Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.
They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.
Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.
Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.
If only.
Chevron’s Gorgon project will be ongoing for decades and making money hand over fist flogging LNG out of Australia to overseas customers.
It'll be a massive source of previously sequestered CO2 and claimed to be "the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet* .. with the minor catch of (re-) stashing away a very very tiny portion of the CO2 released. Something, something, not let it out in the first place?
Still, could be worse, at least they're not planning on fracking the Kimberley.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
The excess deaths and human misery (both that which is increasingly clearly ongoing, and we have to look forward to) are going to be tragic.
That’s overstating it. A couple clarifications.
It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.
2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...
Nice opportunity for the rest of the world, though.
It really wouldn’t hurt if the developers involved tried even a little bit to be good neighbors and to select sites where they’re not going to be a nuisance and net negative to adjacent communities at minimum.
The blatantly extractive, externalizing mindset of this all reminds me of the attitude that mining companies have taken towards Appalachian states for over a century at this point.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.
So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
But hey, line go up!
- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
It's a catch22 problem because nuclear is much slower to build than a data center so there is no demand from the data centers. And the nuclear plant doesn't know the demand will be there in 5 years once with gas soaking up demand. So the build it and they will come strategy is risky. Building infrastructure is like a muscle that gets stronger with repetitions. The cost will only come down once some are built but nobody wants to build at the current high prices. Govt help is needed to kick start it.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
It's very trendy right now to get mad at datacenters, but I'd much rather energy come from natural gas than from an existing coal power plant. (Obviously, renewables would be better than either.)
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
Capitalism is a death cult, AI capitalism doubly so.
I would urge you to stop spreading misinformation about imminent catastrophe unless we reduce emissions. Catastrophe meaning our lives would be even worse in the future than now.
The flip side of course is that gas turbines are in short supply and manufacturers are in no hurry to build out production capacity for what is effectively obsolete technology with a very uncertain future. A lot of the projects being announced may never get delivered for the simple reason that there are long waiting lists for these things.
And there is the notion that related investments might end up under water when the few plants that do get built start struggling economically in ten years or so. These are not very attractive long term investments. The short term interest in securing any capacity at all is overriding this. Of the well over a hundred GW of data centers planned until 2035, probably only less than a 30-40% will actually get built; if not less. Michael Liebreich is predicting only about 35GW will be realized. His estimate is that there simply is no more production capacity that can be committed than that.
It will be interesting to see if this Amazon plant actually gets built. For now Amazon can afford to gamble on this and just write it off if it doesn't work out.
If policy changes in a few years, I expect a lot of these projects to get unceremoniously cancelled when it turns out that they are a combination of under water financially and behind on schedule because of component shortages anyway. Also, it only takes a few failed projects for everyone to get cold feet. Premature closures of new gas plants could happen if renewables get cheap enough. Those are already happening in some places.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
So yes, wind and solar are cheap. Depending on where in Texas you are, gas is cheaper.
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
I can certainly believe that oil and gas pay better bribes, and that this incentivises a certain kind of politician who seem to be over-represented among conservatives in the US. But that doesn't explain the widespread dislike among the conservative end of the general population. Is it just groupthink or Overton Window -nudging using social media? Or is there something more psychological going on? Some kind of disgust reaction?
The reason here is it makes no sense for what they are trying to do. They want to power a DC, the sun sets and wind comes and goes. You would need overcapacity on both and then batteries. Probably something in there with not wanting to connect to the grid.
Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.
Your statements are borderline lies. Texas gets a lot wrong but it is still building out lots of solar and wind but neither of those power and onsite DC very well.
Eg https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.
Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
https://www.selc.org/press-release/naacp-asks-court-for-emer... and the previous link I referenced.
One would think if there is even a suspicion (even if it hasn't been ruled in court yet) about large-scale harmful toxic emissions, the police and relevant authorities would at least quickly do some samples or what not, to figure out if they need to put an immediate stop to it until the courts ruled either way.
But seemingly it's still ongoing and no harm no foul?
No need—the current ones are uploaded directly into my mailbox regularly by Randy Weber, my district rep.
Please share your sources saying it's not getting worse.
It simply repeats the claim that sea level rises, things get hotter and so on. Its a good rhetorical move because it doesn't quantify the impact it has on us (deaths or economic).
An example,
>widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people
Ok. How many deaths? What impact? Any metric? Couldn't they have simply said something like "X number of people are going to die.."? Or something like "people are going to become X poorer"?
They don't because other studies did it and came to the conclusion that GDP still rises.
Since you seem to be able to easily quantify it, would you be able to bet on the fact that our life expectancy reduce and we would get poorer if emissions don't reduce? And would you bet that this (above) is the mainstream idea? And would you be able to show some sources? Here's mine:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...
Edit, can't reply
>Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
This my problem with y'all. What pray tell me is the objective measure? Life expectancy? HDI? Literacy? All are going to go up. The main issue is that you will never accept an objective measure and dance to the tunes of anyone who says what you want because ultimately it is unfalsifiable.
Come up with few metrics. Convince yourself that these metrics are important. And then show me that it will get worse. I hope you agree that life expectancy is a fundamental one.
> https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
Oh maaan. Notice how this document doesn't show aggregate numbers? Its the exact failure mode I was criticising. They only show the climate related deaths. But what about the climate related lives saved? What about general prosperity increasing in the world?
It would be easy to dismantle my argument by showing that aggregate life expectancy is reducing and that people are getting poorer and people are more unhealthy. But you can't do that. Because that's not the truth.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Spain and France this year, Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
Rivers in Europe are at an all-time low [5], nuclear power plants need to shut down because they can't be cooled anymore. [6]
It takes deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the obvious.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
[5] https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-cope...
