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Voters in California City Become First in US to Approve Permanent Ban on Data Centers
"We hope that other communities will use the model set by residents here... as inspiration to stop data centers from encroaching in their backyard," said a Monterey Park city councilmember.
Jun 04, 2026
Voters in Monterey Park, California on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a permanent ban on data centers within city limits, becoming the first city in the US to prohibit the power-hungry facilities via a ballot initiative.
In total, the anti-data center resolution passed with 86% voter support, with only 14% of voters opposed. The resolution's text said that a ban was necessary to "protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health" and "prevent impacts to electricity and water rates."
Steven Kung, a leader of the local initiative, told ABC 7 Eyewitness News that the result was "a landslide victory."
Kung listed multiple reasons why residents in the city resoundingly rejected building data centers in their community.
"The noise pollution, the air pollution, the rise in the electricity rates," he said, "the deal just didn't make sense and it doesn't make sense for most, if not all, cities data centers go to."
In an interview with Politico, Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang predicted that her city would be far from the last to pass data center bans, noting data center projects have spurred protests across the country.
"A lot of the other cities that are facing data center proposals are going to follow suit," said Yang. "There's [a] bad reputation across the board, across the country, from other data centers that have been built in neighborhoods."
Monterey Park city councilmember Jose Sanchez expressed a similar sentiment, telling The Guardian that he hoped his city would become a inspiration to others.
"We hope that other communities will use the model set by residents here in Monterey Park," said Sanchez, "as inspiration to stop data centers from encroaching in their backyard."
Data centers have become political lightning rods in recent months, as residents across the country object to their massive resource consumption, which is leading to a major spike in utility bills, as well as the noise pollution they generate.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this year introduced a bill that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction “until strong national safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, and communities, defend privacy and civil rights, and ensure these technologies do not harm our environment."
A poll released on Wednesday by Public First showed US residents more opposed to data center construction than any nation in the world, with just 26% of Americans registering support for building more data centers.
This opposition isn't merely abstract, as it has caused major headaches for Big Tech firms that have been scrambling to increase their AI models' compute power.
As The Financial Times reported on Thursday, "dozens of projects collectively worth at least $156 billion have been blocked or stalled since 2025" thanks to local opposition to their development.
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Virginia's Data Center Alley Reveals Big Tech's Vision for America
Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another noisy, polluting data center hub, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process.
May 09, 2026
Even if you’ve never stood next to a data center, you’ve probably felt its impacts. For instance, if you’re one of the 65 million people served by regional transmission giant PJM in the eastern United States, a huge spike in projected demand for electricity, driven almost entirely by proposed data centers, has raised your electric bills. But standing next to a data center—or worse, living next to one—is where you can really feel the totality of its impact. I didn’t fully realize this until I spent time in the belly of the beast.
In January, I took a trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the notorious Data Center Alley, to do research for my new podcast project for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “The Data Centers Are Coming.” I wanted to learn about how ever-expanding data center facilities impact their neighbors. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I crested a rise on the freeway: 199 operational data centers laid out before me and around 100 more under construction, densely packed together and sprawling to the horizon. So much digging and building left everything covered in red dust, giving the whole scene an eerie, Martian feel. The noise was unbelievable, clanking metal and chugging diesel engines all atop a deep industrial hum.
The people that live here are experiencing negative health effects stemming from pollution and chronic severe noise exposure. I talked to people in neighborhoods where folks no longer hang out in their yards because of the noise, in turn becoming isolated from their neighbors. I heard about people spending thousands on renovations just so they can sleep through the noise. One Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch—equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.
People die here, too. I visited Tippets Hill Cemetery, a historic Black burial ground dating to before the Civil War, now surrounded on three sides by monumental, noisy data centers. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard.
As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
This is Big Tech’s vision for America. Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another Data Center Alley, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process. Elon Musk built what he called the world’s biggest supercomputer next to the Boxtown neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Dismayed at the idea of waiting for a grid connection to power his massive electricity needs, he plopped more than 30 huge generators in the parking lots next to his Colossus data center, essentially building an unregulated gas power plant himself. This, of course, circumvented any regulatory processes, spewing dangerous pollution into adjacent Boxtown.
It’s worth noting that Boxtown is a historically Black neighborhood, founded by freedmen after the Civil War. But according to the logic of data center proponents, the land was already a lost cause. One podcast guest said, “Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he’s also doing it in an area where there’s like, a bigger natural gas plant right next door and like, a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby, right?” By this logic, the presence of other polluting facilities somehow gives data centers permission to pollute more. Industry has already colonized these communities, so what’s a bit more colonization?
