The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288
Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
141–150 of 168 posts
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> additionality Why do people keep adding "ality" to words? "Addition" works fine here: "I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the addition of their clean energy purchases and offsets"
Additionality means "does this purchase of clean/green energy increase the total amount on the grid or does it just take it from other users who are now associated with the emissions of the non-clean energy". Or more broadly "the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not have occurred in the absence of the intervention."
How is that not contemplated in "additional"?
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#143Now imagine how much pollution from the airline industry costs public health ...
According to the paper, the public health cost from data centers is 1/3 of the road transportation emissions of California. The tool they used (https://www.epa.gov/cobra) to calculate the emissions impact doesn’t have aviation emissions.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.
Couldn't we just make donation opt out and solve the problem?
US has the second highest deceased organ donor rate after Spain despite US being opt-in.
https://www.irodat.org/?p=database#data
I worry about a public opinion chaining on switching to opt-out in the US so it has to evaluated carefully.
I'm guessing the US wait time is long because there are a lot of people with failing kidneys due to poorly managed diabetes and high blood pressure. But there are a whole host of auto immune and genetic diseases also.
Now we have better drugs for treating diabetes like Ozempic and SGLT so hopefully that improves the situation for kidney failures caused by diabetes.
I myself had an auto immune disease IgA nephropathy 10 years back but at that time there were hardly any drugs targeting it. I've since was on dialysis and recently got a kidney transplant. But the positive at the same time a half dozen drugs have been approved or under trial to slow down the progression of IgA nephropathy.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#145Now imagine how much pollution from the airline industry costs public health ...
According to the paper, the public health cost from data centers is 1/3 of the road transportation emissions of California. The tool they used ( https://www.epa.gov/cobra ) to calculate the emissions impact doesn’t have aviation emissions.
Following from your model California is responsible for roughly 9.6% of the total road transportation emissions in the U.S > So 1/3rd of that is 3.2% . So road transportation's health cost is roughly 30x higher than datacenters'. Aviation, while extremely polluting (~9%), is also dwarfed by road transport due to the latter's shear volume
Another thing to observe: The paper's claims are based on a McKinsey projection to 2030 that assumes 'a strong decrease of road transport emissions' and a 'surging demand for AI data centers' that 'outweighs power plants emission efficiency improvement'.
Contrast this to today where energy estimates are 2% for datacenters vs. 80% for road transport. Guess what is causing more outweighing of power plant emission efficiency improvement as that fleet of cars, trucks and lorries is electrifying (the reason for McKinsey's reduction projection)?
Now I'm not saying we should let data-centers get a free pass. Pollution is a serious problem. But in terms of priorities, curbing datacenters might not be the number one concern.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Hard to find the original numbers since China, which accounts for ~70% of mining, cracked down in summer of 2021. But according the US Energy Information Administration, crypto mining in 2024 accounted for 0.6% to 2.3% of all US electricity consumption.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
According to the UN, China's share of mining dropped from 73% in 2020 to 21% in 2022. They also state
> The greenhouse gas emissions of Bitcoin mining alone could be sufficient to push global warming beyond the Paris Agreement's goal of holding anthropogenic climate warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
https://unu.edu/press-release/un-study-reveals-hidden-enviro...
In 2024 the percent of global energy usage for crypto mining has dropped to around 2% according to the IMF
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/08/15/carbon-emis...
Someone less lazy than me could probably take some of these statistics to get an estimate of global energy consumed by crypto mining at its peak in 2020
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You haven't said anything that disproves the statement you're quoting. Regardless of intention it's still factual.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You cant make a car not pollute. Even EV pollutes the local neighborhood. Ever notice how tires and the stains on the curbs and the black soot you wipe off the window sills are all the same color? How tires get bald? You are probably breathing tire right now. It is probably getting on your plate of food and you are eating tire.
I feel like this is just making the point.
Originally cars ran on leaded gasoline, which was very bad. But we didn't ban cars, we got unleaded gasoline. Then they were emitting too much in terms of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, so we got low-sulfur fuels and catalytic converters. Then it was brake dust from friction brakes, but now hybrids have regenerative braking. Then it was CO2, so we got electric cars that can be charged purely from the sun -- they can emit less CO2 than most mass transit systems despite the lower passenger density because transit systems regularly use diesel buses or locomotives or run after dusk on electricity generated from coal and natural gas because they don't have internal batteries that can charge exclusively from the sun.
Somebody is going to invent some tires that last for 800,000 miles because they're made of something with such high internal cohesion they never get bald, or erode into something already commonly found in nature, and then people would find something else to complain about. And then someone would solve that too.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Practically speaking, poor people can't just get an electric car .
You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Practically speaking, poor people can't just get an electric car .
You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
> You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000.
With how much life left on its battery before it needs a $10k+ replacement?