Schuyler
Mitchell
As multiple
wildfires tore across Los Angeles County this week, leveling thousands of homes
and businesses and killing at least 10 people, incoming President Donald Trump
seized upon the crisis as an opportunity to point fingers and make false
claims.
“Governor Gavin
Newscum [sic] refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him
that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow
melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California,” Trump posted
on Truth Social, “including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually
apocalyptic way.”
No such water
restoration declaration exists, but Governor Newsom’s water management policies
have become a flashpoint for conservative ire after news broke Wednesday that
the hydrants being used to fight the Pacific Palisades fire had run dry.
In reality,
according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, firefighters’ need
for water at lower elevations had depleted the storage tanks, causing a drop in
pressure that prevented water from traveling to hydrants uphill in the
Palisades. The immense demand on the hydrants was worsened by the fact that
firefighting aircraft were temporarily prevented from performing water drops
amid hurricane-force winds. As local news outlet LAist put it, “water supply
was too slow, not too low”; the extensive scale of the emergency meant
firefighters struggled to refill the tanks quickly, not that the region lacked
an overall reserve.
Trump’s latest
smear campaign is little more than political football. But the renewed
attention on California’s water does highlight ongoing tensions over the
conservation and management of this finite resource. As the climate crisis
worsens, it’s expected to exacerbate heat waves and droughts, bringing water
shortages and increasingly devastating fires like those currently scorching
southern California. The situation in Los Angeles is already a catastrophe.
Climate change-induced water shortages will make imminent disasters even worse.
In the face of
this grim reality, it’s worth revisiting one of the major water-guzzling
industries that’s hastening future crises from California’s own backyard:
artificial intelligence (AI).
Silicon Valley
is the epicenter of the global AI boom, and hundreds of Bay Area tech companies
are investing in AI development. Meanwhile, in the southern region of the
state, real estate developers are rushing to build new data centers to
accommodate expanded cloud computing and AI technologies. The Los Angeles Times
reported in September that data center construction in Los Angeles County had
reached “extraordinary levels,” increasing more than sevenfold in two years.
This
technology’s environmental footprint is tremendous. AI requires massive amounts
of electrical power to support its activities and millions of gallons of water
to cool its data centers. One study predicts that, within the next five years,
AI-driven data centers could produce enough air pollution to surpass the
emissions of all cars in California.
Data centers on
their own are water-intensive; California is home to at least 239. One study
shows that a large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per
day, or as much as a town of 50,000 people. In The Dalles, Oregon, a local
paper found that a Google data center used over a quarter of the city’s water.
Artificial intelligence is even more thirsty: Reporting by The Washington Post
found that Meta used 22 million liters of water simply training its open source
AI model, and UC Riverside researchers have calculated that, in just two years,
global AI use could require four to six times as much water as the entire
nation of Denmark.
Many U.S. data
centers are based in the western portion of the country, including California,
where wind and solar power is more plentiful — and where water is already
scarce. In 2022, a researcher at Virginia Tech estimated that about one-fifth
of data centers in the U.S. draw water from “moderately to highly stressed
watersheds.”
According to the
Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. government’s leading report on
climate change, California is among the top five states suffering economic
impacts from climate crisis-induced natural disaster. California already is
dealing with the effects of one water-heavy industry; the Central Valley, which
feeds the whole country, is one of the world’s most productive agricultural
regions, and the Central Valley aquifer ranks as one of the most stressed
aquifers in the world. ClimateCheck, a website that uses climate models to
predict properties’ natural disaster threat levels, says that California ranks
number two in the country for drought risk.
In August 2021,
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared the first-ever water shortage on the
Colorado River, which supplies water to California — including roughly a third
of southern California’s urban water supply — as well as six other states, 30
tribal nations and Mexico. The Colorado River water allotments have been highly
contested for more than a century, but the worsening climate crisis has thrown
the fraught agreements into sharp relief. Last year, California, Nevada and
Arizona agreed to long-term cuts to their shares of the river’s water supply.
Despite the
precarity of the water supply, southern California’s Imperial Valley, which
holds the rights to 3.1 million acres of Colorado River water, is actively
seeking to recruit data centers to the region.
“Imperial Valley
is a relatively untapped opportunity for the data center industry,” states a
page on the Imperial Valley Economic Development Corporation’s website. “With
the lowest energy rates in the state, abundant and inexpensive Colorado River
water resources, low-cost land, fiber connectivity and low risk for natural
disasters, the Imperial Valley is assuredly an ideal location.” A company
called CalEthos is currently building a 315 acre data center in the Imperial
Valley, which it says will be powered by clean energy and an “efficient”
cooling system that will use partially recirculated water. In the bordering
state of Arizona, Meta’s Mesa data center also draws from the dwindling
Colorado River.
The climate
crisis is here, but organizers are not succumbing to nihilism. Across the
country, community groups have fought back against big tech companies and their
data centers, citing the devastating environmental impacts. And there’s
evidence that local pushback can work. In the small towns of Peculiar,
Missouri, and Chesterton, Indiana, community campaigns have halted companies’
data center plans
“The data center
industry is in growth mode,” Jon Reigel, who was involved in the Chesterton
fight, told The Washington Post in October. “And every place they try to put
one, there’s probably going to be resistance. The more places they put them the
more resistance will spread.”
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