Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his actor buddy Leonardo DiCaprio are catching some heavy flak recently, but for a seemingly bizarre reason: pledging millions of dollars to protect 100 of the world’s most threatened animal species.

The charity initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was first revealed on DiCaprio’s Instagram account, where the six-time academy award nominee described it as the “largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated to the recovery of Critically Endangered species, across 30 countries.”

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio continued. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

For such a seemingly altruistic venture, the response to the announcement was strikingly polarized. As the Independent noted, DiCaprio and Bezos were summarily blasted for engaging in “greenwashing,” a negative term given to the strategy employed by massive corporations and the wealthy to cover their outsize impact on the environment with a little eco-charity.

“As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f***s did to our planet they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign,” one Redditor wrote in response to the announcement, per the Independent.

“Uber-wealthy people helping a fraction of the problems that they cause,” another commenter lamented. “For publicity.”

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bezos has been accused of greenwashing, especially given the immense carbon footprint of his flagship company Amazon. In 2020, for example, the billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund pledged $10 billion to protect biodiversity, bringing a massive amount of money to the global effort to mitigate climate change — at least on paper.

As the backlash illustrates, your reaction to the those types of efforts probably hinge on your economic and social worldview.

The haters aren’t just being petty, though. As the Journal of Political Inquiry observed, Bezos’s wealth is only possible thanks to his previous position as chief executive of one of the largest corporate polluters on the planet. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Amazon’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 18 percent, while his space company Blue Origin is altering the outer atmosphere in ways we’re only starting to understand.

And his empire’s carbon emissions have only skyrocketed since then, as the demand for cloud computing supersedes previous pledges to clamp down on Amazon’s extraordinary excretions of noxious pollutants.

In other words, it’s no wonder the masses are rising up in opposition to the billionaire and his actor friend — if only online, at least for now.

More on billionaires: The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn

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The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.

And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.

Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.

Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.

That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure.

It’s possible that moratoriums on new data centers might slow the burn, but unless states begin the unlikely task of banning new gas generators for existing facilities, we can expect US fossil fuel emissions to continue to rise precipitously in the years to come.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build appeared first on Futurism.

Seemingly unlikely alliances are springing up in Canada and the U.S. to prevent rural communities from becoming a ‘toxic CO2 dumping ground.’

Sewer sludge, called biosolids, is used as inexpensive fertilizer on Indiana's farms, but PFAS contamination is not tracked in Indiana.

A $2 billion lawsuit for defense base contamination against the U.S. chemical manufacturer is heard in court for the first time.

Republicans on Thursday voted down a proposed amendment to the Farm Bill that would have protected consumer rights to sue pesticide manufacturers over alleged harm after the U.S. Supreme Court recently narrowed those rights.

As regulations have reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions from vehicles and industry in recent years, smoke from climate-fueled wildfires is erasing air quality gains.

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The president’s push for data centers is driving a boom in gas-burning power plants. Texas is leading the way.

© The New York Times

A die-off of seabirds has some experts thinking an El Niño weather pattern is to blame, a look at data centers and pollution, and more climate news.

© American Bird Conservancy

A published study suggests exposure to fine particle air pollution may trigger flare-ups.

Despite being the world’s second-largest producer of jute, a biodegradable fiber, Bangladesh faces the daunting task of combating the onslaught of hazardous plastic-based packaging and synthetic fibers.

India's Andhra Pradesh state, governed by an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has denied allegations that the Google project was fast-tracked without weighing risks.

Paraquat is banned in over 70 countries. Some farmers and their families in Hebron, New York believe the pesticide is causing Parkinson’s disease and are demanding that New York ban it.

Two years after environmental regulators first documented 'red mud' waste from the Atalco alumina refinery escaping into public waterways, the state has yet to penalize the company. 

A chemical company has been leaking “black material” into a Durham, North Carolina waterway for years; a new court order hopes to hold them accountable.

After heaps of criticism, SpaceX said it’ll remove the dozens of fumes-belching gas turbines it’s using to power its gargantuan data centers near Memphis, Tennessee — which it’s been using without a permit — a year from now.

In an update on its website spotted by TechCrunch, the Elon Musk-owned company laid out its plan to hook up the sprawling AI facilities, some of the largest in the world, to a 1.2 gigawatt nantural gas power plant. 

Credit where credit’s due: it’s an improvement over the dismal status quo. But it’ll take a while, and in the meantime the company plans to continue to use its preponderance of 69 portable gas turbines that were trucked in to sustain its data centers. It won’t fully remove them until July 2027, a full year from now.

“We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community,” the company said.

The “Colossus” data center campus, comprising two separate data centers, has come under fire from locals and activist groups. The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, sued xAI — which is now known as SpaceXAI, after being rolled into Musk’s rocket company prior to its initial public offering — for operating the turbines without a permit and spewing harmful pollutants.

At the time, the lawsuit estimated that the gas turbines could emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitric oxides every year. It also claimed that the turbines release hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to lung and nasal cancer that can also inflame airways.

In May, Politico reported that the data center had become one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the county, where smog levels were already considered unhealthy before the facility went online. 

Some parents in nearby communities have complained that their children have developed respiratory problems since the facility went online. And residents in the predominantly black neighborhood of Boxtown say that the fumes are so oppressive that it’s making it hard for them to breathe.

More on data centers: Data Center Emits Constant Screeching Noise Directly Into Man’s House

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