This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
Why is skipping public review bad news for everyone?
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
We arrange to have everybody vote on a designated day. We publicize that day. We make a very big deal out of getting people to vote. We don't do it too often. People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action. But in local politics they often can't, because interest groups that lost the election will camp every meeting afterwards with canvassed public commenters jawboning officials to make different decisions.
> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?
In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.
I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.
I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
I don't know, this sure sounds like NIMBYism to me. Public comment was used to organize against multifamily housing units. That's approximately the whole story; I think you pretty much just have to add "organizing against new renewable and grid upgrades" to complete it.
"5-over-1 or over-1s, also known as a one-plus-five or a podium building,[1] is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America", so either you're wrong about them wanting to build a 5 over 1 or wrong about them being multi-family.
We can agree to disagree, so long as we can at least recognize NIMBYism when we see it. "Public comment works great because it enabled us to organize to keep a multifamily development out of our vicinity" is like the archetypical NIMBY project.
The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
> several stories higher than any of the other buildings
If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.
I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?
As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.
Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.
Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.
That's literally what NIMBYs exploiting public comment say: whatever else is happening, at least they're striking back against the psychopathic Private Equity firms who are building all this evil housing.
Blocking datacenter builds is the right thing to do right now. Whether the general public has the right vocabulary to explain why is not so important when the people in charge are actively evil and tasked with the exact opposite of their claimed job title.
We don't agree, but either way, the only thing I'm here to say is that public comment distorts democratic process and entrenches concentrated local interest groups. You're happy about it (in the abstract, apparently) because it's achieving an outcome you support, but mostly what it supports is preventing housing and renewable energy from being built.
Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
I'm really not sure how I can be clearer about the fact that I don't agree with the prevailing sentiment on these threads about data centers† but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).
Texas is a weird case because they're the fastest growing state in the country and they run their own independent power grid --- badly (see: the winter outage a couple years back). And even then: data centers are going to get built in Texas. Gov. Abbott is doing a performative audit thing, but they're ultimately going to clear projects.
No, I did not! I've written at length about how I engaged with my local municipality on Flock cameras. The search bar will avail. None of it involved public comment.
> Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them.
People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.
> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
"The public having access to information on what corporations plan to do in their communities and having the ability to vote to against what corporations want is a blight on the democratic process" is a crazy stance to take.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
> Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
70% opposition and people who strongly support (7%) continues to decrease. I guess that’s plenty in absolute numbers. But even the Iran war has more supporters than that.
Often not everyone is impacted equally by a policy. So it is reasonable to allow, for example, the people living near a potential data center greater say into what happens.
See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.
>Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles.
While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhu-oid godlings...
I did not say that, but is so obvious, like looking through a plate glass window. There is no pressure, its just a natural transition to the end of bipedal life.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
They're good analogies. It's possible to keep a Jenga tower going forever, just extremely difficult once it reaches the point of being all middle pieces.
If the need is driven by a bubble economy, when the bubble pops the demand disappears too. This can even lead to a separate bubble popping (see: the dotcom and telecom bubbles).
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
It doesn't work out for the owners of the capital. Their wealth is entirely based on their claims on future production that is consumed by people with money.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
But they haven't replaced every knowledge worker. The unemployment rate remains unaffected by all the AI progress. At some point the bill comes due, and if most of those jobs are still around, then what?
well, according to finance bros, shovelling cash into a furnace to power a boiler to steam some eggs is considered a wild success. Economics is for normies.
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
>(well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
These exemptions are not granted based on logic or precedent. "Less dirty" has nothing to do with it. They're entirely based on open bribery. This will be granted to any industry that bribes the administration enough. What's the good news again?
All that stuff is more dirty to the local community than your average datacenter.
The vast majority of these these no one knows even exist until told. They are basically warehouses without loading docks not much traffic goes into or out of.
Sure some horrible projects exist and are repeated over and over on social media, but they are the exception.
Most folks working across the street from one of these facilities had no idea until they were told to care.
oh! "This will benefit the 2%, while the 1% burns the earth to the ground"
This is like Republicans claiming that they're doing everything for small businesses, when the reality is they're doing things for contract workers who more often are just being forced into contracts that wouldn't exist without the lax regulatory reality and are abused thereof.
"This will benefit the little guy (assuming they survive their cancer diagnosis)"
I just heard this last night: buried in the "support for small business" was the repeal (or effectively neuteringO of the Corporate Transparency Act's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
That program had a simple ask of every corporation doing business in America: who really owns it? No more hiding of ill gotten gains and laundering through US real estate, etc (hint: anybody come to mind who might do a lot of that)?.
It was a stupid regulation to begin with. Any investigative agency already could trivially get this data through already existing means.
All it did was make your 3 member condo association have to pay a lawyer $500/yr in compliance fees for utterly no benefit to anyone other than the compliance folks collecting their rent. Or take on personal criminal liability to file it yourself. Better not forget one random year or it’s a felony!
Just like most of the rest of the AML/KYC creep after 9/11 it did absolutely nothing to go after anybody they say it did - it just made things harder on normal everyday people.
The EPA hasn’t been able to regulate anything since it’s been gutted by the current administration. Of course it’s going to scrap rules. We’re not even allowed to measure the effects of climate change.
One of the very early Nick-names for the EPA (shortly after its founding) was “Every Polluter’s Ally”, as it was viewed as more emitter-friendly than the state regulators which preceded it.
Reminds me of how HIPAA was actually created as a way to standardize patient data so it could be more easily shared. The stuff about doctors not being allowed to share your medical history with employers only came later. A lot of people think of it as a privacy bill but it's actually the exact opposite
A lot of industry regulation has basically been regulatory capture since the start
It makes sense if you are a boomer wanting to extract everything possible for yourself with zero regard for even 10 years in the future where you will most likely be dead.
It's not a boomer thing other than the old people in power happen to be boomers right now. But it is related to them being at the end of their lifespan. The greed is so incredibly short sighted because they only have a few years left to exploit society. Trump won't live long enough to see the full consequences of his actions.
We are watching world leaders get increasingly old which is having catastrophic impact on society.
Nixon created the EPA because he used our natural unspoiled resources to back the dollar. Looks like the admin doesn't care about that anymore, they think global war and AI can back the dollar
I can’t believe we’re seeing so much bad news coming from EPA. Why all this backtracking from an agency that used to be so effective and well organized? Well, I guess we know the reason.
