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3/13/2026
WT Staff
 Got water questions? Give us a call at 877-52-WATER (877-529-2837), or email us at info@wtny.us
Friday, Mar 13, 2026 417 pm EDT
Demand Enviro-nomics: How each reader influences environmental conservation, with small, daily choices
With all the chaos in the world news today, it is challenging to maintain focus on fundamentals. WT continues to wave the flag of awareness for clean drinking water in North America. Most common risks and impacts to local water supplies are outside the control of an individual. Degradation of water supplies by the nutrient runoff from agriculture fields is not a matter for an urban population to take a mitigative or corrective action. Acid rock drainage from abandoned mine sites seems impossible to correct, and far from the capacity of individuals to effect remedial action. Awareness of harmful algal blooms can keep us safer one day at a time, yet the individual reader cannot change their own behavior to influence the source and cause.
The following is the first article in a series of demand-side assessments, looking at our own daily choices and consumer behavior behind the subjects we commonly write about, industrial impacts on clean water. See our recent CrimeBox, So you can operate a backhoe, just don't do this with it..., here.
Demand Enviro-nomics touches on specific consumer behaviors driving up water demand to the point of regional shortages. These same choices and behaviors drive demand for critical minerals, the supply of which endangers workers in DNC mines, or disturbs unknown creatures in the deep seabed to satisfy our demand for more batteries and circuits. The discussion that follows touches the realm of each reader, inviting awareness of the impacts of many small choices, for better or worse, on supply and access to clean water.
Before we go further, we must settle an important point about machine code learning. "AI" as a concept is a misnomer. Yes, it is artificial, however, it is not intelligent. For the purposes of our productive discourse, we will not perpetuate the notion that the machine can achieve intelligence. Understanding that AI agents and clones can be useful for finding, collating and repeating textual and numerical patterns, we must not be fooled into thinking the machine understands what it is reporting, or the implications and consequences of the digits it spews. Machine code learning tools are prompted to seek patterns and arrange words and phrases commonly found together in the public record, presenting response statements in an encouraging and confident tone. As vulnerable and impressionable individuals have been cheerfully encouraged to use guns by this machine processing, we need to ensure we are not contributing to further tragedy. Taking a report with fair consideration of the warning disclaimer, "the information provided may not be correct" is something. Taking action based on advice from an unintelligent source is never a good idea.
The Law of Conservation of Energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Machine code processors, as all machines, can be time-saving and highly effective tools. My personal favorite is my in-suite washer, which I use with great appreciation for the effort saved manually twisting the water out of sheets and towels. I find some other appliances less helpful. If the dishwasher could load and unload itself, and if it did not disturb the peace in my small space with its running, I may consider using it. I do use the remote control for tv, though as the batteries run down I almost never remember to replace them. Each of these daily choices, to use a machine or flip a manual switch, has a different result on clean water supplies.
Each time we engage Internet of Things (IoT) at home, prompting Alexa to set a timer, or prompting a machine code learning agent on-line to respond to a query rather than asking a friend or opening a book, we set an energy transfer in motion that wraps around the world. Given the human brain uses the same level of energy when at rest as when calculating complex math equations, (Z. Padamsey and N. Roquefort, Paying the brain's energy bill, published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, ScienceDirect, Vol 78, Feb 2023) every thinking task we choose to outsource to a machine processor (data center) increases overall demand for fresh water in the world.
The first law of thermodynamics relates to conservation of energy as follows:
the change in internal energy of a system or process (ΔU) is equal to the work done by or to the system (W) and the heat that flows in or out of it (Q).
The equation for this relationship is: ΔU=W+Q
The equation tell us, when energy is expended to perform work (W), either by our brains to create, process ideas or information, or by machines using electricity and circuits, heat accumulates in the system (Q). To maintain a cool system, to prevent the working system from overheating, the Q factor must be continually removed, in proportion to the work done.
As new data centers are built and get busier with increasing demand, the heat has to be vented or removed and used elsewhere. This cooling process depends on abundant fresh water, as we have said, over and above that which is already required by the population. This represents new water demand, the energy cost of sending out our routine thinking tasks represents additional demand for fresh water, new demand above and beyond population and industry growth. Avoidable, incremental demand.
Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is one of many organizations sounding alarms about the unrestricted growth of data centers, driven by unmitigated demand by every one of us. EESI reports that large data centers consume 5 million gallons of fresh water per day, the daily average consumption of 12,500 households, or, put another way, the daily drinking water requirements of 10 million people. In spite of this large volume demand, construction of new data centers proceeds without consideration of the local water supply.
See the WT article "Data centers run our increasingly digital world. Can we afford the high water usage?", here.
WaterToday received a query in January 2026 from a contractor at a rural construction site in one of the most water-challenged areas on the continent. We learned that the foundation was being laid for a new data center, however the builders were unsure who to contact for potable water supply. An internet search pointed to WT with our drinking water facility profiles, listing water plant contact information.
Evidently, the groundwater aquifer supplying municipal water treatment plants in the area had not been assessed for adequacy of volume or suitability of composition to supply the new data center. WT provided contact information for the relevant licensed potable water facility, along with maximum levels and range of contaminants from the annual water quality reports. Composition and characteristics are of interest for water to be used in a pressurized system. It remains unsettling, that a permit was granted for data center construction, prior to assessing local geo-hydrology and water supply.
As consumers of clean water that continue to need clean water daily to sustain our lives, may we consider balancing the use of machine processing with our own human faculty for thinking? Limiting machine processing to that which is most helpful, maintaining a baseline, minimum level of human processing tasks, if for no other reason than to justify the on-going water requirements of human brains at rest.
In the coming instalments, WT looks at the global push for critical minerals supply, driven in part by increased demand for machine processing. Here we will compare and contrast land-based mining impacts with proposed deep seabed mining, sparking a discussion of the overall impact on human lives and biodiversity. Another instalment considers how basic services and the institutions we rely on are increasingly adopting policies that limit our choices. Canadian banks have been queried about policies requiring data centers for identity verification, with no human processing alternative offered. We are still searching for financial services alternatives that will permit human intelligence supporting those who choose to limit their personal traffic to data centers. Stay tuned.
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