(2 October 2024)

While attention has rightly been paid to the devastation of western North Carolina and other areas in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, a non-natural disaster in the Southeast that appears to be unrelated to the storm transpired simultaneously. Over the weekend, a chemical plant in Conyers, Georgia, exploded in a massive warzone-level blast. Billowing clouds of smoke could be seen from miles away. The nearby stretch of the I-20 highway shut down, 17,000 residents have been evacuated, and another 90,000 have been ordered to shelter in place. That order was reimposed Tuesday morning after briefly lifting, when a weather change blew the toxic clouds back over a populated area.

There are conflicting indications from authorities about safety and air quality. According to local reporting, residents are already exhibiting symptoms such as shortness of breath, lung tightness, coughing, and eye irritation. A law firm is investigating the matter and offering free consultations with affected residents, advising a local news site that victims “may be entitled to compensation.”

But will the company that owns the plant have any cash left over for the victims of its negligence? A cursory look at its capital structure raises doubts.

The explosion came from a facility owned by the swimming pool and spa water treatment manufacturer BioLab, Inc., which itself is owned by the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners. The plant has a long recent history of explosions, fires, and workplace safety violations. Four years ago, a similar explosion at another plant in Georgia subsumed the vicinity in a chlorine vapor cloud, just one month after a major fire at a BioLab plant in Louisiana triggered a nationwide shortage of pool products.

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The BioLab bonanza is part of a broader—and quite dangerous—industry trend. Dividend recapitalizations, in which private equity–owned companies issue debt to finance payouts, are back in a big way, and on track to surge past the record level set in 2021. Centerbridge has cashed in mightily on this trend. The firm just last month pocketed more than $250 million on a dividend recap of a home health agency it co-owns.

What’s truly alarming about this trend is that interest rates have been about 500 basis points higher than they were during the last dividend recap bonanza, meaning the price that workers, customers, and stakeholders of these companies must shoulder to service the debt resulting from these transactions is substantially higher—as is the risk that they will push companies into bankruptcy.

On the occasion of BioLab’s last monster dividend in June, the credit rating agency S&P Global estimated that the parent company would still generate enough profit to make its interest payments, but it hedged that confidence with an astonishing admission: It was grading the unsecured debt at a “recovery rating” of “6,” denoting “negligible (0%-10%; rounded estimate: 0%) recovery in the event of a default.” Translated into plain English, this means that if the explosion totals BioLab’s chlorine plant and forces the company into bankruptcy, unsecured creditors will likely get nothing. That includes the company’s pension funds and any contractors, staffing agencies, or suppliers to whom BioLab owes money—as well as anyone who tries to sue BioLab for the harms, environmental or otherwise, caused by its series of toxic infernos.

Somewhat ironically, Centerbridge founder Mark Gallogly, a Democratic mega-donor who has contributed millions of dollars to Democratic politicians and committees over the years, is married to an environmental scientist and identifies as a “climate activist.” The couple has given well over $800,000 to Democrats this election cycle. Just a few months ago, Gallogly even went on CNBC to beseech viewers to vote for Joe Biden because of climate change. (Gallogly retired as managing principal of Centerbridge in 2020 but still owns a chunk of the company.)

Centerbridge did not respond to a request for comment from the Prospect.

Poisoning communities with toxic negligence and then using bankruptcy discharges to get out of paying for it is such a common private equity playbook at this point, Gallogly probably doesn’t see the contradiction. After all, Biden BFF David Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group left a far bigger environmental disaster when a Philadelphia oil refinery it owned blew up in 2019 after Carlyle siphoned at least $600 million in dividends from the dilapidated facility, then abandoned it altogether in bankruptcy the year earlier. (That cleanup is projected to cost well over a billion dollars, with most of it shouldered one way or another by taxpayers; the refinery also owed the Environmental Protection Agency hundreds of millions of dollars when it filed for bankruptcy.)

