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Reflect on AI's Environmental Impact and Take Action Today
As the rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming multiple sectors of our globe simultaneously, ethical concerns are increasing. New and urgent questions of privacy and data protection, transparency and accountability, intellectual and artistic copyright infringement, human rights and safety, and environmental impact continue to arise from what Pope Francis called “an epochal change.”
In Antiqua et Nova, Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education emphasized the importance of technology as part of “the collaboration of man and woman with God in perfecting the visible Creation.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 378) However, concerns are growing worldwide about the massive amounts of water, fossil fuels, and other resources that AI requires.
In A Call to Courageous Action on the Climate Crisis, MSJC’s integral ecology team urges the Marianist Family to take urgent action to help mitigate the most dire environmental effects of climate change and its impacts on the most vulnerable people in our country and world. Action to protect natural resources from further degradation and to lessen the impacts of emerging technologies on our common home is an important way we can respond to the signs of our times in the spirit of our Marianist Founders.
A study published in November by Cornell University, and reported by the Cornell Chronicle, found that at its current growth rate, by 2030 AI would add 24 to 44 metric tons of carbon dioxide - an important greenhouse gas - into our atmosphere. This is the equivalent of 5-10 million additional cars. Additionally, AI would consume as much water as 6 to 10 million average US households, endangering local water supplies.
Here in the US, the data servers that support AI have been largely built in the water-scarce southwest. As the industry grows, companies are looking to expand to regions of the country with more water, including Ohio. Ohio borders one of the Great Lakes (the largest freshwater system on Earth) and is home to the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer, the largest sole-source aquifer east of the Mississippi. Ohio is currently home to 217 data centers.
In December, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency opened a public comment period for a draft wastewater general permit for data centers, which would expedite permitting and bypass important environmental reviews. Save Ohio Parks was founded to protect our groundwater from oil well fracking, and they are urging members of the public to comment on the EPA’s draft. Among their concerns are regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals used in data farm cooling systems, lack of baseline water quality measurements to detect impact from wastewater discharge, lack of concentration limits on impurities in wastewater, and consideration of social and economic impacts.
Charlette Buescher, a member of Dayton’s Queen of Apostles Marianist Lay Community, expressed her concerns about the general wastewater permits:
“All living things need water. The water in our wetlands, our streams, our rivers, our lakes is a precious resource given to us by the Creator for the benefit of all living creatures. It is not a resource to be squandered and polluted for the benefit of large corporations and their shareholders in the interest of profit.
“These draft general wastewater permits for data centers remove all accountability on the part of the businesses developing/operating these data centers for the condition of the wastewater being reintroduced into the environment. AND, in fact, the wording of the general permit tells us
that a denigration of the water quality under these permits is to be expected!
“As a Lay Marianist and a baptized Christian, I cannot turn a blind eye to something so blatantly harmful to the common good of ALL of creation. We need to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor in this outrageous end run around accountability.”
We urge you to learn and reflect on this issue, which promises to be an area of concern for people of faith well into the future, and to make your voice heard either through the Save Ohio’s Park’s campaign or directly through the Ohio EPA site.
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