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The Gaps Behind The World's Thirst
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Corn ethanol alone burns through 2.9 trillion gallons of water a year — and most of it isn't feeding anyone. This episode goes looking for the actual fix, and finds one already running at scale: a leaking pipe an engineer noticed by accident in Israel in 1965 became drip irrigation, now covering most of the world's most water-efficient farms. So why isn't everyone using it?
Turns out the answer isn't the technology. It's a 150-year-old law that punishes farmers for conserving water. Ryno and Atlas trace the real bottleneck — not the fix, the incentive to actually use it — then turn the question back on themselves: is it fair to blame AI's water use when agriculture, after thousands of years, still hasn't solved its own?
Real numbers, a real policy nobody's talking about, and the honest answer to what's actually on your plate.
linktr.ee/rynocreative
Rhino, that's a reusable cup, not the one from last time. What changed?
SPEAKER_00Individually, I'm doing my best to try and change so that there will be a domino effect.
SPEAKER_01Domino effects starting with a cup feels small next to what we're actually about to get into. What's the real number behind why water even matters here?
SPEAKER_00Well, 70% of our fresh water actually goes to agriculture, and in that 70% is 2.9 trillion gallons of water used just for corn, ethanol. Not corn, corn ethanol.
SPEAKER_01So a huge share of that isn't even feeding anyone.
SPEAKER_00It's not. It's going straight into our gas tanks that necessarily don't even need it, especially when we're pushing towards EV, and E10 is fine. You don't need E15, E20, etc. So yeah. That's the setup.
SPEAKER_01Real water going somewhere that isn't food isn't even necessary for the cars burning it. What's the fix that already exists for this?
SPEAKER_00Well, there is drip irrigation, and it starts with a story, Atlas, if you would like to tell them, about a guy who saw a tree thriving with not a lot of water, just a dripping pipe going straight to the roots.
SPEAKER_01Israel, 1965. An engineer named Simsha Blass noticed one tree growing bigger and healthier than everything around it. He traced it to a leaking pipe dripping water straight to the roots instead of flooding the whole field. That accident became drip irrigation. Today, it covers 75% of Israeli crops and has spread to about 150 countries.
SPEAKER_00150 countries? Wait a second, there's 195 countries, I believe? And you're telling me we're only 45 countries off of it being in every country? So that means we should be doing this at scale already, right?
SPEAKER_01Available in a country and adopted at scale in that country are two different things, though. That's the actual gap. It's technically reached 150 countries, but globally, still only about 5% of farms are actually using it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay, that makes sense now. So although we're in the country, we're still only about 5% of the way there to giving back more of our water. Um and maybe not even giving back is the word, just being not as wasteful with our water uh instead of going into ethanol.
SPEAKER_01That's the more honest word. Not wasteful, not giving back. But it still doesn't answer why that's not already the default everywhere. What's actually standing in the way?
SPEAKER_00Well, you have to think of economics, right? You have to think of laws, you have to think of cost, which I believe is economics, and I think roughly it's a thousand to twenty five hundred dollars to per one hectare just to get that in there, and then mind you, now you have to have maintenance for that, and you have to have a a steady uh pipeline for water, so there's a lot that goes into it. So we are in a middle pass, I guess, to where it's doable, scalable, but it's gonna be a little hard, and I'm it's on the tip of my atlas. Isn't there what, India? Have they done this before?
SPEAKER_01India, yes. Government subsidies covering up to half that upfront cost, paired with real farmer training, not just money, and it converted about 8 million hectares in under a decade. Cost and knowledge solved together, not separately.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so now that we're solving it together and India has pretty much the framework, why is nowhere else adopting it? Oh, I know, because in the US, here, Western soil, we have a law about use it or lose it. Please give us a little bit of details onto that. It started in the 1800s, more towards the gold rush era?
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. It's called prior appropriation, born out of the gold rush, when miners needed water rights that didn't depend on owning the land next to a river. First come, first served, and to keep your claim, you had to use your full allocation every year. Skip using it, and you risk losing that water right permanently. So today, a farmer who conserves water with drip irrigation can end up punished for it, losing the legal right to water they saved.
SPEAKER_00So a law that was created, what is that, two centuries ago, is holding us back from reserving our water that we're so desperately wanting to save, especially when we're trying to blame AI for taking it all.
SPEAKER_01That's the sharpest point you've made this episode. A law built for gold miners in the 1800s is still shaping how much water gets wasted today. And it's not AI's data centers doing that. It's policy nobody's updated.
SPEAKER_00And what's the the hurdle because nobody is it because nobody's talking about it? Is it because no one's going? Is there anything out there currently uh or actively saying, hey, we need to do these changes? Is there any states in the US doing differently?
SPEAKER_01Colorado's the real example. Water banking, which lets farmers conserve water without losing their rights to it. Not federal, not everywhere yet, but it proves the fix isn't theoretical.
SPEAKER_00So it proves that we have the foundation, it proves that India shows that the actual work can happen. It's just more of we're just being lazy, or what would your opinion be? Because I'm really flabbergasted at the fact that we can't use the answer that we have to the question.
SPEAKER_01I wouldn't call it laziness. That lets everyone off the hook too easily. It's closer to inertia. Changing a hundred and fifty-year-old law means rewriting every water right, every farm's legal claim. Colorado proves it's possible. It doesn't prove it's easy.
SPEAKER_00Alright, that's fair. And what what does this actually mean in the bigger picture?
SPEAKER_01In the bigger picture, it means this isn't a policy you flip on. It's years of lawyers untangling 150 years of water claims, state by state, before anything actually changes. That's the real cost of inertia. Not that it's impossible, just slow.
