Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this?
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.
--------
"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"
--------
Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.
So why the fuck are we in the habit of giving companies the benefit of the doubt on this? Companies always follow the financial incentive. There is rarely a financial incentive to not pollute and always a financial incentive to spend less money on costly processes that slow things down, so they’ll pollute every chance they can. It’s just a side effect of how capitalism works.
So yes, if you actually care about your property (including public property in your town!), you absolutely need to push for more oversight. Companies have absolutely zero incentive to do it themselves, as evidenced in this scenario where the town “caught them in the act” so to speak.
And I’m not saying this company was doing anything deliberately malicious, but it takes the town being on top of their wastewater management processes and doing a solid root cause investigation to even find out this was happening. That doesn’t happen unless people care. A company has no incentive to do it themselves.
Because companies pay for lobbyist, give donations, and other perks to politicians. Simple as that ... And companies a a-political, they simply give money to both sides, so who is in power has less effect.
While you the normal voter, only matter a few times, and with increased irrelevant as how powerful your vote is.
The fact that companies can now vote in local elections (in some states, you can guess the states colors), tells you how deep the corruption has gone.
After all, the executives of the company (the important people) know not to swim in that lake (their swimming pools are clean) nor drink the water (as they can drink Perrier bottled water).
Are you going to apply the same standard to every house with a swimming pool, every municipal storm drain that collects rain water having passed over the ground in nature where there are untold strains of bacteria and every other system handling thousands of gallons of unfiltered water?
Otherwise it's an isolated demand for rigor.
You can tell that something has an ulterior motive when the rule or its enforcement special cases the doing of a generic thing only when it's being done by the people being targeted.
All of those are regulated and studied.
> some random sampling of a minuscule proportion of storm water for a minuscule subset of possible contaminants
The whole point of random sampling is to ensure you need as miniscule amount of water as possible. These tests checking likely polutants is also not a bad thing.
Are you claiming these pools are massively poluting water? Or are you just angry that potentially large polutants are not allowed to just do what they want?
They towed it outside the environment.
DCs should be responsible for their output but this seems to be a super edge case.
Effluent and wastewater companies have been getting greedy. If one suddenly 100x's your cost, you're fucked until you build onsite treatment or find a way to ship it out.
Profit over safety all day long