While the Gulf of Mexico is a region known for oil, it’s also home to something far less expected. Nestled among offshore oil platforms, about 150 miles from Houston, is one of the healthiest coral reefs in the world: the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
Marine researchers who have visited the Flower Garden Banks describe it with awe in their voices. “When you look out, it can be almost disorienting because there’s so much coral,” said Michelle Johnston, superintendent of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
As reefs around the world bleach at alarming rates, scientists are racing to study and preserve this remarkable coral reef in the unlikeliest of places. “We have these magical underwater places, [and yet they are] completely surrounded by the oil and gas industry,” Johnston said.
A panoramic image of East Flower Garden Bank, where coral cover is upwards of 80 percent.
Emma Hickerson / Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary via NOAA
To understand how both can exist in such close proximity, it helps to understand the history of the region. Roughly 190 million years ago, the ocean here was drying up, leaving behind a massive plain of salt. Over the ages, that dried-up layer of salt was buried deep in the earth.
And eventually, a new body of water — the Gulf of Mexico — formed high above it. Because salt is less dense than the surrounding rock, the layer slowly rose toward the surface, pushing the earth above it, while pulling up massive oil deposits from below. Slowly, this shift created enormous underwater mountains known as “salt domes.” Looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico today, you can see that many of its oil drilling sites are on those same underwater mountains.
A few of these mountains rose so high that sunlight was just able to filter down through the water to reach them. And roughly 10,000 years ago, coral polyps latched onto the peaks and started to grow. Those underwater mountaintops are now the Flower Garden Banks.
Because the reef is so far from the shore, it’s been protected from many threats like overfishing and coastal pollution. And because of its depth and northern latitude, the water here is about as cold as corals can tolerate, essentially protecting the Flower Garden Banks from global warming. In the summer of 2023, for example, while other reefs throughout the Caribbean were being ravaged by heat stress and bleaching, the unique geology of Flower Gardens allowed it to fare better than the rest.
But this same unique geology has also turned the region into a massive hub for offshore oil drilling.
“When you’re offshore diving at the Flower Gardens, you look around from the dive boat and you can see oil and gas platforms in every direction,” Johnston said. “So there’s all of this industry happening around this beautiful place.”
Oil platforms are visible through the haze near the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Galveston, Texas, Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023.
LM Otero / AP Photo
For now, the reef has thankfully avoided any catastrophic oil spills, but that doesn’t mean that oil hasn’t left its mark. In fact, the legacy of oil extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change are quite literally etched into the hard skeletons of the corals themselves.
“I think of that skeletal material as a little time capsule,” said Amy Wagner, a scientist who studies corals to find clues about Earth’s past.
Back when she was a graduate student in 2005, Wagner and a team of scientists came to Flower Garden Banks in search of one very specific type of coral, Siderastrea siderea. “They just look like a bunch of rocks on the bottom,” she said.
The team dove down 78 feet, to the peaks of these ancient mountaintops, and drilled a nearly 6-foot-long core of this slow-growing species of coral — a 250-year record of pollution, climate change, and even world events. “You start to drill in and, especially in that initial drilling, you’re getting the tissue layer of the coral,” Wagner said. “And you end up having a lot of fish come in, because it’s free food, right?”
Amy Wagner’s team drills a coral sample from the Flower Garden Banks in 2005. Courtesy of Amy Wagner and John Halas
After hours of drilling, they patched up the hole and swam the 6-foot-long core to the surface. Back at the lab, they split open the core samples and x-rayed them. “They’re like trees,” Wagner said. “You can count the tree rings and go back in time. Corals produce these annual bands.”
Every year, the living coral organism lays down a new growth band, using the nutrients and minerals it pulls out of the seawater. Essentially, whatever’s in the seawater makes it into that year’s layer of coral skeleton. “So we have this long record of these little, tiny time capsules that are sort of locking in the ocean chemistry,” Wagner said.
Using a high-tech version of a dentist’s drill, Wagner and her colleague Kristine DeLong, a professor at Louisiana State University, collected a tiny bit of dust from each growth band. Then, like detectives, they analyzed different elements in the dust for clues, looking at the variations in the coral core over time.
Amy Wagner holds a coral core collected from the Flower Garden Banks
Jesse Nichols / Grist
Just like humans, corals build their skeletons out of calcium. But sometimes they make mistakes, accidentally grabbing look-alike elements from the seawater. One of those elements is barium, which is often used as a lubricant in offshore oil wells. During the 1970s energy crisis, oil drilling boomed in the Gulf of Mexico. And Wagner and DeLong could see that spike reflected in the barium levels in the coral: When oil prices crashed, production went down, and so did the barium.
There are many other histories scientists can see etched in this coral core. By looking at nitrogen, they can see the rise of fertilizer pollution from the Mississippi River. By looking at radioactive carbon, they can see the rise of nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War.
And the corals even tell the story of how fossil fuels are changing the climate — in the words of one scientist, “recording their own demise.” To see how, it’s important to know that carbon atoms aren’t all exactly the same. They actually come in a few different weights, depending on the number of neutrons in each carbon atom. A carbon atom with seven neutrons is called “heavy carbon,” while an atom with six neutrons is called “light carbon.” Plants prefer to use the light carbon for photosynthesis. So, inside of a plant, the carbon atoms tend to be a little bit lighter than those, say, inside of a volcano.
Fossil fuels come from ancient plants, which are full of light carbon. As fossil fuel emissions rise, the carbon atoms in our atmosphere are slowly getting lighter.
An X-Ray view of a coral core reveals annual growth bands that scientists can use to detect environmental change
Courtesy of Kristine DeLong
You can see this same trend playing out inside of the corals: The carbon in the coral slowly gets lighter in the band samples as the world burns more fossil fuels. As those fossil fuel emissions warm the climate, they put reefs around the world in danger.
Today, the Flower Garden Banks are still holding on, but they won’t be safe forever. As early as 2040, the Flower Garden Banks could start to see major bleaching events every summer. If we can reduce our emissions at a more reasonable pace, climate models say we might be able to buy an extra 15 to 20 years for the Flower Garden Banks — essentially doubling its window of time. That window would be critical for the sanctuary staff and independent scientists who are working hard to study and protect what might become one of the last coral reefs.
