August 2025 Networker: The Fight for Safe and Sufficient Water |
Volume 30 (8), August 2025 |
No matter how often I turn over in my mind the phrase, “water is life,” words can’t seem to capture the gravity and the urgency of this truth. Access to sufficient and safe water is recognized by the United Nations as a human right (along with the related need of sanitation). I’m moved to tears when I think about the many profound violations of this right, worldwide, in our time. In our staff meetings, each frequent mention of “water” is about our renewed commitment to playing a leadership role in addressing worsening water-related crises. SEHN has always maintained some focus on water: for example, note the nearly 70 pages on water in the fracking science Compendium, or the many resources on water impacts within our coalition carbon capture and storage website. But especially over the past year, water is much of what we talk about. We’re addressing several rapidly emerging issues—including one that is new nationwide in recent years, and one that has risen from the dead, where I am in New York State.
The first is the proliferation of data centers and the prodigious amounts of water they require. In this edition of the newsletter, we are very pleased to share a hot-off-the-press new SEHN information resource, “Data Centers and the Water Crisis.” In it you will find an impressive set of facts and dot-connecting on what we currently know in an atmosphere of, as we describe, “non-disclosure agreements, proprietary secrecies, and limited regulatory oversight.” All over the country, data centers are threatening water quantity and quality. This unfolding crisis demands our attention. A second current focus is within our New York coalition work, as we work to educate the public and our representatives about the sudden return of plans for two fracked gas pipelines, the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project (NESE) and the Constitution. Both were previously denied permits by the state several years ago, using its authority under section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act. No matter, apparently… these schemes are back. NESE would run approximately 24 miles under water in the harbor between New Jersey and New York. As we describe in our new information sheet, construction would resuspend long-buried toxic chemicals—including PCBs, dioxin, lead, and arsenic—threatening water quality, the marine ecosystem and its food chains, as well as human health. The 120+ mile route of the Constitution Pipeline would threaten more than 250 waterways and wetlands throughout upstate New York. Additional states are implicated in both pipeline projects, and residents are voicing their opposition, for example in New Hampshire. Related to our data center work, for this newsletter we reached out to a colleague to update us on a threat to an extraordinary lake that is particularly dear to me and SEHN senior scientist and writer-in-residence, Sandra Steingraber. Residents and small businesses populating the shores of New York State’s Seneca Lake, the largest of the chain of glacial Finger Lakes in central New York, have long been active in protecting this unique body of water. Sandra was a leader in the We Are Seneca Lake campaign which helped block a plan to turn the area into a fracked gas transportation and storage hub for the entire Northeast. The company aimed to store fossil fuels in depleted salt caverns under the lake. (What could go wrong?) Another leader in that effort, Yvonne Taylor of Seneca Lake Guardian, then organizing as Gas Free Seneca, today focuses on protecting the lake from several other threats, including the currently unpermitted (but still operating) “mining” of Bitcoin in a gas-fired power plant on Seneca’s eastern shore. This longtime colleague and frontline leader shares information on the impacts of that operation, as well as related national work, with her contributed article. In her monthly column, Sandra describes two processes that surprisingly turn out to have much in common: the humidity-augmenting impact of vast monocultural corn fields, and the impact of the large-scale evaporative cooling technologies required by many data centers, or… clouds that make clouds. We learned much putting this issue together and we hope you learn a lot reading it. We hope that it helps you look out for the water, wherever you are. In short, and always to be taken seriously, water is life. Carmi Orenstein, MPH |
How a Pro-Crypto Presidency Threatens Vulnerable Communities Across the United States |
by Yvonne Taylor, Seneca Lake Guardian and the National Coalition Against Cryptomining |
We’re often told that new technologies will power us through eras of progress and prosperity. At a time when technological innovation is taking the world by storm, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype, believing that every invention is "the next best thing," just because it can do something we never thought possible. That's exactly how cryptocurrency was sold to us when it burst into public consciousness back in 2009. At first, Bitcoin was introduced as a harmless innovation that promised to revolutionize American finance and reimagine our approach to fiscal independence. But the process of “mining” cryptocurrency has proven to be anything but harmless. Despite most Americans not using crypto in their daily lives, the small number who do, backed by a crypto-crazed presidential administration, are fueling a boom that is leaving behind a sizable carbon trail and direct impacts on vulnerable communities across the country. “Proof-of-work” cryptomining, the most common form of cryptomining, is an extremely energy-intensive operation that currently accounts for 2.3 percent of the nation’s total energy consumption. These cryptomines operate with one goal: running computers around the clock to generate digitized coins. And the climate impact is massive. Cryptomining emits up to 130 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—on par with the emissions of entire countries—driven by its enormous energy consumption, often from fossil fuels. Continue Reading |
