Some countries are using 10–30x more water than their natural supply can sustain. Kuwait has the highest water stress level in the world at 3,850%. The U.S. water stress level is 28.2%, making it the 58th highest water-stressed nation globally. “When Apple decided to go titanium … | Continue reading
In the USA, Utah’s scarce wetlands are facing new pressures: inland ports and data centers Microsoft builds water-thirsty data centers in Medina County, San Antonio, near Medina Lake, which has suffered from drought for several years. New study estimates data centers may soon con … | Continue reading
We are mainly water. The UN has estimated that a human needs about 50 liters of water every day to meet basic needs, though the Global Commission on the Economics of Water states that the total daily minimum requirement could be much higher, at 4,000 liters (if, for example, the … | Continue reading
We are at the beginning of Big Tech’s relentless war on life in order to extract all the resources it requires to grow and consolidate its AI surveillance capitalism global architecture. Sam Altman of ChatGPT has made it brutally clear. Stories about AI’s consumption of water, en … | Continue reading
“Techno-optimism is a plague on our society, rife with unintended consequences,” Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins, wrote to me after reading my new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology. “Its single-focus problem-solving in a complex, intertwined world causes or ampli … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the last five years writing and researching my new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology, which will be published on February 2, in celebration of Brigid’s Day, named for an ancient wise Irish witch. Unlike in the genocidal continent of Europe and much of the UK ( … | Continue reading
It is always a sign of danger when there is an obsession with one metric. It is always a sign that, behind the scenes, something nefarious is going on. Our environment is immensely complex and interconnected. We must always seek to calculate the true and total costs of our action … | Continue reading
In the poorer parts of Kern County, California, they may have to turn the streetlights off because of soaring electricity prices. “Californians pay the second-highest electricity rates in the USA,” according to the LA Times, while, ironically, California is the number one state i … | Continue reading
“Nickel is a ‘critical mineral,’ needed for clean energy technology like batteries,” Leah Borts-Kuperman writes for The Narwhal about Canada’s drive to be a lead supplier of metals and minerals for the Green Transition. “It falls under the federal government’s controversial criti … | Continue reading
Computing generates heat. The more computing, the more heat. The more heat, the less computing, because hot computers lose efficiency and ultimately fry and die. You must remove the heat. That’s why when you’re doing some heavy processing on your computer you will usually hear th … | Continue reading
Another approach common to informal recycling is to wash and dip the e-waste—often using bare hands—in acids such as “nitrates, sulfates, hydrogen fluoride, etc., to create slurry,” Andy Farnell explained. Gold is extracted by mixing sodium cyanide to run off gold cyanide. Lots o … | Continue reading
Because of the material and design complexity of electronics, recycling them is much more complicated, energy intense and polluting than recycling for most other goods—and it gets more complicated every year. The silicon chip is a good example. It is very small and made of a comp … | Continue reading
Electronics recycling is a greenwashing con. A scam. There’s little or no money in e-waste recycling. It’s designed that way. For most people, old electronics are not even worth the bother of bringing to the recycling center. Huge quantities of e-waste lie abandoned in drawers an … | Continue reading
With the advent of Bitcoin and AI, data center waste grows even faster. Bitcoin computers have ultra-short lives. They are highly customized and cannot be used for anything else. “AI training is a temporary or one-off process,” Christopher Tozzi wrote for Data Center Knowledge. “ … | Continue reading
Every year, electronics become more wasteful, more designed for the dump. And to hide the problem, we in the Global North have found a classic way of behaving that so expresses the sheer hollowness of our civilization. We dump our toxic crap among the poor in the Global South, wh … | Continue reading
They call them “ships of doom”. As one country tightens up regulations, the e-waste exporters scour around looking for some weaker, even more “developing” country. When the Global North boasts that it has dematerialized, that it has reduced its CO2 and pollution, know that the wa … | Continue reading
To move e-waste from Norway to Ghana you have to cross about 6,000 km of ocean (about 3,300 miles). It’s worth it. It makes economic sense. And it’s better for the Norwegian environment, of course, seeing that Norwegians have for years been the number one producer of e-waste per … | Continue reading
In the West Bank in Palestine, children who live near where they burn the e-waste—much of which has come from Israel—are found to develop cancer at four times the rate of those living in other parts of the West Bank, according to research conducted by Yaakov Garb, a professor at … | Continue reading
I once asked scientist Josh Lepawsky whether it might be reasonable to think of a decaying smartphone or smart TV in a pool of water in a dump, next to a village in some poor country, as some abandoned mini-nuclear reactor. “In some sense for sure,” was his reply: “Nuclear waste … | Continue reading
Big Tech colonialism. Big Tech imperialism. The Global South is stripped of its metals at the cheapest of cheap prices to build the laptops and smartphones and e-toys consumed in the Global North. Mining poisons land, water, air, people, animals. If anyone complains, they get int … | Continue reading
E-waste is increasingly becoming even more hidden because chips are being integrated into practically everything. Almost one e-toy per person on Earth is tossed away every year, with few even thinking that these are toxic electronics. Talking dolls, teddy bears, musical toys, rac … | Continue reading
Invisibility. Dematerialization. Outsourcing of harm. The chips are hiding in plain sight. In our toys, in our clothes, in our shoes, in every aspect of our lives. Invisible. And after ultra-short lives, the e-waste becomes even more invisible to the Global North consumer as it i … | Continue reading
