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Google Is Really, Really Thirsty
(gizmodo.com)
It's important to remember that not every litre of water is the same as every other liter of water.
It's really important to watch water use if you're using groundwater in Texas or California, but water is a renewable resource in many places and it isn't a problem to use water as long as it's properly managed. For example if you remove water from a river, purify it, use it for something benign like cooling making sure not to add anything to it, process it so you're not impacting the ecosystem, then return it to the same river, then you've used water, but you didn't really consume anything.
On the other hand, if you polute that water, or you damage local ecosystems, or if you're pulling water out of non-renewable sources, that's a problem. Environmentalism must be local, there are few universal answers.