The same EPA that under 5+ administrations has taken no material action to reduce the effects of climate change? Approved the widespread use of PFAS for stuff as silly as egg pans and snowboard wax, poisoning people's blood and community water supplies for decades? The same EPA that allows the use of leaded AVgas for flights over communities and schools, because otherwise a dentist might have to pay a little more for his Cessna flight?
Gosh, they were such a paragon of environmental protection, effective and well organized in the last 40 years.
It doesn't serve any purpose to act like they were good at their jobs before. Returning to a status quo of 5 or 15 years ago is such a mediocre goal in this space that its arguably not worth spending political capital on.
> The same EPA that under 5+ administrations has taken no material action to reduce the effects of climate change?
Huh? The endangerment finding was in 2009. The problem is that we have a very litigious set of polluters and then we elected Trump who stacked the supreme court, and then we elected Trump again, this time with a bunch of insane people with him who had specific plans to bring on the end of this country via the unitary executive.
I agree with the sentiment but you lack context. The SuperFund has been a training ground for stall-and-pad-billing for decades. Certain bureaucrats gained lifetime employment for stall-and-declare skills.
read the article (shocking i know) there's no avoiding a review. The local government can have as much public review as it wants. This is where control should have been all along since the local government is accountable to the local community.
The article says they're considering removing the federal requirement that state governments even tell their constituents let alone allow public review.
So literally yes you can avoid the review... until you manage to convince your local government to pass their own version of this law, or vote out the existing people if they are against this thing you didn't think you had to care about because it was already law. And the slated time is within a year, so good luck accomplishing that in time.
Also please note the rules of this forum: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
public forums should be for exchanging ideas and not a place to virtue signal whatever fad Nextdoor/Facebook emotional bait normies are feeding each other via brain rot feeds.
the public essentially has little interest in preventing human extinction. And tons of interest in preventing data centers under false arguments and performative displays.
What is the point of empowering the public when they are not curious but rather emotional children.
Basically, to empower the public now means, how to bastardize your arguments into an emotional narrative that is palatable to the commoners but probably misses all relevant arguments.
Like if you think x-risk is real, and datacenters are benign/reasonable/can-be-done-in-net-local-positive-way - then you are incentivized to pretend like datacenter are bad because peasants will not entertain your x risk calculus.
It's a herding/shepherding game where the only people willing to play are compromised.
ftfa "provide the state and local agencies most familiar with local issues the discretion to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation."
so give local government the controls, that doesn't seem so bad. As for the next line in the article saying people are losing faith in their local government i don't buy that a bit. Local government and elections are where your vote and voice are loudest. The most faith lost seems to be at the federal level.
Triggering articles like this are usually not so alarming if you take the time to read them and fish out the details. They're made for social media distribution and engagement from the headline alone.
Here's the thing... pollution is a global issue. We share the same atmosphere, we share the same grid, we share the same resources to generate energy.
So no this isn't an issue for local governments who can be easily bribed, it's absolutely something the federal gov should be all over. This isn't some "gotcha" you're offering, it's damning.
About the only type of pollution which is actually global is CO2, which is exactly the thing this kind of review has nothing to do with. If you want people to emit less CO2 then you price carbon and as a result everyone has that amount of incentive to prefer alternate means of generating electricity.
> The federal Environmental Protection Agency plans to scrap a federal requirement that states tell the public — and allow public comment — before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities. That includes the data centers rising across the country, as well as the power plants built to feed their enormous appetite for electricity.
These changes will last exactly as long as this administration, so it would be a pretty foolish business that makes long term investment decisions based on this announcement.
The bet is that the democrats won’t have the spine to force AI companies to eat a loss on half a trillion dollars worth of data centers, and it’s frankly a pretty good one.
Currently there is no "Republican party" just Trump loyalists. In 2030 the party might still be called the same but I doubt it will have moved far from the principles of today.
Well, in part you are correct but look how the billionaires set up Vance as the next "elected" boss right now - it is quite a lot in the recent media, how Vance single-handedly rescues babies at night while being blindfolded. I think these anti-people changes that are harmful to them, will remain. Trump is just the old dementia guy; Vance "my eyeliners are perfect" will follow after "winning" the next election. And then nobody will admit to ever having voted for him - and people will be very befuddled, almost as if an oligarchy runs the show.
Vance’s problem is that whenever he walks into the room at least half the crowd covers their drinks. He’s got absolutely negative charisma. It’s the same reason Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Ted Cruz couldn’t win the big chair - for all Trump’s… Trump-ness, people actually want to follow him. The rest of that cohort sets off people’s uncanny valley detectors - they’re just viscerally unappealing.
A good start is to vote in the midterms to reduce the amount of power that these antihuman criminals have. The US is currently in the midst of a serious political disaster and there will be no quick fix to any of this. But if we take every opportunity possible whenever we can to rid ourselves of these people and to stand in their way as much as possible, we can work our way back from the brink.
I'm not sure winning in the midterms will be a net positive for Democrats (barring an infeasible supermajority). Even if they stop everything Republicans want to do (which they won't even get close to), that's just going to become the excuse for the next Republican campaign to blame Democrats for a dysfunctional government, and there's a good chance Democrats would lose as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if it would actually turn out better for Democrats if they stay a minority so that they can't get the blame during the presidential election.
The left needs to stop giving the right a cudgel with which to beat them every election. It's a cudgel of culture-war memes and badvocate tik-toks that resonates with voters more than corruption, autocracy, debt, wars, and the dismantling of our democracy. Meanwhile the DNC gerontocracy hires an army of feckless corpo-humanoid consultants to issue press releases listing all the people Dems fight for - a list that happens to leave out men and white people.
Winning the midterms would make the house speaker a democrat, which would allow for the removal of both the president and vice president via impeachment such that the democratic speaker of the house becomes the acting president, effectively stopping the bullshit of this administration. The question then becomes if the amount of flipped senate seats + the number of republican senators voting yes on impeachment reaches a supermajority. Possible for Trump, highly unlikely for Vance. This was likely the angle Republicans plan to take, as that would make Vance the Incumbent in the 2028 elections, giving him a statistical edge. It also allows for the current republicans in office to look like they are trying to meet the demands of their constituents without giving up any real power and effectively not changing their agenda. A reminder that although Trump is a rapist, the fight against this administration will not end with him. Republicans will continue to employ smoke and mirrors strategies and lean heavily into value extraction from the US and global economy as has been occuring.
