Similar story with Tesla's Berlin factory. Musk even said look look everywhere is water hurr durr. Politicians folded like teen girl fans meeting their kpop idol. Fast forward factory operates and household's waterconsumption in the far area is rationed. Turns out you cant take just all the water you see without damaging the ecology.
why don't they just build a pipeline from the nearest bigger river
Ask the Colorado river how that works out. So much is piped out that the river no longer makes it to the ocean. It just peters out into a dry river bed dozens of miles from the shore nowadays.
Since it's useful to see large numbers normalized, this is a little less than how much water all US households used in ten days in 2025 (28 billion/day per comment below) and a little under three days of the total water used for US crop irrigation (100 billion per day).
Edit: updated household numbers per comment below
Each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day at home (USGS, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2015).
estimated population was 341,784,857 on July 1, 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That's 28 billion gallons per day from US households. Your 300 billion number would mean each person in the US is somehow using almost 1,000 gallons of water per day.
Thanks! Updated the numbers for the direct household use.
Also, technically when you account for indirect water use, individuals use closer to around 4,500 gallons per day (Chini, et al. Direct and indirect urban water footprints of the United States (2016)).
thank you for putting things into proportion
The numbers in their comment are all wrong.
Must've been an LLM generated factoid.
Maybe this is the real reason water is so rare in Tank Girl.
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