My research travels also took me to remote, mountainous Tucker County, West Virginia, home to a few idyllic small towns and a thriving outdoor recreation economy. A mysterious shell company, Fundamental Data, is trying to build a data center and power plant next to the landfill between the towns of Davis and Thomas. Many residents there have concluded that Fundamental Data saw old strip-mined land behind a landfill and considered it theirs to extract from.
Nikki Forrester is one such resident refusing to accept this data center land grab. An organizer with Tucker United, she argues that thinking the only use for old strip-mined land is industrial development is a failure of imagination: “You could do a lot of restoration and trail development and all sorts of stuff on old strip mine land. We bike on awesome bike trails through old strip mines all the time.” Restoring this land for outdoor recreation would keep with what people love about Tucker County, not to mention what drives much of the local economy. Building a data center on that land threatens all of that.
The story of companies seeing community resources and assuming that they can easily extract them because “nobody is using them anyway” is not new. Indeed, such thinking runs beneath America’s 250-year history and beyond, from the seizure of Indigenous lands to highway expansion, from industrial agriculture to today’s data center boom. But another undercurrent of American history is localized resistance to corporate power and extraction, from the Boston Tea Party to the West Virginia Mine Wars, from the Great Railroad Strike to the successful unionization at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.
We see that resistance today as vibrant and fearless coalitions form across the country to resist the corporate extraction of data center construction. These coalitions are so strong in part because people of all stripes, across the political spectrum, resent the idea of tech corporations feeling entitled to their local resources. As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
When framed this way—the powerful and rich vs. the people they’re trying to extract resources from— the data center fight becomes another chapter in a long American history of resisting corporate extraction enabled by feckless, unimaginative politicians.
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How to Save the World: Give Up War, Cars, and Leaf-Blowers... and Unveil the Stars
It's imperative that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.
Jan 14, 2026
Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don’t bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we’re doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world’s population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year.
On average, according to the medical journal The Lancet, 84% of the extremely hot days we’ve faced over the past five years would not have occurred without human-induced climate change that the American president seems intent on making so much worse. Heat-related deaths are already 63% more frequent than in the 1990s. That Lancet article also reported that heat- and drought-related hunger, as well as deaths from wildfire smoke and industrial air pollution, are breaking records globally almost yearly.
Climate Impacts Tracker dubbed 2025 “The Year of Climate Disasters,” noting:
Flash floods tearing up a Himalayan village in India, hurricanes and wildfires ravaging the US, heatwaves and wildfires scorching Europe, record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, torrential rains and floods roaring through Southeast Asia—2025 marked yet another year of human tragedies, driven by extreme weather events.
The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.
Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.
In other words, our species is vainly striving to circumvent what’s come to be known as Stein’s Law from an aphorism credited to economic guru Herbert Stein: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”
Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth.
Count on this: At some point, global economic growth will finally have to grind to a halt and shift into reverse. After all, if the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse. (Think Mad Max.) But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.
That’s the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it’s a refutation of the “green growth” doctrine. (Green-growthers, ignoring Stein’s Law, claim that technological “innovation” will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely.) In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.
And here’s the reality the rest of us need to take in: Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth, since full-scale restraints on the endless extraction and consumption of fossil fuels could force them to ensure that their limited resources would be used to satisfy basic human needs instead of being wasted on yet more increasing profits for the already wealthy few.
The growth-addled political and economic forces pushing us toward ecological doom are many and formidable indeed. And that makes it ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours come to realize how important it is that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.
One way to bring that better world into sharper focus is to examine a few of the many miseries and dangers that degrowth would help us alleviate or even leave behind. What follows is just a handful of examples.
Goodbye, War Machine
Topping the list of American institutions and resources that a degrowth economy could starve would be the US military-industrial complex. After all, the Pentagon is actually the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world. The greenhouse gases our military emits, even in peacetime, are believed to have a global-warming impact of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The Earth can’t handle that any longer.
To begin shrinking our military’s now trillion-dollar annual budget would not only prevent a significant amount of global warming but also save countless human lives and greatly enhance the quality of life in this country and across the planet.
With degrowth, for example, the Defense (not—thank you, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and crew!—War) Department’s nearly 3 million employees, who enable the resource-heavy, deadly work of war-fighting, imperialism, and, if the Trump administration gets its way, the suppression of domestic political protest, can find themselves better jobs. After all, employees in all but the top echelons of the military, underpaid and exploited, endure often harsh working and living conditions. Zeroing out the Pentagon would free up a vast workforce to help meet people’s actual needs rather than killing all too many of us on this planet (most recently, at least 115 in the bombing of Venezuelan boats and 40 more in the January 3rd attack on Caracas). And they’d be better off losing those jobs.
