confusing to the average person? I teach it to high schoolers in environmental systems. They get the hang of it pretty easily if you just give them a decent example with a visual. Unless high schoolers aren’t average people anymore…
That’s the point, CO2 doesn’t store energy (well, it does a little, but not so much that it makes any difference). What it does is blocks the energy from leaving (until you reach a high altitude).
CO2 doesn’t store energy (well, it does a little, but not so much that it makes any difference).
Carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.’
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/
I understand there’s many dimensions and factors involved in the entire process, but it’s not a wrong interpretation to say it stores more energy, even if it’s just borrowing it for a moment. It acts like both a heat sink and a thermal blanket. While I’m not a climatologist, I have a pretty good grasp of physics so I’m guessing we’re just talking about pedantic or technical differences in description of the process… something that again, average layperson does NOT need to hear about, people can barely understand scientific concepts as it is.
The slinky model makes good sense and it’s not wrong, it was described to me BY a scientist in RL, so I will keep using it.
- All things shine away their hot, as long as they are at least a little bit hot.
So, we cull the herd in large cities and thereby reduce the CO2 and cool the local area?
The problem is the the concrete and asphalt act as a heat sink. And it holds the heat rather than letting it dissipate in a reasonable manor, thus encouraging those springy balls to play rubby rubby for longer than they should in any one particular localized area. Let alone have some of them soaked up by the pretty green scenery.
So you’re partially on the right track, concrete is one of the biggest problems we have with global warming, but it’s not the slabs of hardened concrete that are the problem, yes they get hot and reflect heat upwards so cities feel hotter, but that’s not causing the whole climate to change as much as the carbon dioxide produced in the manufacture and setting of concrete, which produces more of those springy balls than even airplane emissions annually.
The problem is the carbon (and other greenhouse gasses) far more than anything we do with structures and surfaces on the ground. If you were to take away every road and parking lot, it would make cities feel a little better, but the globe would still be on a runaway temperature increase. Even the idea of planting vast amounts of trees is likely not nearly enough. We had our window to act, it slipped by.
Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don’t do anything
Yes because washing cars is much less important than growing food
The US massively overproduces food. We absolutely can afford to not water some of those crops.
The US massively overuses cars. You can absolutely afford to not wash your car.
If the cars are overused that means they require more maintenance, not less. I want walkable places but that’s not the argument to make lol
We can do both.
You can just… not wash your car. It literally doesn’t matter. If water rationing is in effect, washing your car should be the least of your concerns.
I don’t care about washing my car. I care that they’re moderating our car washing while allowing foreign businessmen to use as much water as they want on hay that gets exported. And that could be fine if they were doing it in the Mid West. No, they’re doing it in Phoenix, Arizona. A region that knows it’s counting down to a zero day.
So while I’m not washing my car, they shouldn’t be watering those crops.
If you don’t wash your car and you’ll get corrosion from the salt on the road. If you live where it snows of course.
This person is talking about being from the desert, so yeah, no sympathy here. The Fremen could figure out that water shouldn’t be wasted when it’s scarce.
Not washing cars results in long term damage to the car. If you have a 200k mile shitbox with peeling clear coat, sure, you don’t need to wash it because it probably won’t matter.
If you have something nice with good paint, washing is an important maintenance item
If you wash a car it uses less fuel. Dirt makes cars less aerodynamic.
lol fresh food is like all public health and wellbeing is non existent unless its been heavily industrialised to make as much money out of it as possible.
Juts search for “AI water consumption” or “data center water consumption”. I’ll agree that “we could be using this to wash our cars” is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
Some facilities is do this. They’re not 100% efficient, so some is lost to evaporation, some must be dumped because it has too much mineral content (and too much conductivity) to go back through the cooling system. Reusing is only about 50% efficient (according to Google’s numbers).
Half a liter per kilowatt hour. That’s the average water use
It’s like the idea of recycling plastics with water.
Not all of it is reusable to the same degree. A good portion of water has to be evaporated off to cool down the exterior towers plus water isn’t really infinitely usable in these loops. It gets gross or full of materials.Another thing that people need to remember is generating electricity uses the water here as we literally don’t use many methods that don’t involve water, we are not on a green grid and neither are these huge data centers for the most part. We boil it for the electricity then have to use additional to clean the system after.
On a standard PC, you can easily have a loop because the radiator is big enough to exhause all that heat. But when your computer or cluster puts out multiple thousands of watts of heat, eventually you need to get rid of tge hot water and replace it with cold water. And when it gets even hotter, you need a steady stream of cold water that immediately gets dumped.
Right, so agricultural was a bad example.
If you can’t imagine a world without eating meat, yes.
Not really. Look at California agriculture. You’ve got immense and unsustainable amounts of water going to almonds, pistachios, and other cash crops (not to mention animal feed for the Saudis) with voracious demand for more water, despite it causing damage to the water sources.
Sure but growing water intensive crops in the desert is also not logical.
Why don’t humans migrate with the seasons? Are we dumber then birds?
People who live in the desert and then complain about not spraying their giant hunk of metal with water are definitely dumber than birds
Yep… phoenix, Tucson, LV, all of those need to be vacated and the populations moved somewhere useful like the Midwest where they can help grow crops somewhere that makes sense
Last I ran the numbers, industry and agriculture used 98% of the water. This being in CA.
