On May 11 2017 regulators in South Carolina unanimously approved Google's request to triple
their daily groundwater withdrawal permit from 500,000 gallons to 1.5 million.
This controversial permit comes at times when the aquifer under counties surrounding Charleston
began to experience sever drops of water levels and water pressure.
Google wants to use this precious source of fresh water that's used by locals for farming
and daily needs, to cool its large data center in Goose Creek in Berkeley County.
Google ignored the concerns of residents and local water utilities officials, that no further
permits should be considered until groundwater pressure and water levels begin to recover.
The problem with this aquifer is that there is not enough data to fully understand and
interpret recent downward trends.
What gives companies like Google a leverage to ask for more permits, is the uncertainty
of attribution of these trends – whether they are caused due to droughts, pumping,
or a combination of both.
Aquifers are natural underground resources of fresh water, that act as sponge capturing
the raining water beneath the soil instead of releasing it into the ocean or evaporation.
In order for an aquifer to sustain itself, it has to at least reach the equilibrium between
the amounts of recharged and discharged water.
Aquifers are only renewable as long as rate of recharge and discharge equalize over time.
However, several observations have been already made that suggest the critical level of the
situation.
The groundwater levels in the Charleston aquifer have declined from 126 feet above land surface
prior to pumpage, to 40 to 60 feet below land surface in 2015.
Another proof of declining water levels is that many well sites are losing pressure and
had to devote more resources to increase the power of their pumps, or dig deeper to regain
the water pressure.
For example, 6 wells of Mount Pleasant Waterworks are now pumping at 400 feet below land surface,
which significantly increases the costs for electricity needed to lift water from these
depths.
To respond to the alarming state, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control
has designated Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties as Capacity Use Area.
In a Capacity Use Area, each groundwater withdrawal exceeding 3 million gallons per month is requested
to be reported to and gain permission from the South Carolina Department.
Permitting expansion of groundwater withdrawal by Google poses a threat to many residents
fearing that they will be limited to increase their pumpage to support their daily needs
in the future.
While trends show that Carolina aquifers clearly responded accordingly to multi-year droughts
of 1998 – 2002 and 2007 – 2008, it has been observed that where users transitioned
from ground water to surface water, water levels in those aquifers began to see recovering
trends.
Wells that had experienced these droughts but have not recovered are the ones where
pumping continued increasing.
The three-fold increase of groundwater withdrawal by Google will inflict an exponential stress
on the aquifers in Coastal South Carolina.
Even if the groundwater in the aquifer prove to be able to sustain excessive withdrawals,
ever declining water levels will put costly barriers to entry for small and middle size
users.
This will essentially transfer ownership of South Carolina water to the ever enclosing
circle of elites, because ordinary people will not have enough financial means to tap
into the water resource that used to be publicly available on free-to-all basis.
To estimate how much groundwater there is in Carolina aquifers, a study by the US Geological
Survey and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources was set to be completed
by 2019.
A date for which Google refused to wait despite calls by the local community around Charleston
to not allow further permits until ground water levels begin to rise again or sufficient
studies are completed.
The talks for regulations were being delayed for 15 years, and have been coincidently closed
within three months at nearly the same time as Google permit came to be okayed in May.
And while Google's public relations staff vehemently claims they want to collaborate
with the community, they refuse to disclose any details on how much fresh water they collect
in South Carolina, and how they treat it during and after use under trade secrecy.
What Google did confirm however, is that they are never going to return the water back to
the aquifer, but dump it into the sewers.
Google will reuse some groundwater, but it will still inquire losses due to evaporation.
No used water will be processed to be returned to recharge the aquifer.
Another issue with this controversial permit, is that Google already uses 4 million gallons
of tap water a day to cool its Goose Creek data center in Berkley County.
With increasing average temperature in the region and potentially more frequent and sever
future droughts, diminishing surface water resources might lead Google to expand its
permit to make up for the losses should the supply of tap water drop.
This is a likely scenario if no regulations are implemented in the mean time to protect
the groundwater so that it continues to serve the needs of general users and farmers and
not just single conglomerates.
Google refuses to accept their withdrawals have any substantial impact on the sustainability
of the aquifer.
The company also declared that the aquifer is the most readily available source of cooling
and that no other alternatives are viable.
