CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Vampire Planet: “Shark Tank” AI, PFAS, and a CO2 Record

Kevin O’Leary, in a social media video, claimed paid activists turned out this week to protest his massive Utah data center. Screenshot via Facebook.

This week in the Anthropocene.

Let’s start with the bad. Carbon dioxide levels just hit a new record of 431 parts per million. Some of you may remember that 350 was the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon. Oh, how times have changed. 

What does this mean for the planet? We’re already seeing the consequences of out-of-control fossil fuel consumption. Corpus Christi, Texas (population 317,000), may be the first major city in the country to run out of drinking water entirely, possibly before the end of the year. Climate-induced drought is the culprit. 

Corpus Christi isn’t the only large US city facing a water shortage. Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and El Paso could one day be in the same predicament.

Making matters even worse? You guessed it! The data center boom. This week in New Mexico, we learned that a supercomputer expansion at Los Alamos National Laboratory will occupy 100,000 square feet and devour a 1.4 million gallons of water per day. It’s a preposterous amount. As Source NM notes, the average person in New Mexico consumes 81 gallons. On the Navajo Nation, about 40% of residents, many in New Mexico, don’t have running water. Over two-thirds of New Mexico is experiencing severe to exceptional drought conditions. 

Los Alamos is expanding for the first time since the Manhattan Project and has already begun building plutonium bomb cores (pits) for a new fleet of nuclear warheads. 

Up in Utah, another enormous data center was approved this week. A 40,000-acre campus called Stratos........

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