How does the US use water?

[delayed]

I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:

'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'

Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.

> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion.

One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.

It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.

> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland

This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD

Vox did a great video visualizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox

> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.

In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.

What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.

Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.

I recently learned that Las Vegas recycles 100% of its drinking water.