> Winning the midterms would make the house speaker a democrat, which would allow for the removal of both the president and vice president via impeachment
That's... not how it works. Democrats literally had a House speaker and the president was, as you could see, not removed despite impeachment.
Impeachment means nothing without convinction by a super majority in the senate. The republicans had a chance to convict trump and remove him from our politics right after he tried to murder them on Jan 6, but most of them were still to stupid or spineless to vote for it. No chance they are going to suddenly spring into action next year.
We're all stuck with two more years of an increasingly demented trump. The best Dems can do is highlight to incompetence/corruption, limt the damage, and get their own brand out of the mud so they can win a strong majority in 2028.
Unfortunately the answer is ”it requires effort”, or in other words: Vote (and hold them accountable after the ballots have been counted), Shout (literally), Protest (including civil disobedience), join any civil or environmental movement, help file legal challenges.
Democracy is for good and for worse not a one-and-done thing, it is a continuous fight.
The time cost to the thousands of people putting in long hours to organize against bad ideas is a measurable loss to the economy. It's very clear that the system itself is deficient because it massively rewards first movers, incumbents, and amplifies economic leverage rather than mitigating it.
This doesn't seem like a very effective method. I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something. Literally shouting at a data center seems more cathartic than helpful.
It's about numbers. A small group isn't going to do anything directly to the data center, but it can raise awareness that other people do indeed care. This, in turn, can slowly (over multiple demonstrations) grow the size of the demonstrations to a critical mass that cannot be ignored.
> I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something.
How do you think you as a voter who presumably aren't a billionaire (or CEO of a mega corporation) with politicians on speed dial who will take the call get the politicians to pass those laws?
If the electorate is asleep at the wheel, the people pushing the politicians are all pushing them one way and the car isn't going in the direction that most of the electorate would necessarily want.
If you value your democracy you sometimes have to be an active participant in it and sometimes that means turning up more than once ever X years and ticking a box.
If such reviews are required by legislation then you stop it in the courts; approvals without legally required steps are invalid.
If they are not required by legislation then you just deal with the change.
While you're thinking about this, realize even the Democrats are annoyed at how weaponized things like NEPA have become to slow down necessary changes.
The people in power are making a lot of mistakes right now. You ignore popular will at your peril. The more the bought-and-paid for Supreme Court and politicians weaken the power of the individual voter through shit like Citizens United and gerrymandering, the further they push people towards "uncivilized" methods.
4. Find every publicly accessible local forum with _your_ representatives at every level, and get on the mic. Tell your reps they will lose your vote and the votes of your entire network for complicity in harm against society on behalf of the billionaire class. Follow through on that threat.
Extreme option: Run for election yourself on the platform and get voted into office. The bar is lower than ever in some places.
Scrap the current forms of elected representation with one that encourages multiple parties instead of a forced dichotomy. Create some kind of constant recall mechanism for elected officials. And other things.
Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
If you are in a D leaning district, then register as a D and vote in the D primary. Make sure the candidate you vote for is the most likely to win who isn't captured by big business.
A good example of a datacenter friendly dem that just won by the skin of their teeth is Crowley for governor in Wisconson.
We need ranked choice like yesterday. It's not a magic fix-it solution, but it is a giant step in the right direction. I'm so tired of the whiplash between these two parties.
> Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
The only thing that matters is Democrats gaining control of Congress and state governments. The choice that isn't a democrat is the wrong one. The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
> The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
I agree, that's why I'm saying you should be involved in the primary and not just the general. Because, as I said, it's not the default position of the democrat party to be for regulating datacenters. I gave an explicit example of that where a dem is completely aligned with the republicans on DCs.
Dems win power, but they are still beholden to OpenAI, then they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
It's too late for 2026 and IMO you should vote for Ds wherever you are at. But if you want to affect change on DCs then voting in the primary for anti-dc dems is what you have to do. It's not enough to just vote in the general elections.
You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters. The sides are clear and bringing up primaries when it's too late is irrelevant.
> they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
There is no reason to think this is true. I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
> You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters.
No I'm not. We can walk and chew gum. It's important to recognize when and how Dems fail and this is one case where more than a few are failing their voters.
> There is no reason to think this is true.
There is if people aren't involved. A Gavin Newsom president would absolutely be pretty happy to receive campaign funding from AI firms.
> I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
Break the rules, no that's unlikely. However, it's entirely possible that the same results and rubber-stamping happens with enough campaign contributions. You need to look no further than all the money that's been dumped into "clean coal" and "CO2 capture" boondoggles by democrats to understand how this sort of thing works.
I could completely see a democrat president allowing DCs to be built so long as they buy carbon offsets, which is every bit as corrupt as just telling the EPA to not regulate. It's simply just not as brazen.
But I don't think this is true of any or all democrat presidential candidates, just some. Specifically Newsom would very much pull this sort of shit.
We usually have had less than 30% participation for the local Democratic primary in off years (Republican primary in off-years is not much better). The complete lack of civic-mindedness is why the only strategy that works at the general election is "vote for the lesser evil." Note: that only include 2 viable candidates, a third party will never win the Presidential election without elimination of the parties themselves or implementation of rank-choice voting by a majority of states to counteract the anti-democratic (that's small "d") bias of the Electoral College.
Republicans just took a vocal public oath of loyalty to their President in which they promised to cheat in the the election. That happened. It's on video.
My claim is that you should vote for the other party. That sounds reasonable to me.
I voted in the primary against the incumbent. The incumbent won. I will vote for them because the Republican opponent is a documented sexual predator. That is literally true.
That interpretation seems... odd. You seem to be implying that if your policy is to give everyone a tax credit (i.e. give them money) if you win then you're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
He's also stated that he can issue the money without help from Congress, which directly contradicts the idea that it's harmless bloviating about voting in a 120th Congress to implement specific policy:
The people that treat political parties like sports teams are awful and a big part of why we're where we are today, but with the current state of affairs and the choice being between essentially fascism (Republicans) and 1990s conservatism (Democrats), it's not a hard choice. I couldn't agree more with what I think you're implying though, which is that this is a shit state of affairs where we're constantly voting for the lesser of two evils. We need ranked choice and open primaries, imo.
> Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
It's not that simple. The Democrats are shit, and lost to Trump twice because of that shittiness. Perversely, Trump has allowed them to convince themselves that they don't have to reform.
I don't expect anything to change if the Democrats gain power, they'll curb only the most egregious abuses curbed a bit, while leaving the overall thing intact. Then they'll lose again because they're shit.
