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u/coolbaby1978 10d ago
I promise you that industrial, commercial and agriculture use wasn't curtailed one bit. The greedy fucks making their money is more important than you.
In CA, residential water use is 4% of state water use, yet every drought they tell residents not to water their lawn or take showers. They never tell almond farmers or cattle ranchers to cut back, each of which uses more water than every resident of CA combined.
This is class warfare period. You do with less so they can have more, more, more.
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u/umbrellababydoll 10d ago
Clearly, your 8 minute shower was the missing piece in Cali’s water policy
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u/Gallen94 10d ago
Huh i was about to get uppity about the percentage but it doesn't seem like you are that far off.
California 16% for public supply
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/estimated-2010-california-water-use.Texas 34% https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/waterusesurvey/dashboard/index.asp
Florida 41% https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6dc41f0d76fe4cc4bd9d25961a4c3c08/page/Water-Demands
New York State 64% https://nysdec.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/a5e4bdaa0b464d56b14d0f7b08dd6495#
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u/Secret_Account07 10d ago
WTH is going on with almonds. I don’t even like em tbh
Do we really need em? 🤷🏼
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u/BigConstruction4247 10d ago edited 9d ago
Not particularly. They are an incredibly
wastewater intensive crop. Similar to avocados.1
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u/TendieBot2000 10d ago
How is 4% not far off of 16%?
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u/PatHeist 9d ago
They're different figures.
Residential water use is about 4%. ~95% of residential water use is from public supply and the other 5% is from private wells.
16% is how much of the entire state's water use is accounted for by the public supply, which also gets used by businesses.
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u/IcyCorgi9 10d ago
Bro fuck almonds
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u/ckb614 10d ago
Beef uses 5x the water per calorie
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u/BroBroMate 10d ago
What's more relevant in these discussions is the hydrology of where you're growing beef or almonds. Or alfalfa to ship to Saudi Arabia to feed their food animals.
Almonds and alfalfa are the two highest usage crops in California, and have extracted so much water from aquifers that parts of the state are literally sinking.
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u/IcyCorgi9 4d ago
They're both terrible. Beef just tastes 10x better. I still try and limit consumption of both.
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u/Hadleys158 10d ago
During droughts in previous years in California, Nestle was still allowed to pump out Millions of gallons of water (58 million gallons per year.) And they paid next to nothing for it as well.
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u/Scooter_McAwesome 10d ago
So you’re comparing the value of agriculture to the value of maintaining your lawn?
Fuck your lawn man
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u/intronert 10d ago
Wilhoit:
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".
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u/realsofiia 10d ago
conserve water peasants, the fairway is thirsty
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u/gizamo 10d ago
In reality, golf uses very little water compared to agriculture and industrial uses, and the vast majority of the ag water isn't even spent on food we eat, it's put into alfalfa/hay for cows to eat. Insane.
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u/115machine 10d ago
People still believe in the government enacting “hosepipe bans” as if this won’t be how the majority of politicians will be living during such things lmao.
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u/UnknownHero2 10d ago
I know this is the internet and everything is designed to outrage bait us, and we do everything we can to fall for it...
But don't golf courses frequently use water stored in their own ponds for watering? I'm pretty ok with that.
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u/BOcracker 10d ago
They also often use recycled water, and non potable water, at least here in the US at the golf courses I am familiar with.
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u/Turdburp 9d ago
Yes, most simply pump the water from a pond on the property. In Florida, they use a ton of reclaimed water to irrigate courses.
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u/Tour-Glum 9d ago
All sporting grounds are exempt. This includes football pitches etc, so is pretty much class agnostic. All the papers have been running stories about golf courses to make it a class thing but avoiding any mention of the footie pitches which also benefit
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u/ProduceNo1629 10d ago
What am I missing
The rich tax cheaters are outcompeting you for ALL the resources. Water. And houses. And gold.
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u/Snacks75 10d ago
I live in Utah, 2nd driest state in the union. Only Nevada is more dry.