In a similar saga two years ago involving a sterilization plant just 26 miles away from BioLab’s pool products factory, the company Sterigenics, co-owned by the private equity firm helmed by former Obama administration Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, knowingly exposed local residents of the area surrounding its facilities in Georgia and Illinois to carcinogenic emissions, all while issuing billions of dollars in debt to pay dividends to investors, according to published reports. While Sterigenics has yet to file for bankruptcy protection, it used the threat of it to settle lawsuits with more than 870 residents who had been sickened by its toxic fumes for about $400 million, a fairly paltry sum given evidence assembled by the EPA that residents of the contaminated areas developed cancer at a rate nine times the national average.

It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom. This is not simply an academic point but a practical one, and it has everything to do with how societies prepare for and absorb natural events and how they can or should reconstruct afterward. It is difficult, so soon on the heels of such an unnecessarily deadly disaster, to be discompassionate, but it is important in the heat of the moment to put social science to work as a counterweight to official attempts to relegate Katrina to the historical dustbin of inevitable “natural” disasters.

First, causes. The denial of the naturalness of disasters is in no way a denial of natural process. Earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards, droughts, and hurricanes are certainly events of nature that require a knowledge of geophysics, physical geography, or climatology to comprehend. Whether a natural event is a disaster or not depends ultimately, however, on its location. A large earthquake in the Hindu Kush may spawn no disaster whatsoever while the same intensity event in California could be a catastrophe. But even among climatic events, natural causes are not entirely divorced from the social. The world has recently experienced dramatic warming, which scientists increasingly attribute to airborne emissions of carbon, and around the world Katrina is widely seen as evidence of socially induced climatic change. Much as a single hurricane such as Katrina, even when followed by an almost equally intense Hurricane Rita, or even when embedded in a record 2005 season of Atlantic hurricanes, is not in itself conclusive evidence of humanly induced global warming. Yet it would be irresponsible to ignore such signals. The Bush administration has done just that, and it is happy to attribute the dismal record of death and destruction on the Gulf Coast—perhaps 1,200 lives by the latest counts—to an act of nature. It has proven itself not just oblivious but ideologically opposed to mounting scientific evidence of global warming and the fact that rising sea levels make cities such as New Orleans, Venice, or Dhaka immediately vulnerable to future calamity. Whatever the political tampering with science, the supposed “naturalness” of disasters here becomes an ideological camouflage for the social (and therefore preventable) dimensions of such disasters, covering for quite specific social interests.

Vulnerability, in turn, is highly differentiated; some people are much more vulnerable than others. Put bluntly, in many climates rich people tend to take the higher land leaving to the poor and working-class land more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. This is a trend, not an iron clad generalization: oceanfront property marks a major exception in many places, and Bolivia’s La Paz, where the wealthy live in the cooler valley below 13,000 feet, is another. In New Orleans, however, topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients, and as the Katrina evacuation so tragically demonstrated, the better off had cars to get out, credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies, their immediate families likely had resources to support their evacuation, and the wealthier also had the insurance policies for rebuilding. Not just the market but successive administrations from the federal to the urban scale, made the poorest population in New Orleans most vulnerable. Since 2001, knowing that a catastrophic hurricane was likely and would in all probability devastate New Orleans, the Bush administration nonetheless opened hundreds of square miles of wetland to development on the grounds that the market knows best, and in the process eroded New Orleans’ natural protection; and they cut the New Orleans District US Army Corps of Engineers’ budget by 80 percent, thus preventing pumping and levee improvements. At the same time, they syphoned resources toward tax cuts for the wealthy and a failed war in Iraq. Given the stunned amazement with which people around the world greeted images of a stranded African American populace in the deadly sewage pond of post-Katrina New Orleans, it is difficult not to agree with Illinois senator Barack Obama: “the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane,” but were “abandoned long ago.”

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The final lesson of environmental geography concerning disasters is that far from flattening the social differences, disaster reconstruction invariably cuts deeper the ruts and grooves of social oppression and exploitation. And so, while abolishing competition by giving no-bid contracts to some of the same companies that operate in Iraq—Bechtel, Fluor Corp., Haliburton—the Bush administration has mandated cutthroat competition among desperate workers by suspending the federal law that requires federal contractors to pay at least the prevailing local wage. Meanwhile, with many of the dead still unaccounted for, developers descended on New Orleans with wallets bulging and chops smacking. In anticipation that the city will be rebuilt with higher and better levees and with many fewer working-class people and African Americans, New Orleans two weeks after Katrina already looked like a developers’ gold rush. These people, these developers, and these corporations, say many New Orleanians, are the “true looters.” By contrast, those displaced, with no private property to reclaim, face lower wages, escalating costs for scarce housing, and as the initial sympathy wears away, increased stigmatization.