This is a natural consequence of a two-party system: you will be forced to choose between two parties that both deviate from your political preferences. Casting a ballot for a third party, or abstaining from voting, are both effectively the same as voting for the party you hate the most.
You may feel some semblance of true choice by participating in primaries.
Otherwise, the only path to installing politicians you truly believe in is to change the system -- be it by reform or revolution.
So vote for Republicans because while the outcomes are worse, at least they aren't pretending they are going to make things better?
You've made it clear why you think people absolutely shouldn't vote for Democrats, but haven't really stated what people should do instead, just left the implication.
> So vote for Republicans because while the outcomes are worse, at least they aren't pretending they are going to make things better?
No, voting for Democrats isn't enough, because they're shit. They'll probably in better shape to be reformed that Republicans, but that's not saying much. I don't have a ton of hope based on what I'm seeing. I expect they'll either go back to the behaviors that enabled Trump, or commit some anti-democratic power grab more extreme than anything Trump has ever done.
IMHO, after someone like Trump, they need to reform themselves to be an actual-majority party that can competitive almost everywhere.
There is a huge business opportunity to become the world leader in sustainable data center design. Whoever wins could one day have immense influence over every single data center in the world (or even out of this world, where efficient resource utilization would likely be essential). It’s disappointing to see the United States miss out: US companies and research institutions would actually be extremely competitive in this field with the right government incentives.
Sustainable design for datacenters is orthogonal to success in data centers. That's like saying a local bakery should become a leader in pet adoption - it'll score some feel good points, but is almost counterproductive to the actual mission.
A data center (right now) needs to be built fast, with a large amount of always-on power. Sticking a gas turbine behind the meter in the parking lot is one of the most practical ways to get there.
It’s not just a feel good thing. There are real resource limits, even if someone chooses to foolishly not believe that. If you can get more done with a given level of power and other resources, you get more out of your data centers.
I think most people who are working towards greater AI would consider that not an opportunity, but planning to lose in a game that is winner(s) take all.
Winning scenarios in AI don't include being accountable for sustainability and they don't include expertise being valuable. Winners will decide what sustainable means for them.
The situation only has to be sustainable for those entities that get a vote that matters. I don't think they've given us any reason to believe they intend on that being a whole lot of people. In fact they've been quite up-front about saying they are concerned about the possibility of that number being zero
Winner take all is a farce. It didn't work for Uber when they tried to out-spend the competition, Lyft is still very much a thing, and so are taxis (the non-robo kind). There will always be many, many AI companies and trying to execute "winner take all" in this space is only going to make more problems and waste a shit-ton of money.
If you subscribe to an AGI/ASI view, the stakes are different than the network effects that Uber thinks they could get. Success here would mean you could theoretically pull away from the competition so far and so fast, whether that be at a company or nation-state level.
Isn't the goal to power most non-earthbound data centers with solar? I am no scientist, but going out to space feels like it gets rid of most of the downsides to solar.
Public comment is bad. It gives people with time to comment far more power than those who can't. It's one of the major reasons we can't building housing or high speed rail.
I'm glad to see this. Anti data center propaganda is rampant right now, with large amounts of it proven to be pushed by China to slow down American AI companies. We have tons of oil processing facilities, way more than data centers and they use way more water.
The US is in a new cold war. It's clear that the government has determined that who owns AI will be leaders in this century and they will do whatever is necessary to accomplish that - I mean in the 50s into the 90s we nuked our own soil - I don't know what we expect here.
>Last year, Lee Zeldin, who runs the EPA, said it was now the agency’s top priority to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” The 56-year-old agency was established in 1970 to protect the environment and public health.
lol, reminds me of those videos where a host will say one thing and then the cameraman pans to reveal the lie
You can help me here. Maybe slavery as a word is not suitable.
I think they need humans to recycle money
They need humans to run the green economy as the Afro-americans in the south
They need humans as a hunting sport, how to make them do what we need. Let's play with them.
The AI is not viable as a business model. So they will use it as a tool for their purposes as long as they can.
This just simply removes the last vestiges of the old Republic, and leads the way to the common deployment of Chinese designed AI reactors, which while designed by AI, are really for the burning of the sky in preparation of a Matrix future. It has been foretold: It is the way.
It’s strange because on one hand, people don’t want to live near data centers, but on the other: the rampant use of AI signals people really *do* want data centers.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
Funnily enough this probably the most safetyist thing the administration could do at the moment, since this will certainly autocatalyze more opposition to DC construction in a bunch of states and probably accelerate the state-level moratoriums. A big thank you to the White House for taking AI pause as such an urgent priority.
IMO, capitalism is itself an unaligned artificial intelligence, with its own logic and goals orthogonal to human life. All “ex risk” paranoia is a projection of sublimated anxiety about capitalism.
The crazy part is that everybody in the US calls this "data center pollution". Over here in Frankfurt/Germany, we have data centers in the middle of the city, right next to residential housing. You don't smell anything, you do not hear anything.
A data center can simply put the heat pumps onto the roof or in the backyard pointing away from housing. Humans have developed noise protection systems for ages. All this stuff is available.
This is just end-stage capitalism giving a sh*t about humans, burning fossil fuels without any filters of any kind next to kids playing outside like it's the year 1920.
It's like we're on a 100 year cycle over here, gilded age part 2 and a return to letting those who aren't rich eat straight industrial pollution so the rich can keep getting richer.
This is the missing context for NIMBYism. The legal mechanisms used to stall construction in San Francisco were created because of an explicitly racist plan to demolish people’s homes to build freeways. The people building datacenters should stop, take a breath, and think a few moves ahead about how to get to real agreement and mutual benefit with surrounding communities instead of just driving a truck over them. Nobody’s going to be happy with the consequences.
At which point installations can be grandfathered in under previous rules. It would be so unfair to the corporations to suddenly have to meet the stricter standards that came out of nowhere.
Goddamnit this is the worst possible administration to have while we’re having this massive buildup of data centers. Any reasonable government would have done what Massachusetts did and stipulated that you can build a data center, but it needs to be powered by renewable energy so build out your own energy sources, which would have been a win-win for everyone but instead we get this. Also, if the Democrats were in power, I hope they wouldn’t succumb to a minority in their base and just ban data centers and completely take us out of the race.