But the real reason Google went for South Carolina in the first place is the low cost
of electricity in the region and virtually no price tag and regulations for tapping into
groundwater sources.
You see data centers spend staggering amounts of electricity.
Just in the US, data centers consume as much electricity as produced by roughly 10 nuclear
power plants.
What's most controversial about this is that more than 90% of this energy is not used
to power computation.
On average only 6 to 12 percent of the electricity coming to data centers is used.
The rest is being dumped as waste simple because most of the processors are idle majority of
the time.
The wastefulness of the data center industry is so severe that its 76 billion kilowatt-hours
energy input from the grid in 2010 outperformed paper industry by nearly 10 billion kilowatt-hours.
It was the computer technology that was supposed to be a "green" alternative to paper.
This is because data centers of these reckless companies are not designed to conserve the
energy as long as they don't have the incentives to do so.
In addition to wasting vast majority of electricity flow from the grid, data centers also use
banks of diesel generators and thousands of lead-acid batteries to insure against grid
failure.
However, most of this energy is not needed and is therefore wasted, because data centers
hold redundant data on their hard drives, even if they are no longer in use by consumers.
More than 75% of trillions of gigabytes of data are being created by ordinary consumers.
This number is estimated to be even much higher for Google, because the company's business
model relies on generating and collecting users private information to be shared and
sold for marketing purposes.
You need to realize that Google is no longer a technology start up and they are not making
revenue from selling products that have a creative value.
Google has transformed itself into an advertising platform that offers marketers and retailers
auctions to place their bids for people's private and personal information.
Similar to stock exchange and trading strategies of the Wall Street banks, Google engages in
high-frequency-trading to always find the highest bidder willing to pay the most for
invading your privacy.
And thus Google participates in depleting fresh water resources that could have been
used by ordinary citizens for drinking, or farmers to grow food, only to deliver targeted
advertisements and politically biased search engine algorithms.
Google's Goose Creek data center emits 1,350 tons per year of particulate matter, sulfur
dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and other pollutants.
There are however viable alternatives for data centers.
For example, the National Security Agency Fort Meade data center in Maryland uses wastewater
for cooling.
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
in California, runs at roughly 96% utilization by queuing up large jobs and scheduling them
so that the machines are running nearly full-out, 24 hours a day.
There are also various methods to considerably shrink data center foot print, and thus decrease
the amount of energy and water needed to maintain the power.
Google doesn't do this in Coastal South Carolina, because it doesn't have to think
about the consequences and outrage of the local population.
No major nation wide media or news outlets are covering these local controversies, so
Google is under no public pressure to alter their practices.
Roughly 90% of Google's revenue comes from advertising programs.
Most of which is generated through their search engine and Google Adwords and Adsense programs.
If you want Google to feel the pressure, and stop them from making profit off of your private
life to fund their reckless business strategies, you can start using search engine alternatives
like DuckDuckGo, Qwant, or Startpage, and install uBlock Origin on your browser of choice
to block Google's ads and trackers.
Great alternatives to Chrome browser that will not share your data with Google are Firefox,
IceCat, and Brave Browser.
If you are using gmail, you can switch to private encrypted email providers like Protonmail,
Tutanota, or Posteo, who will never share your data with advertisers or government spies.
I talk about all these alternatives and other essential methods how you can stop Google
along with other corporate monopolies like Facebook or Amazon from making you part of
their unsustainable business model.
Google keeps stepping over the line with their privacy violating algorithms, unconstitutional
collaboration with government spies around the world to help them build mass surveillance,
constant tweaks to their search engine algorithms to filter web content, and political censorship
of dissenting opinions.
Now they are going to drain precious sources of fresh water in a century during which water
is bound to become the scarcest commodity on Earth.
My only question is – is Google now too big to fail?
Can they do whatever they want and they will be given a pass?
If you feel like this message is important, share this video with your friends and comment
below whether some kind of action needs to be taken to put Google in check.
If you are from South Carolina, or other areas where Google drains fresh water resources,
please do leave your thoughts in the comment section.
I created this channel to use Google's own algorithms against them and expose their and
other big corporations' dirty practices.
Subscribe before this channel gets shut down, so that we can build a community that wants
to make everyone play fairly by the same rules.
Thanks for watching.
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