Nationwide, golf-course irrigation consumes less than half of 1% of the 408 billion gallons of water used daily, a golf-industry report concludes. Even so, that's a lot of water -- two billion gallons a day, or enough to satisfy the household needs of more than two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Necessary Sacrifices for Environmental Sanity?
According to the Wall Street Journal, golf courses consume enough water to supply the household needs of two-thirds of the U.S. population. Can you imagine the ruling class acting to limit its favorite "sport"? Newport, John Paul. 2008. "Play It as It Dries." Wall Street Journal (3 May): p. W 1.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
But this seems to me a classic example of framing an issue misleadingly.
The water that goes to golf courses is truly irrelevant compared to the colossal amount of federally subsidised water that gets wasted in states that reliably send Republicans to Senate.
There are farms in the Great American Desert only because taxpayers pay large amounts of of money for Republican farmers in red states to destroy their own environment and their own acquifer, all for the sake of very short term gain.
Compared to the colossal waste of very precious water resources in the Great American Desert, golf courses barely register. But pointing at golf courses is better than taking issue with all "take personal responsibility", "government is the problem" conservative Republican farmers who squander stupendous amounts of water, almost entirely paid for government funds.
according to a google search (similar in authoritativeness to wikipedia or the US university system) the us daily average households use is about 15 Billion gallons. the wsj claims that golfcourse use daily is 2B and this represents 2/3 of us households. using the theory of ricci flows in a quantum theoretic context, my calculations show that the wsj implies total us daily household use should be 3B gallons, so one needs 'error bars'. maybe they meant 2**4, which seems reasonable (quartic potential)? or, maybe its pareto's law. this seems to be an ill posed discussion (eg some golf courses may be near adequate water sources; others, not. ) golf courses have many other detrimental effects, mostly with regard to fertilizer runoff, landclearing, and permitting mostly a certain class to enjoy themselves.
Well I am not smart enough to follow media's comment but I think I catch the drift of the overall calculation:
Golf courses: 2 billion
Household use: 3/2s of 2 billion = 3 billion
Total use: 408 billion
Can anyone but me understand the concept of 'proportion' here? Until or unless we have some understanding about where the other 405 billion gallons go this seems to be much ado about pretty much nothing. Maybe we could talk about the cost benefit analysis of lining irrigation ditches or drip systems vs spray systems or whether it makes sense to grow cotton in what would otherwise be a California desert.
I am just as ready as the next Red Hand Socialist to haul out the tumbrills and take the plutocrats to the guillotines (at least figuratively) but somehow I doubt that article 1 of the bill of particulars is going to read 'He played golf'.
By the way while you are looking up 'proportion' skip ahead a few pages and look up 'reductio ad absurdum'. Because this line of argumentation doesn't even rise to the level of farce.
All of you make good points. Near where I live, farmers used to grow irrigated sugar beets with highly subsidized water!
An environmental bogey that's par for the coarse [sick!] as well as for the birds.
During the last "let your lawn go brown" years here in California the scales dropped from my eyes when driving around Silly Con Valley i noticed that all the corporate lawns were green and their flower beds were splendid. Even at work, at Ames Research Center, our Bermuda Grass lawns, acres of them, were green. On a drive down I5 in the Central Valley I watched overhead sprinklers watering cotton plants in high summertime heat. I went home and started watering the grass and flowers again. Screw being the sucker in the water wars.
"Envy of green? Just pay the green fees."
Hasn't this been the approach of the Bush Administration on global warming?
Post a Comment