> I hope they wouldn’t succumb to a minority in their base and just ban data centers
The most recent set of polls I saw said that 71% of Democrats and 64% of all Americans support banning datacenter construction. It's not merely a majority, at this point it's a pretty significant supermajority. There are good recents not to ban DC construction but at this point it's pretty clear it's what the people want and letting construction go ahead is, in some sense, undemocratic.
This doesn't scrap public review. It scraps federal mandates requiring public review. The states can decide for themselves if a public review is required. This is a good thing. As the ability for highly motivated activist groups to veto projects is a major strategic impediment for the economic expansion of the United States.
Trump and co have done so many awful things that I forgot about their gutting of the EPA. There is no punishment fitting for him and the idiots who voted for him. A significant amount seem to prowl around HN I'll add. They can read and write but can't think apparently.
I'm pro-information and believe generally that anti-data-center activists are chasing a Glonzo on par with anti-5G electrosensitives. That said given the tide of opinion I'm overjoyed that Trump and his allies want to step into the fusilade to defend the unpopular.
That data centers need a lot of power and some cases a lot of water isn't some sort of conspiracy theory. When you have data centers like the box elder county DC that is planed to consume more power than the entire state of Utah and it wants to do that by burning natural gas, that's not some sort of conspiracy theory that it would be tremendously bad for the environment and the regional gas and electric bills (particularly since a decent amount of power already is generated via natural gas there).
I'm not wholesale against data centers, but there are more than a few projects that are downright irresponsible.
It's not the only GW datacenter planned [1]. AFAIK, a majority of these big datacenters are going to produce their power via natural gas turbines. I don't know of any that are actually planning on powering themselves via renewables or even nuclear power.
The sub 100MW data centers are mostly relying on the grid, but even a number of them plan on having natural gas turbines.
I agree, that'd be a great way to approach things. The problem is a lot of the regulators are instead looking at doing tax breaks for these data centers when they should be taxing them (and other businesses) for the externalities of the problems they'll cause.
I'm of the opinion that billionaires are good for the economy. Wages in the US are about double what they are in the EU.
There are some aspects in which the EU provides a higher quality of life, but those have nothing to do with tax rates or the concentration of billionaires. They're more related to things like good city planning allowing for pedestrian and biking-friendly neighbourhoods (E.g. 50% of commutes to work in Copenhagen are by bike, where in the U.S. it's less than 1%.), old cohesive cultures, and better, more developed culinary traditions.
The billionaires here are just a scapegoat because the rent-seeking parties need a target that is naturally unsympathetic for the public to direct its anger toward. The National Education Association is the largest union in the US with three million members. 99% of its campaign contributions go to the Democrats. I haven't seen a single policy that it advocates that is actually good for society. If you look at the jurisdictions where the teachers' unions hold the most sway, they make the least efficient use of public money. New York spends three times more than Florida per pupil on public education and has slightly worse academic performance.
I'm sure this will stop all the public opposition to data centers! /s
This type of thing will just enrage the opposition more, give them far more fuel, and attract far more people into opposing data centers.
The ruling regime is used to controlling a subservient political group that always, 100% falls in line to marching orders. Now that they control the entire country, they either need to have oppressed tho populace enough that all objection gets arrested or is subject to immediate political violence. But that's not going to be possible with how unpopular they have made themselves.
The nonsense about 'using all the water' and datacenter protests has to be a Chinese psyop. It's so fantastically stupid to protest someone taking an empty field and paying local taxes on it and employing dozens of highly paid people in the middle of nowhere. There's literally no downside. There is effectively no pollution. There are jobs for every level of education, from security guard to the people installing hardware. There's no toxic runoff, no danger of a chemical explosion, and no carcinogens being dumped. This is the only rural industry you can say that about.
Water is a renewable resource. I know you folks in California can't comprehend this, but in the parts of the country where it actually makes sense for humans to live water just falls from the sky multiple times per week. We get so much water the problem is making sure we get rid of it safely, we don't have to fight over who has the most senior claim to it or decide whether we want to have endangered species or almonds more. Our streams don't run dry 4/5 of the year. We don't have to check about water restrictions when we water our lawns because there are never water restrictions and we never have to water our lawns.
There are entire areas miles across in this country where if you drive through it you might throw up from the smell. The ponds full of animal feces make the air un-breathable. Where is the protest over that? You realize that this literally does ruin ground water and poisons surface water? Where are the people coming out to say they have to live 4 miles from oceans of pig feces and when the wind blows their way they can't go outside? Yet the media is able to find the 4 people on earth that want to say a building full of computers is 'loud' and that computers use lots of water? When was the last time you filled the water tank on your computer? Yet people are very quick to believe that somehow a warehouse with a bunch of computers in it somehow destroys water?
When did datacenters start using up all the water? Nobody seemed to worry about this until the US and China were fighting for AI dominance, then suddenly datacenters use water and are so loud people go insane from them. What is the first time someone mentioned datacenters using water and causing pollution?
It's absolute group psychosis. Are you actually so dumb that you don't notice that a thing that has been around for 50 years suddenly is a threat to our survival? Were you born yesterday so you don't remember 2 years ago when nobody had ever realized the existential threat of building datacenters in America? Why didn't anyone notice that datacenters were pumping the wells dry in 2021? Maybe they weren't and still arent...
Also, your last two paragraphs are completely bogus because you overlooked something important: scale.
AI data centers are being built at a massively higher rate than data centers were being built a few years ago, and an AI data center uses 5-10x more energy than a non-AI data center.
It is quite common for something that is not a big problem to become a major problem when scale massively increases. You can't simply dismiss concerns because they weren't concerns a few years ago. You will have to actually do the analysis to determine if they are legitimate concerns now.
With diesel over $6/gallon now that's probably not too attractive. Natural gas probably more likely, and less polluting at least as far as particulates go. CO2 still created.
Are all new data centers being built with on-site power generation (for regular operations, not just emergency backup)? I'd assume they'd prefer utility power where they could get it.
Diesel generators are mostly for emergencies. Natural gas turbines (many of which are or are derived from jumbo jet engines) are for on-prem power generation.
Perhaps the next administration will drop a few cluster bombs on some hyperscaler data centers. The air force needs targets to practice on, after all. Then throughout the land there will be much rejoicing and feelings of justice done, as trillions of dollars of GPUs go up in smoke.
Good. Public review is nonsensical anyway. The public always “wants everything in one bag but the bag shouldn’t be heavy”. Elected representatives, and a set of rules with enforcement are a far better system than discretionary review.