“Going to a place like Flower Gardens, it’s like — these corals, they’re still pretty darn healthy,” said DeLong. “Being able to manage those reefs and take care of them is important, because they may be the last ones we have.”
Recently, scientists at the Flower Garden Banks have started collecting corals from the reef and storing them in an onshore coral lab. The hope is to eventually bank enough coral here in case the worst happens.
Coral fragments from the Flower Garden Banks are housed in the coral rescue lab at the Moody Gardens Aquarium in Galveston, Texas.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
“It is a grim prospect,” Johnston said. “It’s better to be proactive and have some things banked versus getting into the situation where all the corals have bleached and died and we have nothing left. It’s my hope that nature can figure things out and things can adapt. I think the problem is that the climate is changing quickly enough that there might not be time.”
The Flower Garden Banks are a product of 10,000 years of slow, steady growth, capturing annual snapshots of our world, in small millimeter-sized chapters. The next few decades will be critical in determining just how much longer this reef will be able to continue its ancient undersea story.
More so than any other fossil fuel company, Occidental Petroleum — known as Oxy — has built its climate strategy around innovations that capture carbon before it can be emitted or pull it directly out of the air. The Texas-based oil giant, which made more than $23 billion in revenue last year, says on its website that these “visionary technologies” will help it achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and enable a lower-carbon future.
Scientists agree that such technologies will be necessary to limit global warming. But Oxy’s plans for them appear to be less about sustainability and more about creating a “license to pollute,” according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch. The analysis describes Oxy’s focus on carbon capture and removal as a “costly fig leaf for business as usual,” allowing the company to claim emissions reductions while continuing to profit from the sale of fossil fuels — rebranded as “net-zero oil” and “sustainable aviation fuels.”
The company “makes this whole spiel about meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, but it’s very clearly flying in the face of that,” said Marlène Ramón Hernández, an expert on carbon removal at Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report. “What we have to do is phase out fossil fuels, not perpetuate their life.”
Oxy first outlined its net-zero strategy in 2020, making it the first American oil major to do so. Today, Oxy describes that strategy using four R’s: The company says it will “reduce” operational emissions, “revolutionize” carbon management, “remove” carbon from the atmosphere, and “reuse/recycle” it to produce new low-carbon or zero-emissions products. Its overarching goal is to achieve net-zero emissions for its operations and indirect energy use by 2040.
This is where the problems begin, according to Carbon Market Watch. Despite Oxy’s net-zero pledge for its operation and energy use, it is much vaguer about the emissions associated with the oil and gas it sells. These emissions, known as Scope 3 emissions, represented more than 90 percent of Oxy’s greenhouse gas footprint in 2022. The company has asserted an “ambition” to zero them out by 2050.
However, Oxy does not plan to reduce Scope 3 emissions by phasing down the production of oil and gas, but through investments in carbon removal. Direct air capture, or DAC — a technology that uses large fans and chemical reactions to separate carbon dioxide from the air — is a main focus. An Oxy subsidiary called Oxy Low Carbon Ventures announced in 2022 that it would deploy up to 135 DAC plants by 2035, and last year Oxy bought a major DAC technology company for $1.1 billion.
A DAC facility owned by the Swiss company Climeworks.
Halldor Kolbeins / AFP via Getty Images
Some of Oxy’s DAC projects are already in the pipeline. The largest, called Stratos, is under construction in the Permian Basin, a massive oil field, in Texas. If it reaches its nameplate capacity of capturing half a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — which Oxy says it will do by mid-2025 — it will be 14 times larger than the biggest DAC facility in the world. (That facility, owned by the Swiss company Climeworks, began operating in Iceland this week with a nominal capacity of 36,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.)
In order for DAC to result in net removal of carbon dioxide, however, captured carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for good. This is usually achieved by locking it up in rock formations. Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub, however, has said this would be a “waste of a valuable product,” and instead plans to use the captured carbon. In one application, it would be converted into synthetic electrofuels — low-carbon fuels produced from their chemical constituents using electricity — and sold to other companies.
The other major application is for a process known as enhanced oil recovery, where CO2 is injected into oil and gas wells in order to extract hard-to-reach reserves of fossil fuels. This forms the basis for Oxy’s “net-zero oil” claims. According to the company’s logic, the atmospheric carbon dioxide injected into the ground cancels out any new emissions from the oil and gas it’s used to pull up. In an interview with NPR last December, Hollub said this approach means that “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.”
Neither Carbon Market Watch nor the independent experts Grist spoke to look favorably on these approaches. Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT who was not involved in the report, called it “absurd” to use captured carbon to make so-called sustainable aviation fuels; these fuels will eventually be burned, re-releasing the captured carbon back into the atmosphere.
In fact, the whole process may result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, since DAC is an energy-intensive process that is often powered by fossil fuels. Oxy has no publicly announced plans to power its carbon capture and removal facilities with renewable energy. “They’ll be releasing more CO2 than they’re capturing,” Harvey said.
As for “net-zero oil,” Carbon Market Watch calls it an “oxymoron and a logical fallacy.” A 2021 analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory suggests that this application would also result in net-positive emissions — both because it takes so much energy (likely supplied by fossil fuels) just to run a DAC plant, and, because every metric ton of carbon dioxide injected into oil fields extracts two to three barrels of oil. Each barrel of oil generates half a metric ton of carbon dioxide when burned, which means each metric ton of carbon dioxide used for Oxy’s net-zero oil may create 1 to 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions.
Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub speaks at a panel during the World Petroleum Congress conference in 2021.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Hernández said she is also concerned about Oxy’s plans to generate carbon credits from its DAC projects. Even though none of its planned DAC facilities has been built yet, Oxy has already pre-sold or is in negotiations to sell DAC-generated carbon credits representing between 1.63 million and 1.98 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Carbon Market Watch’s calculations. If the company uses the same captured carbon to offset its own emissions and generate credits, which can be used to offset the emissions of another company, “This is a blatant issue of double-counting,” Hernandez told Grist.