“Green” and “clean” energy is built on a vast dump of super-toxic batteries. “Renewable” energy is about as renewable as a rechargeable battery is renewable. The energy that the battery uses is renewable and may even come from a solar panel or wind turbine. The battery itself is … | Continue reading
“We’re going through a process of recolonization rather than decolonization,” Harald Gaski, a professor of Sámi literature, told Gabriel Kuhn in Liberating Sápmi. “A very concrete example is the wind farms that are built all over Sápmi. We have no free space anymore, the colonize … | Continue reading
Like all new tech innovations, the initial design focus for wind turbines was not on reuse or recyclability. “Made from fibreglass-reinforced polymer and coated with epoxy resins, turbine blades are designed to maximise aerodynamicism whilst remaining light enough to minimise str … | Continue reading
Wind turbines do not simply kill millions of birds and bats every year, they displace many millions more. Studies have shown that in an area where wind turbines are present, as many as two-thirds of birds, bats and terrestrial mammals showed displacement, thus impacting their sur … | Continue reading
To maximize profit, solar panels prefer very large, flat open spaces with lots of sun. Deserts seem perfect. “It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing … | Continue reading
“Solar-powered water pumps can provide a sustainable solution to the global water crisis by tapping into vast groundwater resources,” Felicity Bradstock excitedly wrote for OilPrice.com. What could possibly go wrong? The desert state of Rajasthan is an Indian pioneer and innovato … | Continue reading
Solar panels are toxic. They are the very opposite of Nature—the antithesis. While there will always be a case study here and there about technology being Nature’s friend, the humdrum day-to-day reality is that technology is Nature’s worst enemy. No matter how many tech optimism … | Continue reading
Wichimi is a village of some forty families deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Solar technology transformed it. According to a report by Isabel Alarcon for the Washington Post, villagers used to pay $10 for a noisy and polluting petrol-fueled boat trip to the nearest town. Now, they … | Continue reading
How did solar power become so cheap? By the 2020s, China was dominating the global solar market. How did they manage that? Solar needs cheap coal because making silicon requires volcano-like heat. In the 2020s, China was building about two new coal plants a week—six times more th … | Continue reading
On multiple levels, ‘green’, ‘renewable’ energy dams devastate freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. “While they account for less than 1 percent of the Earth’s surface, freshwater ecosystems are home to more than 10 percent of all species,” Josh Klemm and Eugene Simonov wrote f … | Continue reading
In Nepal, Indigenous peoples have ongoing struggles against dams. Lakpa Angjuk Bhote, secretary of Chyamtang-Kathmandu Welfare Society, told their story to Mongabay. “The rivers, lakes and forests are at the center of many people’s faith and folklore stories and therefore sacred … | Continue reading
In 1979, representatives of the Indigenous Sámi people went on hunger strike to protest a decision by the Norwegian government to build a dam at Áltá. Land Sámi lived on for untold generations was expected to become a Green Sacrifice Zone for hydroelectricity, like so much other … | Continue reading
Yet we can’t escape the hype. It seems like almost every day we hear a story about how ‘cheap’ hydro, wind, solar and biomass have delivered 50%, 70%, 100% of electricity demand. It sounds amazing, like the energy problem is almost solved if we only believe a little more in these … | Continue reading
‘Renewable’ energy has another trick up its sleeve. It has become a key weapon in the War on CO2. ‘Renewable’ energy reduces CO2, therefore renewable energy is untouchable, holy, irreproachable. That other stuff—overconsumption, mining, manufacturing, recycling, biodiversity, soi … | Continue reading
‘Renewable’ energy is not renewable. It’s a Big Lie that’s helping accelerate environmental collapse by encouraging overconsumption. It externalizes and makes invisible the materials. ‘Renewables’ can only become renewable by a magic trick: Look! Look over here! The renewable win … | Continue reading
“We walk for the water we need,” Juan, a middle-aged man born in the Indigenous rural community of Maconí, Mexico, explained. “If we don’t walk, who will give it to us? It’s a four-hour journey each day to fetch water … Since last year, there hasn’t been rain, and this year it’s … | Continue reading
Soon, we will be producing thousands of zettabytes a year. It’s a tsunami of data every day, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour, every second of every minute. As a result, important data that definitely does need storing is getting lost. In relation to academic r … | Continue reading
It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in … | Continue reading
We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, nev … | Continue reading
As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker wrote for Wired. The security guards for data centers are specially trained to be aggressive and confrontational, so as to reinforce the air of secrec … | Continue reading
Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and big tax breaks. The data centers were coming. The data centers came. Where were the jobs? peop … | Continue reading
You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawnmower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fans … | Continue reading
Big Tech’s vaunted data center energy efficiency gains were not what they seemed. Despite substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much after that. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta more than doubled their energy demand between 2017 a … | Continue reading
For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for our environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more po … | Continue reading
Using a slew of aliases to buy land and make sweet deals, getting secret, historic tax breaks, getting electricity at less than half of what ordinary people pay, being sold public land for less than half the market value, slurping down the cheapest of cheap water like there’s no … | Continue reading
The total amount consumed by Big Tech could be much, much higher than what they nominally disclose. “When it comes to water, Big Tech only shows its direct water consumption, while hiding its real water footprint,” Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer en … | Continue reading