THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF COMPUTING

The Environmental and Social Consequences of Computing examines the environmental and social consequences of the large data centres now being built to support artificial intelligence, and argues that those consequences are determined less by technology than by the institutional arrangements that surround each facility: how clean electricity is procured and verified, who pays for the grid capacity a connection occasions, whether flexibility is purchased or merely assumed, where cooling water comes from and where it goes, what is disclosed and to whom, and how host communities are positioned in negotiations they are structurally unequipped to conduct. Working systematically through electricity, air, water, noise, land, and materials, the book separates what has been measured from what has been modelled and from what is only inferred, states plainly where the evidence runs out, and represents the case for the sector as strongly as the case against it. It closes with a seven-condition test for evaluating individual projects, a worksheet that converts that test into questions a planning authority or procurement officer can ask, an indicator matrix for researchers, and a research agenda built from actual gaps rather than fashionable ones. Written for policymakers and regulators, nonprofit and community advocates, corporate sustainability and infrastructure teams, and graduate students in environmental policy, energy systems, information systems, and management, it offers a usable map of an unsettled field and a set of instruments for acting well within it before the current buildout hardens into concrete.