Oxy did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Holly Jean Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo, said it’s possible to pursue DAC responsibly. Even a moonshot project like Stratos could be seen as having an important demonstration or research value. “The point is to figure out if the technology is going to work at a real-world level,” she told Grist.
That said, she agreed there are ways Oxy could make its DAC agenda more credible. “They could make a commitment to building renewable power to power it,” she offered, or donate the technology to developing countries.
Buck and some other academics say fossil fuel companies should be doing more of this research — or at least footing the bill for it — in order to take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis. Harvey, however, argues there’s an opportunity cost to such research and deployment, which is expensive. He and other researchers have estimated that it will cost Oxy’s Stratos facility $500 to capture each metric ton of carbon dioxide. (The company predicts costs will fall to around $200 per ton by 2030.)
Every dollar spent on DAC means a dollar not spent on more reliable, immediate emissions reductions. “There’s low-hanging fruit to do before you get there,” he said, like building renewable energy for non-DAC purposes, insulating houses, installing heat pumps, or putting more batteries on the grid with existing renewables.
“Almost anything is better” than DAC, Harvey said.
As an essential first step toward a more credible net-zero strategy, Hernández suggested that Oxy abandon its aggressive plans to extract more oil and gas, since doing so is misaligned with scientists’ call for adramatic cut in production in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). “It’s actually planning to increase its oil production, so there is clearly no intention there to transition to net-zero,” she said.
We take for granted the endless flow of electrons that enable modern life just as we take for granted the air we breathe. Yet, an outage can occur at almost any time, usually when too much demand is placed on some portion of the circuit distributing energy around a neighborhood. As misfortune would have it, the rush to electrify the cars we’ve come to depend upon is increasing the risk of overloads and outages in the years ahead if utilities can’t keep up.
Nowhere is the need for bolstering the grid as pronounced as it is in California. A new study reveals that, as the state chases its audacious goal of ensuring that every new vehicle sold from 2035 on plugs into an outlet, Golden State energy providers will need to perform extensive upgrades to the circuits that shuttle energy around cities. By 2045, California’s three major utilities will need to expand their combined distribution capacity by 25 gigawatts. The researchers found that these upgrades could cost $6 billion to $20 billion for the transformers and other hardware alone. Despite the expense, it will likely benefit, not burden, everyone who uses electricity.
“According to our study, actually, there will be a decrease in electricity price,” said Yanning Li, a doctoral student with a focus on energy systems at the University of California, Davis and the study’s lead author.
Li and her co-author found that the increase in energy consumption — and the revenue that would generate — will exceed the cost of the upgrades and ultimately reduce rates by up to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Energy in California currently costs, on average, just over 31 cents per kilowatt-hour. Yet, in a report with findings aligned with Li’s study, the California Public Utilities Commission pointed out that, depending on how much utilities spend on things like renewables and transmission capacity, the price customers pay could stay the same or even inch upward. Li also acknowledged that many factors may complicate how energy prices change for customers, including energy efficiency programs and rooftop solar.
A shortage of new transformers that plagued the industry even before the pandemic shuddered the entire supply chain complicates the price picture further. As a result of these challenges, “you can see utility lead times go up from an order of months to a year or two plus, and prices going up by a factor of five or greater,” said Killian McKenna, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who specializes in the distribution grid. If transformer costs continue rising as EV adoption pushes more utilities to consider upgrading their grids, then the overall outlay will grow as well — something Li notes in her study.
In the face of long waits and high prices, options exist that can ease the pace and extent of upgrades required to manage increasing loads, said Kristin Eberhard, the senior policy director at Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification.
One option is to provide customers with incentives to shift the time or location of charging in a way that reduces peak demand — something Li discusses in her study. This can mean a driver choosing to charge at work instead of at home, or it can mean that, if a utility increases or decreases its energy prices depending on real-time supply and demand data, EV owners can program their car to charge when the rate drops below a prescribed level.
Utilities also can leverage big data. About a decade ago, in preparation for the surge in electric vehicles, Burbank Water and Power, a Los Angeles-area utility, developed a smart grid that allowed it to monitor its equipment with a high level of precision and accuracy, detect potential outages before they occur, and identify other sources of inefficiency and vulnerability. Noticing that some transformers saw significantly less demand than they were designed for while others were chronically taxed to their limits, the utility systematically shuffled components to right-size its distribution system, making it one of the most reliable in the nation. While not a permanent solution, such a project can certainly buy time for the supply chain to catch up with demand.
Of course, while a rapid growth in EV adoption across California and the 14 states that have adopted its EV mandate creates a new and growing source of energy demand, these plug-in vehicles are by no means the only reason distribution networks must be upgraded, which is why the California Public Utilities Commission expects the current plans for distribution maintenance to be able to keep up with the growth in demand from EV charging. Utilities need to perform line maintenance because America’s energy infrastructure has aged. And in some places, power lines need to be buried to make them more resilient and to reduce wildfire risk. But these concurrent dilemmas present an opportunity.
“You can imagine if you have old infrastructure that needs to be put underground and needs to be modernized at the same time that you expand the network, there’s a lot of opportunities for cost savings there,” McKenna said. “And that’s the big opportunity piece that I think folks need to look at.”
The planet just had its hottest April ever recorded, extending a streak of 11 consecutive record-setting months, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
The monthly bulletin from C3S said the average global temperature was 1.61 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average — the highest for a 12-month period. It was also 0.73 degrees Celsius above the average from 1991 to 2020.
“El Niño peaked at the beginning of the year and the sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are now going back towards neutral conditions. However, whilst temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped into the ocean and the atmosphere by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will keep pushing the global temperature towards new records,” said C3S Director Carlo Buontempo in the report.
For months, ocean surface temperatures broke records as well, leading scientists to ask whether a tipping point due to human activity had been reached, reported Reuters.
“I think many scientists have asked the question whether there could be a shift in the climate system,” said Julien Nicolas, senior climate scientist at C3S, as Reuters reported.
Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth research scientist, has estimated that there is a 66 percent chance this year will be the hottest ever recorded, and a 99 percent likelihood of it being the second hottest, reported CNN. Hausfather added that the best estimate is that the global average temperature for 2024 will be a little higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Regions in eastern Europe had temperatures that were the most above average for April 2024, the C3S report said. Iceland and Fennoscandia saw temperatures that were below average.
Other than Europe, most of Africa, parts of South America, eastern Asia, Greenland, the northern and northeastern portions of North America and the northwestern parts of the Middle East saw temperatures that were the most above average for the month.
“The El Niño in the eastern equatorial Pacific continued to weaken towards neutral conditions, but marine air temperatures in general remained at an unusually high level,” C3S said. “This is the thirteenth month in a row that the SST [(sea surface temperature)] has been the warmest in the ERA5 data record for the respective month of the year.”
While the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement has not been officially overshot — the target refers to an average temperature for the planet over a period of decades — some scientists think the goal is already out of reach and that governments should be focusing on reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible, Reuters reported.
“At what point do we declare we’ve lost the battle to keep temperatures below 1.5? My personal opinion is we’ve already lost that battle, and we really need to think very seriously about keeping below 2C and reducing our emissions as fast as we can,” said Newcastle University climate scientist Hayley Fowler, as reported by Reuters.
According to Ember’s executive summary of the report, record solar and wind construction in 2023 means “a new era of falling fossil generation is imminent.”
“The renewables future has arrived,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s global insights director. “Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible.”
The report pointed out that, while electricity demand worldwide has continued to rise, renewables have helped slow fossil fuel growth by nearly two-thirds in the past decade, The Guardian reported.
The report found that green energy had increased from 19 percent of the power supply in 2000. The main contributor to the growth was solar, which added more than twice the generation of new electricity as coal last year. Solar’s surge was the fastest for the 19th year in a row and the biggest new electricity source again after surpassing wind power last year.
“The decline of power sector emissions is now inevitable. 2023 was likely the pivot point — peak emissions in the power sector — a major turning point in the history of energy. But the pace of emissions falls depends on how fast the renewables revolution continues,” Jones said, according to Ember.
The report looked at power data from 215 countries. The analysis included the latest data from 2023 for 80 countries that represented 92 percent of electricity demand around the globe. It also examined data for 13 economic and geographic groupings like the European Union, Asia, Africa and the Group of Seven largest developed economies in the world.
At the United Nations COP28 climate change conference at the end of 2023, world leaders set a target of reaching 60 percent of global electricity being supplied by clean energy by 2030. The goal would mean countries would have to triple their current renewables capacity in the coming six years, reported The Guardian.
“The good news is we already know the key enablers that help countries unleash the full potential of solar and wind. There’s an unprecedented opportunity for countries that choose to be at the forefront of the clean energy future. Expanding clean electricity not only helps to decarbonise the power sector. It also provides the step up in supply needed to electrify the whole economy; and that’s the real game-changer for the climate,” Jones said in Ember’s summary of the report.
Ember added that global power generation’s carbon dioxide intensity fell to 12 percent below its peak in 2007 — a new record low.
“The speed of solar and wind expansion is remarkable and a sign that society can bring about rapid change,” said Niklas Höhne, a climate scientist with the NewClimate Institute, who did not contribute to Ember’s research, as CNN reported.
Drought conditions caused a record fall in the generation of hydropower to a five year low, Ember said. The shortfall was met by a rise in coal power generation. Nearly all — 95 percent — of the increase in coal generation last year was in four drought-stricken countries: India, China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Ember’s forecast was for fossil fuel generation to “fall slightly” this year, but for the decrease to grow in subsequent years.
Ember said electricity demand growth was expected to be higher this year, but that the increase in green energy generation was predicted to be even greater, resulting in a reduction in global fossil fuel production of two percent.
“The decade ahead will see the energy transition enter a new phase,” Ember said. “Clean electricity additions – led by solar and wind – are already forecast to outpace demand growth in the coming decade, securing moderate reductions in fossil fuel use and hence emissions, even as demand accelerates to meet the growing needs of electrification and other booming technologies.”
Ember said green power was key to the decarbonization of heating, transportation and much of industry.
“An accelerating transition to a clean electrified economy powered by wind, solar and other forms of clean energy will also unlock benefits in areas such as economic growth, jobs, air quality and energy sovereignty,” Ember said.
Nancy Haegel, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory research advisor, told CNN that, while the report “does provide hope,” the question was whether the transition to renewables would happen quickly enough.
“Choices in the next 10 years are critical,” Haegel said.
Scientists have reclassified what was the last remaining glacier in Venezuela to an ice field, following significant shrinkage. The reclassification means that Venezuela is believed to be the first Andean country, and the first country globally, to lose all of its glaciers.
The Humboldt glacier, or La Corona, had been the only remaining glacier in Venezuela since 2011. By that year, five other glaciers in Venezuela had been lost, The Guardian reported.
As of 1910, Venezuela was home to six glaciers, which spanned about 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), IFL Science reported. But over time, amid global warming, the glaciers have shrunk until they no longer met the criteria to be classified as a glacier. Typically, a glacier is considered to be at least 10 hectares.
In the case of the Humboldt glacier, it shrank from an initial 450 hectares to only 2 hectares, as Phys.org reported.
“In Venezuela there are no more glaciers,” Julio Cesar Centeno, professor at the University of the Andes (ULA), told AFP in March 2024. “What we have is a piece of ice that is 0.4 percent of its original size.”
By the end of 2023, the government announced plans to slow thawing of the Humboldt glacier by covering it in sheets of polypropylene plastic. However, scientists are planning to ask Venezuela’s highest court to overturn the project due to concerns over microplastics and their impacts on what remains of the ice and the surrounding environment.
“These microplastics are practically invisible, they end up in the soil and from there they go to crops, lagoons, into the air, so people will end up eating and breathing that,” Centeno told AFP.
Scientists originally believed the glacier would last at least another 10 years before being reclassified, but political turmoil and the glacier’s remote location put observations on hold in recent years, The Guardian reported.
From the previous observations in 2019 to the following observations at the end of 2023, scientists discovered the glacier had lost about 2 hectares.
