Agriculture, restaurants and hospitality use a sh!t ton of water, there’s more to water usage than just watering lawns and drinking water.
This article claims 50-70% of watering lawn use in Oklahoma is for lawns: https://okepscor.github.io/watercalc/
I’d like to see sources cited for that. I’m sure that water usage in Oklahoma is vastly different than California’s but Oklahoma is not in a doomsday scenario or anywhere close to it. There’s not even an exceptional drought classification anywhere in the state. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
I’m not here to be argumentative but it’s tiring to see the same line that watering lawns accounts for such a huge number when in reality it only accounts for a third of all residential use in the United States. That’s only a small part of the overall water usage in the country anyways.
https://ensia.com/articles/water-use/
I’m not saying it wouldn’t help to conserve water or switch to xeriscaping for those who want to do it. But out west there’s insane proposals to ban lawns which is asinine, IMO. We need to tackle the biggest culprits which are unsustainable agricultural practices and a massive waste problem it supports where tons of food is thrown away. Anyone who’s ever worked recently in the food industry can attest to that.
The drought will go away and come back. Oklahoma, the entire country rather, needs to be looking at dealing with climate change and the issues it will cause because we aren’t stopping it. You aren’t getting enough people to change their habits to reduce the carbon footprint enough to change it nor are the BRIC countries doing enough to reduce their footprint like the US or EU is. China already accounts for 30 percent of global emissions and is rising. We need to invest more in water infrastructure and like what’s said earlier in this thread we will have an “interstates for water infrastructure” plan long before the situation gets dire.
Water is extremely abundant. We just need to build more desalination plants find ways to distribute it.
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