We can’t have everyone extracting rent from all productive pursuits. If the public has their way they’d prefer to have the right to vote on who gets to be their neighbor.
This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
Why is skipping public review bad news for everyone?
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
What democratically established laws? This is America. Policy is determined 95% by monied interests over the preference of voters at large.
Seems to me public review is a failsafe - an acknowledgement that laws and regs can't always keep up with real life harms.
Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
Public comment is antidemocratic.
> Public comment is antidemocratic.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
We arrange to have everybody vote on a designated day. We publicize that day. We make a very big deal out of getting people to vote. We don't do it too often. People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action. But in local politics they often can't, because interest groups that lost the election will camp every meeting afterwards with canvassed public commenters jawboning officials to make different decisions.
> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?
You can't give all citizens effective veto power and then expect it will only be used for good in cases where the law is behind.
Right. But what about the cases it is used for good?
In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.
I mean, this is way too vague to really talk about usefully, but like, adding some friction to certain processes can be pretty useful.
While that is true, the current default situation in the US is way too far on the anti-build side.
Hey man Sam and Elon gotta eat
I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.
I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
I don't know, this sure sounds like NIMBYism to me. Public comment was used to organize against multifamily housing units. That's approximately the whole story; I think you pretty much just have to add "organizing against new renewable and grid upgrades" to complete it.
They weren't multifamily units.
"5-over-1 or over-1s, also known as a one-plus-five or a podium building,[1] is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America", so either you're wrong about them wanting to build a 5 over 1 or wrong about them being multi-family.
NIMBYism isn't always wrong.
We can agree to disagree, so long as we can at least recognize NIMBYism when we see it. "Public comment works great because it enabled us to organize to keep a multifamily development out of our vicinity" is like the archetypical NIMBY project.
The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
> several stories higher than any of the other buildings
If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.
I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?
If it's everyone's favorite part of town why not just codify it at the city level?
That's what they're working on next.
So what will likely follow is a 'takings clause' case by the owner, who can no longer use their property the way they want.
You clarified it wasn’t “never change NIMBYism” - was it a case of just changes I don’t like NIMBYism?
As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.
Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.
Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.
It's literally "don't build on this one spot I really like". It's in the name!
I didn't know that the acronym was NITOSIRL. Sure seems like a weird way to spell NIMBY, but who am I to judge?
At least in this instance it's a counterbalance against the psychopathic tech CEOs
That's literally what NIMBYs exploiting public comment say: whatever else is happening, at least they're striking back against the psychopathic Private Equity firms who are building all this evil housing.
Blocking datacenter builds is the right thing to do right now. Whether the general public has the right vocabulary to explain why is not so important when the people in charge are actively evil and tasked with the exact opposite of their claimed job title.
We don't agree, but either way, the only thing I'm here to say is that public comment distorts democratic process and entrenches concentrated local interest groups. You're happy about it (in the abstract, apparently) because it's achieving an outcome you support, but mostly what it supports is preventing housing and renewable energy from being built.
Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
I'm really not sure how I can be clearer about the fact that I don't agree with the prevailing sentiment on these threads about data centers† but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).
> what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all
The data center backlash is bipartisan though? Even Texas froze all data center buildouts recently [1].
[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-pr...
Texas is a weird case because they're the fastest growing state in the country and they run their own independent power grid --- badly (see: the winter outage a couple years back). And even then: data centers are going to get built in Texas. Gov. Abbott is doing a performative audit thing, but they're ultimately going to clear projects.
Did you not use public comments to help stop flock in your community? Why is that different?
No, I did not! I've written at length about how I engaged with my local municipality on Flock cameras. The search bar will avail. None of it involved public comment.
> Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them.
People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.
> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)
These aren't private equity firms building housing. Did you read the article?
I did and was not referring to the article. Also:
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Wait, we're talking about public comment.
That doesn't give anyone veto power, the worst people can do is say mean comments and make the listeners feel bad before they do the thing anyway.
Moving to cut off comments is simply breathtaking arrogance, which is on brand for this regime.
"The public having access to information on what corporations plan to do in their communities and having the ability to vote to against what corporations want is a blight on the democratic process" is a crazy stance to take.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
> Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-does-everyone-hate-data-cen...
> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
> Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them.
Your definition of "plenty" does not match up with the accepted definition.
> But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
70% opposition and people who strongly support (7%) continues to decrease. I guess that’s plenty in absolute numbers. But even the Iran war has more supporters than that.
Often not everyone is impacted equally by a policy. So it is reasonable to allow, for example, the people living near a potential data center greater say into what happens.
See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.
Thank you for this take.
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
Pejoratives aside, it’s also bad news for AI companies.
Anyone who knows the story of the US auto industry in the 1970’s and 1980’s knows how excessive government protection for an industry works out.
I don't know that story. Can you summarize?
They became lazy and uncompetitive, and were eventually overrun by Japanese imports. It's probably reasonable to say they never really recovered.
I would not class this as government protection. More just leveling the playing field.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.
[1] https://www.datacentercoalition.org/members
>Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles.
While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.
> except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhu-oid godlings...
I did not say that, but is so obvious, like looking through a plate glass window. There is no pressure, its just a natural transition to the end of bipedal life.
It isn't flippant, it's just not exclusively focused on your target of choice.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
> the bubble
> the jenga tower
I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.
Both bubble and Jenga tower are examples of unstable systems that can persist for an unexpectedly long time.
They're good analogies. It's possible to keep a Jenga tower going forever, just extremely difficult once it reaches the point of being all middle pieces.
Also easier if you can hold up bits of it with strings from the ceiling, which is what the EPA is doing for data centers here.
I don't think it's a bubble
It’s a bubble. “AI” could be quite successful at this point, and the economics still don’t work out.
Parts of it can be a bubble while other parts are not. The need for datacenters can be real while the valuation of model providers can be a fantasy.
If the need is driven by a bubble economy, when the bubble pops the demand disappears too. This can even lead to a separate bubble popping (see: the dotcom and telecom bubbles).
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
What even is the economy after they have killed all the workers and it's just bots clicking on each others ads?
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
Once the economics work out, the economy as a whole doesn't, therefore the economics DOESN'T WORK OUT.
I think you're making an assumption that the owners of this capital aren't: "That the economy has to work out for everyone."
It doesn't work out for the owners of the capital. Their wealth is entirely based on their claims on future production that is consumed by people with money.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
I’m old enough to remember when people said computers would do all jobs 30 years ago
>citizens known for owning guns.
