News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth # 24
Trying to get internet companies to clean up their act, the secret successes of the Inflation Reduction Act, a sustainable transatlantic flight and more!
WHEN BIG DATA GETS TOO BIG: Virginians are asking their government to rein in the data center industry because of energy, water concerns. (Inside Climate News)
Since I first started writing about climate change almost eight (8!) years ago, I have been interested in the internet’s energy and electricity consumption. It’s something I wrote about in my book, and have been thinking about for years, especially as internet use expands around the world, and its applications become more and more data-intensive: artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, cryptocurrency, the end of the distinction between IRL and online.
So I was interested and excited to see this article in Inside Climate News about the efforts by environmental organizations and community members in Virginia who are calling on the state to more effectively regulate data centers, given their impact on the state’s environment, energy use and health. Data centers use tremendous amounts of energy to run — most of which is spent on cooling — and rely on a lot of water for all of that air conditioning too. And Virginia gets the majority of its electricity from natural gas. (It gets about 49% from renewables, but 85% of that comes from wood and wood waste, which, in my opinion, is not renewable.)
Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers — it’s estimated that 70 percent of global internet traffic passes through the state. And it’s growing: the power capacity of Northern Virginia’s 250-plus data centers doubled between 2018 and 2022 to 2,767 megawatts. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest energy provider, has proposed meeting future needs with new fossil fuel infrastructure, which, these groups argue, will further pollute Virginia’s air, water, and threaten its public lands, including its 22 national parks. Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, among other tech companies, have data centers there.
Glen Besa, the retired director of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, said that asking Virginians to cover the cost of new power plants for data centers is unfair, particularly if they’re fossil-fuel-powered, said: “Why are we bearing the burden of additional air pollution, climate pollution, additional costs when the data centers are serving all of the United States as well as the world?”
FAT AND SUGAR POWERS EVERYTHING: In this case, a flight from London to New York (Washington Post)
For the first time, a plane using only “sustainable aviation fuel” made a transatlantic crossing. This was a Virgin Atlantic test flight, so not something that will be done regularly anytime soon — sustainable aviation fuel is still too expensive because there’s not enough demand — but the fact that it was done at all is cool!
Sustainable aviation fuel results in fewer carbon dioxide emissions than traditional kerosene-based jet fuel — by definition, it has to be 50 percent less per federal guidelines — and for this flight, according to a press release, it resulted in 70 percent fewer emissions, using a fuel made from “waste fats and plant sugars.”
To get to zero carbon emissions, planes will need to be different — they might run on batteries or liquid hydrogen — and so SAF isn’t a long-term fix but it is a fix that can take place immediately — a “drop-in fuel” that can be added to a plane’s gas tank, resulting in fewer emissions, right away. Wheels up, boys!
SOME COST INCREASES ARE GOOD: Like when it’s the social cost of carbon in a methane regulation, it’s really good and very important! (New York Times)
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