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The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia’s water

Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers hum with the electricity required to process and store every byte of information that modern lives rely on.

In recent years, these data centers have been rapidly expanding in the United States. But the gargantuan facilities do more than keep cloud servers running — they also guzzle absurd amounts of water to run cooling systems that protect their components from overheating. Now, as artificial intelligence applications become ubiquitous, they’re using more water than ever.

Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the globe, where more than 300 facilities process nearly 70 percent of the world’s digital information, a job that requires ever more electricity. A utility that serves the area, Dominion Energy, announced during a May 2 earnings call that the industry’s demand for electricity had more than doubled in recent years. The week before that call, Google announced a billion-dollar expansion of three Virginia facilities, following a $35 billion investment by Amazon Web Services in the same area last year. State lawmakers and environmental groups have begun worrying about what this industry boom means for the area’s supply of water.

“Some of these data centers will use resources equivalent to a small city for energy and water,” said Ann Bennett, chair of data center issues in the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter. “They are being built on a scale that we just haven’t seen in the past.”

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Burn After Wearing

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with El País. A Spanish-language version can be read here. Reporting was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a law student in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her red Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated apartment complex in Alto Hospicio, a dusty city at the edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles.

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over next to a car on the side of the road, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students, who were waiting inside.

They headed toward a mountain of sand known as El Paso de la Mula. Less than a mile from her home, squinting into the distance, Astudillo saw a thread of smoke rising from its direction. With her in the lead, the two vehicles caravanned toward the dune, the site of the second-largest clothes pile in the world.

As they got closer to El Paso de La Mula, the thin trail of smoke had expanded into a huge black cloud. Astudillo stopped the car and texted the academics behind her.

It looks like it’s on fire. Hopefully, it’s not there. 🙁 🙁 🙁

She then dialed them directly and asked, “Do you still want to go?”

a Chilean flag stands in a traffic cone in the desert among burned piles of garbage
A Chilean flag stands in a traffic cone among burned piles of clothing in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

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Staggering Quantities of Valuable Metals Are Winding Up in the Garbage Bin

Staggering Quantities of Valuable Metals Are Winding Up in the Garbage Bin

Recycling more of the copper, aluminum, and other minerals in our old electronics could reduce the need for mining.

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Photo: vladdon (Shutterstock)

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year.

Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.

Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.

“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”

One of those facts is that some staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin.

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It will cost up to $21.5 billion to clean up California’s oil sites. The industry won’t make enough money to pay for it.

For well over a century, the oil and gas industry has drilled holes across California in search of black gold and a lucrative payday. But with production falling steadily, the time has come to clean up many of the nearly quarter-million wells scattered from downtown Los Angeles to western Kern County and across the state.

The bill for that work, however, will vastly exceed all the industry’s future profits in the state, according to a first-of-its-kind study published on May 18 and shared with ProPublica.

“This major issue has sneaked up on us,” said Dwayne Purvisa Texas-based petroleum reservoir engineer who analyzed profits and cleanup costs for the report. “Policymakers haven’t recognized it. Industry hasn’t recognized it, or, if they have, they haven’t talked about it and acted on it.”

The analysis, which was commissioned by Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank that studies how the transition away from fossil fuels impacts markets and the economy, used California regulators’ draft methodology for calculating the costs associated with plugging oil and gas wells and decommissioning them along with related infrastructure. The methodology was developed with feedback from the industry.

The report broke down the costs into several categories. Plugging wells, dismantling surface infrastructure and decontaminating polluted drill sites would cost at least $13.2 billion, based on publicly available data…

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‘It doesn’t have to be this way’: Lessons from the slow death of Louisiana’s oil industry

‘It doesn’t have to be this way’: Lessons from the slow death of Louisiana’s oil industry

The Gulf Coast is bleeding oil jobs. Here’s what it tells us about a just transition.

David Dismukes studies the energy industry for a living. As the executive director of the Center for Energy Studies at Louisiana State University, he has spent the last 30 years pinpointing the industry’s challenges and theorizing around it’s rapidly changing future.

This is what he wants you to know: The energy transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind sources is real. “It’s happening and it’s gonna continue to happen.”

“At this point, It doesn’t matter if you’re right, wrong, for, or against,” said Dismukes. “People and industries are making, not just hundreds of millions, but billion-dollar decisions based on the belief that this transition is here.”

It’s creating – and taking away – jobs, swaying the economy, and transforming how we commute. The transition is also killing refineries, to the sounds of praise from environmental groups and uncertainty from the thousands of oil industry workers.