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Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022 by Chang Yuchen

Including 216 words that Chang Yuchen has translated with fragments of coral bodies, “Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022” is a tool book customly designed for one person’s need in her ongoing endeavor of making a language. Published by Gong Press in two versions: paperback (open edition) and accordion (signed and numbered edition of 30), and both include an exquisite introduction by Alvin Li, where he wrote: “Coral Dictionary is a poetic investigation into the nature of language and the language of nature.”

review in the LARB:

CHANG YUCHEN’S Coral Dictionary Vol. 1: 2019–2022 (Gong Press, 2022) is a linguistic and geographic reference point, a touchstone that seeks to provide channels for understanding. Fitting in the span of an open hand, the narrow but thick text contains translations of over 200 coral fragments into Malay, English, and Chinese, printed on blue paper the color of shallow tropical waters. This volume is only a portion of Chang’s ongoing Coral Dictionary, which since 2019 has sought to assemble and articulate a writing system for the Malay language by way of coral fragments found by the artist during a residency on Dinawan, an island that lies a little over a mile off the west coast of the Malaysian state Sabah. Chang’s project is a poetic gleaning of language, coral, and encounter, an ongoing endeavor to translate a selected 182 sentences from the first edition of the Kamus Sari, a Chinese-Malay dictionary originally published in 1973 that Chang picked up in a secondhand store during a supply trip to the mainland. Coral Dictionary Vol. 1 is a tool or manual to be deployed in service of Chang’s still-unfolding pursuit, an indexing and referential vehicle with simplified drawings of coral fragments for use in the artist’s translations. Yet more than anything, Coral Dictionary is a manifestation of the artist’s desire to carefully probe, grasp, and share language as an innately grounded and expansive form of relation.

While mimicking the didacticism of a traditional dictionary, Chang’s Coral Dictionary is a work that arises out of a series of indeterminacies, haphazard encounters with sites, washed-up pieces of coral, and conversations spoken in many tongues. The text is a microcosm of lived experience, which poetically and persistently constellates a mode of understanding. With Chang herself moving between geographic locations and dialects of Chinese and English, this dictionary is deeply informed by the artist’s own experience of seemingly “always looking for a word.”

Over the past seven years in solitary, I’ve seen magazine images of the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires. These climate disasters have a way of feeling impossibly distant from inside these four cinder block walls. But a trip to medical after fainting during a heat wave last year helped put everything into perspective.

I have lived without air conditioning in this cell for the past seven summers. I wasn’t even allowed to shade my window from the sun. On a hot day in July, cells regularly reached 110 degrees. I’d heard stories of it getting up to 129. When the temperature would start to spike, I’d lie on the cement floor in wet underclothes and try not to move. In these conditions, women in my unit who are over 50—myself included—experience heart issues at alarming rates. These incidents are never reported as heat-related. Prison officials just explain it as a woman over 50 having a heart attack or stroke.

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The recent summer heat wave finally brought conditions too dangerous to ignore. Between mid-June and mid-July, at least nine incarcerated people in Texas died of heart attacks or cardiac events in uncooled prisons where the outdoor heat indexes were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data. The Tribune documented another 14 deaths due to “unknown causes” during the extreme heat, with prison staff often finding the deceased unresponsive in their cells. Two women recently died at Lane Murray Unit, where I’m incarcerated, though the causes have not yet been confirmed.

Officials recently installed temporary air conditioning in my unit following demands from the incarcerated population and staff. It offers a light breeze—enough to break the sweltering heat but too weak to actually cool my cell. Thousands of incarcerated Texans are suffering through much worse. Roughly 70 of the state’s 100 prisons do not have air conditioning in most living areas, according to a 2022 report by the Texas Tribune. State lawmakers have refused to provide funding to address this issue, and their inaction is costing people their lives.

