Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 168 posts

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#121

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

drysine wrote: post #68
scarab92 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, w…

>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.

This is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#122

Post by bombcar »

dpierce9 wrote: post #104
kaonwarb wrote: post #46

This reads as less than useful research to me. E.g.: "The analysis does not account for the purchase of market-based instruments that are meant to represent investments in new renewable energy in the US and that tech companies buy to offset the pollution from their electricity consumption. ... 'Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,…

Without agreeing with the paper’s general point, imagine a coal plant that emits particles which cause asthma within a 25 mile radius of the plant that also buys legit offsets for all the carbon they emit. They aren’t buying offsets for the local harms.

Something else has to be added, or you could just have coal plants perpetually moving around and buying credits by shutting down the previous one.

Now if they offset by buying scrubbers that cleaned similar particulates elsewhere in the world you'd have a "average stayed the same" but the problem moved.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#123

Post by bombcar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #117
gruez wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.

Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#124

Post by gruez »

callc wrote: post #115
gruez wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Every bit counts.

"every bit" also costs political capital. Making any sort of change is going to cause a stir, and if you're going to cause a political shitshow, you might as well get good returns for it. Causing a political shitshow, but only making a modest impact is the worst outcome. Just look at the pasty tax in the UK[1]. The government proposed a change to the VAT rules that would have made a minimal fiscal impact, but generated so much flak that they were forced to back down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty_tax#Aftermath

>start with the things with outsized effects with simple alternatives.

The examples you gave all cause disproportionate harm to a small group, which will raise a stink to their local representative, especially if they're being singled out.

An across the board carbon tax avoids both these problems.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#125

Post by bombcar »

scarab92 wrote: post #72
tbrownaw wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

The media A/B tests headlines to see what generates the most clicks. The journalists then learn what their audience responds to and creates narratives around that. The result is the reality and the narrative often differ dramatically. "News" is just "Reality TV" but in text format.

As an aside I've noticed this in real time on Youtube - titles of videos just released changing before my eyes.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#126

Post by bombcar »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #59
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reads veiled de-development. > If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive. That reads like veiled de-development. How do you reconcile saying both those things?

De-development is saying we have to e.g. stop driving cars. Regulations that make dirty power more expensive are the likes of a carbon tax, which you can avoid while still having a car by getting an electric car and charging it from solar panels.

The cars is a perfect example. Many people who want there to be much fewer car miles in toto will argue they're polluting, but will also not want anything that makes them not polluting - because they're not actually arguing for pollution reduction, they're arguing against the car.

Same with this, I feel. It's not anti-pollution, it's anti-AI.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#127

Post by bombcar »

SilasX wrote: post #93
rat87 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article you linked > We’re all for saving lives—we aren’t saying that we should stop self-driving cars so we can preserve a source of organ donation. But we also need to start thinking now about how to address this coming problem.

It doesn’t matter how much they try to walk it back and not sound so criminally insane. Refer again to my second paragraph: The issue is, would the author ever think of writing this article for any other instance of saving lives ? If not, then it’s a case of selective focus, the same problem in this submission. I mean, why not just say the organ shortage is bad, without pointing the finger at the latest hip, hot butt…

You could also use some other way of looking at the problem instead of "lives". For example, from some morbidly accounted points of view, reducing deaths of able-bodied young people by incidentally increasing deaths of older, organ-needing people results in more "able-bodied life years" saved or something.

Of course, down this path too far and you start looking at prisoners and death sentences and organ harvesting, which I think most people would agree ain't right.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#128

Post by gruez »

bombcar wrote: post #123
mschuster91 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement. Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.

>The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.

The problem is that's basically entirely based on vibes. For crypto opponents it's justified by crypto not doing anything that the traditional finance system can't do, and for AI opponents it's justified by AI only being able to rehash soulless copypasta while stealing jobs. As a result the whole argument just becomes a roundabout way of arguing "[technology] sucks".

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#129

Post by margalabargala »

dmoy wrote: post #38
margalabargala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell us more about the death count from solar. Is it all people falling off roofs?

Pretty much yea. So not exactly a fair comparison because e.g. grid level solar doesn't necessarily involve roof climbing. But given current installation base, it's like 3x more deaths per unit energy than wind.

Got a source for that?

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#130

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

culi wrote: post #106
kaonwarb wrote: post #46

This reads as less than useful research to me. E.g.: "The analysis does not account for the purchase of market-based instruments that are meant to represent investments in new renewable energy in the US and that tech companies buy to offset the pollution from their electricity consumption. ... 'Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,…

Oh c'mon are we still buying into the carbon offset greenwashing bullshit. There research that it's mostly a big fraud is piling up at this point. Can we stop gurgling on corporate misinformation

I'm skeptical of carbon offsets for direct polluters. But the idea that Big Tech data centers "costs US public health $5.4bn" comes mostly from the precise inverse of carbon offsets, where a prorated share of the local electric company's emissions is imputed to them. Presumably big tech would be just as happy if the local grid were 100% renewable, and the article quotes Google at least saying they actively try to use clean energy when it's available.
Post reply on HN