Enlisted personnel receive such small paychecks that many are eligible for SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, even if only 14% apply for them. Among the families of junior enlisted troops, 45% often can’t afford enough food. More than 286,000 of them don’t get an adequate variety or amount of food and, of those, about 120,000 report sometimes skipping meals and eating less than they need for fear of running out of money.
And that’s not all. A nationwide analysis suggested that towns and cities abutting military bases have higher crime rates (19% greater for property crimes and 34% for violent crimes) than similar towns not near such installations.
Worse yet, people living or working in or around military bases are often exposed to dangerous levels of toxic contamination over long periods and can also be plagued by noise pollution. Not surprisingly, studies have also found high rates of hearing loss among the troops. In the United States, almost 15% of active-duty personnel suffer hearing impairment of some sort (and it’s one of the most common health problems among veterans as well).
Dismantling our war machine would also help restore a better quality of life for tens of millions of people elsewhere. Consider the death and misery our military has inflicted during the past six decades on Indochina, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and now the Caribbean Sea, the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and of course Venezuela.
As if that weren’t bad enough, for decades, our military-industrial complex has provided armaments to repressive, murderous regimes around the globe—Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people being the most recent example.
Adiós, Vehicular Supremacy
In a much less resource-intensive American society, human needs would also no longer be subordinated to those of gasoline-driven motor vehicles, and our collective quality of life would improve dramatically.
Based on the importance of keeping this planet livable, any ecologically sane society would break free from what Gregory Shill has labeled “automobile supremacy” and that, of course, would be a particularly significant accomplishment for any degrowth movement in the United States or other wealthy countries.
As a start, motor vehicles are regularly among the top 10 causes of death for US residents under the age of 55. Worse yet, pedestrian fatalities, which had been falling for decades, shot up by 71% between 2010 and 2023, while fatalities caused by increasingly taller, heavier, more aggressively armored pickups and SUVs climbed at precisely twice that rate, 142%.
Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past.
With private gas-driven vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks, electric vehicles, and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with as many road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. We won’t face the health dangers posed by air and noise pollution from vehicle traffic. Our cities will have vastly more green space, because significant parts of the 30% of their soil surface now covered by concrete or asphalt solely to accommodate motor vehicles could be revegetated. And we won’t suffer the extra-blistering summer heat that comes with such over-paving.
With degrowth and the end of automobile supremacy, traffic jams will vanish into the past; we’ll no longer risk being killed while simply walking, biking along a roadway, crossing a street legally, or engaging in lawful, peaceful protest; and everyone will all too literally be able to stop driving everyone else crazy.
Farewell to So Many Other Fossil-Fuelized Plagues
Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past. Taken alone, each might appear insignificant, but cumulatively, such culprits severely degrade the quality of life in our wildly growth-oriented economy. As just one example of something that, with degrowth, we could say “good riddance” to, let me suggest that loud-mouthed neighborhood bully, the leaf blower.
Generating wind speeds approaching those of an EF5 tornado, gas-powered leaf blowers blast out noise at 95 to 115 decibels (two to eight times louder than the safe upper limit set by federal agencies). Electric leaf blowers, while less noisy, still significantly exceed the maximum safe noise level near schools, hospitals, daycare centers, retirement homes, or anywhere else where there are vulnerable people present.
Most gas-powered blowers and other deafening lawn machinery are operated for long hours by commercial landscaping crews, whose ears are just a couple of feet from the roar. Often surrounded by other leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and gas-powered equipment, such workers commonly suffer hearing loss.
The noise of a leaf blower, like that produced by vehicular traffic and wind turbines, is rich in low-frequency sound that carries long distances, easily passing through walls. Exposure to such noise raises the risk of a range of health problems, including sleep disruption, mental stress, high blood pressure, heart ailments, stroke, and immune-system dysfunction.
And keep in mind that the substitution of leaf blowers for perfectly functional rakes is just the tip of the iceberg. Our economy is now chock-full of unnecessary products that diminish the quality of life and would be left in the nearest ditch if energy consumption were deeply reduced.
Hello Again, Night Sky
By ending profligate energy consumption, degrowth could also restore much-loved wonders of nature that the growth economy has stolen from us.
Consider the night sky. Since 2010, in cities and towns, as well as anyplace near them, “skyglow” (a bleaching out of the night sky that hides stars from view) has been increasing at an astonishing rate of 10% a year.