“Other countries lost their glaciers several decades ago after the end of the little ice age but Venezuela is arguably the first one to lose them in modern times,” said Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian, as reported by The Guardian.
Now, experts believe what remains of what was the Humboldt glacier will disappear entirely in five years at best, or two years at worse.
In addition to impacting local ecosystems, the disappearing ice is also expected to affect tourism in Venezuela. The ice cover of the country’s second highest mountain, Pico Humboldt, was a big draw for visitors.
“Now everything is rock, and what remains is so deteriorated that it is risky to step on it,” Susana Rodriguez, a forestry engineer, told AFP. “There are cracks.”
For nearly a decade, Holly Alpine (née Beale) loved working at Microsoft. Shortly after finishing college, in July 2014, she landed a job there as a technical account manager. Less than four years later, Alpine was leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft’s data centers are located. She was also helping organize a worker-led sustainability group called the Sustainability Connected Community, which would grow to nearly 10,000 Microsoft employees worldwide by late 2023.
But at the end of last year, Alpine reached a painful decision: She could no longer ethically work at Microsoft. On January 24, 2024, Alpine sent an email to Microsoft president Brad Smith, CEO Satya Nadella, and several other senior company officials, letting them know why.
Writing on behalf of herself and a colleague who resigned at the same time, Alpine told the tech giant’s top brass that the two were quitting in “no small part” due to Microsoft’s work for the fossil fuel industry aimed at automating and accelerating oil extraction.
“This work to maximize oil production with our technology is negating all of our good work, extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions,” Alpine wrote in the email. “We are both deeply saddened to be so let down by a company we loved so much.” (Alpine’s colleague asked Grist not to identify them, citing concerns over how it might affect their future employment prospects in the tech industry.)
Alpine’s blunt resignation letter didn’t come out of nowhere. For years, she was one of the faces of an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft’s work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools. Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies. But convincing the world’s most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult. Eventually, Alpine decided speaking up internally wasn’t enough.
This spring, Alpine spoke with Grist for her first on-the-record interview describing her experience advocating for change inside Microsoft. By speaking out publicly despite her concerns about legal risks, Alpine hopes to place additional pressure on her former employer to address the emissions it is enabling through technology partnerships with fossil fuel companies. Alpine’s account, along with those of other former Microsoft employees, as well as internal documents current and former employees shared with Grist, offer a rare glimpse into how tech industry workers are applying behind-the-scenes pressure to hold their bosses accountable on climate change.
“My resignation was driven in part by the realization that the tech industry, including Microsoft, is increasing the profitability and competitiveness of these fossil fuel giants and perpetuating their existence when they should be phased out,” Alpine told Grist. “It became apparent after years of internal efforts … that Microsoft was unwilling to enact meaningful change.”
A Microsoft spokesperson told Grist that the company’s employees are “core to our sustainability mission” and that executives engage with employee groups, like the Sustainability Connected Community that Alpine helped establish, “on a regular basis as part of an ongoing dialog.”
The Microsoft company logo is seen during the 2021 SmartCity Expo World Congress, an international event focused on innovative and sustainable cities.
Paco Freire / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
“The energy transition is complex and requires moving forward in a principled manner. We believe that technology has an important role to play in helping the industry decarbonize, and that requires balancing the energy needs and industry practices of today while inventing and deploying those of tomorrow,” the spokesperson added. “And we continually monitor our emissions, accelerate progress while increasing our use of clean energy to power data centers, purchasing renewable energy and other efforts to meet our sustainability goals of being carbon negative, water positive, and zero-waste by 2030.”
It’s true that Microsoft is taking numerous steps to address the sustainability of its own operations. But for years, the company has also furnished fossil fuel giants with cloud computing services and specialized software tools powered by machine learning and AI in order to streamline and automate their operations. These digital technologies help companies discover oil faster, squeeze more from existing wells, and boost productivity across their operations in order to stay cost competitive in an age of cheap renewable energy. The digital services market for oil and gas is “immense,” as a 2020 report by oil industry analysts at Barclays put it, with the potential to unlock $150 billion in yearly savings for producers.
In 2017, Alpine and former Microsoft employee Drew Wilkinson came together to organize a small group of workers who shared a passion for sustainability and wanted to make positive changes at Microsoft. In early 2018, that group was folded into the company’s formal Connected Communities program, which provides employees with support and resources to organize volunteer communities based on shared interests. The mission of the Sustainability Connected Community — to make sustainability part of everybody’s job at Microsoft — resonated with workers around the world, and the group quickly grew to several thousand members.
In the group’s first few years, tech companies’ oil and gas contracts becamea focal point for climate-concerned workers across the tech industry. As they organized and began pressuring their bosses to take action on climate, news outlets started calling out Big Tech for creating AI technology aimed at accelerating oil production.
Sustainability Connected Community employees on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, on the day of the 2019 global climate strike. Courtesy of Drew Wilkinson
At an employee town hall in September 2019, a Microsoft worker asked Nadella, the company’s CEO, if he believed that helping oil companies extract more fossil fuels was an ethical use of the company’s technology. Nadella responded by stressing that fossil fuel companies are actively investing in the energy transition, according to a meeting transcript that was manually recorded by employees present at the time. Nadella’s response implied that by helping oil companies be more productive and achieve cost savings, Microsoft was enabling them to put more resources into emissions-reducing innovations.
“To me his answer was borderline gaslighting,” Wilkinson told Grist. “Those of us in the sustainability community were like, ‘The work you’re doing is not to help them transition. The work you’re doing is to help them find and extract and burn more oil.’”
As concerns over the company’s fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis. The news generated a wave of positive mediaattention and was met with cheers from the Sustainability Connected Community, Wilkinson said.
“The initial reaction was like, ‘Holy sh–t, this is awesome,’” Wilkinson told Grist. “All this pressure we put on the company” — not just around the oil contracts, but sustainability more broadly — “worked.”