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Everyone agrees addressing climate change will cost money. But there’s so much hesitation to spend it—on this particular problem, at least. According to recent data, Texas spends over $3 billion annually to incarcerate more than 120,000 people in state prisons.

That money could be helpful to transition our energy system away from fossil fuels, provide low-carbon housing, insulate homes, or invest in bike lanes, greenways, and reforestation. People recoil at this sort of spending. But there’s always more money for prisons—because incarceration “keeps us safe.” The reality is that the devastation of the climate crisis will do far more harm than the folks who are locked up.

Before being sent to solitary, I worked in the fields doing the same unpaid forced labor as my enslaved ancestors. Sometimes, this meant picking, planting, and tending crops under the authority of armed white men on horseback. Mostly, we “cleared the fields,” chanting aloud to entertain our captors as we used dull gardening hoes to uproot the grass that would otherwise die in the drought and ignite from the heat.

Back in April, a group of researchers pondered this question as they created an estimate of AI’s water consumption. As they note in their paper (which is here free in full), the main use of water is when tech firms train their AI, and when the firms are running inferences (i.e. when you, I or anyone else interacts with the model).

Tech firms like Microsoft and Google and Meta do all that training (and inferring) on their huge computational farms. That computation requires a ton of energy, which generates heat. To remove that heat from server farms, the tech firms generally use cooling towers, where water is evaporated to send the heat out into the outside world. That evaporation? That’s how AI consumes water. It is, it’s worth noting, mostly all freshwater.

Tech firms do not publish specific stats on how much freshwater they use for different forms of computation. So the academics did some estimates. They calculated how much energy it would take to train one of the well-known large language-models (and to run inferences using it). (Here, there actually is some useful public info: As Google explained in this paper, when they created their large language-model LaMDA it required 57.7 consecutive days of training.) Then the academics used metrics of efficiency for the cooling mechanism to figure out precisely how much water would be needed.

The upshot, they figured, is that that …

Training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater, enough for producing 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles … Moreover, training GPT-3 is also responsible for an additional off-site water footprint of 2.8 million liters due to electricity usage (assuming water usage efficiency at the U.S. national average level 1.8L/kWh [32] and power usage effectiveness 1.2). Thus, combined together, this would put GPT-3’s total water footprint for training at 3.5 million liters if trained in the U.S.

And when you’re chatting with a large language-model?

ChatGPT needs to “drink” a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20–50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed.

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Of course, AI is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tech firms’ use of water. All cloud computation requires cooling, right? So tech firms are constantly shopping around for states and towns that will sell them freshwater at massive scale for the lowest possible price, as Gizmodo notes …

Water consumption issues aren’t limited to OpenAI or AI models. In 2019, Google requested more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in just three states. The company currently has 14 data centers spread out across North America which it uses to power Google Search, its suite of workplace products, and more recently, its LaMDa and Bard large language models. LaMDA alone, according to the recent research paper, could require millions of liters of water to train, larger than GPT-3 because several of Google’s thirsty data centers are housed in hot states like Texas; researchers issued a caveat with this estimation, though, calling it an “approximate reference point.”

Now! This offers a civic lever we can use to impel tech firms to make their computation less energy- and water-intensive. If we, the public (via our local and state governments) are the ones selling the community-owned and -managed water, then we could strike a harder bargain here, and charge much more. Putting a stiff price on externalities is basically the only reliable way to get companies to price them into their cost of doing business.

Alas, I won’t hold my breath on this one. Cities have been stumbling over themselves for two decades now to give sweetheart energy and water deals to tech giants, under the frequently-dodgy assumption that it’ll generate cornucopian local prosperity. City officials seem to get Stockholm Syndrome around tech firms. (Consider this object lesson: In the city of The Dalles in Oregon, Google’s use of water had nearly tripled in the last five years. But the city wouldn’t release these figures when asked; indeed, the newspaper The Oregonian/Oregon Live had to sue the city until a judge’s ruling forced city bureaucrats to make the data public.)

