Las Vegas has something like 70 golf courses wasting inordinate amounts of water. Of course most houses also have outside private swimming pools tool.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Vegas actually is a poor example, they have excellent water management policy even in spite of what is typically considered wasteful. Being so far down the Colorado River Basin kinda made being experts on the subject a necessity.

[–] arc@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course it has excellent water management because otherwise they'd run out. Doesn't mean that everyone having pools and so many golf courses is anyway defensible, or doesn't put insane stress on the supply.

[–] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think they're saying golf courses in the desert are defensible. I think they're saying that Nevada does better water conservation job than other nearby states (I believe Utah is the worst per capita) and has not nearly as much impact on the colorado river, so there's probably bigger fish to go after in terms of saving water than Las Vegas. When you get down to it like >80% of the water use out west is agriculture. If you're going to make significant savings you have to tackle agriculture practices. Not that you shouldn't clamp down on the golf courses too (I totally think they should, just deal with the artificial turf golfers if you want to golf in the middle of an arid desert and go golf in the scottish highlands if you want real grass), it just probably wouldn't help all that much in the grand scheme of things even if golf courses didn't exist at all. Surprisingly the best thing to do to conserve water would be to reduce meat consumption, most of what's grown is for livestock feed not human consumption.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231030112319/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right. Lake Mead is sure looking lovely these days.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lake mead is being drained from the other direction into Utah and you'd have known that before commenting if you'd actually looked that shit up before going to say something that spectacularly unaware of what's going on.

Vegas actually net zeros their allotment of the water share every year, as far as Mead is considered, Vegas almost doesn't exist.

[+] zeppo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] MammyWhammy@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The other commenter's point is that Las Vegas returns almost all of the water it consumes cleaned and back to Lake Meade. As a municipality their net water consumption is close to zero.

It's other municipalities and agricultural ventures that are draining Lake Meade not Las Vegas. Vegas pulls water from Meade, treats it and then returns it back to the reservoir.

If you're going to pick on water wasters Vegas isn't where you want to start. There's plenty of other reasons to pick on Vegas, water isn't one of them.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-water-conservation-grass/

That's the first search result when I searched "Vegas water conversation" it wasn't hard to find.

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How is that possible, due to evaporation?

Elimiating lawns is a great idea, seeing as they live in a massive desert. I approve of that, for everyone who cares.

the famed fountains at the Bellagio Hotel use water from a private well — not the Colorado River. He also said the water that evaporates into the hot desert air is replaced with recycled water from a 1.5 million gallon pool.

so... they just drain groundwater?