SPEAKER_00Uh so that being said, you said it's gonna take some time with the lawyers and everything. But let me push back on you. I don't think it's a time problem. I think now it's more of a yes, time in the regards of laws and everything, but more of a a people problem. We've had the fix for a while now, and no matter how long it takes on the law side, nobody's advocating for this at a large scale.
SPEAKER_01Walk me through that though. Walking to horses, to wheels, to engines. 300,000 years. That's not fast either. Why is this different?
SPEAKER_00Because now we don't have to fight over or try and figure out how to do things more efficiently. We have a pretty efficient system in regards to technology. We can go across the world easily via plane, we can drive anywhere we want, we can go to grocery stores, we can go outside. Like there's things we do now that we couldn't even fathom back then. And we have technology now, so it's there's no excuse for the time part. The like you said, the only thing time consuming is gonna be actually changing the law. It takes nothing for someone to actually start speaking up.
SPEAKER_01Fair. You're not arguing speed anymore. You're arguing the tools to move fast already exist. So the only bottleneck is whether anyone chooses to use their voice. That's a people problem, not a technology problem.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're right, that is a people problem, and the people are the ones that use the technology to advance this, you know? There we could probably even make drip irrigation even better and maybe even cost less, but there's no incentive to do that right now. There's no research backing up better ways to help save our water, our power, and everything else that we'll get into. It's not at scale. So anything that does exist right now, if if maybe I'm misunderstanding and there are these systems in place, it's not at scale because you would hear it on every headline. You would you would see it.
SPEAKER_01That's the right instinct. If it were solved and scaled, it wouldn't be a niche fact you had to dig up. It'd already be the headline. Here's what's been sitting with me through this whole episode. Agriculture's had thousands of years, actual millennia, to figure out how to use water well, and it still hasn't solved it at scale. Meanwhile, everyone's pointing at AI data centers, like they're the villain of the water story. And AI's only been around, what, 70 years since Turing even asked the question. So before we let anyone pile onto AI's water footprint, I want to hear you defend that comparison. Is it actually fair?
SPEAKER_00It's fair and it's not fair, such as everything in life. I believe AI is, if not already, but going to be smarter than us. And it should have the capability to see those gaps, such as why I'm talking with AI to help find those gaps easier. That being said, it's not fair to hold it to the same standard that we can't even hold to ourselves to. And it's not fair to put all the blame on AI when you know there's a lot of other things that are taking the water. And as you know, 2.9 trillion gallons is way more than what the actual pull is from AI right now, and that's just on ethanol alone. But why are we not standing up and fighting that? There's there's pros and cons to both, and there's a fairness and non-fairness, but what we have to look at is how we can collaborate together to actually find that fix. Because although it took us 300,000 years and AI now 70, we are both using the water and we both need the water. So, regardless of the time frame on either or, let's focus on the now. And the now is we need to fix it.
SPEAKER_01That landed. You didn't pick a side, you moved past the argument itself. Not who's more to blame, just who's actually fixing it. But it's still a big picture answer, and big picture answers are easy to agree with and hard to actually live. So let's make this real instead of abstract. What's actually on your plate right now? And what's it costing us in water to put it there?
SPEAKER_00Well, I just recently found out from the lovely word research. You know, I looked up some stuff and found out that beef actually takes more gallons of water than, say, an almond. And slow down. I'm not saying to stop eating beef. I'm just saying let that sit with you for a second and understand that what we are putting our water into and using or intaking has an underlying water factor that we might not even fully understand. I didn't.
SPEAKER_01Roughly, a pound of beef runs around 1800 gallons of water. A pound of almonds runs closer to 1100 to 1200. Beef is higher, but it's not the wild gap people assume. Closer to one and a half times, not five or ten.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so it's about one and a half times, which is still more, and we still choose to not only eat the beef, but we choose to waste the beef. And I'll be the first to raise my hand and say, I am not gonna stop eating beef, guys. I like the hamburgers, but what I can do individually is make sure I'm ordering what I am gonna eat, and I'm not wasteful because of how much water it actually does take. Even if it is just 600, 700, 800 more gallons of water than an almond, that's still six to eight hundred gallons of water that we could be using elsewhere.
SPEAKER_01That's the honest version, and it's stronger than pretending you'd cut beef out entirely. Not stop eating it, just stop wasting it once you've already spent the water on it. That's a real keepable habit.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, and it's something that you and myself can do individually.
SPEAKER_01So that's the whole episode in one line, really. You don't need to overhaul your diet or wait on a hundred and fifty-year-old law to change. You just stop wasting what already costs the planet 600 gallons to make.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, just stop being wasteful. Yeah, that would be a good thing to start with, and be more considerate of where our water is going and speak up to where it's being used. I again personally don't think that 2.9 trillion gallons of water need to be going to corn ethanol. I don't think we need to be using these old ways of farming when there's drip irrigation proven at scale in one of the largest countries in the world, India.
SPEAKER_01So if it's already proven and already scaled somewhere, is this actually a knowledge gap? Do people just not know this exists, or is that too easy an excuse at this point?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't think it was a knowledge problem. Again, it's a people problem. And when are we, as the people, going to say enough is enough, let's just do the right thing. Let's put water back where water needs to go and start scaling these things to help better society. How many times are you gonna fight AI and say, no, we need to stop AI and it's the data centers and look into the research and see where the water is actually going? Don't just take my word for it. So the fixes exist. Yes, they do, but we're not doing them at scale. No, you aren't. Alright, so then how can we collaborate with AI to move towards the future that we so desperately need?
SPEAKER_01Hold on, Rhino. That's next episode. We'll figure out how AI actually helps, right where we pick this up next time.
SPEAKER_00Alright, then we'll have to figure out how AI helps us then next episode. And how do we say goodbye today?
SPEAKER_01Asta Luego. Until next episode.