TITLE: Anxiety, Mood Swings and Sleepless Nights: Life Near a Bitcoin Mine
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/bitcoin-arkansas-noise-pollution.html
EXCERPT: On a sweltering July evening, the din from thousands of computers mining for Bitcoins pierced the night. Nearby, Matt Brown, a member of the Arkansas legislature, monitored the noise alongside a local magistrate.
As the two men investigated complaints about the operation, Mr. Brown said, a security guard for the mine loaded rounds into an AR-15-style assault rifle that had been stored in a car.
“He wanted to make sure that we knew he had his gun — that we knew it was loaded,” Mr. Brown, a Republican, said in an interview.
The Bitcoin outfit here, 45 minutes north of Little Rock, is one of three sites in Arkansas owned by a network of companies embroiled in tense disputes with residents, who say the noise generated by computers performing trillions of calculations per second ruins lives, lowers property values and drives away wildlife.
Scores of the operations have popped up in recent years across the United States. When a mining computer lands on numbers that Bitcoin’s algorithm accepts, the payout is currently worth about a quarter-million dollars. The more computers an operation has, the better chance of earning the payout.
The industry is often criticized for its vast energy use — often a boon for the fossil-fuel industry — and noise is a common complaint. Though some elected officials like Mr. Brown and other Bitcoin operators in Arkansas have voiced support for the beleaguered residents, a new state law has given the companies a significant leg up.
The Arkansas Data Centers Act, popularly called the Right to Mine law, offers Bitcoin miners legal protections from communities that may not want them operating nearby. Passed just eight days after it was introduced, the law was written in part by the Satoshi Action Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Mississippi whose co-founder worked in the Trump administration rolling back Obama-era climate policies.
“The state of Arkansas has pulled off a surprise victory and become the first in the nation to pass the ‘Right to Mine’ #Bitcoin bill in both the House and Senate,” Dennis Porter, the fund’s chief executive, posted on social media when the law passed last April.
A similar bill passed in Montana last May, and the group has said it hopes to enact its
successful formula in more than a dozen other states. Bills written in collaboration with the group were introduced last month in several states including Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska and Virginia.
Founded five years ago as the Energy 45 Fund, the group sought to tout Mr. Trump’s energy and environmental agenda and “defend the greatest president in modern history.” Its founder, Mandy Gunasekara, had spent the previous two years at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she played a key role in the decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord and helped repeal the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce emissions from coal-burning power plants.
The group is widely lionized by the Bitcoin community, both for its legislative work and for its combative stance toward critics of the industry. But the fund’s aggressive approach has riled others in the Bitcoin community who say they prefer to build consensus around cryptocurrency operations.
Arry Yu, executive director of the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, an industry group, said Arkansas residents were “taken advantage” of.
TITLE: A Texas Town’s Misery Underscores the Impact of Bitcoin Mines Across the U.S.
https://time.com/6590155/bitcoin-mining-noise-texas/
EXCERPT: Granbury is one of many towns across the U.S. feeling the negative impacts of bitcoin mining, an energy-intensive process that powers and protects the cryptocurrency. Those impacts include carbon and noise pollution, and increased costs on consumers’ utility bills. According to the New York Times, there are 34 large scale bitcoin mines across the U.S. In 2022, the crypto market tumbled, in part due to high-profile collapses of crypto companies like Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. But in 2023, prices rebounded once again, and mining companies decided to expand their operations in order to cash in, causing global energy consumption for mining to double, according to one study. Critics say that mining is causing both long-term environmental damage, due to its energy use, as well as local harm. “We’re at a loss here,” Granbury resident Shadden says. “We want our lives back.”
Bitcoin is so energy-intensive because it relies on a process known as proof-of-work. Rather than being overseen by a single watchdog, bitcoin is designed to disperse the responsibility of the network’s integrity to voluntary “miners” around the globe, who prevent tampering through a complex cryptographic process that consumes a vast amount of energy. Over the last few years, Texas has become a global leader in crypto mining because miners can access cheap energy and land there, as well as benefit from friendly tax laws and regulation. Bitcoin miners consume about 2,100 megawatts of the state's power supplies, and companies like Riot Platforms and Marathon Digital Holdings have recently expanded in the state. (Other states, conversely, have pushed back on the industry: In 2022, New York imposed a moratorium on bitcoin mining over concerns that miners were overusing renewable energy resources.)
In December, Marathon paid $178 million to purchase bitcoin mines in Kearney, Nebraska and Granbury from Generate Capital. But with the Granbury purchase, Marathon also inherited a swath of angry nearby residents across Hood County whose lives have been upended by the mining facility. Generate Capital started operating the 300-megawatt facility, which sits about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, in 2023. Initially, many residents were unaware what, exactly, was causing the noise. Shannon Wolf, who lives about 8 miles from the plant, first assumed that the rumble was coming from a nearby train. “It has woken me from a dead sleep before,” she says.
The rumble, it turned out, comes from the massive cooling fans that the facility runs to keep their computers from overheating. Data centers, like bitcoin mines, also run massive cooling fans that have drawn the ire of nearby residents.
As residents learned what had caused the din, social media platforms like NextDoor and Facebook flooded with complaints. “This sound has been driving me to the point of insanity. I have continuous migraines, I can barely get out of my head, vomiting, nosebleeds, painful knots on my scalp,” wrote one commenter. “All the birds have left, only [buzzards],” wrote another poster.