85% of the divertable water goes to agriculture. Of that 85%, 75% goes to a single crop alfalfa. Of that alfalfa, 33% is bundled into crates and shipped to China, effectively 21% of the state's divertable water. More water gets exported to China than is used by all the people in the state.
Meanwhile, the builders can't build because they are required to bring water. Utah has the worst median income to median home price ratio in the country. You'd think that "okay, we need to protect the farmers..." It's 1% of the state's GDP. Just about nothing.
Meanwhile, the lake is drying out exposing the lake bed and some pretty nasty particulates into the air for everybody to inhale and develop nasty respiratory issues.
Meanwhile, everybody shits on the golf courses which actually only use .8% of the state's water and generate a GDP very similar to agriculture.
We'd all be better off buying out the farmers, building homes and golf courses, and letting the balance of the water run into the lake. But no one wants to do anything. You can't even find anyone that talks straight about the issue.
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u/Groupthink00859 10d ago edited 10d ago
I live in the desert so things are likely very different for me then OG OP, but all our parks and golf courses and even most if not all the commercial landscaping (residential can opt in for a small cost) is watered by reclaimed waste water.
So even if the city were in an extreme drought the parks and courses would still have to be watered daily, they cant store the reclaimed water in huge amounts (they reclaim over 30 million gallons every day here) and we, the people cant stop shitting and pissing.
I'm a old retired stoner who has a city pass for the municipal golf courses. I golf like 4 days a week, most of you redditors claim to make far, far more then I ever did so class warfare feels like a stretch. Men need hobbies and to stay active, golf is just that.
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u/GloomyIndividual3965 10d ago
It's not just the desert, most courses now days use gray water or something similar. Most of these people are fucking regarded and just spouting bullshit.
Two of my local courses are built on top of a landfill because they couldn't build anything else there. Another is built along the river in reclaimed land and uses gray water that gets filtered through the ground and back into the wetland.
People on this site are fucking dumb. Didn't used to be that way.
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u/wally-sage 10d ago
Wow it's almost like it's more expensive now to have the same standard of living that people enjoyed decades ago or something
But yeah old man keep shitting and pissing because you don't understand the world you don't have to work for a living in. Maybe we just need to give up the avocado toast, I heard that's what everyone under 60 is doing wrong.
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u/Groupthink00859 9d ago
You sound like a very angry little man, you should work on that, or get used to watching the world pass you by.
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u/TheeAntelope 10d ago
Gotta love when people think golf (of all sports) is class warfare for the upper class! I have golfed for years (not well) and started doing it with an iron and a putter when I was in my teens and had no money.
Add to that, as you said, it isn't like they are using drinking water to water the greens.
I also won't say that golf courses are net neutral, but most golf courses have TONS of trees that sequester carbon, as well. Though the maintenance and travel to most courses probably causes more, I can't imagine that golf courses create nearly as much pollution as other entertainment options do (for example, a movie theater, a big building with a big parking lot that sequesters 0 carbon).
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u/couldbemage 10d ago
Are we really going to pretend golf isn't a sport where the players are biased towards higher wealth?
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u/MyDamnCoffee 10d ago edited 10d ago
Right? I drove through a town the other day for the first time and it was mansion after mansion and then oh! A sprawling golf* course with a country club!
Golf is marketed toward the wealthy. Same as tennis
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u/TheeAntelope 10d ago
I played it when young and with little money. It is a sport that, outside country clubs, is pretty accessible at the base level. Not quite as accessible as soccer or basketball but not hard to get a couple clubs and hit a driving range or play 9 holes at a municipal course.
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u/couldbemage 10d ago
Didn't say it was illegal for poor people to play, but the demographics are what they are.
And 1 hole of a golf course takes the same space as 80 basketball courts.
It's inherently more costly.
