Comment by MonkeyIsNull
15 hours ago
Wow, just a quick check .... it appears you are correct.
Golf: ~531 billion gal/year
Data centers: ~17 billion gal/year
Golf ≈ 31× as much
Indirect Water footprint via Electricity Usage:
Golf: ~500–531B gallons
Data centers including electricity: ~228B gallons
I don't really get the golf course hate.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
I'm not hating on golf. My grandfather would be appalled! In crowded urban areas they don't work so well anymore. And I'm also not against using our resources for human pleasure!
its because "green spaces" and "spaces with greens" are not the same. just imagine a 150 acre generic park or forest instead of an over fertilized over watered field for a single game played by only .002 percent of people.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
Golf courses are not green spaces, come on now. They are most often limited in their access and devoid of greenery native to the area or that supports pollinators. Grass does not equal green space, and certainly not the flavor of green that is present in golf courses. The alternative to a golf course is not hot concrete either, that's a false dichotomy.
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
Yes. And right after we kill golf lets pave over Central Park. And we can tear down sports arenas and concert venues after that. It's a huge waste when you think about how few people actually go there and what benefit they actually have. Sports overall are a waste of time. Everyone should just walk in the woods instead. Except soccer. You're right that we need thousands more soccer fields. Its way more efficient than any other kind of exercise. And there is so much demand for soccer in the US, you can't even find an empty field. In contrast to golf courses which are mostly empty like you noticed.
go ahead and reductio ad absurdum.
you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people.
heck keep it golf but switch to driving ranges and its still like 10x more capacity for users than golf courses.
counter arguments that point out other things that are still 10x better uses of space than golf are not very compelling. a sports arena that serves 2.5m people/year is a terrible argument against a golf course that maxes out at 117k. (using sofi in LA numbers as its a similiar footprint as well 150acres)
im also not saying abolish golf, just only play it in places where the space/water use dont matter. like rural scotland. don't put golf courses in/near cities where we should use our space better.
[deleted]