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Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
111–120 of 168 posts
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some reports say carbon offsets suffer from widespread fraud [1] - if you emit pollution, pay someone to 'protect the rainforest' and they 'protect' some rainforest that wasn't at risk anyway? Your emissions haven't actually been offset. Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's sti…
Where do you get the 1.6% figure from? It's not mentioned anywhere in the attached link. Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year so 1.6 seems exceedingly low
>Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year
Where are you getting that from?
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent. If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 pp…
The marginal health impact of 1 ppm (of what?) may not be the same across all concentrations, not least because of adaptive behaviors: avoiding outside exercise, using air filters.
But in general I agree that you should be able to look at tradeoffs of a set of actions and allow of the possibility that some negatives are offset by positives.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#114"Air pollution derived from the huge amounts of energy needed to run data centres has been linked to treating cancers, asthma and other related issues, according to research from UC Riverside and Caltech."
"The academics estimated that the cost of treating illnesses connected to this pollution was valued at $1.5bn in 2023, up 20 per cent from a year earlier. They found that the overall cost was $5.4bn since 2019."
Note that pollution is not defined in the article.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or superfluous private jet usage by executives “super commuting” between states …
For all the flak that CEOs and taylor swift gets, their contribution to global warming is a drop in a bucket (percentage of aviation emissions that can be attributed to private jets), of a bucket that's being dumped in the ocean (percentage of global warming that can be attributed to aviation). They produce outsized emissions on a personal basis, but there's also so few jets relative to commercial airlines that banni…
Every bit counts. And to make a dent, start with the things with outsized effects with simple alternatives.
It’s easy to make laws about it:
- private jets/charters: only allowed if have enough passengers (calculate the CO2/person)
- old cars - illegal if don’t pass emissions check
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent. If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 pp…
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
Not exactly. The other place might have people die from poverty, illnesses and godknowswhat much earlier so the effect of pollution shifting doesn't manifest itself or even gets masked off by rising life expectancies in general - that's the dirty secret behind the move of dirty and toxic productions to Asia.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development. Hard to tell if they're singling out AI because it's the current hot thing that everyone's talking about (and afraid of being replaced by), or if they're singling out "big tech" because they're rich and cool to hate on.
Probably the latter. A few years ago the same argument was being trotted out for crypto mining.
And with good reason - some particularly enterprising miners revived a coal power plant of all things. Other meme coins wasted insane amounts of HDDs and SSDs. I'm glad it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum that are left over these days.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent. If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 pp…
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has global impact]:
1) If place A has 10 ppm and place B has 10 ppm, then nobody is sick
2) If place A has 15 ppm and place B has 5 ppm, then people in place A are sick
Public policy generally doesn't work well with averages and similar analyses, because outcomes are usually discrete for each individual; it's not a stew where you can mix outcomes together and get something good.
As another example, if the economy results in one person making $1 billion and 999,999 making nothing, the average is $1 million per person - but what does that mean? 999,999 people are still in dire poverty. (It does have some significance, for things society does collectively - fund police and fire, and even help for poor people.)
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#119Sounds to me like the real criticism is dirty electricity generation.
Everyone needs a pollution tax, hardly anyone wants one
Everyone pays it, but the distribution of costs depends on nature and not on rational policy. It also depends on having the wealth to avoid certain costs, e.g., by leaving dangerous areas.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#120We should be building far more nuclear. We wildly overengineered on safety regulations making them far more costly and risky to build than they actually need to be. Even our older Gen II nuclear reactors from the 1990's are orders of magnitude safer than current fossil fuel power stations, in terms of both released radiation and lost human lifespan years. Moreover, the higher electricity prices that resulted from usi…
How about we build this stuff in deserts where you can just plaster everything with solar in like 10% of time and 30% of money investment. You now have 70% of budget to build battery/wind and still got enough time. This is solved with current renewable prices without ideological preferences.
No thank you. Build it in your backyard, not mine.