In January 2020, a few months before the first coronavirus pandemic shutdown, the American oil refining industry reached its highest capacity peak in history. It didn’t last long. Within months, six refineries, including the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Philadelphia – the 13th largest in the country – shut off oil production. By December, U.S. oil consumption reached a 25-year low. In the next two years, Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting group, forecasts that 20 refineries across the globe, including roughly a dozen in the U.S., will cease operations.

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Yes, the U.S. can go carbon neutral by 2050, says new Princeton study

Princeton Net ZeroDavid McNew / Getty Images

Yes, the U.S. can go carbon neutral by 2050, says new Princeton study

The month of December opened with good news and bad news for people concerned about the climate crisis.

A climate analysis released by the independent watchdog group Climate Action Tracker said that based on promises made by Paris Climate Agreement participants, the world could limit warming to 2.1 degrees C (3.8 degrees F) by the year 2100. Countries including Japan, South Korea, and China have promised to reach zero emissions by 2060. And while the U.S. isn’t currently a part of the agreement, President-elect Joe Biden plans to rejoin next month and has set a rigorous net-zero promise for 2050.

But the next day, another report threw cold water on that hopeful note, pointing out that many of these countries were not on track to keep their emissions promises. In fact, the study, which explores the gaps between Paris agreement goals and reality, found that countries are planning to increase fossil fuel production by 2 percent annually on average, which would push global temperature rise well past 2.1 degrees C by 2100.

Into that conversation comes a Princeton University report, published Tuesday, that presents several plausible paths for the U.S. to arrive at net-zero emissions by 2050 (complete with economic growth) — as long as government officials make swift moves to invest in sustainable infrastructure.

One such path requires an investment in solar and wind manufacturing, which offers long-term domestic employment opportunities without incurring too many additional technology costs. The caveat? Manufacturing capacity for turbines and photovoltaics would have to increase drastically by 2050 — up to 45 times for wind and 120 times for solar. These strides aren’t achievable without short-term public and political support — progress that has been difficult due to the Trump administration’s habit of burying dozens of studies outlining the promise of renewable energy infrastructure.

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Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining

Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining

Preface. Everyone talks about oil spills, but what about the dirty mining that will have a huge polluting footprint on the earth, and potentially destroy the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery among other side-effects? Renewables aren’t cleaner and greener than fossils, and require a hell of a lot of fossils to mine the ore, deliver it to a crusher, blast furnace, and fabrication, all accomplished with fossils. 

***

Sadasivam, N. 2019. Report: Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining. Grist.org

For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama administration but inching forward under the Trump administration, has been billed by proponents as necessary to meet the growing demand for copper, which is used in wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels. Similar stories are playing out in Norway, where the Sámi community is fighting a copper mine, and in Papua New Guinea, where a company has been mining the seabed for gold and copper.

Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.

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‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ puts words to a future you don’t want to live in

‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ puts words to a future you don’t want to live in

Prepare yourself for grisly descriptions of how the body breaks down in overwhelming heat, predictions of prehistoric plagues springing back to life beneath melting permafrost, and the possibility of an economic collapse several times worse than the Great Depression.

David Wallace-Wells’ dystopian vision of where we’re headed is guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of readers of his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Some will surely have to look away. Wallace-Wells, perhaps surprisingly, seems OK with that. More than a hundred pages in, he writes, “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.”

Based on the viral New York Magazine article that portrayed out a hellish future for humanity, the 230-page book is an immersion in seemingly all of the worst-case climate scenarios. It’s terrifying. The point is to get readers to confront “the scarier implications of the science,” Wallace-Wells told me an in email. More terrifying still: There are scarier scenarios that he didn’t touch.

When his original magazine article came out in 2017, science communicators and climatologists like Michael Mann criticized it for being “overly bleak.” Wallace-Wells argues that our dire situation merits an array of storytelling approaches, including ones that embrace the worst possibilities.

“[T]here is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” he writes in the new book. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”

Probably to distance myself from the book’s intentionally upsetting depictions of our predicament, I started writing down all the new words and phrases I encountered while reading it. (Yes, Grist writers have coping mechanisms, too.)

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doomsday postponed? What to take from the big new Antarctica studies

ICE TO KNOW YA

Doomsday postponed? What to take from the big new Antarctica studies

There’s grim, mixed news out about Antarctica.

Two new papers on melting Antarctic ice come just days after NASA scientists announced the discovery of a massive subterranean hole in West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, the Florida-sized hunk of ice which alone could unleash more than two feet of sea-level rise should it collapse.

One study found that all this melting could have surprising and profound impacts on weather while the other (controversial) study scaled back previous Doomsday estimates. Still, the takeaway from both studies is clear: If we keep on our current path, things could go downhill for humanity very, very quickly.

