Photo credit: Sergei Starostin
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
The title of Stan Cox’s article on the Naked Capitalism website is: “We’re getting sick of noise pollution,” but I might prefer: “We’re getting sick from noise pollution.” Or, maybe both titles.
Cox writes about the psychological and physiological effects of noise on health, associating noise pollution with fossil fuel use. Unwanted noise pollution is the inevitable concomitant of the internal combustion engine, with transportation noise being the most common form of noise pollution in most of the world. But Cox also draws attention to two newer sources of noise pollution linked to specific industrial uses: data centers for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Unlike road traffic or aviation noise, which usually decrease or stop at night, electronic data centers run continuously with noisy cooling fans bothering people as far as 3 miles away, and disrupting their sleep. Uninterrupted sleep is important for health. I like Cox’s almost poetic paragraph:
“With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.”
Of course, I can’t resist adding my usual closing tag line: A quieter world will be a better and healthier world for all. As Cox points out, cooler, too.
