I saw an ad for being vegan saying either don’t flush your toilet for 6 months, don’t shower for 3 months or don’t eat a burger once. But isn’t all of our water basically renewable and no matter if we do any of these things, it just goes back into the water cycle and we’ll reuse it eventually, even if we have to clean it somehow? What’s the big deal?
In: Earth Science
Water is renewable, but the way it currently gets “renewed” is limited in capacity.
As you said, human survival today depends on the natural water cycle; plus hacks that we’ve added to it, such as dams and reservoirs. But in a lot of places (the American West, for instance), we capture so much of the water cycle that we have to take care that we’re leaving enough water for the fishes and ducks. Some rivers are entirely diverted for human use and don’t reach the ocean any more.
The natural water cycle is literally not enough for all the things that creative humans want to do with water. We like growing crops (some of which we feed to cows), watering our gardens, and brewing beer; and we also like having fishes and ducks around. This is not a future problem; it is a now problem that lots of people are actively working on.
Because water *is* limited, farmers and ranchers pay for their water. Some agricultural company paid for the water to grow the soybeans that went into the cattle feed that was fed to the cow that became your hamburger. If water became *more* limited, the price would go up, and so would the price of the burger. And if burgers got more expensive, fewer people would choose to eat them as often.
In other words, we already have a system in place to decide how much water gets used by cattle ranchers, and farmers who grow cattle feed, and so on. That system is the market economy, plus taxes and subsidies and environmental laws to protect the fishes and ducks. We know how to adjust it; it’s called *politics* and it is usually a big bunch of no fun.
Want less water usage for agriculture? Tax it. However, the effect is that *all* the food, *including the vegan food,* gets more expensive. The animal-based food gets *more* more expensive, but the plant-based food goes up too. Also make sure to add something for the food banks, because higher prices hit the poorest hardest.
(That may not satisfy the vegan activist group, who maybe really just wants you to hug a cow and not eat it.)
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