> Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

I just love the irony of being absurdly callous and dismissive of human life while also getting the basic math wrong.

Nevermind that the 100,000 figure is across the nation of 300 million and includes things like automotive exhaust, while the other number is likely to be borne by that one specific community. Indeed, if you look at the study[0] your article cites -- which is looking at what we should be working on reducing -- industrial deaths are under 30,000, and electrical are around 10,000. So below half of your figure.

[0]: https://pubs.acs.org/estlcu/article/7/9/639/504911/Reducing-...

I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:

- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.

- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.

- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.

- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.

People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."

Some of these residents will die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

There is already very little to make these projects pay the externality costs; at this point paying enough remediation costs to reduce additional deaths should be the minimum.

And this reasoning is exactly how we got here in the first place.

“It’s not that bad, just a little bad, so it’s okay”

We’re talking about air pollution and death rates, not financial risk.

Irony is wasted on the stupid (on @docdeek).

But that’s already the framing.

A minor source should never lead to deaths or to put it otherwise No deaths = minor source

deaths = major source

Many deaths = majormost source

Now we just need define many but we already know its a major source of pollution that kills people

Health costs don't matter, because someone else is paying them. We handwave them with "well only 3-4 additional people die after paying that cost.

The air pollution does not matter, because global warming already exists and air is already polluted. And making all that worst also does not matter, because who cares about anything but what AI companies want.

So it is a low efficiency power station with some servers attached to it.

Good luck with that. Order books for gas turbines are full for decades. Diesels will probably get used and pollute everything with their stink and noise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> What waste products do data centers output?

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

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