This surge in light pollution has coincided with the rapid adoption of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for streetlights and other outdoor illumination. Such LEDs produce far more light per watt of energy consumed than older light sources. Unfortunately, companies and municipalities have taken advantage of LED efficiency not by cutting their energy consumption, but by flooding parking lots, streets, billboards, sports fields, and car dealerships with even brighter light.
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Most LED lighting now in use is rich in short wavelengths at the “cool-blue” end of the visible spectrum, which ensures that it will be scattered by the atmosphere more efficiently and so produce a rapid increase in skyglow. As a result, stars have all but disappeared from the night sky in cities, suburbs, and nearby rural areas.
Exposure to cool-blue light at night also threatens humans and other species by disrupting our circadian sleep-wake cycle. Among the impacts on human health are gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer.
A degrowth society dialing down its energy use would not only reduce light and noise pollution but achieve significant advances in environmental justice. Brightly lit industrial and commercial facilities and parking lots are all too often placed in low-income, racialized communities. As a consequence, across the United States, light pollution is more severe in neighborhoods where a larger proportion of the population is Black, Latino, or Asian.
Amid mounting ecological and humanitarian crises and with Donald Trump still in the White House for another three potentially devastating years, the vanishing of the heavens may be regarded as a problem only for astronomers and aesthetes. But such a view badly underestimates how important the starry night sky has proven to be to our culture, scientific progress, and social cohesion. It was an unalloyed good, shared freely and equally by all humanity. And it could be so again if, with degrowth, we put our cities and towns on a dimmer switch.
To be clear, the degrowth movement’s not claiming that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is simply to play Whac-A-Mole by working our way through individual problems like traffic congestion or light and noise pollution. In fact, the point of degrowth is that societies should leave all such problems, including the potential disaster of climate change, in history’s trash heap. We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
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Why Is Big Tech Using the Energy of the Past to Power the Future?
As these companies invest billions in technology for AI, they must re-up investments in renewables to power our future and protect our communities.
Sep 06, 2025
AI is everywhere. But its powerful computing comes with a big cost to our planet, our neighborhoods, and our wallets.
AI servers are so power hungry that utilities are keeping coal-fired power plants that were slated for closure running to meet the needs of massive servers. And in the South alone, there are plans for 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years—enough to power millions of homes—just to feed AI’s energy needs.
Multibillion dollar companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta that previously committed to 100% renewable energy are going back to the Jurassic Age, using fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to meet their insatiable energy needs. Even nuclear power plants are being reactivated to meet the needs of power-hungry servers.
At a time when we need all corporations to reduce their climate footprint, carbon emissions from major tech companies in 2023 have skyrocketed to 150% of average 2020 values.
AI data centers also produce massive noise pollution and use huge amounts of water. Residents near data centers report that the sound keeps them awake at night and their taps are running dry.
Many of us live in communities that either have or will have a data center, and we’re already feeling the effects. Many of these plants further burden communities already struggling with a lack of economic investment, access to basic resources, and exposure to high levels of pollution.
To add insult to injury, amid stagnant wages and increasing costs for food, housing, utilities, and consumer goods, AI’s demand for power is also raising electric rates for customers nationwide. To meet the soaring demand for energy that AI data servers demand, utilities need to build new infrastructure, the cost of which is being passed onto all customers.
These companies have the know-how and the wealth to power AI with wind, solar, and batteries—which makes it all the more puzzling that they’re relying on fossil fuels to power the future.
A recent Carnegie Mellon study found that AI data centers could increase electric rates by 25% in Northern Virginia by 2030. And NPR recently reported that AI data centers were a key driver in electric rates increasing twice as fast as the cost of living nationwide—at a time when 1 in 6 households are struggling to pay their energy bills.
All of these impacts are only projected to grow. AI already consumes enough electricity to power 7 million American homes. By 2028, that could jump to the amount of power needed for 22% of all US households.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
AI could be powered by renewable energy that is nonpolluting and works to reduce energy costs for us all. The leading AI companies, who have made significant climate pledges, must lead the way.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all made promises to the communities they serve to tackle climate and pollution. They all have climate pledges. And they have made significant investments in renewable energy in the past.
Those investments make sense, since renewables are the most affordable form of electricity. These companies have the know-how and the wealth to power AI with wind, solar, and batteries—which makes it all the more puzzling that they’re relying on fossil fuels to power the future.
If these corporate giants are to be good neighbors, they first need to be open and honest about the scope and scale of the problem and the solutions needed.