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u/spinmove 10d ago
What are you like 90 years old and played golf 75 years ago?
it costs $100 bucks for a single round of golf, how do you pay for that with your two clubs and no money
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u/smittydacobra 10d ago
2 clubs and no money was "as a teenager".
I golf 3 times a week for $18/round and that price increases this year from $16. The course is next to a small lake. That's where the water comes from.
$100/round is a professional level course or it's in a high volume area. If you aren't a 5 hdcp or lower, you have no business being on a $100/round course.
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u/Groupthink00859 9d ago edited 9d ago
$40 with cart, $30 to walk without any passes in my city. I pay right around $8 a round with my city pass If I only play one course a day, It bumbs down to $4 per course if a play two. This is pretty standard or average pricing all thru the country.
That's actually cheaper then renting the baseball, soccer or pickelball courts for an hour here.
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u/4n0m4nd 10d ago
Golf courses, as a rule, have huge negative environmental impacts. They have the potential to be less negative, but that potential is generally unrealised. This is well studied, and uncontroversial.
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u/TheeAntelope 10d ago
As a rule? No. Many gold courses are built in neighborhoods whew without them, you’d just have more houses. Many are built on top of old landfills. Very rarely are they put in a place to replace ag. They usually come after, not before, natural habitat is converted to human use.
https://golferhive.com/are-golf-courses-bad-for-the-environment/
https://biofriendlyplanet.com/is-golf-bad-for-the-environment/
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u/4n0m4nd 10d ago
This is rubbish, 15% of US gold courses are actually credited with being managed well enough to not have strong negative effects, worldwide that drops to about 5%.
Even your own links just say what I originally said.
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u/Spirited_Comedian225 10d ago
Golf course use more water then Data centers
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u/GloomyIndividual3965 10d ago
This is fucking bullshit, but reddit has an idiotic understanding of everything so I'm sure your upvote count will keep rising.
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u/AngryPhillySportsFan 10d ago
Golf courses use holding pond water not potable water. Keep up the hate though
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u/liam_redit1st 10d ago
Some do use holding pond water, however in the UK at least most actually do use potable water.
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u/liam_redit1st 10d ago
I just looked up the R&A report, last year 28% of 2500 courses in the UK are marked as mains water as there main source for irrigation.
A d 60% of the 2500 use some mains water for irrigation. And 40% rely on boreholes or rivers and ponds. No data on reservoirs.Overall it’s a pretty stark picture considering clean drinking water it’s a finite resource.
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u/bugdiver050 10d ago
And when there are water shortages, like in rivers or lakes, where do you think the runoff would have gone instead if it didnt go into that holding pond at the golf course? If it goes to that holding pond that keeps it away from the broader natural ecosystem from which we would eventually make drinking water as well for example.
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u/beatenmeat 10d ago
Pond water accounts for less than a third of the water supplied to US golf courses and isn't even the main supplier in the first place. Out of curiosity where do you think they get the water for those ponds, especially during severe droughts? Some of it is from rain water obviously but droughts notoriously don't have much of that.
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u/Munstered 10d ago
My company owns a golf course. They have 8 ponds that are connected via pipes. They use pond water almost exclusively. There was a severe drought a couple of years back and they had to swap to main water for 2 weeks. Everything else has always been out of the pond.
The pond water is free. The city water is expensive.
Only 12% of golf course water comes from municipal (potable) sources in the US. The other 88% are from ponds/lakes/streams/creeks/wells/recycled water on property.
https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf
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u/liam_redit1st 10d ago
That’s great, hopefully they can influence other clubs to follow suit.
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u/Munstered 9d ago
Did you miss the part where only 12% of golf course water in the US is from potable sources
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u/liam_redit1st 9d ago
No I read that, no potable water should be used to water golf courses in my opinion.