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...
If one is trying to attack the threat you claim, one might ban all internet capable inverters.
To ban all, even fully offline ones, means the threat you describe is an excuse.
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
There’s around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California for a total water usage of 1,625,000*1,000,000=1.625×10¹² gallons (or 5 million acre-feet) per year.
365 million gallons of water per year for one data center is 1000 acre feet of water. California’s alfalfa crop uses as much water as 5,000 of these data centers.
Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.
The reason these DC use so much water is because it uses less electricity to evaporatively cool than it takes to cool with a heat pump.
You are trading water scarcity for energy scarcity.
In my personal opinion, the right tradeoff is more electricity. Also IMO, these DCs should be required to build out solar + battery + wind offset plants which supply their energy either directly or indirectly by selling to the grid operator at a discounted rate. If you want 40MW of power, you need to deploy 40MW of solar (not peak, but yearly average output) and a 400MWh battery plus all the grid hookups required.
The end result for residence should be lower energy bills, not higher bills.
What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.
Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.
More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.
The first two charts are for GDP, which correlates pretty well with geopolitical power. Moreover if we're going by population, wouldn't that imply India, and then later Africa are going to be superpowers?
Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...
There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.
If Canada was a US state it would rank around 4th or 5th in terms of economic size and power. There's a lot of doomerism, but I seriously doubt the US is going to lose its top 4 or 5 economies in the next 50 years.
If you want to go really doomer, then I think it's actually more likely that Canada would become a US state instead of the US economy shrinking to the size of Canada.
But this is all nonsense talk anyway.
The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.
It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.
This is about not having to connect to the grid and to guarantee the dc can get running soon.
Conventionally, a continent isn't a superpower. A country is.
Do you really believe, that the way humans are using resources and polluting everything, doesn't have any negative impact?
And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, since it does not include any environmental costs (if I don't need to correctly dispose of my trash and can burn it cheaper, I have an economic advantage in the way of less costs)?
And your OECD study: doesn't it specifically talk about economic impact if climate change measures ARE being implemented (especially emission reductions)? This of course makes sense, as this would imply massive investments in technologies and sectors. This source specifically does not make a case for climate change being not as bad as predicted or that it doesn't take place.
Looking at the current state of the world (especially ecosystems, which are extremely important for us), I really wonder how someone can make an argument, that it isn't as bad as it is made out to be. It is often way worse, as many things aren't really talked about in the open.
That's anthropomorphizing. The ecosystem cannot be stressed because it has no natural/good state.
> And why the hell would the GDP be ANY good measurement, since it does not include any environmental costs (if I don't need to correctly dispose of my trash and can burn it cheaper, I have an economic advantage in the way of less costs)?
Because people predict life will eventually get worse. Your scenario is why people are making bad long term decisions (according to you) but the reason it's a bad long term choice is because it's supposed to lead to bad outcomes for humanity. GDP is a pretty decent measure of quality of life.
If the climate gets worse but quality of life gets better, it's not quite the catastrophe that's often claimed.
Not OP but that's the point being made.
Essentially you're both talking about different things. you're saying the environment will be worse and OP is saying we'll be better off.
You're also saying a worse environment will make us worse of but not backing that up with data. OP is. That data might be bad but I haven't seen you say anything that would make me doubt it but the OECD has overseen a period of immense improvement of all the measures OP is talking about.
OPs argument is that climate change might kill a billion people but the energy used that creates that climate change created two billion people with better lives.
A simple Google search brings up: https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
A couple of excerpts from the front page, without even registering to access the full report:
1.1.5 Heat-related mortality
Failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge 23% since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year.
1.2.1 Wildfires
The risk of wildfires is growing: 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5)
Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
That's just uncritical thinking.
The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks - not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet
1. Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
2. What's it going to be like when Europe is so squeezed by China that the likes of Volkswagen are going out of business (happening now.)
I would find these two things literally existential. But I think these are hard questions to tackle or even ponder it's easier to shit on America instead as a feel-good distraction.
What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
If you are not a moronic racist, #1 is a non-issue.
As for #2, Volkswagen is far from going out of business. In any case, trade with China can be adjusted with adequate policy, EU as a trade block can handle it just fine.
As an European, I see the US as an actual existential threat to Europe. China is just a trade partner with some clashing trade interests.
I didn’t expect having to read great replacement bullshit on Hacker News. JFC do some napkin math, it’s utter nonsense.
It's tough being here and feeling powerless to stop it. Beyond voting, campaign donations, judicious choice of employment, etc.
Anyhow, you're welcome back should you change your mind. In my book, anyway.
You guys are the meekest sheep to ever been led astray by a howling, undisguised wolf.
What more does this regime have to do to warrant massive, historic, disruptive, non-peaceful protests in the USA?
Have you seen protests in France? Bringing the country to a halt is the least you have to do in order for us to ever have faith in the USA again.
Until then, nothing any US citizen can say online will do anything to restore trust. If you're not rioting, you're complicit. It's as simple as that.
Going back to the original rule the point is to not have endless meta discussions. I am skirting it imo but I included rationale for my argument.
But instead of continuing a meta discussion the better option for someone like you would be to downvote it.
> What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
European countries take great care in maintaining and strengthening their traditions and cultural heritage. That would be at risk. Now, whether or not that actually matters or not is debatable, but Europeans DO seem to care to keep their cultures and traditions alive.
fuck off.
