alt Hacker NewsAre you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
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AlotOfReading • today at 9:26 PM
Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
dekhn • today at 8:50 PM
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
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No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.