Data Centers and the Water Crisis |
by Sandra Steingraber, Ted Schettler, and Carolyn Raffensperger, the Science and Environmental Health Network |
When we say that our photographs, videos, playlists, emails, documents, and applications are stored “in the cloud,” we mean that they are housed virtually in servers maintained inside data centers to which we have access through the Internet. Data centers, of course, are physical places that exist in the ecological world. They consist of warehouse-style buildings with floors, walls, and roofs that cover many acres of land. And the servers they hold are physical objects in the form of very large computers, digital storage equipment, cables, and various supportive infrastructure. Proliferating across the landscape as cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence (AI) operations accelerate, data centers do not require components that we associate with industrial spaces populated by large human workforces. Indeed, many data centers are fully automated with remote security and few on-site staff. Lights-out data centers require no windows, office furniture, break rooms, restrooms, conference rooms, on-site daycare centers, or employee cafeterias. And yet, however uninhabited by living beings, all data centers require prodigious amounts of water for direct and indirect cooling and so exert profound environmental impacts wherever they are located. These impacts are nearly impossible to quantify. Data centers are surrounded by non-disclosure agreements, proprietary secrecies, and limited regulatory oversight. Currently, most of the pushback to their construction comes from nearby residents. Just the act of inventorying their locations, their end users, and the basic details of their operations is difficult work, as FracTracker’s National Data Centers Tracker mapping project documents. Nevertheless, some clear trends are emerging. Continue Reading |
Repercussion Section: Clouds That Make Clouds |
by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
In this column we consider the various unintended consequences of technology that contribute to public health or environmental harms. This month, we are considering clouds. Both kinds. The metaphorical ones where our data are stored and fluffy ones up in the actual sky of our actual planet. It turns out they are connected. *** But first, a quick meditation on corn sweat. In rural Illinois where I grew up, the corn growing in the fields collectively sends 48 million gallons of water each midsummer day into the atmosphere. It all begins in late July when each stalk of field corn simultaneously hits puberty and goes through some wild changes, all of which require lots of water. First, there is silking stage, whereby each potential kernel (female ovule) sends out a hair-like tube that grows an astounding 1.5 inches a day, elongated by the turgor pressure of the moisture that is being drawn up by the roots and pushed into the ears. Propelled by water, the silks emerge from the husk leaves and just keep growing until they capture a pollen grain and send it down the shoot to the would-be kernel. Or die trying. Continue Reading |
“The Science and Environmental Health Network describes EOR as ‘a moral failure, a climate failure, and a threat to public health and the environment.’” SEHN’s insights were included in a Noema Magazine article on carbon capture and storage, including the practice of enhanced oil recovery. The fracking science Compendium, published by our program Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility, was linked in an article in Capital & Main addressing fracking and the work of recently retired Colorado scientist Lisa McKenzie. Media coverage of an Iowa water quality forum hosted by Food & Water Watch featuring SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger and senior scientist Sandra Steingraber included pieces on cbs2iowa and the Gazette. “I join with you in preventing suffering in Iowa, knowing that you have a terrible problem: some of the worst nitrogen pollution and water that we've ever seen, the highest cancer rates and highest new rates of cancer… And so those two terrible truths together, I hope… will lead to change,” the Gazette reported Sandra saying to participants. “We can’t eliminate heat—that would be the first thing. But what we can do are engineering controls that would provide more cooling and ventilation, especially for indoor workers. That’s a real possibility…. For outdoor workers.... we need to build in breaks, and we need to build in places where people can cool down.” SEHN Board member Dr. Madeleine Scammel spoke with Boston’s WGBH about her new study on the severe impact of heat on workers. She also discusses the ramifications of federal funding cuts on her and her colleagues’ work. |
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