Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
More or Less · Does it take 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef? · 2 May 2026
podcast
I'm Charlotte McDonald.
If you spend much time on social media, and we don't necessarily recommend it, then you've probably come across a strange fascination with water consumption.
Mainly, this is people telling you that using AI is terrible for the planet because of how much water it uses.
We've already made a couple of programmes about the numbers in those arguments, and long story short, they probably aren't saying what you think they're saying.
But on the platforms like X, Blue Sky and TikTok, an opportunity to keep an argument going is rarely missed.
And one of the numbers that's been enlisted in that glorious cause concerns the water that's used for a seemingly unrelated pastime, eating beef.
Does it actually take 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef?
This is Mesvin Meekanen, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, and he definitely knows what this 15,000 number means.
It features in scientific papers from the early 2010s that he co-wrote with Arjen Hoekstra, a Dutch professor who pioneered the idea of the water footprint.
The issue is that the water footprint is being used to say that the amount of water beef uses is bad.
And the story explaining what's wrong with that goes back to before the water footprint was developed.
Quick botany lesson.
As they grow, plants absorb water from the soil through their roots.
This is sucked up through the plant to the leaves where it evaporates.
It's a process called transpiration.
This might sound a bit technical, but for the work Tony Allen was doing, the importance of the water required to grow plants was pretty obvious.
In very dry places, water is a precious resource.
The water you use for irrigation is water you can't use for something else, like drinking or sanitation.
This water has a clear environmental cost.
The idea of virtual water was taken on by Arjen Hoekstra and expanded.
Showing 41–60 of 483 · page 3 of 25
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