[ForHackernews]

> permitting delays for terrestrial datacentres

"Well, you didn't want a data centre in the field near your town, so instead we'll rain astrocentere debris across the western hemisphere and set off a Kessler syndrome cascade. Thank god we didn't have to wait for a permit."

[ben_w]

I get the point, but if society cared about globally distributed pollution more than about money, we've have transitioned to renewables and EVs a decade or three earlier.

[SiempreViernes]

A lot of bribes have been spent to buy that delay you know, the first global meetings about addressing climate change happened in 1992 and the petrostates have been stalling since then.

[ben_w]

Musk has a lot of money for that, too, if he wanted.

Also, well before then, most of the bigger petrostates got together to create OPEC, raised prices enough to cause an economic crisis and stagflation. I don't doubt that big oil companies have bribed and/or SuperPACed and/or lobbied, but fact was, until the mid 2010s (exact year depending on where you live), renewables were more expensive than oil. Now PV and wind are both cheaper. But before renewables were cheaper they were a very hard sell, while "support oil and coal because power is critical" was a very easy sell.

Right now, space data centres are a hard sell even economically, but given most of the land area of the world isn't the USA, I can easily imagine the US not caring (because even what survives re-entry mostly won't end up in the US), while everyone else can care as much as they like but can't do anything about it (unless I'm right about a completely unrelated topic, which is that we're pretty close to ground-to-orbit laser weapons being viable).