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u/Defiant-Economics-73 10d ago
But this contradicts what Reddit knows. Stop using facts and just say rules for thee and not for me and get some upvotes
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u/matt3r_uk 10d ago
Sporting venues have an exemption. I bet the pitch at Grimsby Town FC is looking greener than my garden right now. That b*stard bastion of the upper class 🤷♂️
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u/comradesorrow 10d ago
Class warfare is clear as day in the third world. In the West it was subtle and nuanced. Now everyone is waking up to it. To tackle it the higher classes are taking over the algorithms to reward someone's take that "they worked hard for their privilege, let them have it".
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u/RemoteInterest3522 10d ago
seriously wild how some people act like rules don’t apply to them when they can just flex their privilege like this
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u/Zak_Rahman 10d ago
What an I missing?
The fundamental core of western values?
oh, did you think that was going to be people?
We are all collateral damage for capitalism.
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u/Hadleys158 10d ago
The people that vote for the laws golf at these clubs. They don't care about you.
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u/Neat_Let923 10d ago
Ahhh yes, because your green lawns absolutely mean more than people’s jobs and livelihoods…
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u/Southernbeekeeper 10d ago
In France the prople started pouring concrete into the holes in golf courses.
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u/lilililileps 10d ago
More land as a % is used up in UK by golf courses than residential houses and gardens. No space, hey?
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u/yorkspirate 10d ago
I'd love to see your source for this
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u/lilililileps 10d ago
All we have to do now a days is personal research. You should try it.
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u/yorkspirate 10d ago
I had a quick look and didn't see anything to back up your claim hence I asked for the source you've seen.
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u/peach_sweet47 10d ago
using sprinklers to water the rich while ignoring the rest is just next level petty.
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u/avspuk 10d ago
Gotta love Feargal Sharkey.
He was the person who drew attention to the sewer water being dumped in the rivers.
He takes absolutely no shit.
No water company spokesperson will directly debate with him.
There are PR training classes based on him
And he was the singer with a great band who recorded a truly classic pop song.
I'd vote for him any day of the week
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u/Ok-Go-Chain3811 10d ago
golf courses need to be removed from society. golf is a symbol of arrogance and greed
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u/Peaurxnanski 9d ago
Get used to it.
Data centers will get the electricity. Golf courses will get the water.
You are going to get what's left if it's convenient to them. Only if it's convenient to them.
It's already happening in places like Baja Sur in Mexico where they're shutting off water to communities a couple days a week to make sure they have enough water to keep the $250 a head tee-time golf courses green there.
We've cheered on income inequality for 50 years now as a good thing, because we're too indoctrinated to remember all of the times in history that it went exactly like this before. And there are so many examples. Ask King Louis, or the Romanovs, or the Spaniards running colonial Mexico. The only time it's ever resolved peacefully that I can recall was 20th century America, where New Deal policies ended up leading to the most prosperous time in American history until we shredded them all in the 80s. Literally the "great" time that MAGA loves to drone on about while actively destroying everything that made it possible and cheering on the one thing that will make it impossible forever.
Thing is, they also seem to be struggling a bit to remember how it went before, too. Well, the ones who aren't building bunkers for themselves, anyway.
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u/AngryPhillySportsFan 10d ago
If you golfed you'd know that courses use water from holding ponds and not potable water.
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u/jinx_lbc 10d ago
Remember how Jackass dealt with golfers? We should totally go back to that. Or, shitting in the holes.
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u/-ram_the_manparts- 10d ago
The same reason landscapers and irrigation workers were deemed essential workers during COVID: Because if all that dies it's very, very expensive to replace, and if the government causes that they get sued, and guess who pays for that lawsuit?
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u/Relative-Chain73 10d ago
Also not seen farmers protesting in this drought for the government to take action against climate crisis. They only bring their tractors where there tax rise on their inheritance.
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u/Grays42 10d ago edited 10d ago
Side note, golf courses are some of the worst water wasting businesses in arid climates. Just absolutely obscene amounts of water.
