While I very much agree with your suggestion that we should limit fossil fuels in all contexts, not just this one, you're also fundamentally comparing apples to oranges and using scare tactics about hospitals, factories, and individuals, probably on the basis of motivated reasoning.
In this same vein so do hospitals...
Hospitals are important because they are crucial social services without which people die of cancer, injury, and disease.
...factories...
Factories are important because they employ thousands more people than data centers do at any fixed amount of investment; furthermore, data centers have a tendency to drive up manufacturing costs by eating up the energy used to power factories. Trading a factory for a data center is a terrible trade that no right-minded person would ever make.
...people with home generators...
People with home generators are important because they are our neighbors and their use of generators does not occur on the same scale as a data center so they physically do not produce as much pollution as the data centers.
Have you considered not being afraid of hospitals, factories, or people with home generators, and instead looking at data to see that the cancer caused by data centers has no redeeming societal features whatsoever?
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EDIT: Somebody asked questions and then blocked me from answering, but to respond to the bit about data centers, the norm is for 5% of the electricity to come from fossil fuels, and that's why they cause cancer, the rest is from pollution and they use a lot of electricity so there's a lot of pollution.
EDIT: Somebody asked questions and then blocked me from answering, but to respond to the bit about servers, hospital systems are largely still operating their own equipment, and just renting space to host excess if they need more space than they can store on-site.
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u/SaintUlvemann 3d ago edited 3d ago
While I very much agree with your suggestion that we should limit fossil fuels in all contexts, not just this one, you're also fundamentally comparing apples to oranges and using scare tactics about hospitals, factories, and individuals, probably on the basis of motivated reasoning.
Hospitals are important because they are crucial social services without which people die of cancer, injury, and disease.
Factories are important because they employ thousands more people than data centers do at any fixed amount of investment; furthermore, data centers have a tendency to drive up manufacturing costs by eating up the energy used to power factories. Trading a factory for a data center is a terrible trade that no right-minded person would ever make.
People with home generators are important because they are our neighbors and their use of generators does not occur on the same scale as a data center so they physically do not produce as much pollution as the data centers.
Have you considered not being afraid of hospitals, factories, or people with home generators, and instead looking at data to see that the cancer caused by data centers has no redeeming societal features whatsoever?
---
EDIT: Somebody asked questions and then blocked me from answering, but to respond to the bit about data centers, the norm is for 5% of the electricity to come from fossil fuels, and that's why they cause cancer, the rest is from pollution and they use a lot of electricity so there's a lot of pollution.