The group’s concerns over Microsoft’s fossil fuel business “died down” for a while, according to Wilkinson: “Those of us who had been organizing on it back in 2019 were like, ‘Let’s wait and see what they do. Let’s give them a chance.’”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers a speech during an event named Microsoft Build AI Day in Jakarta in April 2024. Adek BERRY / AFP voa Getty Images
For Alpine, Wilkinson, and other employees, the incongruity between Microsoft’s climate goals and its efforts to enable oil extraction was too big to ignore.In late 2021, a small group of employees involved in the Sustainability Connected Community came together to craft a memo for Microsoft’s leadership calling attention to the climate impact of the company’s fossil fuel business. By customizing its cloud computing technology for oil and gas companies, Microsoft was “enabling far more emissions than we offset or remove,” employees asserted — yet those indirect emissions were not included in the company’s internal carbon accounting. The employees calculated that a single deal with Exxon Mobil to expand production in Texas and New Mexico by up to 50,000 barrels per day could enable carbon emissions adding up to 640 percent of the company’s carbon removal target for 2021.
“We believe we must hold ourselves accountable for the enabled emissions of our technology,” reads the memo, a copy of which was shared with Grist. “Our principled approach and leadership can — and should — set an industry standard.”
The memo goes on to outline more than a dozen recommendations for the company, including advocating for policies that align with 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, measuring the emissions increases (or reductions) enabled by Microsoft’s technology, and ceasing to develop custom software tools aimed at increasing oil extraction.
In December 2021, Alpine, along with two other employees who asked Grist not to identify them, held a meeting with Smith and Lucas Joppa, who was then Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, to discuss the memo and present their recommendations. The meeting felt “really positive,” Alpine told Grist, adding that Smith expressed agreement with most of the employees’ recommendations and even appeared surprised that one of them — adding environmental impacts to Microsoft’s internal principles governing the responsible use of AI — hadn’t already been implemented. Smith, Alpine said, even offered to assemble a small team to further explore the concept of environmentally responsible AI principles. A former Microsoft employee familiar with the company’s responsible AI standards told Grist the idea was investigated but never went anywhere; the company’s responsible AI principles still do not include sustainability.
Microsoft and Joppa declined to comment on the meeting.
Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, speaks at the ”New Strategies for a New Era” keynote at the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, in February 2024. Joan Cros / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Alpine told Grist she left the meeting “hopeful that things would change.” And several months later, in March 2022, Microsoft issued a blog post outlining a series of principles that would guide its future work with the energy industry. The so-called energy principles included expanding work on initiatives focused on low and zero-carbon energy and helping energy customers develop “effective net-zero commitments.” Perhaps most significantly, the principles stated that Microsoft would only develop specialized tools for oil and gas extraction for companies that had agreed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner.
“We were really excited when [the principles] were first published,” Alpine told Grist. “They were published, we were told, in part because of our advocacy, which felt really good.”
But the more Alpine and others asked questions about the principles, the more they felt let down. Microsoft’s pledge to only develop custom fossil fuel extraction technologies for companies with a net-zero target only covered the emissions associated with producing the fuels, known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Oil and gas companies weren’t being asked to zero out the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, known as Scope 3 emissions, which can represent upwards of 85 percent of their total emissions.
What’s more, oil companies simply had to put forth a net-zero target. Microsoft wasn’t requiring them to do anything to show they were on track to meet it.
“Requiring a net-zero target only for Scope 1 and 2 emissions brushes aside the vast majority of the problem, which is the emissions that result from burning the fossil fuel companies’ products,” said Bill Weihl, founder of the nonprofit advocacy group ClimateVoice and a former sustainability director at Facebook and Google. “And a 2050 target, with no intermediate targets that would demonstrate a real commitment to shifting toward clean energy, is essentially meaningless.” Microsoft declined to comment on these concerns.
In November 2022, the Sustainability Connected Community held a call with Darryl Willis, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of energy, to discuss the principles. According to a meeting transcript generated by Microsoft Teams, employees peppered Willis with questions about what the principles meant and how Microsoft was implementing them, including which standards Microsoft would use to judge energy companies’ net-zero pledges, whether Microsoft was bringing up Scope 3 emissions in conversations with energy industry clients, and whether Microsoft had a plan to transition its energy division revenue away from fossil fuels.
Willis acknowledged that there was “a lack of standards” around Microsoft’s net-zero requirement, and that including emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in companies’ net-zero targets was “going to be a journey.”
“It’s hard, it’s big, it’s complicated,” Willis told employees on the call, according to the transcript. “But I think it’s not unrecognized as a necessity.”
Darryl Willis, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of energy, left, greets Crown Prince Haakon of Norway at Microsoft Conference Center in April 2024 in Redmond, Washington. Mat Hayward / Getty Images
On the call, Willis committed to providing employees with updates on net-zero requirements as Microsoft continued to implement the principles. He also committed to providing a breakdown of the energy division’s revenue across six different sectors, from oil and gas extraction to low- or zero-carbon energy, as well as an analysis of personnel resources assigned to extractive industries versus renewable energy. Finally, Willis agreed to share a plan for how Microsoft’s energy division would transition its revenue toward low-carbon energy.
Alpine says she held several additional meetings with senior energy division and sustainability officials at Microsoft over the following year, and that Willis joined the Sustainability Connected Community for another call in November 2023. But the promised updates and analyses never materialized. At a December 2023 meeting with energy executives, Alpine says she was told that Microsoft was not responsible for defining net-zero for their customers, as there’s no global standard. (Microsoft declined to share any additional information with Grist concerning its net-zero standards for energy sector clients or any of the other commitments Willis made to employees in 2022.)
A few weeks later, Alpine came across a LinkedIn blog post Microsoft technical architect Azam Zaidi had written in April 2023 about the company’s work on oil and gas industry automation. Microsoft’s cloud services division, Azure, Zaidi asserted, was “at the heart” of the fossil fuel industry’s digital transformation,“enabling faster and more accurate decision-making and unlocking previously inaccessible reserves.”
“With Azure,” Zaidi concluded, “the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever.”
“That was really a nail in the coffin for me,” Alpine said.
In her January resignation email to Smith, Alpine quoted Zaidi’s post directly. “Facilitating a ‘future of oil and gas’ that ‘is brighter than ever’ goes against everything that we stand for, and everything we thought this company stands for as well,” Alpine wrote.
Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, responded to Alpine the next day, thanking her for her “continued advocacy for sustainability.” Microsoft, Nakagawa wrote, is continuing to “uphold and adhere” to the energy principles, which the Sustainability Connected Community “had a role in shaping.”
Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, speaks at Web Summit 2023. Hugo Amaral / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Weihl of ClimateVoice says it’s important to recognize that Microsoft employees “have been very effective internally on several fronts,” including encouraging the company to publicly voice its support for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked hundreds of billions of federal dollars toward clean energy. Last fall, Weihl said, employees at Microsoft launched an internal campaign targeting the company’s membership in trade associations that oppose climate policy, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Earlier this year Microsoft released an audit of its trade associations showing their alignment (or lack thereof) on climate policy, which Weihl called “a big step toward accountability.”
Wilkinson, who started his own climate consulting business after he was laid off from Microsoft in early 2023, has maintained contact with many former colleagues in the Sustainability Connected Community. When it comes to addressing the emissions Microsoft enables within the fossil fuel industry, “the work is continuing,” he said.
Alpine isn’t sure what’s next for her career-wise, but she’s considering focusing on coalition-building around the emissions that tech corporations enable, or sustainable food production. In the meantime, she’s keeping the heat on Microsoft by speaking out publicly about her time there.
Weihl is optimistic about what Microsoft employees — and former employees — can do if they continue to raise a ruckus.
“The energy principles open a door,” he said. “So do the commitments Willis made. Employee pressure made that happen. It’s now up to employees … to keep the pressure on and make sure those principles and those commitments aren’t just window dressing.”
Correction: This story originally misidentified the structure of Holly Alpine’s work leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft’s data centers are located.
A quarter of the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from electricity generation. The biggest polluters in the sector are the country’s coal-fired power plants — decades-old facilities that emit enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air. Federal regulators and policymakers have spent years coming up with a plan for minimizing emissions from fossil fuel-run power stations. The Environmental Protection Agency finally unveiled the results of that work last week: a historic suite of rules that aim to prevent 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon pollution by 2047, the equivalent of annual emissions from 328 million gas cars.
The new rules were finalized under multiple laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. In addition to cutting carbon emissions, they are expected to vastly reduce air, water, and soil pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants by preventing toxic discharge into rivers and streams, better controlling coal ash pollution, and reducing toxic mercury emissions.
Of the four new rules, one in particular sets a new precedent by being the first to require the implementation of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, in order for certain existing plants to continue operating. Some of the facilities that fall under the rules are the more than 200 coal-fired power plants across the country that collectively account for more than half of the energy sector’s carbon emissions. Per the regulations, the companies operating these facilities have three options: they can capture 90 percent of their emissions and keep running past 2039, capture a smaller share of emissions and close by 2039, or continue operating normally and retire by 2032.
Carbon capture and storage is a complex, multi-site process that involves trapping the gas at the point of emission and piping it underground to a well where it is injected for long-term storage. And so some climate advocates fear that the rule will only prolong the lives of power plants that run on fossil fuels.
Other critics of the EPA’s rules doubt the technology’s effectiveness, and point out that it has never been deployed on a commercial scale. Despite the hundreds of millions in tax incentives that the Biden Administration allocated to spur the development of CCS, there are currently no operations in the US that capture a substantial portion of a facility’s emissions. The fossil fuel giant Occidental Petroleum quietly abandoned its largest CCS facility in Pecos County, Texas, last October, selling it for a fraction of its construction cost. Elsewhere, Chevron’s massive operation on Barrow Island off the coast of Western Australia is successfully capturing carbon, but challenges in the underground storage system has led it to only store 1.6 million tons per year, under half its capacity.
Still, some other climate advocates say the rule fits well into their overall strategy: Capturing and storing carbon is such an expensive endeavor that some of the country’s oldest and biggest emitters, they hope, will choose to shut down rather than operate under the new rule.
“This is a regulation that on its face appears to be mostly about CCS,” said Emily Grubert, a civil engineer and environmental sociologist at the University of Notre Dame. But Grubert believes that the rule can be harnessed for other ends: “The goal of the climate movement is for it to be about plant retirement.”
Grubert told Grist that it is unlikely many of the operators of these plants will elect to retrofit their facilities with CCS, since adopting the technology can cost companies over $1 billion.
“I don’t want to see carbon capture put on the coal plants. The U.S. coal fleet is very old,” Grubert told Grist. “When you talk about putting multibillion-dollar investments on these plants, that almost certainly guarantees that they will stay open longer than they would have otherwise.”
Advocates who live in communities near CCS infrastructure along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana applauded some aspects of the new rule, but worried about the safety of the new technology. Capturing and storing carbon involves a complex network of industrial equipment, underground pipelines, and injection wells, each of which has their respective risks. When a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured in Mississippi in February 2020, dozens of people were rushed to the hospital after experiencing shortness of breath. A similar incident occurred with an Exxon Mobil-owned pipeline in southwest Louisiana last month. With the EPA’s recent decision to grant industry-friendly Louisiana the authority to approve new carbon dioxide wells, advocates worry that the majority-Black communities that live alongside much of the South’s fossil fuel infrastructure will have yet another pollution hazard in their midst.
“We’re looking at a perfect storm,” said Beverly Wright, the executive director of the New Orleans-based Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “You have this new shiny object that’s gonna solve all our problems by pumping the carbon into the ground. But whose ground?”
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Existing coal plants have until 2032 to implement CCS and reduce their carbon emissions by 90 percent or shut down. Some politicians have indicated their determination to fight these requirements and keep the country’s coal fleet running without emissions-reducing technology. When the rules were initially proposed last year, a group of Republican attorneys general led by Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia wrote EPA Administrator Michael Regan a letter saying the regulations would “kill jobs, raise energy prices, and hurt energy reliability.” Last week, Morrisey threatened to challenge the EPA’s finalized decision in court. Separately, Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator from West Virginia, said she planned to draft a resolution opposing the rules. But beyond the potential legal and congressional challenges, CCS technology will have to develop substantially over the next decade to be used on a commercial scale.
