Comment by everdrive
10 hours ago
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
> People don't know how to be efficient at scale.
Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd.
Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency.
Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).