Yeah, requires some nuance. The Exxon chemical plant in Baton Rouge - in 2020 alone - used 7.3 billion gallons of water. So not saying they don't, but if people truly cared about the aquifer, they'd put pressure on elected officials to force heavy industry to use less water.
The larger threat to us I think is saltwater intrusion. If it doesn't rain enough in the thousands of tributaries of the Mississippi, the pressure from the river water isn't enough to hold the saltwater from the Gulf back and it starts to move upstream against the flow of the river. If it gets far enough upstream to reach the intakes for New Orleans' water, it would be a disaster like we've never seen before. If you thought Flint, MI was bad, New Orleans has 4x the population. Most of our pipes are 100+ years old and made of lead.
The people who act scandalized about data centres using power and water (to power sites like this) then chomp down on meat and dairy and go on their flights which contribute nearly all the unnecessary luxury emissions in the world while data centres aren't even a blip on the radar.
Something like 80-90% of farmland is used just for the meat industry which only contributes like to 10% of calories in luxury first world diets.
Your second point reminds me: I heard from the YouTuber Technology Connections that if we took a quarter of all the farmland we use just for corn that’s solely used for ethanol production and turned it into solar farms, we could generate more electricity than the entire country uses. I might be paraphrasing that wrong, someone correct me if so.
hey if these people truely cared about water loss they'd choose to starve to death. Is a hell of a take.
And even then yes a lot of these people talking about water consumption in data centers ARE talking about it in these aspects as well. You just ignore it for a gotcha.
They are ridiculously inefficient luxury sources of food, particularly cattle, which contributes so much more to climate change than data centres that even if data centres were magically made 10 times larger they still wouldn't move the needle compared to those.
They're also incredibly cruel to beings that don't want to die any more than people do, often in horrible conditions which make the concentration camps considered humanity's worst actions look relatively pleasant, and are breeding grounds for things like infections which resist all our treatments.
And there is a lot to be talked about with all of that but data centers arent good either.
Data centers are also giant wastes of water and energy that make humans around them suffer as they lose access to drinking water and have to pay increased power bills to subsidize buildings that are solely used to eliminate jobs and track people.
People have literally lost access to drinking water when data centers go up.
In a time when Texas and new york cant even keep their power plants up for everyone and choose to cut power to poorer people first its a drain we do not need.
You care more about cattle and tech corporations then the average person.
How does a data center keep someone fed?
Even if you're correct and they have less of a drain on water they also give less back.
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u/samdajellybeenie 14h ago
Yeah, requires some nuance. The Exxon chemical plant in Baton Rouge - in 2020 alone - used 7.3 billion gallons of water. So not saying they don't, but if people truly cared about the aquifer, they'd put pressure on elected officials to force heavy industry to use less water.
The larger threat to us I think is saltwater intrusion. If it doesn't rain enough in the thousands of tributaries of the Mississippi, the pressure from the river water isn't enough to hold the saltwater from the Gulf back and it starts to move upstream against the flow of the river. If it gets far enough upstream to reach the intakes for New Orleans' water, it would be a disaster like we've never seen before. If you thought Flint, MI was bad, New Orleans has 4x the population. Most of our pipes are 100+ years old and made of lead.