As these companies invest billions in technology for AI, they must re-up investments in renewables to power our future and protect our communities. They must ensure that communities have a real voice in how and where AI data centers are built—and that our communities aren’t sacrificed in the name of profits.
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Norwegian Deep-Sea Mining Threatens Arctic Biodiversity With 'Irreversible Harm'
"Norway's plans not only directly threaten species and habitats on the seabed, but also the wider marine ecosystem, from the tiniest plankton to the great whales," one Greenpeace scientist said.
Sep 20, 2024
Norway's plans to move forward with deep-sea mining could do irreparable damage to unique Arctic ecosystems and even drive unobserved species to extinction.
That's the warning issued Friday in a Greenpeace report titled Deep Sea Mining in the Arctic: Living Treasures at Risk. The environmental group argues that Norway's mining plans contradict its previous ecological commitments, such as its 2020 pledge to manage 100% of its ocean area sustainably by 2025.
"The measure of a nation's success is not how many promises it makes, but how it honors them and how much of its ecosystem is safeguarded for present and future generations," Greenpeace Nordic campaigner Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle said in a statement. "While Norway claims to be a respectable nation with responsible policies on ocean management, it's rolling out the red carpet for deep-sea mining companies to deploy machines that will cause irreversible harm to the Arctic's unique and vulnerable biodiversity. Somehow Norway's words and ocean commitments get forgotten when profit opportunities arise. We cannot let that happen."
"Mining will cause permanent damage to those ecosystems and it will remain impossible to assess the full extent of those impacts, let alone control them."
Norway's parliament sparked global outrage when it voted to explore its Arctic seabed for minerals in January 2024. Its Ministry of Energy then released a plan for the first round of licenses in June. The country aims to extend its first licenses next year and see mining begin by 2030.
Now, the Greenpeace report details what would be at stake if it does so.
"The Arctic is a unique and vital marine environment, home to one of the world's most fragile and diverse ecosystems, crucial for global climate regulation and supporting a wide array of species found nowhere else on Earth," Greenpeace International executive director Mads Christensen wrote in the report foreword. "The recent decision by Norway to open up 281,200 square kilometers of its claim to an extended continental shelf to deep-sea mining is putting ocean life and the livelihoods of those who depend on it at grave risk."
The mining would threaten life at all levels of the ocean and all nodes in the marine food web. Norway is hoping to mine for metals in the manganese crusts around hydrothermal vents, but these vents have also enabled a diverse array of life.
"They are home to creatures such as stalked jellyfish, tube worm forests, fish that produce antifreeze, and hairy shrimps hosting colonies of bacteria that can convert toxic hydrogen sulphides and methane into energy," Christensen wrote. "These are unique habitats with endemic species that can be found nowhere else on Earth, including ones that have yet to be scientifically described."
Deep-sea species like sponges, stony corals, sea pens, sea fans, lace corals, and black corals are also particularly vulnerable because they grow slowly, mature late, reproduce infrequently, and live for a long time. The habitats they form are therefore classified as Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems. Mining would disturb these ecosystems directly as "underwater robots" would both damage and remove them in the hunt for metals.
However, the impacts of deep-sea mining extend beyond the seabed and included sediment plumes, the release of toxins, the alternation of the substrate and its geochemistry, noise and light pollution, and moving some organisms from one part of the sea to another. These could harm both marine and human communities, as unique conditions in the Arctic Ocean create a spring phytoplankton bloom that feeds important fisheries like herring, mackerel, and blue whiting. The area also draws migrating seabirds and several species of marine mammals.
In particular, 12 species of marine mammals are commonly found in the area slated for mining: minke whale, humpback whale, fin whale, blue whale, bowhead whale, northern bottlenose whale, sperm whale, orca, narwhal, white-beaked dolphin, harp seal, and hooded seal.
"Although it has long been documented that whales and dolphins live in this area, we still know remarkably little about their abundance, distribution, and behaviors, including how much they rely on healthy ecosystems around seamounts," Kirsten Young, a science lead at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, said in a statement. "Mining will cause permanent damage to those ecosystems and it will remain impossible to assess the full extent of those impacts, let alone control them."
"What is clear is that Norway's plans not only directly threaten species and habitats on the seabed, but also the wider marine ecosystem, from the tiniest plankton to the great whales," Young concluded.
Norway's plans also come as the region is already undergoing changes due to the burning of fossil fuels and the heating of the atmosphere and oceans.
A 2023 assessment of the ecosystems of the Norwegian Sea found that both water temperatures and ocean acidification had increased.
Acidification in particular is of "grave concern" in the sea because it is moving more quickly than the global average.
