Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US.
The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.
Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.
>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.
If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)
Yes, that's roughly what I said in my post. If we're doing a controlled economy and triaging for the health of the ecosystem, we'd start with feed for cattle, and almonds wouldn't be much further down on the list.
The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.
The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.
Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.