As complaints swelled, local officials brought their concerns to the site’s operator, US Bitcoin Corp. Over the summer, the company agreed to construct a 24-foot sound barrier wall on one end of the property at the cost of $1 to $2 million. But while the wall reduced sound in some areas, it actually amplified it in others. “To be honest, the complaints have gotten louder for us since the mitigation efforts,” Constable John Shirley says.
Shirley says that he is monitoring the decibel levels of the facility. Texas state law stipulates that a noise is considered unreasonable if it exceeds 85 decibels. For comparison, vacuum cleaners often run at around 75 decibels—and a cardiologist told TIME in 2018 that chronic exposure to anything over 60 decibels had the potential to do harm to the cardiovascular system. Shadden took her own readings at her house near the Bitcoin mining facility that reached 103 decibels.
But the maximum penalty for breaking that Texas law is a $500 fine, Shirley says, adding: “The state law is inadequate.” He says that he has been talking to the county attorney’s office about options for recourse. “If we have a repeated violation problem, he will be looking into potential injunctive relief,” he says.
The community’s ire boiled over at a town hall on Jan. 29, hosted by Shirley and Hood County Commissioner Nannette Samuelson. About 75 people filled the room to complain about the facility. Complaints from attendees included migraines that required trips to the emergency room and a vertigo diagnosis. One attendee said she had been forced to put her chihuahua on seizure medication. Others claimed that their windows rattled from the vibrations, and that the noise made their homes unsellable.
“How does Hood County benefit from having such a ridiculous thing?” asked one woman. “What does this community gain from having them there?”
TITLE: In New York, 1 in 4 residents now live within a half-mile of a mega warehouse
https://grist.org/climate/quarter-new-york-state-residents-live-near-mega-warehouse/
EXCERPT: Stephanie Joseph loves her dream home, a colonial-style house in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. She and her husband stayed within a budget, paid off student loans, and made sacrifices all so that their family could live in the peace and quiet of Cornwall, a placid town of just under 13,000 people situated in the Catskills.
The area is lush and green and dotted with American beech and red maple trees. Joseph regularly sees hawks, foxes, and deer as well as woodpeckers near her house. State parks and a wetlands sanctuary are nearby.
Then came the news in 2022 that land next to Joseph’s home was slated to become a mega-warehouse — just 50 feet from her front door.
Before she purchased the house, Joseph was told the property next door was owned by the state, relieving her fears about another piece of land so close to hers. Later, however, she discovered that it was privately owned. The proposed mega-warehouse — dubbed the Treetop Warehouse Project — will be more than 1.7 million square feet spread out over five buildings.
“Our first thought was, oh, my god, we’re going to have to move,” said Joseph. “And we just lost all the money that we put into this house, because who’s gonna want to live next to a warehouse?”
A new report by the Environmental Defense Fund and ElectrifyNY shows that Stephanie is not alone. Nearly one in four New York State residents live within a half mile of a mega-warehouse — the sprawling complexes used for everything from e-commerce to plane manufacturing to farm equipment distribution.
These warehouses can bring all sorts of disruption to daily life, more noise, more light, and most importantly: diesel pollution from truck exhaust.
“The main reason it’s a particularly concerning theory is that it produces a large number of very small particles,” according to Dr. Christopher Carlsten, an expert in occupational and environmental lung disease at the University of British Columbia. “And those particles are problematic because they are known to get deep into the lungs.”
When those particles burrow into the lungs, they can cause all sorts of havoc. Past EDF research has found that diesel pollution contributes to nearly 21,000 childhood asthma diagnoses in the New York City metropolitan area each year.
“The concern is that research over decades has shown that virtually every part of the body is affected,” said Carlsten.
Another concern is where that pollution is usually located. The report found that Black, Hispanic and low-income populations live near warehouses at rates that are more than 59 percent, 48 percent and 42 percent higher, respectively, than would be expected based on statewide statistics.
For the more than 230,000 residents of the South Bronx that live half a mile from a warehouse, these statistics echo their everyday lives.
Arif Ullah, executive director of South Bronx Unite, says that the problem is historic and dates back to redlining which initially zoned the area for highways and industry.
“What we’re seeing right now is linked with the legacy of redlining, where certain communities were marginalized and just disinvested in,” said Ullah.
Proximity to this type of pollution not only impacts the respiratory system, but can affect other aspects of a person’s health.
“A lot of research has been done on other impacts of air pollution to help in ranging from infant mortality, to maternal health, to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even dementia,” said Ullah.
Ullah stresses that those wide-ranging health effects can add up over a lifetime.
“At every point in a person’s life, exposure to air pollution is impacting them in a very detrimental way and what that has done for the South Bronx and other communities like ours is diminished the quality of life,” he said. “It’s diminished our ability to thrive.”
Back in Cornwall, Joseph has been fighting the mega-warehouse alongside her neighbors. They’ve formed a group called No Warehouses in the Woods to fight against what they see as an unnecessary burden on the community. She’s concerned not only for her own family, but for all members of the surrounding communities.
“You look at the studies and you realize, the closer that they live to a warehouse, especially a mega-warehouse, the more dangerous the side effects are for them,” said Joseph. “And that’s why a lot of families try to move away from places that are crowded with these warehouses and we thought we were doing that.”