I’m glad to see some political groundswell against these data centers.
In late July, I took a tour with my choir through Eastern Oregon. To get there, we drove along the Columbia River on I-84, and one of the shocking new features of that highway is the huge data centers built along the river next to the dams at Hood River, Cascade Locks, and The Dalles. They are enormous, out of human proportions, and blandly ugly. They are uglier than the wildest phantasm of Socialist brutalism dreamed by a 1980’s Cold Warrior. Their presence by the river is a third theft, not just water and electricity but beauty, too.
We need data centers. Locate them somewhere else, and the power is dirtier and the water more scarce. I worry, though, about the scale of these buildings. There have always been upper limits on the economies of scales. Build too large of a factory, and there will not be enough workers. These buildings, these massive industrial park blanknesses, do nothing that you can see with the naked eye except turn electricity into steam. They have few workers. Everything goes in and out through a wire or a pipe.
Do we need this many data centers? Even under the logic of capitalism, which I am more friendly to than most I know, price is the outcome of a vast behavioral computer. Prices aren’t working right now. There’s a thumb on every scale. Vast stores of work and value and resources are being fed into a fire underneath a cauldron that might never come to boil.
I can’t bring this to any more of a coherent conclusion other than we need a global emissions tax system.
hammer & jack 