The worst-case scenario that’s emerging is shockingly bad

In the first paper, an international team of researchers examined the impacts of melting ice on global ocean circulation and weather patterns.

As relatively cool, salt-free meltwater spreads from Antarctica and Greenland across the world’s oceans, it will have dire impacts: The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean will slow, changing how the planet distributes heat, and prompting “a complex pattern of atmospheric and oceanic changes” worldwide, according to the paper.

Weather would worsen almost everywhere, with year-to-year swings in temperature and precipitation increasing in severity by more than 50 percent, especially in eastern North America.

New Zealand and Iceland may warm at a much slower rate than the rest of the world, but ice melt at both poles may actually quicken as heat from the rapidly warming tropical oceans is shunted below the surface where it can stay for hundreds of years. Sub-surface ocean currents would then be able to eat away at the undersides of polar glaciers even more quickly.

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Still Toxic After All These Years

Grist / EuToch / Getty Images / Alison Cassidy

Still Toxic After All These Years

Nearly a quarter-century after winning millions from PG&E, the ‘Erin Brockovich’ town continues its fight for clean water.

It was a sweltering, 117-degree July day in Hinkley, California. The surface of the 13-mile highway east to Barstow had become an asphalt skillet, and the town’s lone recreational feature, a children’s playscape, stood shining and unused like a monument to the lofty melting point of low-density polyethylene. Residents here appreciate the dry, desert landscape — that’s why many moved to Hinkley in the first place — but on days like this everyone takes refuge indoors, curtains drawn against the view of empty lots where neighbors’ houses once stood. Along the empty roads, thousands of pipe stubs — groundwater monitoring wells installed by Pacific Gas and Electric — began to look like air vents to some underground bunker where most everyone in town had retreated.

Despite the oppressive weather, a small group of residents had gathered at the community center for a workshop on bioremediation, basically how to remove chemical contamination from their land and water. These workshops are a regular occurrence here and broach topics like isotope analysis, well testing techniques, and the best ways to navigate the political machinations between oversight organizations. Hinkley-dwellers’ interest in these subjects is more based on survival than scientific curiosity; they want to make sure no one can pull the wool over their eyes again.

Hinkley is still best known as the “Erin Brockovich town.” In 1996 a group of residents famously won a massive direct-action arbitration against Pacific Gas and Electric with the help of Brockovich, a savvy single mom and Los Angeles legal clerk.

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Let’s say I wanted to escape climate change. Where should I go?

Let’s say I wanted to escape climate change. Where should I go?

Q.I am not giving up … but if I were to move, where in the United States could I go to minimize climate disruption?

— Uneasy in a U-Haul

A.Dear Uneasy,

So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence. Every survival instinct we’ve cultivated to date should, understandably, make us want to get away from it.

Let’s start by evaluating regions of the U.S. based on the basics of what we expect climate change to bring. We know that the seas will swell and temperatures will go up. So that particularly endangers a host of coastal cities with relatively warm climates, especially in the summer — so MiamiNew OrleansNorfolkWashington D.C.New YorkLos Angeles. A 2017 paper in Nature Climate Change estimated that the 13.1 million people displaced from those cities by sea level rise could head for more inland locales like Atlanta, Houston, and Phoenix.

So there you have it, Uneasy! Let’s all head to Atlanta, Houston, and Phoenix.

But wait a second: Hurricane Harvey gave an alarming preview of how Houston will fare in a climate-changed future. Phoenix is in the middle of a desert with no reliable water source, where temperatures can surge to 120 degrees F in the summer. And Atlanta is the third fastest-warming metropolitan region in the country.

Forget about those cities. What’s a nice, temperate place? Never gets too hot or too cold, has lots of water? Aha — the Pacific Northwest. Umbra’s home! It’s part-rainforest, after all.

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Why should I sacrifice when big companies are to blame for climate change?

ASK UMBRA

Why should I sacrifice when big companies are to blame for climate change?

Q.Why should I feel guilty for flying abroad for vacation or having a child when 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of CO2 emissions? And how do I hold those companies responsible for climate change when every facet of our political system benefits them?

A. Have you ever heard the credo “every day, once a day, give yourself a present?” It comes from Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, and personally, I live by it. In response to your question, I propose a slight modification: Every day, once a day, give your future self a present … by doing something to counteract climate change. Certainly less catchy, but a more noble motto nonetheless.

But you correctly point out that living that motto often seems like an exercise in futility (unless you happen to be the CEO of a major gas conglomerate)! The 100 companies that are responsible for 71 percent of emissions are the biggest fossil fuel producers in the world. The best thing that you can do to fight climate change and hold those companies responsible is to take revenge by jumping into, not out of, the climate action game. It’s truly a win-win. Bear with me.

