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IB Ingrid Burrington On Tech Won't Save Us

“Saying you've addressed all of the water use you did in Arizona because you did something that was good for like a watershed in Delaware. People still live in Arizona and still need to drink water, right?”

Tech Won't Save Us · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“Saying you've addressed all of the water use you did in Arizona because you did something that was good for like a watershed in Delaware. People still live in Arizona and still need to drink water, right?” — Ingrid Burrington, Tech Won't Save Us

Burrington was interviewing Paris Marx about his book on hyperscale data centers. Marx had just described how data center operators buy water replenishment and carbon credits so their sustainability reports show far less water and fossil fuel use than they actually consumed.

Transcript

Tech Won't Save Us Around 37:08 into the episode
Speaker 2

…me so much was the use, was the sort of like use of it in like greenwashing, right? The like problem solving environmental impacts of industry through inventing a market through which to kind of buy and sell like culpability. Please share with your readers, what is a water replenishment market?

Speaker 1

…or get cut down within the time that it would have been needed to actually see that kind of benefit to the climate. So, yeah, anyway, I'm going on a bit too long about this, but it's all just like a complicated way of them trying to appear like they're not being nearly as bad as they actually are.

Speaker 2

And it, well, and I think it comes back to that scale thing we were talking about earlier because saying you've addressed, you know, all of the water use you did in Arizona because you did something that was good for like a watershed in Delaware. People still live in Arizona and still need to drink water, right? Like there is a, and it feels also weirdly of a piece of that sort of like utilitarian long-termist thinking where it's like, well, if only a billion people die, it's fine because like we're going to, you know, have tens of billions of people living in space or something, right? Like that it's, it's really a misunderstanding of like what time scale you're trying to live on and how you interface with and relate to other human beings.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's just really frustrating to see the way that they get away with it, right? And, you know, you're talking about water, but like on the carbon side of things, you know, I feel like a lot of people don't realize that they are spending a lot of money and expanding a lot…

Speaker 2

To me, it almost reads as though it has to generate a lot of money, right? Like, you write a little bit about sort of the circular financing stuff and the sort of so much has been put into making it succeed that it's not even that this is how it's supposed to go. It's like if it doesn't go this…

Speaker 1

Or also just our own version of undemocratic, you know, like problematic computer that exists everywhere else. Like one of the really depressing things has just been to see how these conversations around like digital sovereignty and whatnot have been very effectively co-opted by industry, right? In…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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