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> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.

Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.

[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...

Apparently when there's value to be extracted, everything else can be dismissed.

Reading these kinds of things make my blood boil, and I'm not someone who gets angry.

I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:

- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.

- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.

- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.

- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.

People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."

But that’s already the framing.

A minor source should never lead to deaths or to put it otherwise No deaths = minor source

deaths = major source

Many deaths = majormost source

Now we just need define many but we already know its a major source of pollution that kills people

Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.

> How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

That’s a good question. It seems in this case that 3 to 6 deaths a year qualifies as ‘minor’ for the government. I don’t know where the line should be but, based on the number of people that suffer and die from air pollution related causes in the US each year, I thought that 6 additional deaths probably meant it qualified as minor. I’d be just as interested as you to know what the answer is.

Edit to add: ‘minor’ in this case doesn’t mean people deserve to die or that we should be happy they are suffering, just that compared to some other even worse projects, this one is less important.

It's a price you are willing top pay for other people? What price are they willing to pay?

It's not your price to pay. It's their lives.

You should see the Shrek movie.

Its a reference to the first Shrek movie, where Lord Farquaad (yes, word play on fuckwad) says "Some of you may die... but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"

And this reasoning is exactly how we got here in the first place.

“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”

We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.

I’m not suggesting it is OK or not OK, just that ‘minor source’ of air pollution is probably the right term to use in context for this single site.

On a scale of billions of years, what's an extra death or two?

/s

60 people over a decade dying is not minor. If a school killed two entire classes of kids over their k-12 education, that'd be a shocking amount of death. If a sports team lost 6 players every year we'd shut down the team instantly. Treating 6 deaths as minor is absurd and callous.

It only feels ok because it's so abstractly connected to pollution.

If this data center killed 6 people every year on site due to industrial accidents, we'd almost certainly close it. What Amazon warehouse kills half a dozen people on site every year?

Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.

The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.

For context, a US coal plant on average causes 3 deaths per year due to air quality. If we're not calling a coal plant a major source, wtf would we refer to as a major source?

It doesn't matter that the aggregate air pollution of the entire country far exceeds any individual source, the point of the major/minor distinction is to compare individual sources.