The idea of working against a fossil-fueled lifestyle isn’t a small decision. The everyday things that are tied to fossil fuels in some way are … well … very numerous. Anything made with plastic, anything using a combustion engine, and, if you live in most parts of the world, anything that uses electricity. Hmm. This is looking like a very ascetic and, dare I say, rather untenable, life.

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We broke down what climate change will do, region by region

Grist / Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

We broke down what climate change will do, region by region

Yeah, we read each chapter of the report so you don’t have to.

Look, at this point, even the most stubborn among us know that climate change is coming for our asses. We really don’t have much time until the climate plagues we’re already getting previews of — mega-wildfires, rising sea-levels, superstorm after superstorm — start increasing in frequency. The 4th National Climate Assessment says all that and much more is on its way.

Here’s the thing: Not all regions in the U.S. are going to experience climate change in the same way. Your backyard might suffer different climate consequences than my backyard. And, let’s be honest, we need to know what’s happening in our respective spaces so we can be prepared. I’m not saying it’s time to start prepping your bunker, but I would like to know if my family should consider moving to higher ground or stock up on maple syrup.

Luckily, that new report — which Trump tried to bury on Black Friday — breaks down climate change’s likely impacts on 10 specific regions. Unluckily, the chapters are super dense.

Silver lining: We at Grist divvied up the chapters and translated them into news you can actually use.

Northeast

Ahh, the Northeast, home to beautiful autumn leaves, delicious maple syrup, and copious amounts of ticks bearing disease. What’s not to love? A lot, according to this report.

Our region is looking at “the largest temperature increase in the contiguous United States” — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the time 2035 rolls around. We’re going to be slammed with the highest rates of sea-level rise in the whole damn country, and we’re going to have the highest rate of ocean warming. Urban centers are particularly at risk (remember Superstorm Sandy?).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

With the world on the line, scientists outline the paths to survival

With the world on the line, scientists outline the paths to survival

This week, scientists and representatives from every country on Earth are gathering in South Korea to put the finishing touches on a report that, if followed, would change the course of history.

The report is a roadmap for possible ways to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. Anything beyond that amount of warming, and the planet starts to really go haywire. So the International Panel on Climate Change — a U.N.-sponsored, Nobel Peace Prize-winning assemblage of scientists — wants to show how we can avoid that. To be clear, hitting that goal would require a radical rethink in almost every aspect of society. But the report finds that not meeting the goal would upend life as we know it, too.

“This will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history,” said Hoesung Lee, the group’s chair, in his opening address on Monday.

The report will be released on October 8. From leaked drafts, we know the basics of scientists’ findings: World greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 — just 15 months from now. The scientists also show the difference in impacts between 1.5 and 2 degrees would not be minor — it could be make-or-break for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, for example, which would flood every coastal city on Earth should it collapse.

“The decisions we make now about whether we let 1.5 or 2 degrees or more happen will change the world enormously,” said Heleen de Coninck, a Dutch climate scientist and one of the report’s lead authors, in an interview with the BBC. “The lives of people will never be the same again either way, but we can influence which future we end up with.”

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The 1.5 Generation

Grist / Amelia Bates

My generation is radically remaking climate activism. Will it be enough?

My generation, the millennials, will never know a time when climate change wasn’t a grave threat.

Back in 1988, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossed the 350 parts per million level when I was still watching Sesame Street and digging up worms in the backyard. Scientists consider that mark the maximum threshold compatible with a stable climate and suitable for human life on Earth. That same year, NASA researcher James Hansen told the U.S. Senate he was 99 percent confident global warming was already taking place. The public started taking notice, but little was done to address the accelerating crisis.

Earlier this year, scientists in Hawaii and California confirmed that our planet’s level of atmospheric CO2 had surpassed 411 ppm. It’s at the highest concentration in human history — not just over the past 100 years or so of modern recordkeeping, or since the Industrial Revolution, or since the invention of agriculture around 9000 B.C. There’s more of the planet’s main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since before our species evolved from our distant primate cousins millions of years ago.

The average global temperature is on course to rise 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels in the coming decades, escalating the risks of irreversible and widespread sea-level rise and more frequent extreme weather — blistering heat waves, punishing hurricanes, and ravaging wildfires. So it’s no exaggeration to say that my generation is up against seemingly impossible odds.

For years, environmental activists have told us that we could make progress by tinkering with the status quo, that a big part of halting warming is buying the right car, clothes, and moisturizer; avoiding the dirty products; and reforming the way consumer goods are made. And still, the world’s emissions keep climbing.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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