"As the waters of the Nordic Seas become more acidified, there will be impacts to species, ecosystems, and ecosystem functioning as a result of changes to organisms' structure, distribution, and ability to function," Greenpeace wrote.
Greenpeace is calling on Norway to abandon its plans for deep-sea mining and add its name to a list of countries backing a moratorium on the practice.
In addition, the group urges Norway to instead facilitate more scientific research in its Arctic waters and to protect a network of 30% of them by 2030 in keeping with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and work with other nations to preserve all marine environments under the global ocean treaty.
"Now, when six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded, is not the time to be opening up a new frontier to extraction, but one when we should all be doubling down on doing what is needed to safeguard the wildlife and ecosystems that we share this wonderful blue planet with," Christensen said.
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Turning Down the Heat, and the Noise
With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.
Sep 17, 2024
The most pressing environmental crisis of these times, our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world—and it’s not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.
Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.
Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, the nation’s data-center epicenter, have filed dozens of complaints about an especially loud facility located in the town of Leesburg. People living as much as three miles from the center compared the noise from its giant cooling fans to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter hovering overhead, day and night.
The data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.
Attorneys representing a group of Williston, North Dakota, homeowners argued last December that noise pollution from the nearby Atlas Power Data Center “is a continual invasion of their homes, their health, and their North Dakota way of life. They are now virtually shut-ins in the slice of North Dakota they once called their own.” In April, Gladys Anderson of Bono, Arkansas, told reporters that a nearby cryptocurrency-mining data center was “like torture, like a form of military-grade torture.” Her neighbor complained, “It’s caused problems for me with my hearing, my blood pressure, with the sweetheart where she gets migraine headaches.”
Chicago-based airline pilot Joshua Zhang—someone who (I’m betting) knows a thing or two about loud noise—told CBS News in 2021 that a new data center in his Printers’ Row neighborhood whined like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that never shuts off. “I try to fly as much as I can to stay away from here,” he said. “I can’t really sleep well… and I have to operate a flight.” In other words, the data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.
Noise Makes Us Sick and We’re Sick of Noise
The recent, rapid proliferation of data centers has been due, at least in part, to the similarly rapid growth of two types of enterprises: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). Those voracious wasters of electricity were unasked-for inventions that filled largely nonexistent human needs. And they’re amplifying the very real problem of noise pollution.
Crypto and AI illustrate a larger issue. An all-out effort to curb climate change will require deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, which will, in turn, require more frugal use of all forms of energy. And if that happens (as it should), it will have profound repercussions throughout society. As one of the more welcome consequences, our now-cacophonous world is likely to become easier on the ears.
With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.
The severe impact of noise pollution on both mental and physical health is well documented. Hearing impairment is the most obvious malady it causes. The World Health Organization (WHO) finds that noise pollution severely disrupts our quality of life in other ways, too, raising the risk of heart disease, childhood cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, and general annoyance. WHO notes that while
...annoyance is not normally classified as a health effect, it certainly affects well-being and therefore is considered to fall within the WHO definition of health as being “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” More importantly, however, it is the effect of noise that most lay people are aware of and concerned about.
And annoyance can be a gateway to much worse, to “feelings of disturbance, aggravation, dissatisfaction, concern, bother, displeasure, harassment, irritation, nuisance, vexation, exasperation, discomfort, uneasiness, distress, hate, etc.” You might think I got that quote from a thesaurus, but, no, it’s from a study published in the journal Noise and Health. Any person living near a data center or other source of loud, continuous noise can, I expect, attest to having experienced most (or all) of those feelings. And it’s well known that such stresses can lead to physiological health problems.
When it comes to making people miserable, keep in mind that not all noises are created equal. The roar from data centers, vehicle traffic, commercial lawn-care operations, and other notorious disturbers of the peace is rich in low-pitched audible frequencies that travel much further than others and can even pass through walls. Such low tones also irritate us more, even when they aren’t all that loud. Consequently, and unfortunately, people complaining about their exposure to noise from data centers or other sources of low-frequency noise are all too often dismissed as hypochondriacs. In a recent, comprehensive article on noise pollution in The Atlantic magazine, Bianca Bosker told a gripping tale of how people in Chandler, Arizona, suffered for years as their complaints about data center noise were casually dismissed by local authorities.
The Cruelty Is the Point
For those of us not living near a data center, road traffic may be the most pervasive, day-to-day source of unhealthful low-frequency noise. In the European Union, for example, 113 million people, or 20% percent of the population, live with noise pollution from road traffic that’s loud enough to raise risks of heart disease and heart failure. The risk of developing diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, and of course, sleep disturbance also increases as traffic noise gets louder.
