[WarmWash]

It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.

People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting.

Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.

[nancyminusone]

I can assure you that people protesting the the one near where I live barely know or care about AI, but they know something is up when a giant evil fuckass building shows up seemingly overnight. Who knows what sort of horrible things are going on inside, it's not like you'll be allowed in to check. The only connection to AI is that the AI companies placed the order for it.

My town also protested when Walmart decided they wanted to install one of their mega shopping centers here. A big building means someone has too much money, and its only a matter of time until they use it against YOU.

[j_w]

> It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress.

Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.

[autoexec]

> People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis.

Turns out you you don't have to reach very far at all

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...

https://news.asu.edu/20260518-environment-and-sustainability...

We already know that that data centers impact the environment in many ways and can be harmful for the water, air, and the health of the people around them. It's the dose that makes the poison though and so the push for more and more data centers increase the harms.

[WarmWash]

Did you read these or did you just post them to illustrate my point? Like the only real datacenter centric point made in all three is that you can detect air being a couple degrees warmer within 1,700ft of a datacenter.

The rollingstone article is crazy, because it's actually just about agricultural runoff which is poisoning a well Amazon uses for cooling.

My point here isn't that datacenters have zero impact, my point is that if people actually cared about any of these things, datacenters are way down on the list of causes. Unless I suppose you live within 1,700 ft of one.

[autoexec]

> The rollingstone article is crazy, because it's actually just about agricultural runoff which is poisoning a well Amazon uses for cooling.

Did you actually read that article? The issue isn't that amazon is the source of the nitrates, the problem is that the data center is concentrating them and pushing them into the aquifer. Saying that the data center isn't responsible is like arguing that desalination plants don't cause pollution because the brine came from the ocean.

When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold before it leaks all the way through the dirt, polluting the aquifer below. “The aquifer is basically one giant sandbox, and the water flows through there very quickly,” says Chad Gubala, a hydrologist who managed Oregon DEQ’s oversight of the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit from 2018 to 2022. Once the crops have absorbed what they can, the rest of the nitrates “get flushed right through [to the basin].”

Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.” ...

As the underground aquifer became tainted with more nitrates, even the ostensibly clean water that the Port pulled from the aquifer’s deepest wells — which it used to service its large industrial customers like Amazon — became polluted. Soon, Amazon was using water to cool its data warehouses with nitrates as high as 13 ppm — above the federal and state limits.

When that tainted water moves through the data centers to absorb heat from the server systems, some of the water is evaporated, but the nitrates remain, increasing the concentration. That means that when the polluted water has moved through the data centers and back into the wastewater system, it’s even more contaminated, sometimes averaging as high as 56 ppm, eight times Oregon’s safety limit.

[WarmWash]

I don't see how you can make the case that Amazon is responsible for cleaning up farmer's waste...

The water utility and the farmers need to solve the problem, not Amazon. If the farmers are dumping shit in water, they can pay to remove it.

The whole article is the bad faith desperate reaching I'm talking about. What's the takeaway? "Datacenters are bad because they make it harder for polluters to dilute/hide their pollution levels"?

Don't get yourself in a knot trying to defend this, because like I said, it's incredibly shaky and bad faith compared to "AI is going to take jobs and I don't want to be destitute"

[autoexec]

> If the farmers are dumping shit in water, they can pay to remove it.

Amazon isn't responsible for causing it, they're responsible for having made the existing problem much much worse. Amazon didn't start the fire, but they poured millions of gallons of gasoline all over it and as a direct result that fire spread farther and faster than it would have.

As for who is paying to remove it, Amazon's currently paying out $20.5 million in settlements with the residents. Those whose drinking water is now polluted well above legal limits will get a new source of clean drinking water.

> it's incredibly shaky and bad faith compared to "AI is going to take jobs and I don't want to be destitute"

The environmental harms are measurable and real and happening right now. The idea that AI is going to take our jobs is entirely theoretical. Right now, AI hasn't even managed to successfully take over even extremely basic jobs that children often perform like taking drive thru orders at fast food restaurants. There have been attempts to use AI for such menial tasks, but they have been plagued by embarrassing failures. It's a lot more reasonable to be worried about the environmental harms of AI data centers than AI putting people out of work.

[WarmWash]

>Datacenters are bad because they make it harder for polluters to dilute/hide their pollution levels

[kube-system]

> because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis.

I think most people are aware that computers don't emit pollution directly. It's the externalities that do.

[WarmWash]

So why aren't they protesting meat production, SUV sales, or golf courses?

[kube-system]

1. People do protest these things

2. There is not currently trillions of dollars of investment driving the construction of those projects

3. None of those concerns are currently driving up utility costs in the communities where they exist