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The specific issue is that because it's a data center, from a company with unlimited money and therefore political power, it's being allowed to skip all the rules about clean generation. The ones in question are building on-side dirty power.

Oh add in the Texas railroad commission just voted to end public participation... they are the regulators that permit natural gas pipelines.

So ya, add that to the corruption.

There's a surge in data centre building - a massive surge of power hungry hungry hyper scaled hippos.

Many local grids are currently unable to meet that demand, therefore various "solutions" so far include:

* buying up jet engines from COVID era bankrupted / downsized air fleets and running them continuously in banks along side data centres to spin generators.

You'll note these aren't the cleanest solution, are a bit noisy, and not renewable.

* building a data centre AND and onsite LNG gas extraction facility to directly on site gas supply and derived electrical power.

This one is expected to be the single largest CO2 source in mainland USofA (or some similar stat, it was recent news).

So these are fossil fuel polluting sources that are directly attached to specific data centres and not being used for non data centre purposes.

So it seems like confirmation that this really is a case of disingenuous conflation of power-generation concerns with data centers per se.

I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers" any more than concerns about, using the same jet engines to power charging stations in remote areas would, for example, amount to "opposition to EVs".

> I don't think it's reasonable to regard concerns about emissions from banks of continuously running jet engines as "opposition to data centers"

Clearly you don't.

For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.

> Clearly you don't.

Obviously, since I'm the one discussing it here. The broader question is whether the people who are conflating them together are doing so out of honest confusion or out of ulterior motives.

> For others, it's opposition to power hungry, polluting, noisy, developments that are concentrating digital power in the hands of a few, raising local heat levels (if topology domes heat), consuming memory and GPU resources to the detriment of the commons.

This seems like a hodgepodge of concerns that are all quite distinct from each other. None of them is necessarily invalid in its own right, but lumping them all together and treating them as irresolvable problems in order to oppose data centers per se -- rather than issues that can and should be mitigated independently of anything related to AI -- seems to be disingenuous.

The people presenting these different concerns are all individuals with their own agendas. You're the person lumping them all into one confusing mass so you don't have to deal with each viewpoint.

When people are assholes across multiple domains they get pushback from each of them. This isn't emergent behavior, it's emergent consequences.

> You're the person lumping them all into one confusing mass so you don't have to deal with each viewpoint.

Rather, I was responding to the comment that did explicitly lump all of these concerns together in a single sentence that was trying to explain and/or justify opposition to AI per se, in a thread that originated from merely discussing how it makes sense to attribute pollution to data centers, without bringing up those other concerns.

> When people are assholes across multiple domains they get pushback from each of them. This isn't emergent behavior, it's emergent consequences.

That's true. But the issues are about neither about people being assholes, nor people giving pushback, but rather addressing legitimate concerns, each within its own domain. The fact that some of the people involved are assholes makes it more likely, not less so, that opposition is originating from emotional rather than objective factors, and makes it more necessary to disentangle the issues from each other and deal with them each appropriately.

Ask the people living near them what their agenda is regarding the different issues they're dealing with.

Which ones? The people living near the thousands of data centers that have already been running for decades, the people living near the sites of proposed data centers that include plans for repurposed jet engines to run continuously to power them, or the people living near the sites of proposed data centers that plan to be powered normally in ways that don't generating any localized pollution?

I'd expect the different issues involved in each of these distinct scenarios to be, well, different. And it doesn't quite make sense that someone living near the proposed site of a normal data center would oppose that project on account of some other project proposal, from someplace else, including something outlandish.

If building a data center essentially necessitates building more fossil fuel plants (and/or indeed comes with its own gas and diesel generators because the grid could not handle the extra load, plus generating their own dirty electricity is cheaper for the megacorp because a corrupt govt allows them to externalize costs), the extra emissions are obviously caused by the data center. No matter whether it could maybe in the future run on renewables instead.

>to my knowledge, computers do not produce any emissions at all.

>is there something more to these arguments that I'm missing?

Yes.

You can't be expected to know everything that comes into play, each person rarely has a very good grasp of the big picture.

Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

> Have you ever smelled the type of acids and toxic gases that need to be handled before you even get computer chips to build computers with?

Yes. These are waste products generated by chip manufacturing, not by using computers that include chips that have already been manufactured elsewhere.

> Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?

Hopefully, they end up neutralized at the site of their production. In the worst case, they may end up creating pollution around the locations where the chips are being manufactured, in which case the chip manufacturers should definitely be held responsible for the externalities they create.

Could you elaborate on how this relates to data centers?

> Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.

And scales not at all in relation to what categories of products are included in that tonnage. This seems to be another instance of cherry-picking a single use case to blame for the externalities of a services that's used by essentially everything else too -- the solution here is to find cleaner ways of fueling cargo ships, just as we need to find cleaner ways of fueling power plants, since it is not reasonable to expect any net reduction in demand for either cargo shipping or for electricity.

> And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.

This should be a strong impetus for expanding clean energy production. There's little point in complaining about any specific application of electricity if it's not meant to advocate for generating more power with less pollution.

There is also the giant "Tax Incentives" being given to these projects under the guise of them being "job creators". Unfortunately, data center's only need a bunch of jobs at the initial construction + installation of hardware. Once it's operational, it'd need about a dozen staff to maintain round-the-clock on premise supervision.

The data centers described incorporate dedicated power generation into their design. The power generation is fossil fuel based and high-pollution, and is being deployed at scale.

> What waste products do data centers output?

Energy production consequences aside, they produce tons of e-waste

Behind the meter power generation is being included on site with the data centers.