Under President Biden, there was extraordinary pressure for big business to address climate change. The Trump administration is now pushing companies to abandon climate goals and encouraging the use of more oil, gas and coal, claiming that environmental initiatives are “woke” distractions that hamper economic growth.
This was the part I wanted to understand, what exactly were the pressures under both administrations? Were these companies going to be punished under Biden if they didn't make some vague, nonbinding promises about pollution?hardly getting away with it when youre stuck choking on wildfire smoke
Needs a Hail Mary event for humanity to work together
A $13 billion dollar Meta datacentre was recently announced for a location near me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alb...
There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it.
So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations.
But none of that is the worst part.
The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else.
In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre.
In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps.
But that isn't the kind of world we live in.
And there's nothing that can be done about that.
It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.
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Nah guys, it’s cool, by 2050 the earths atmosphere acidifies for humans and our bodies can’t hold enough phosphorus or calcium for basic metabolic tasks: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5