NYC – Climate Week NYC started on Sunday September 20 through Sunday September 27 when the U.N. was in session. To punctuate the importance of addressing the climate emergency a Nor-easter slammed into NYC starting Friday September 25. AI and data centers’ impacts on the environment was a hot topic during the week.
Data Center proposals are exploding in Virginia especially in rural areas. Google is in the process of planning to put a hyperscale AI data center campus in Botetourt County where FOIA reports that their plants may require between 2 million to 10 million gallons of water per day from Carvin’s Cove, our region’s reservoir for Botetourt, Roanoke City, Roanoke County and the Town of Vinton. There has been strong community opposition in response to the lack of transparency and unanswered questions that the public has.
On Wednesday September 26, Climate Families united with Rise and Resist to protest in front of Google’s headquarters in NYC as part of the UnPlug AI actions happening during Climate Week. It was a good diverse turn out. From children to senior citizens and people from many different ethnicities.
An elementary school teacher talked about the importance for children to avoid using AI because they need to exercise their cognitive abilities. She explained how children are being taught to use minus ai (-ai) when they do Google searches to prevent the AI overview from being triggered. She encourages everyone to turn off Google AI during their searches because it uses extreme amounts of energy that raises people’s electricity bills and ruins our water supply.
The youth are angry and frustrated about not moving faster to stop the climate crisis from getting worse. The Sunrise NYC Movement interrupted panelists at the Nest Campus who were either actively involved in building fossil fuel infrastructure or were trying to “greenwash” their business to make it look like they were reducing greenhouse gas emissions when they were implementing projects that would release even more emissions at another site. Here’s a link to one of the protests with an interview about why they were protesting JP Morgan: https://tinyurl.com/SunriseNYCNestCampus and Indivisible Virginia video: https://tinyurl.com/SunriseNYCInterview
A coalition of organizations launched a Data Center Policy Guide to help communities who have concerns about a proposed data center: https://tinyurl.com/DataCenterPolicyGuide. The organizations included Public Citizen, We Build Progress, Climate XChange, Friends of the Earth, the Model Climate Laws Initiative, Rooted Futures Lab, Run on Climate, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice. It provides the information for communities to demand transparency from their local and state governments while providing them information to be able to ask the right questions.
The number one obstacle an AI data center developer said was in their way for success is the time it takes to satisfy regulations to get the permits they need. The few regulations that are in place in Virginia are there to protect our economy and environment.
During the week several tech and finance companies tried to make convincing cases at their sessions that they needed to scale up AI data centers in order to solve the climate crisis. They claimed that they could use methane gas for around a decade to power the hyperscale data centers and then transition in time to make their 2050 emission goals.
The recent new UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) report Limiting Overshoot was blunt that the world is in the midst of the climate crisis that the 2015 Paris Agreement tried to prevent. Previous pleas for world powers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent climate catastrophes were ignored and the latest assessments reveal that it is too late because the catastrophes are increasing in intensity and frequency. Civilization must brace for impact while working to reduce further harm.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Anderson explained what we’re witnessing when we watch the evening news that “there are no good outcomes above 1.5° C,” and that “extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and sea-level rise will intensify.” The director also stated that “human health, food and water security, cities, and infrastructure will come under increasing strain,… some losses will be irreversible even if global temperatures eventually decline.”
The bottom line is stop building out fossil fuel infrastructure that increases extreme weather events and transition immediately to sustainable, renewable energy sources. Or face more intense and frequent catastrophes.
There have been some promising developments that may provide a model for the future of data centers. Infomaniak, a Swiss company built its D4 data center in Geneva to run completely on renewable energy. It’s buried underground and captures the heat generated from the data center to deliver heat and hot water to over 6,000 homes.
Future generations deserve our determination and commitment to protect our land, water and intellectual property from being exploited and ruined.
