I really don't disagree that the agriculture industry has pollution problems they need to address. It's just also true that one of the environmental problems data centers can cause is making existing problems with water quality much much worse. That's also a major problem. Maybe Amazon knew about it before they built their data center. Maybe they didn't. Each community where data centers pop up gives us more information about the harms they cause, but we're learning those lessons the hard way. It's smart that NY and other places are being cautious. The fact that we have plenty of other environmental problems to deal with makes it all the more important that we're careful about introducing new ones.
Amazon can just mix in more water post cooling and then by your metric the problem would be solved. They can just rely on dilution like the farmers do.
Or we can use our brain and actually hold the right people accountable.
I'm finding it interesting to reason about this subject, not being a geologist and what not. It seems that there is a relatively stable rate at which the farms output nitrates regardless of how much water Amazon pumps from the aquifer. The issue RollingStone seems to have identified is that as Amazon pulls more water, it effectively concentrates the solutes by evaporating some of the water. As a result, less water going into wastewater treatment, so the pollutants are more highly concentrated. But the total amount of contaminants is unchanged, right? Unless Amazon's water consumption somehow increases the solutes output by the farms. Not sure how that would work, but it doesn't seem impossible.
Do you two think I've framed this issue correctly?
It also drastically accelerated the rate that those nitrates entered the aquifer. Amazon pulled in and spit out tens of millions of gallons of water which forced the nitrates deeper and deeper into the earth until they contaminated the water source. Then amazon was pulling in contaminated water, concentrating the nitrates, and then spitting that out too pushing that even more polluted water into the earth.
The total amount of nitrates is basically the same. Where those nitrates ended up and at what concentrations is what changed once amazon came into the picture. People had clean drinkable water before amazon's data center. They'd have had to deal with the soil contamination eventually, but by forcing the pollution into their clean water supply and increasing the concentration of it amazon's data center made their water undrinkable.