During a typical emergency department shift, I often have little time to eat, drink, or attend to basic needs. Emergency departments are facing rising patient volumes, straining staff and challenging our ability to provide care. Physicians treat the crisis in front of us, but many of those crises begin long before a patient reaches our doors, with air pollution that makes people sick in the first place.
Asthma attacks, COPD flare-ups, heart attacks, and strokes can all be triggered or worsened by air pollution. Now, the expansion of data centers threatens to add to that burden.
The data-center boom is usually framed around innovation, jobs, and economic growth. Missing from that conversation is the cost to our health. Data centers use amounts of electricity, and some facilities can demand as much power as a small or midsized city. Meeting that demand with coal and natural gas could increase pollution and delay the retirement of fossil-fuel plants. Data centers also require uninterrupted power, often relying on diesel backup generators when the grid cannot meet their needs.
The health consequences are significant. Pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants contributes to heart disease, asthma, lung disease, cancer, and premature death. Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, is especially dangerous because it can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing inflammation throughout the body.
Diesel generators compound the problem. Diesel exhaust is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency and is linked to lung cancer, asthma exacerbations, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. When dozens or hundreds of generators are concentrated at a single data-center campus, their emissions become a concern for nearby communities.
These facilities can also worsen climate change if their electricity demand is met with fossil fuels. Climate change is already intensifying extreme heat, worsening air pollution, expanding infectious disease risks, and increasing the health toll of floods, wildfires, and other disasters.
As an emergency physician, I focus on the patient in front of me. But keeping people out of emergency departments requires looking upstream. Data-center growth is not only an economic or technological issue; it is a public-health issue. We have a choice about how this growth is powered and who bears its health costs.