They're largely the ones voting for this.
This is a country that voted for Trump twice soooo... it's anybodies guess.
But they haven't replaced every knowledge worker. The unemployment rate remains unaffected by all the AI progress. At some point the bill comes due, and if most of those jobs are still around, then what?
well, according to finance bros, shovelling cash into a furnace to power a boiler to steam some eggs is considered a wild success. Economics is for normies.
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
This seems like yet another piece in a build up to a civil war. And those in governance know it.
>(well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings
This is potentially good news for everyone who wants to do anything less dirty than a datacenter (logistics, cold chain, light manufacturing/assembly, etc) because they'll probably be able to get the precedent extended to them in the next decade or so. The people and communities that make money off that sort of stuff will probably do well. Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state because the municipalities want to permit it but state rules make that hard. So there is potential for some good to come out of it.
> Most of that sort of industry is in poorer sections of states where the municipalities are constantly being hamstrung by their own state
Oh yes, the well-known path to riches by being a toxic dumping ground.
To be fair he didn't say who was getting rich, presumably the people making the deals, not the chumps left with the cleanup and the bill.
These exemptions are not granted based on logic or precedent. "Less dirty" has nothing to do with it. They're entirely based on open bribery. This will be granted to any industry that bribes the administration enough. What's the good news again?
All that stuff is more dirty to the local community than your average datacenter.
The vast majority of these these no one knows even exist until told. They are basically warehouses without loading docks not much traffic goes into or out of.
Sure some horrible projects exist and are repeated over and over on social media, but they are the exception.
Most folks working across the street from one of these facilities had no idea until they were told to care.
I mean, like this?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
"Great" news indeed.
oh! "This will benefit the 2%, while the 1% burns the earth to the ground"
This is like Republicans claiming that they're doing everything for small businesses, when the reality is they're doing things for contract workers who more often are just being forced into contracts that wouldn't exist without the lax regulatory reality and are abused thereof.
"This will benefit the little guy (assuming they survive their cancer diagnosis)"
I just heard this last night: buried in the "support for small business" was the repeal (or effectively neuteringO of the Corporate Transparency Act's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/09/10/treasury-launder-mon...
That program had a simple ask of every corporation doing business in America: who really owns it? No more hiding of ill gotten gains and laundering through US real estate, etc (hint: anybody come to mind who might do a lot of that)?.
They killed it. To "protect small businesses".
The Trump Regime is pure corruption.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
And that reporting was a trivial ask for a small business and still not a burden for large business.
Sales Tax handling is more of a burden on the business than this reporting was.
I have zero doubt that it was done intentionally to help their "friends" launder money.
It was a stupid regulation to begin with. Any investigative agency already could trivially get this data through already existing means.
All it did was make your 3 member condo association have to pay a lawyer $500/yr in compliance fees for utterly no benefit to anyone other than the compliance folks collecting their rent. Or take on personal criminal liability to file it yourself. Better not forget one random year or it’s a felony!
Just like most of the rest of the AML/KYC creep after 9/11 it did absolutely nothing to go after anybody they say it did - it just made things harder on normal everyday people.
Poor old America.
I think you'll need to wait for the Orange Toddler to pass away before you can get anywhere with reinstating environmental checks and balances.
Even then you'll need to contend with large corporations with buckets of money... and the Republican party...
The EPA hasn’t been able to regulate anything since it’s been gutted by the current administration. Of course it’s going to scrap rules. We’re not even allowed to measure the effects of climate change.
That's in line with the EPA's new mission of ensuring environmental degradation.
One of the very early Nick-names for the EPA (shortly after its founding) was “Every Polluter’s Ally”, as it was viewed as more emitter-friendly than the state regulators which preceded it.
Reminds me of how HIPAA was actually created as a way to standardize patient data so it could be more easily shared. The stuff about doctors not being allowed to share your medical history with employers only came later. A lot of people think of it as a privacy bill but it's actually the exact opposite
A lot of industry regulation has basically been regulatory capture since the start
It was created by Nixon, so yeah I'm sure the early days were a little weird (and it hasn't gotten any better since).
Environment Pollution Agency
Everything this administration does only makes sense if you live in bizzaro-world and want this world to burn.
It makes sense if you are a boomer wanting to extract everything possible for yourself with zero regard for even 10 years in the future where you will most likely be dead.
Take "boomer" out of it and I would agree with you.
Greed and power are not and never have been an age-related thing past early childhood. It's the human condition, not strictly a "boomer" thing.
It's not a boomer thing other than the old people in power happen to be boomers right now. But it is related to them being at the end of their lifespan. The greed is so incredibly short sighted because they only have a few years left to exploit society. Trump won't live long enough to see the full consequences of his actions.
We are watching world leaders get increasingly old which is having catastrophic impact on society.
Nixon created the EPA because he used our natural unspoiled resources to back the dollar. Looks like the admin doesn't care about that anymore, they think global war and AI can back the dollar
The current admin has the explicit goal to devalue the dollar (see mar-a-lago accord). I don’t think the goal is to back it
I was thinking they were trying to crash every currency, with the dollar only coming out barely on top because of oil
Crash every currency relative to what?
Is that like saying "okay gold is 10x as expensive and nothing else changes"?
I can’t believe we’re seeing so much bad news coming from EPA. Why all this backtracking from an agency that used to be so effective and well organized? Well, I guess we know the reason.
The same EPA that under 5+ administrations has taken no material action to reduce the effects of climate change? Approved the widespread use of PFAS for stuff as silly as egg pans and snowboard wax, poisoning people's blood and community water supplies for decades? The same EPA that allows the use of leaded AVgas for flights over communities and schools, because otherwise a dentist might have to pay a little more for his Cessna flight?
Gosh, they were such a paragon of environmental protection, effective and well organized in the last 40 years.
Yeah, they were bad at their jobs before, so we should make them even worse now!
It doesn't serve any purpose to act like they were good at their jobs before. Returning to a status quo of 5 or 15 years ago is such a mediocre goal in this space that its arguably not worth spending political capital on.
> The same EPA that under 5+ administrations has taken no material action to reduce the effects of climate change?
Huh? The endangerment finding was in 2009. The problem is that we have a very litigious set of polluters and then we elected Trump who stacked the supreme court, and then we elected Trump again, this time with a bunch of insane people with him who had specific plans to bring on the end of this country via the unitary executive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_greenhouse_gases...
