Comment by rtpg
1 hour ago
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.