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by King-Aaron 296 days ago
I find it interesting that people go to such great lengths to come up with anti-environmental positions, even when the issue they're talking about it overwhelmingly obvious without doing deep research into it.

Even without pawing over the exact numbers, having a cursory understanding of how a datacentre works should highlight to you that excessive water consumption is going to be a problem. I couldn't imagine writing essays to try and argue against that in the first place. And to be an order of magnitude wrong in your position... sheeesh.
2 comments
sitkack 296 days ago
Not only that, but the guy is clearly out of his element, but makes a big smart looking report and this wrong by a factor of 10.

Ground water is not fungible economic value. When its gone it is gone because the aquifers collapse. The CA central valley dropped 9M from 1925 to 1977 [1]

The space the water was in, is gone. Datacenters pumping groundwater will do the same exact thing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jby06/this_is_the_im...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x

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wnc3141 296 days ago
I think its important to ask: we will have to tackle water scarcity, but for what end? how many and who benefits and what compromises will be necessary?

This is true when examining the environmental impact of anything.

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