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If we really think that we will solve our ongoing environmental collapse through sad showers and paper straws, we are in trouble.

Donald Trump is correct about shower heads.

Well, anyway, on the one hand. Poor water pressure can be very frustrating. One of the purest pleasures in the world is to rinse under a powerful tap. However, in the vast ocean of life insults, this insignificant biological comfort needs water, and now humans are consuming a lot of water, so we citizens must do our part to protect the remaining water. This is why in 1992, the Department of Energy limited the amount of water that American shower heads can splash to 2.5 gallons per minute. In 2013, with the proliferation of multiple shower head installations, the Obama administration updated the rules: The restriction now applies to the total output of all nozzle combinations. However, a few years later, Trump felt an opportunity for a culture war. His colleagues at the Department of Energy canceled the standard, and the big man ranted from the presidential podium about the effect of low water pressure on his large, beautiful hair.

Although Trump’s view of the hellscape of decompression is a bit like his argument that after their throne was allegedly castrated by environmentalist lunatics, “people are flushing the toilet ten times, fifteen times”—but he Indeed, on the level of his familiar intuition, he stumbled to discover the truth: If you are really interested in reducing the amount of water our civilization consumes, then sad showers are not the real way. In the context of global water consumption, there is not much difference between flushing the toilet twice. (If there is a severe drought in your area, the calculation method is different.) When it comes to our water problem, this is a side dish in the King's Feast. A 2018 study based on 2015 data from the U.S. Geological Survey determined that the average American uses 82 gallons of water per day, or only 30,000 gallons of water per year. This is nothing, but it is not much in the plan of things.

This article was published in the Esquire subscribe Winter 2021 issue

Here is a question: How much fresh water consumption do we have each year that can be attributed to individual households? The U.S. Geological Survey found that 12% of the water used in the United States is used for “public water supply”, and not all of it is used for residential water. Almost all the rest is used for agriculture, industry and power generation, although the water flowing to the latter can usually be reused. As for irrigation, we are talking about a wide range of projects, from the obvious necessity-such as lettuce-to the concept that we should grow alfalfa, which is one of the most water-consuming crops in the California desert. The Biden administration restored the Obama nozzle standard, and Kelly Spiks-Buckman, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Department of Energy, provided reasons. "As many parts of the United States have experienced historic droughts, this common-sense proposal means that consumers can buy water-saving shower heads and save them on utility bills." Okay, but we also stop eating almonds. Sample? One acre of these trees drink 1.3 million gallons of water each year. However, some people have become very rich by selling almond milk, so you should only choose the second one.

The same story, in which the protection efforts of our civilization are recycled as personal responsibility, has been repeated. There was a time when plastic straws became the incarnation of the devil. Vinny Chase from Entourage tells you that the only thing worth doing is to use a piece of paper. It will melt in your iced coffee and make the whole thing terrible. Anything else is equivalent to inserting a plastic funnel into the turtle’s nose yourself. At the same time, most of the plastic in the ocean does not come from personal consumption. A study by Greenpeace found that 70% of this - such as on the notorious Pacific garbage continent - came from discarded commercial fishing equipment. Do you think sea turtles have a straw problem? Try the net.

Of course, I want to put a hat on the shower head. But maybe the FBI can also have a dialogue with Nestlé.

It feels like this is indeed part of a larger effort to shift the burden of protection away from huge corporate and government entities that are exacerbating most of these problems and placing them on individuals. For the Washington type, this is very convenient, which constitutes taking action, not taking action, not taking action, and lobbyists are familiar faces in the city. (Where are the lobbyists for Big Showerhead? Lazy!) It also takes advantage of our natural and understandable desire for control and the admirable impulse for most of us to feel like we are doing something.

Each of us should do our part! Of course, we should not deliberately waste water at home, nor should we spend our entire life on consuming disposable plastic. Maybe we can reduce lawn care in Arizona. But this cannot be at the expense of confronting large, reachable organizations that have a huge impact. Yes, these companies often provide goods and services that individuals need, but we can only try to avoid wasting electricity at home. We often cannot choose whether the energy comes from coal or wind turbines.

So, I thought, put a hat on the shower head. But maybe the FBI can also talk to Nestlé about how much California water it has absorbed in order to sell it back to those who first strongly demanded collective ownership of the water. The response to the current interconnected environmental decline due to the activities of human civilization cannot just be individual sacrifices, and corporate profits—and the Pentagon’s imperial appetite—are not challenged. If the larger entity is not held accountable, nothing ordinary people give up in their lives will have no impact. It turns each of these sacrifices into another insult. The Environmental Protection Agency has published a complete list of water-saving measures for individual households, including turning off the tap when brushing teeth, which the agency estimates can save eight gallons of water a day. Okay, okay, but really? Just like our debate around the existence of billionaires, we are here to suffer from such an astonishing difference in scale that is innumerable and difficult for human thought to grasp.

Therefore, before we spread the offerings a bit, if you think this is a good time, please continue to take a long bath. If you won't, I won't tell you.