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Comment by kaonwarb | Hacker News Reader

This reads as less than useful research to me. E.g.:

"The analysis does not account for the purchase of market-based instruments that are meant to represent investments in new renewable energy in the US and that tech companies buy to offset the pollution from their electricity consumption. ... 'Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,' said Shaolei Ren, associate professor at UC Riverside."

Why not? Does clean air elsewhere not matter for the individuals elsewhere? Where is that "elsewhere?"

My admittedly ungenerous interpretation: factoring this context in would be really hard and would decrease the headline factor of the findings, so... publish without.

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Some reports say carbon offsets suffer from widespread fraud [1] - if you emit pollution, pay someone to 'protect the rainforest' and they 'protect' some rainforest that wasn't at risk anyway? Your emissions haven't actually been offset.

Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's still in the atmosphere.

So putting your data centre right next to a hydroelectric or nuclear power plant is the gold standard.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660256

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

I'm a fan of the general concept of credit-based market systems and for carbon or carbon equivalents it is basically fungible by location.

That's not true for other pollutants though, which is one of the reasons that e.g EVs shifting emissions to powerplants is good because cars are used in dense urban environments where the pollution affects more people.

I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the additionality of their clean energy purchases and offsets. They have the data to refute this if they can do so. I'd guess they can't due to their renewables and other offers being further away from population than these data centres.

> 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"?

Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.

No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent.

If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.

The marginal health impact of 1 ppm (of what?) may not be the same across all concentrations, not least because of adaptive behaviors: avoiding outside exercise, using air filters.

But in general I agree that you should be able to look at tradeoffs of a set of actions and allow of the possibility that some negatives are offset by positives.

> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.

Not exactly. The other place might have people die from poverty, illnesses and godknowswhat much earlier so the effect of pollution shifting doesn't manifest itself or even gets masked off by rising life expectancies in general - that's the dirty secret behind the move of dirty and toxic productions to Asia.

> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.

The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has global impact]:

1) If place A has 10 ppm and place B has 10 ppm, then nobody is sick

2) If place A has 15 ppm and place B has 5 ppm, then people in place A are sick

Public policy generally doesn't work well with averages and similar analyses, because outcomes are usually discrete for each individual; it's not a stew where you can mix outcomes together and get something good.

As another example, if the economy results in one person making $1 billion and 999,999 making nothing, the average is $1 million per person - but what does that mean? 999,999 people are still in dire poverty. (It does have some significance, for things society does collectively - fund police and fire, and even help for poor people.)

Health effects of particulates are approximately linear. So the more particulates the more mortality. There's no threshold below which people are healthy and above which they're sick.

It's actually slightly sub-linear, meaning that an increase for one group and an equal decrease for another group produces slightly less total mortality. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9109601/#gh2329-bib... for some numerically fitted curves (search for GEMM).

> Why not?

If your house had a carbon monoxide leak but your neighbor’s house did not, would you consider your carbon monoxide leak to be “offset” by that fact?

If a mitigating action had decreased CO in my neighbor's house by at least as much as it increased in mine, then potentially yes, a neutral researcher should consider that as an offset at the population health level.

Not sure why we need an analogy, though. How about sticking to standard air pollution, which has direct impact of its own? CO poisoning seems a bit extreme as a comparison.

No, it's not that extreme. If the offset comes from a zone where air quality is already "good enough", no extra lives are saved, so it's still net negative.

One person remains fine, the other is dead. That's a net loss...

Without agreeing with the paper’s general point, imagine a coal plant that emits particles which cause asthma within a 25 mile radius of the plant that also buys legit offsets for all the carbon they emit. They aren’t buying offsets for the local harms.

Something else has to be added, or you could just have coal plants perpetually moving around and buying credits by shutting down the previous one.

Now if they offset by buying scrubbers that cleaned similar particulates elsewhere in the world you'd have a "average stayed the same" but the problem moved.

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 clean energy when it's available.

You haven't said anything that disproves the statement you're quoting. Regardless of intention it's still factual.

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