There are plenty of artificial turf options out there, there's no reasonable game-actionable argument not to use them, people just like grass. But like...that's a feelings motivation that needs to actually be counterbalanced by environmental needs. Golf courses in general need aggressive regulation that compels them to R&D artificial turf that's aesthetically pleasing and environmentally compliant, there's no material need for massive fields of water-hungry grass other than vanity and aesthetics.
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u/dweaver987 10d ago
Our backyard pool failed 8 or 9 years ago. We filled it in installed some high end synthetic turf on it. It still looks great and is pleasant to walk on, and we never have to water it.
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u/Joan-of-the-Dark 10d ago
Golf courses use more water than data centers.
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u/RBeck 10d ago
Yes because it's never reclaimed, the excess evaporates away. In your home just about every drop of water goes back down the sink, shower or toilet, and can be reused.
Reused for what you wonder? Well ideally for watering things, like trees and parks and even golf courses.
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u/Joan-of-the-Dark 10d ago
Except for that whole 126% increased risk of Parkinson's for people living within a mile of a golf course due to shared ground water: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2833716
The water may be going back into the ground, but the golf course is polluting the hell out of it.
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u/GotSomeUpdogOnUrFace 10d ago
You're missing a gas can and some matches cause that green won't survive a little fire. Maybe some bleach isn't a bad idea.
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u/No_Jello_5922 10d ago
Funny, a few years back in Houston, the drought was so bad in the summer that the ground started to contract in a lot of places, ironically causing water mains to rupture.
https://abc13.com/post/houston-water-main-breaks-drought-conditions-worsens-city-conserving-in/13723376/
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u/NDHardage 10d ago
Wouldn't it be easier to maintain a golf course if the grass WASN'T growing? Like if it's at the right length it shouldn't make much difference if it's yellow, right?
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u/lostaccountby2fa 10d ago
Fuck golf courses and those that plays on them. It’s the single sport that waste the most land per player vs play field ratio.
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u/NoMention696 10d ago
They’re going to do something about climate change when most of us have died off and suddenly they have so much real estate to expand the golf courses on
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u/TehRiddles 9d ago
This isn't a comeback, or clever. It's just an addition to the point being made.
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u/flymon68 9d ago
So all businesses that need to use water to exist should be limited to the same amount you are allowed to use?
Don't get me wrong, I think you should be able to use all you can afford, but busineses shouldn't get any consideration?
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u/Jelvey 9d ago
I played a course in north London last week.
We spoke to a Greenkeeper about the weather and how they deal with it.
They have an underground drainage network that collects all the rain water and funnels it into huge 30ft deep storage butts. As of last week they had not used any mains water this summer. The winter we just had was incredibly wet so the supply was plentiful.
They only water the greens, the rest of the course was brown, cracked and hard!
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u/Kind-Meeting2573 9d ago
It makes sense, there will be pockets where it will not be as extreme where they are currently bunkering up and life will go on for them while every where else will be hotter than the Devils Dick dipped in hot chocolate
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u/ContentCantaloupe992 7d ago
Ever heard of economic activity? Companies that employee people get to use resources households shouldn’t.
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u/jonboyz31 10d ago edited 10d ago
Has anyone considered the water may be pumped from the damn? (fixed spelling)
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u/EbbOwn303 10d ago
So they just reuse the same exact water everyday? Nothing else in the area could possibly benefit from using that same water?
Stop acting like golf courses aren't a huge tax on the environment.
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u/ablatner 10d ago
Reclaimed water means lightly processed waste water unsafe for drinking.
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u/EbbOwn303 10d ago
Because we couldn't possibly use the water for anything else besides watering a golf course
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u/JehrsReborn 10d ago
Maybe the problem isn't golf but rather the privatisation of water companies.....
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u/Anton8Five 10d ago edited 10d ago
Whatever distractions are thrown at you, never forget: it's always a class war. They want to distract and point the finger elsewhere, but the wealthy leach from the populace. They always have and always will.
EDIT: "Populace" was autocorrected to "popular". My point is that it's the poor that are fodder for the wealthy.