Nonetheless, Grubert told Grist that it’s important not to discount CCS entirely. While solar and wind farms can replace the country’s rundown coal plants, there are currently few alternatives to clean up major emitters like cement manufacturing plants. In her ideal scenario, the new EPA rules will encourage the coal plants to go offline within the next decade, while spurring investment in other sectors where capturing carbon might be necessary in the interim, to minimize climate warming emissions.
“Begrudgingly, I think we do need to be able to” implement some CCS, Grubert said. “Having a regulatory framework and a regulatory environment that ensures that carbon storage is safe and well communicated to people is a good idea.”
Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers hum with the electricity required to process and store every byte of information that modern lives rely on.
In recent years, these data centers have been rapidly expanding in the United States. But the gargantuan facilities do more than keep cloud servers running — they also guzzle absurd amounts of water to run cooling systems that protect their components from overheating. Now, as artificial intelligence applications become ubiquitous, they’re using more water than ever.
Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the globe, where more than 300 facilities process nearly 70 percent of the world’s digital information, a job that requires ever more electricity. A utility that serves the area, Dominion Energy, announced during a May 2 earnings call that the industry’s demand for electricity had more than doubled in recent years. The week before that call, Google announced a billion-dollar expansion of three Virginia facilities, following a $35 billion investment by Amazon Web Services in the same area last year. State lawmakers and environmental groups have begun worrying about what this industry boom means for the area’s supply of water.
“Some of these data centers will use resources equivalent to a small city for energy and water,” said Ann Bennett, chair of data center issues in the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter. “They are being built on a scale that we just haven’t seen in the past.”
Large data centers are resource hogs, using as much as 5 million gallons of water a day. Big companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta, have faced public backlash for sucking up groundwater in regions plagued by droughts, such as in Arizona. But warming temperatures and more heat waves are driving increased water scarcity even in states that are not used to shortages. Last summer and fall, Virginia suffered a monthslong drought. The worst of the dry spell was in the same watershed as “data center alley,” part of Loudoun County where thousands of technology companies make use of the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, in an area the size of 100,000 football fields.
“I think as we look towards climate change and drought, somebody has to start asking these questions about how that impacts water supply and future increasing need,” said Kyle Hart, a program manager of the National Parks Conservation Association in Alexandria, one of the groups involved in the recently formed Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition. Many environmental advocates say that because companies often don’t divulge details about their water use, calling attention to these issues is a challenge.
Amazon data centers being built 50 feet from residential houses in the Loudoun County, Virginia.
Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Data centers rank among the top 10 water-consuming industries in the United States, according to a 2021 study from Virginia Tech that looked at their environmental cost. And the next generation of technology will only make these facilities thirstier, as servers that run AI algorithms generate more heat. Compared with traditional computing, the average neural network needs six times more kilowatts per rack. And AI scales exponentially: Large-scale algorithms, used by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, consume at least 100 times more computing power and process millions of more data points than simpler kinds of machine learning.
In Virginia, the scramble to stake land for data centers has some residents concerned. In December, local officials in Prince William County approved a $40 billion land-development project that will turn the county into the world’s largest data center hub. The public debate took 27 hours and drew nearly 400 citizens who raised questions about water availability, effect on the grid, and noise pollution.
Dozens of climate advocacy and historical preservation organizations formed the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition at the end of last year over concerns that data centers were being built without prior understanding of the consequences. Julie Bolthouse, director of land use at Piedmont Environmental Council, one of the members of the coalition, says without more information about the resources these facilities consume, it’s difficult to draw a line from data centers to water issues. “We just don’t know. And that’s the biggest problem: We need more transparency around this industry,” she said. “And yet we’re approving them because of the promise of increased revenue.”
“Data centers are really secretive about their operational details,” said Md Abu Bakar Siddik, an engineering doctoral student who co-authored the Virginia Tech study. In 2022, Google became the first company to publicize its data centers’ water use following a lengthy legal battle in The Dalles, Oregon. While a handful of other tech giants, like Microsoft, have followed suit, most companies remain tight-lipped.
Ben Townsend, head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google, says the tech giant has some of the most sustainable data centers in the industry. And if a drought hit the area, Townsend said that Google would work with the local utilities “well in advance to understand what behaviors need to be taken to best support the watershed.”
Last month, Bolthouse learned from a Freedom of Information Act request that data centers serviced by the Loudoun water utility had increased their use of drinking water by more than 250 percent between 2019 and 2023. The documents also showed that water usage peaked during the summer months when the risk of drought is the highest.
Recycled water is being used in some data centers, such as in a Google facility in Georgia. But Siddik says fresh water is usually necessary to keep cooling systems running smoothly.
Members of the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition during a press release last December.
Hugh Kenny / Piedmont Environmental Council
Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at University of California, Riverside, said that instead of returning the water to a city wastewater system, like the one connected to your drains at home, many data centers use cooling methods that rely on evaporation. A study he co-authored last year found that just training Open AI’s flagship product, GPT-3, might have directly evaporated more than 700,000 liters of clean fresh water. “Whether the water is recycled, saline, or fresh water, afterwards the water is just gone,” Ren said.
Some Virginia lawmakers have tried to hold companies accountable for their impact on the environment. In February, Josh Thomas, a Democrat in the Virginia House of Delegates, introduced several data center reform bills, including one that would require counties to conduct water studies before approving new developments. Although the legislation made it through the Virginia House in February, the Senate vote was eventually postponed until 2025, effectively killing it. According to Thomas, industry groups lobbied against the bill. By the time he reintroduces it during next year’s legislative session, lawmakers and the Data Center Reform Coalition expect an environmental impact study, commissioned by Virginia, will be complete.
“I think it’s very fair to paint a picture of a very obstinate industry that is opposed to any type of check on its growth,” Thomas said. “If we don’t do something quickly, there may be a tipping point where anything we do might not have an impact.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the location of a data center in which Google is using recycled water. This post has also been updated to clarify that Google disclosed its data centers’ water use across the U.S. in 2022, not in one location.
