Not as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including threatened predators².

1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g...

2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo...

"Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...

Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!

The aquifer draining article linked is about one in South Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute. From the Sun article:

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.

This strangely seems like the outcome of a successful dwarf fortress

Plot twist: The beams are pressurized lava.

Seems like Bright Energy could do more to prevent bird deaths, such as nets or active scarecrows or audio deterrents.

Google wanting to draw 1.5 million gallons/day when the article says that across the state 330 million gallons/day are already drawn, mostly for agriculture, doesn’t seem like “scary pressuring of local government”.

IUUC the 1.5 million is all from a single rapidly disappearing aquifer, while the 333 million is, as you said, the total of all groundwater usage across the entire state. The use also seems totally unnecessary, as to use an example from the article, the NSA's Fort Meade data center uses wastewater.

It sounds like you may hold a common misconception about rare-earth minerals.

IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....

Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you assumed that). I was more worried about geopolitical factors and having a huge online usage (companies want to make money and keep growing) be a forcing function to keep extracting them in a non-sustainable way.

> Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you assumed that).

Sorry, my mistake. The point your were trying to make is very interesting too.

Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.

One of the arguments for thorium-based nuclear power is that we're already digging up tons of thorium as a byproduct of rare earth mining. This is radioactive material that currently we're just dumping.

This is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all.

Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."

your two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance...

yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are employed specifically for this purpose), but people rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment".

rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad" institution. expect the best of people (which is not the same as "be naïve").

It doesn't matter if the people are bad or the institution is bad. The end result is the same:

> everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all.

I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that the "best" a very large group of people can do re: climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.

Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.

You need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare and comes from the Earth.

(slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what you were talking about)

https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:te....

Nowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.

At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.

Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?

Commercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.

Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.

I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points?

I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?

I only know a bit about this but from what I understand this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which means they then need to be extracted out of the host material. Part of that process often involves multiple steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a very complicated process involving a lot of toxic chemicals.

The rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.

Gold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1]

1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...

Once the gold has been recovered, are they still able to recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically, this is a serious question (in case you know).

Good question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at low rates, and often involve nasty pollution/byproducts[1]

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...