In their defense, tech giants frequently argue that they are, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly profligate consumers of water. As Google pointed out, its 2021 use of water was comparable to golf courses …

Overall, Google’s consumption of water across the US during 2021 accounted for 3.3 billion gallons (12.4 billion liters), with “additional global locations” (ie, the rest of the world) representing an extra 971 million gallons (4.4 billion liters). This may sound like a lot (and it is), but to put it in perspective, Google claims that the total annual water consumption of its datacenter operations is comparable to the water footprint of 29 golf courses in the southwest US.

Fair enough, though I’d note that they picked a rather terrible comparison here, because a) golf is on an absolute collision course with the challenge of increasingly-scarce freshwater supplies, so it’s not exactly an example of a sustainable industry; and what’s more, b) the number of golf courses is not rapidly increasing, while the usage of AI models is.

That said, it’s entirely possible that with sufficient pressure — and again, cities and states, I’m looking at y’all and your pricing of water — tech firms could be induced to become radically more efficient in their water usage.

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Further reading:

Making AI Less "Thirsty": Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models (research paper by Pengfei Li et al, preprint published online in arXiv; 6 April 2023)

Getting Into Fights With Data Centres: Or, a Modest Proposal for Reframing the Climate Politics of ICT (zine by Anne Pasek, July 2023)

How the Cloud Reshaped the Internet - interview with Dwayne Monroe (Tech Won't Save Us podcast, ep. 125; 22 July 2021)

The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage (MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, 27 January 2022)

Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World (Media@LSE, 2 November 2022)

The Secret Cost of Google's Data Centers: Billions of Gallons of Water to Cool Servers (Time/Bloomberg, 2 April 2020)

Extreme Heat, Drought Drive Opposition to AI Data Centers (Bloomberg Businessweek, 26 July 2023)

Drought-stricken communities push back against data centers (NBC News, 19 June 2021)

'It's pillage': thirsty Uruguayans decry Google's plan to exploit water supply (The Guardian, 11 July 2023)

Los buitres de los Centros de Datos en la Mancha: Cuando las grandes tecnológicas vienen a extraer recursos de la Iberia Vaciada (Tu Nube Seca Mi Río, 25 April 2023)

Las zonas oscuras de la evaluación ambiental que autorizó “a ciegas” el megaproyecto de Google en Cerrillos (CIPER, 25 May 2020)

Not Here Not Anywere's Press Pause on Data Centres campaign in Ireland

Are Rural Data Center Jobs “Good” Jobs? (Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, 3 September 2019)

Google’s water use is soaring in The Dalles, records show, with two more data centers to come (The Oregonian/Oregon Live, 17 December 2022)

Getting Into Fights With Data Centres: Or, a Modest Proposal for Reframing the Climate Politics of ICT

zine by Anne Pasek on how ICT (information and communications technology) climate politics and digital decarbonization issues look productively different if we focus less on green consumer behaviours and more on opposing infrastructure expansions.

What's the carbon footprint of our digital lives?

I made this zine because I keep getting asked this question. There's a growing number of people and organizations who are anxious about climate change, aware that digital stuff plays a role in that, and sincerely want to do something about this in their personal or professional lives…

It's encouraging to see so many people pose this question. I'm part of a community that studies the energy and carbon impacts of digital networks, and it used to feel like our biggest challenge was just getting people to understand that online files and services aren't the immaterial stuff of sleek corporate infographics or the whole metaphor of 'the cloud.' That cloud, we'd endlessly reply, is just someone else's computer. Most likely, it's a computer stuck in an enormous data center somewhere sort of rural, where it consumes impressive amounts of electricity (to power the facility) and water (to cool down all those hot servers).

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If you, as an individual or non-tech organization, are looking for a place to dig in, I’d like to suggest that the best place to do so is around resisting data center expansions. … If we can stop the next data center from being built (or endlessly expanded), and if we can create a wider movement contesting the social and ecological licence of these facilities, we can directly impact the climate trajectory of the tech sector overall. And, even if we fail, raising a fuss increases the likelihood of winning better economic concessions and legal regulations for these things down the road.

See also: Interview with cloud technologist Dwayne Monroe on the podcast Tech Won't Save Us