Of course, we produce traffic noise collectively and most, but not all, of us hate it. In an April essay entitled “What is Noise?,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross observed that “if you elect to hear something, it is not noise, even if most people might deem it unspeakably horrible. If you are forced to hear something, it is noise, even if most people might deem it ineffably gorgeous.” Extra-loud vehicles, particularly en masse, richly illustrate Ross’s observation.
In recent decades, American pickup trucks and SUVs have grown steadily larger and heavier, with towering front ends and armoring that create a road-ruling mystique. Increasingly, to further satisfy consumer demand for big, intimidating vehicles, automakers equip many of them with high-decibel engines, turbochargers, and thunderous exhaust systems. Drivers all too regularly dial the volume up several more notches with muffler modifications that are often illegal. The automakers’ economic motivation for offering big, loud vehicles is clear ($), but why exactly do their customers want them? The deafening din emanating from those trucks has distinct political undertones, but there may also be something deeper going on.
A 2023 study published in the journal Current Issues in Personality Psychology sheds some light on this. The researcher interviewed 529 people, split almost equally between the sexes, about their attitudes toward noisy vehicles. Then, using questionnaires, she evaluated the subjects for four “dark” personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. It turned out (surprise!) that men liked loud vehicles significantly more than women did. Across both sexes, those who expressed greater fondness for such vehicles also tended to score higher for two dark personality traits: psychopathy and sadism. The researcher drily observed that the results made perfect sense:
Psychopathy reflects an up-close cruelty, whereas sadism includes viewing the harm to others from a distance… Modifying a muffler to make a car louder is disturbing to pedestrians, other drivers, and animals at a distance, meeting the sadism component, as well as startling when [the victim is] up close at intersections, meeting the psychopathy component.
The author of that study is not a medical professional (nor am I); still, it’s not exactly illogical to consider guys who alter their trucks to produce brain-rattling noise psychopaths. I’m not a lawyer either, but it still seems to me that labeling such practices a form of reckless indifference to human well-being is anything but unreasonable.
Quietness Should Be a Right, Not a Privilege
For decades, the environmental justice movement has been fighting a longstanding American tradition of locating dirty, dangerous industries and activities in low-income, racialized communities. This is a problem that arises with every environmental issue, and noise is no exception. Alex Ross recognized that in his “What Is Noise?” essay when he observed, “Silence is a luxury of the rich… For the rest of society, noise is an index of struggle.”
In neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and/or large Indigenous, Asian, Black, or Latino populations, residents endure greater exposure to noise pollution, especially in areas where informal racial segregation is more severe. Not surprisingly, a separate study found that the same demographic groups experience highly disproportionate levels of annoyance from noise caused by road traffic or aircraft.
Consider it a certain irony then that, despite being exposed to less noise pollution, white Americans are subject to significantly higher rates of hearing loss than Black Americans—and it’s unclear why. Andrew Van Dam of The Washington Post complicated matters further when he noted that there’s also a political disparity: The higher the share of Republicans in a state or county, the greater the rate of hearing loss. He couldn’t fully explain this as a result of populations in redder states being generally whiter and older. There had to be some other factor. When Van Dam looked further, he found one that made a big difference in the prevalence of hearing loss: Politically redder areas have higher rates of recreational firearm ownership than bluer areas, with lots more hunting and gun-range target practice—another kind of noise pollution entirely.
No Peace, No Quiet
The U.S. military also has lots of guns, as well as an enormous climate footprint. A dramatic downsizing of our war-making capacity (and the staggering Pentagon budgets that go with it)—badly needed for both humanitarian and ecological reasons—would have the salutary side-effect of shrinking one of our major sources of noise pollution and hearing loss.
It should come as no surprise that researchers in a wide range of countries have found that hearing loss is more common among military personnel than in the general population. Among American service members, almost 15% suffer hearing impairment. Hearing loss is one of the most common health problems of veterans, especially those who served in special forces units (where it’s twice as prevalent as elsewhere in the armed forces). The exposure of those in such units to large-caliber weapon fire, urban combat training, and the like clearly has a lot to do with that.
In military operations, jet aircraft are the most intense source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and noise pollution. Jets account for almost 80% of the military’s fuel consumption. Their noise output is not as precisely quantified, but recent research in a study on civilian impacts around Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State found that, in the county where the base is located, two-thirds of the resident population were exposed to noise levels that could have negative health effects. One-fifth suffered high levels of annoyance and 9% were “highly sleep disturbed.” Worse yet, according to that study, “the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of the Swinomish Reservation [located northeast of the airfield] was extremely vulnerable to health risks, with nearly 85% of residents being exposed.”
