This video was one of the very worst MPU has done. It’s entirely focused on farmers in the desert feeling entitled to take as much water from the Colorado River as they’d like to farm in the very most arid place in the country with no competition at all with any industry that also uses water. Their first example is a pecan farmer who demonstrates how he dumps huge amounts of water into the ground and then implies that anyone who’s okay with data centers using water must “know how to eat computer chips” because “there won’t be any food left.” This guy thinks if he has to pay a little more for water to farm in a desert, it’s like saying we shouldn’t have food at all. The video frames him as a hero. They also bring up the offsite water cost of generating electricity as if it’s this secret data centers are hiding by not reporting it in their water use. For any other building that uses water, we usually only expect them to report their internal power and water cost and infer the water cost of the electricity from the power plants. This is all out in the open. They interview a county water manager who says the data center really isn’t an issue and only uses 0.4% of the local water, and then immediately cut to a local activist saying they can’t have enough for the data center because water costs have gone up. These are obviously unrelated, because as the video notes the city’s raised water rates every year for 11 years. I could go on and on, every moment is insane.