yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Solving the Water Problem | Breakthrough


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Our lifestyles are very thirsty, and it's not just the water that comes out of the tap at home. You know, if we think about our daily lifestyle, everything we use, and where and buy and eat takes water to make, and sometimes really a surprising amount. It can be 30 gallons of water just to make a glass of wine.

Energy is another really water-intensive thing. You know, it takes about 13 gallons of water to make one gallon of fuel. To the extent we can walk, carpool, bike, those are saving energy but also saving water. Do we have to have brand new clothes? Can we share? Can we recycle? Every time we get something from a thrift store, we've got something new, but it's not taking additional water to make it new.

So there's a lot of opportunity to actually be part of the solution. Most of our water use and water management has been around controlling water with dams and diversions to supply water when and where we need it. And that's allowed places like the western United States to really grow and flourish and expand and become major food-producing areas for the whole nation and parts of the world.

What we haven't done is really bring nature to the table. We haven't really decided that ecosystems themselves deliver a lot of benefits to us, which they do in the form of purifying water, you know, fish and biodiversity habitats, clean drinking water.

And so I think governments and industries that are figuring out how water is allocated and used can begin to bring that important piece of nature into the picture. Policies can help do that; markets can help do that. In some ways, I think the new frontier of water management is going to be bringing together efficiency technologies like drip irrigation, which is used in agriculture, with information technologies that allow us to know how much water is really in the soil right now.

How much water do those crops really need so that we can target delivering just the right amount of water when crops need it, to make sure that they get what they need, but not necessarily more than they need? Right now, agriculture consumes about 80 percent of all the water that's used in the West, and so if we can get more efficient and more targeted about delivering that water, we can free up water for the natural environment.

More Articles

View All
Bird Head Tracking
Hey, it’s me Destin, and uh, yesterday I made a video about chicken head tracking and a chicken’s ability to keep his head stabilized as his body moves. He keeps it in one spot. Well, a very unfortunate thing happened today on my way home. Unfortunately,…
Spider vs Penis (Priapism) - Smarter Every Day 98
Alright, so this video may not be appropriate for kids, and it is, uh… It’s disturbing on several different levels. Especially if you’re a man… So, you know, on Smarter Every Day, I try to keep everything very intelligent and respectful, but this video is…
The Next Great Reset | Why The UK Is Collapsing
What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here and it’s official: the global economy is tanking. In the last 24 hours, Hong Kong and Chinese stocks crashed to a 13-year low. UK’s Prime Minister resigned under financial pressure, holding the shortest term ever in Briti…
Harvesting Wild Honey in the Amazon | Primal Survivor: Escape the Amazon | National Geographic
[Music] Up there is pure energy in its raw sporum. That’s exactly what I need: wild honey, a nutritious calorie-packed hit of energy. It’s pretty special stuff, but getting it is never easy. Oh, I’m getting stung all over! I just keep getting nailed by b…
Irony | Style | Grammar
Hello, Garans. Uh, today I want to talk about the concept of irony, which is a very difficult concept to nail down because it means so many things. But let’s begin with the best definition I can muster, which is that irony is the difference between expec…
Estimating adding large numbers by rounding
Let’s say that we run an egg farm. Yesterday, we went out and we collected 398 eggs from the chickens, and then today we went out and we collected 251 eggs from the chickens. What we’re curious about is roughly how many eggs do we now have that we’ve coll…