In Salina, Kansas, where Priti Gulati Cox and I live, we have less frequent but highly immersive experiences with military noise pollution every time the curiously named “Jaded Thunder joint exercise” comes to town. In part of that “exercise,” pilots from the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy take off from a nearby airfield in fighter jets and fly low over our city of 50,000. The noise hits you suddenly, like a roundhouse punch. It’s like nothing I’ve heard or felt elsewhere. My own reaction to such overwhelming noise levels is similar to those found in survey responses from several residents of Madison, Wisconsin, who hear fighter jet noise much more routinely than we Salinans do. As one of them put it: “Everything I’m doing comes to a halt… my entire body tenses up and my heart starts racing… utterly jarring… impossible to make out dialogue… impossible to just continue any activity… reminds me of every innocent soul killed in a bombing by my home country.” Finally, there was simply this: “Annoyed.”
Cooler Means Quieter
America was getting louder before the rise of data centers, but now it’s getting louder faster. Unfortunately, the research on that is sparse, but it’s still a reasonable conclusion to draw. In her article, Bianca Bosker pointed out another intriguing indicator of our rising noise problem. Fire-engine sirens today are designed to be more than twice as loud as those of the 1970s, just so they’ll be audible above the rising din of our cities and suburbs. And keep in mind that they’re eight times as loud as the sirens of 1912.
Climate mitigation is also noise mitigation. To avoid baking the Earth, governments must quickly phase out the use of oil, gas, and coal. With a slimmed-down energy supply, economies will need to direct fuels and electricity toward uses that meet more essential needs. Crypto and AI are not among such uses, nor can we afford to keep streets and highways crammed with gas- and diesel-guzzling private vehicles. For those and many other reasons, count on one thing: Strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will also have striking beneficial side effects, including more peace and quiet. And that should be music to our ears.
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Seismic Blasting in Pursuit of Oil Puts Whales at Risk, Report Confirms
There are increasing indications that use of underwater airguns could cause 'serious injury' to various species of whale
Aug 24, 2015
A new report urges "extreme caution" in using seismic airguns to explore for fossil fuels underwater, saying it is "indisputable" that the practice has adverse impacts on Arctic marine life, especially whales.
Seismic testing involves a vessel towing an array of airguns that continuously blast loud, low-frequency sound waves down through the water column and into the seabed at intervals as short as ten seconds. Depending on the size of the area designated for the survey, the operations can last for weeks on end.
"This new study shows how destructive seismic blasting can be for whales yet they continue with their pursuit for oil with no regard for environmental impacts and Inuit rights."
--Jerry Natanine, Clyde River mayor
"It is clear that noise from seismic activity has an impact on whales as it can damage their hearing, ability to communicate and also displace animals, affecting diving behavior, feeding, and migration patterns," said report author Oliver Boisseau, senior research scientist at Marine Conservation Research, which conducted the study (pdf) for Greenpeace Nordic.
"There are increasing indications that this could cause serious injury," he said, "and may also disrupt reproductive success and increase the risk of strandings and ice entrapments."
The report states that narwhals, in particular, tend to "freeze and sink" rather than flee the area in response to a threat such as noise. This means narwhals—an at-risk species shown to be one of the most vulnerable Arctic marine mammals to climate change—are more susceptible to damage from airgun blasts as they are not inclined to avoid regions impacted by noise. In turn, they experience increased stress hormones and entrapments due to disrupted migration patterns.
The report acknowledges a "massive research gap in this field," yet as Ethan Cox writes for Ricochet, it is sure to have implications in Canada, where the Inuit community of Clyde River has gone to court to prevent seismic blasting up and down the length of Baffin Island in the Davis Strait.
Last week, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal denied the hamlet's request for a judicial review of a testing permit issued by the National Energy Board. Clyde River Mayor Jerry Natanine immediately vowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. On Monday, he told Ricochet that the Greenpeace study only supported Clyde River's case.
"One would hope for a limit on the greed of oil companies," Natanine said. "This new study shows how destructive seismic blasting can be for whales, yet they continue with their pursuit of oil with no regard for environmental impacts and Inuit rights."
Indeed, added Boisseau: "It is alarming to consider the vast amount of seismic activity being planned and conducted in the High Arctic, given the fragile nature of the ecosystem and the potential for disturbance and harm to whales. It seems justified to urge for extreme caution given both the lack of data and the limited understanding of the short and long-term impact of seismic noise on sensitive Arctic species, especially the narwhal."
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