Original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1uyyywv/comment/oy3cgd7/
Trees vs. Data Centers
Photo 1: Memphis, TN (top)
Photo 2: Sandston, VA
Photo 3: Abilene, Texas
Photo 4: New Albany, OH
Photo 5: Fayetteville, GA
This is violence against the bulk of humanity
You took this from Reddit’s r/interestingasfuck and posted it to c/mildlyinteresting? Clearly neither is a good fit because this isn’t interesting at all.
Makes me sad
Looks like they cleared the area with agent orange 😌
Using the data centers when you posted this, classic sign of these times
There is no greater threat to humanity, than humanity itself. There is so much evidence of this throughout history, and yet we have collectively learnt nothing from it. As a species, we are the most destructive force in existence, and time and time again the value of the almighty dollar, that we ourselves have created, is put first above all else. Even the existence of the only known planet that we can successively survive on, is put behind the priority of the dollar.
On the plus side, at least there’s no bloody rain in Melbourne this weekend!
Sorry shady, I meant trees causing shade
You can do the same with solar panel farms, orphanages, hospitals, community owned grocery stores, or any number of things that you would be happy with being built. Things need space to be built on. More at 8.
Yeah I’m gonna defend this
lmao what a clown. There’s plenty of abandoned stores in every city and empty lots. You don’t have to go tear up mother nature when we don’t even use the land we already have.
Things need space to be built, but all of those other things you mentioned have value. It’s upsetting to cut down a shitload of trees for something that is going to be useless in 3 years when the AI bubble pops.
Nothing mild about this
This is not mild. This is infuriating.
I don’t like AI data centres, but try to get photos of the same month/season to make this point.
Not all development that removes trees are created equally, just saying. If it’s a new interstate power transmission line, solar or wind farm, new non-market housing, passenger rail line, it would be better than a data centre, ICE concentration camp, oil pipeline, intensive agriculture, etc. The end use matters more to weigh against, than saying clearing trees is never worth it as a blanket statement. If it is worth developing, officials have to weigh the importance the forest as a natural habitat compared to natural bogs, lakes and meadows as alternatives, to maintain biome diversity.
Controversial opinion: this is not the problem of the data centers, but the missing laws protecting the land containing a forest. Currently data centers are trendy, but they would also have made room for a regular factory. Now think about how much forest gets deforested in total, not just by data centers, each year.
Your argument is the difference between reactive and proactive legislation, and it’s what we need to do to actually succeed. We are constantly on the back foot because we are trying to stop one problem at a time, i.e. Data Center deforestation. Data Centers are a problem, but not the problem. Destruction of natural, irreplaceable resources is the real problem. Sure, it would be great to stop all data centers from ever being built, but then something else will just take its place. We need to protect our resources first, then it won’t matter what they want to build because they won’t be able to. Getting mad about data centers is good, we should be mad, but let’s make that anger work for us in the best way.
The caveat is that a lot of these protections can just be stripped away by whoever is in the oval office, as we’ve seen with this administration. When they don’t give a damn about poll numbers, they just do whatever they want with impunity. That’s why these need to be written into state constitutions and not just statutes, things that a Washington signature can’t undo. They need to be guarded in land trusts and conservation easements. Put too many stops between the bastards and their prize.
This in exchange for something that just invented nonsense words and inserted them into my science presentation?
Not even solar panels on the roofs.
Ah yes Elon savior of the environment…
The roof might be used for cooling, which is probably be a better use of space for a datacenter roof.
There’s all this talk of solar-powered space-based orbital data centers , but they can’t be bothered to put up cheaper, simpler, grid-relieving ground-based solar, on the real estate they’ve already got, when that would start producing some juice like right now? How does this make any sense?
Because solar on the roof won’t even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.
It’s just that somehow if they get to go to space, they decide they suddenly just need like two servers in a ‘datacenter’ instead of thousands. And they need to go to space because Elon says (checks notes) that it’s too hard to make more natural gas turbine parts…
Just like vaccines, some things need to be done in scale to reach their true effectiveness.
That one facility will always be as net negative for the grid. But with panels on all the other buildings in the area that aren’t a power sap, it would be significantly better.
We’re getting to the point where roof top solar is relatively cheap and worth the effort. I mean, there’s fucking fields near me that they clear cut and put ground based solar panels on, and it was profitable enough for the farmers to lease the land, and the company that owns the panels to get their nut. And a lot of those field based panel arrays are equivalent to, if not smaller than the massive Amazon warehouses we have nearby.
If large corporations pay their fucking taxes and did their fair share of infrastructure investment we wouldn’t even be having a conversation about global warming or about where we’re going to get energy for fucking stupid worthless data centers. The energy is in the fucking sky it’s free goddamn giant nuclear reactor you just need to put panels on top of shit to harvest it.
Because solar on the roof won’t even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.
But (as I’m sure you realize) this would mean every watt from on-premises solar could get put to use immediately, no batteries, no power-grid buy-back schemes. Making those solar panels an unusually good investment.
Unless they’re not planning to keep it running for very long.
It smells un-serious, somehow.
Even if it’s nowhere near a majority of the power, I’m surprised passive cooling from solar plus some electricity isn’t worthwhile enough to be universal. It’s a small impact, but also cheap enough it’ll pay for itself, and many orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to get a datacenter into space, and figure out how to cool it
VC money
As long as they continue to spout pie-in-the-sky for-realsies gonna-be-fantastic totally-not-gonna-fall-apart-like-half-Elon’s-schemes plans for the future, they don’t have to spend ANY money on stuff like ground-based solar panel arrays, and they get more investors who get suckered by the pitch too!
Not even panels over the parking lots.
Is there a /c/extremelydepressing? This would go perfectly there.
That’s just world news.
I wouldn’t really categorize rampant ecological destruction as something calling for merely mild annoyance
Agree
Yeah it needs to be c/extremelyinfuriating
c/pants-shittinglymaddening