Really, you can’t? When the President and his party have been saying out loud for decades that they want to destroy the EPA?
Because it's now headed by an ex-lobbyist for the chemical industry
> an agency that used to be so effective and well organized?
The last time the federal government had an agency that fit that description it was the Hoover FBI.
Man, if you ever start reading books instead of spouting shit online, it is going to get weird.
I agree with the sentiment but you lack context. The SuperFund has been a training ground for stall-and-pad-billing for decades. Certain bureaucrats gained lifetime employment for stall-and-declare skills.
Critics on all sides have ample ammunition AFAIK
Bad news? This is good news.
I wonder if you could open any type of business as a datacenter now, to avoid the review.
Hilarious legal maneuver. Soon to see, Jack’s Slaughterhouse Datacenter, Dean’s Nuclear Waste Repo and Datacenter, et
I can surely squirrel away a couple of GPUs into any random closet and rent out the capacity.
A similar maneuver is already being used for the White House National Security Ballroom.
Jones BBQ and Data Center (Chicagoland only)
read the article (shocking i know) there's no avoiding a review. The local government can have as much public review as it wants. This is where control should have been all along since the local government is accountable to the local community.
The article says they're considering removing the federal requirement that state governments even tell their constituents let alone allow public review.
So literally yes you can avoid the review... until you manage to convince your local government to pass their own version of this law, or vote out the existing people if they are against this thing you didn't think you had to care about because it was already law. And the slated time is within a year, so good luck accomplishing that in time.
Also please note the rules of this forum: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
public forums should be for exchanging ideas and not a place to virtue signal whatever fad Nextdoor/Facebook emotional bait normies are feeding each other via brain rot feeds.
the public essentially has little interest in preventing human extinction. And tons of interest in preventing data centers under false arguments and performative displays.
What is the point of empowering the public when they are not curious but rather emotional children.
Basically, to empower the public now means, how to bastardize your arguments into an emotional narrative that is palatable to the commoners but probably misses all relevant arguments.
Like if you think x-risk is real, and datacenters are benign/reasonable/can-be-done-in-net-local-positive-way - then you are incentivized to pretend like datacenter are bad because peasants will not entertain your x risk calculus.
It's a herding/shepherding game where the only people willing to play are compromised.
> It's a herding/shepherding game where the only people willing to play are compromised.
This is how all politics is, and frankly the existential risk crowd needs to learn how to play the game instead of complaining about it.
>the public essentially has little interest in preventing human extinction.
yes, most people don't belong to that cult
Hasn’t the idea of existential risks entered the kind of “cultural elite Overton window” at this point?
Bill gates is talking about it, NYT just ran a bunch articles on AI safety concerns, a reporter just asked Trump about it in a one on one.
Feels unfair to still dismiss it as a cult LessWrong thing at this point.
ftfa "provide the state and local agencies most familiar with local issues the discretion to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation."
so give local government the controls, that doesn't seem so bad. As for the next line in the article saying people are losing faith in their local government i don't buy that a bit. Local government and elections are where your vote and voice are loudest. The most faith lost seems to be at the federal level.
Triggering articles like this are usually not so alarming if you take the time to read them and fish out the details. They're made for social media distribution and engagement from the headline alone.
Here's the thing... pollution is a global issue. We share the same atmosphere, we share the same grid, we share the same resources to generate energy.
So no this isn't an issue for local governments who can be easily bribed, it's absolutely something the federal gov should be all over. This isn't some "gotcha" you're offering, it's damning.
About the only type of pollution which is actually global is CO2, which is exactly the thing this kind of review has nothing to do with. If you want people to emit less CO2 then you price carbon and as a result everyone has that amount of incentive to prefer alternate means of generating electricity.
From the article:
> The federal Environmental Protection Agency plans to scrap a federal requirement that states tell the public — and allow public comment — before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities. That includes the data centers rising across the country, as well as the power plants built to feed their enormous appetite for electricity.
Second or third paragraph no less.
These changes will last exactly as long as this administration, so it would be a pretty foolish business that makes long term investment decisions based on this announcement.
It's a pretty foolish business plan to depend on wrecking the planet.
I get one small comfort knowing that Wall Street will be increasingly under water as the climate disaster progresses (remember Sandy?).
> It's a pretty foolish business plan to depend on wrecking the planet.
People who thinks they need the planet to survive until they die sees it as a great opportunity to reap the value they generated over their lifetime.
It's very shortsighted and foolish desire.
And how will building data centers wreck the planet?
wall street already moved to higher ground
Wall Street will just move to Mars.
It'll last exactly as long as the Republicans being in power, which could be longer than this administration.
The bet is that the democrats won’t have the spine to force AI companies to eat a loss on half a trillion dollars worth of data centers, and it’s frankly a pretty good one.
The changes may not last, but it’s quite unusual for an already-permitted facility to lose permission to operate.
What are the odds right now this administration is still in power in 2030?
Almost zero. The party may still be, but the administration almost certainly won't.
Currently there is no "Republican party" just Trump loyalists. In 2030 the party might still be called the same but I doubt it will have moved far from the principles of today.
The Republican party looks about the same as it has my whole adult life -- the leader is a lot louder and the racism is less hidden, that's about it.
What are the odds of this regime ceding power willingly in 2028?
Well, in part you are correct but look how the billionaires set up Vance as the next "elected" boss right now - it is quite a lot in the recent media, how Vance single-handedly rescues babies at night while being blindfolded. I think these anti-people changes that are harmful to them, will remain. Trump is just the old dementia guy; Vance "my eyeliners are perfect" will follow after "winning" the next election. And then nobody will admit to ever having voted for him - and people will be very befuddled, almost as if an oligarchy runs the show.
Vance’s problem is that whenever he walks into the room at least half the crowd covers their drinks. He’s got absolutely negative charisma. It’s the same reason Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Ted Cruz couldn’t win the big chair - for all Trump’s… Trump-ness, people actually want to follow him. The rest of that cohort sets off people’s uncanny valley detectors - they’re just viscerally unappealing.
Antis are running out of time to stop what they wish to stop without resorting to destructive methods (bold and extreme action is already necessary).
Pros are running out of time to square their ambitions with a public that's about to go from needing a leg up to a public that wants their heads.
Probably an oversimplified question but how do we actually stop this?
A good start is to vote in the midterms to reduce the amount of power that these antihuman criminals have. The US is currently in the midst of a serious political disaster and there will be no quick fix to any of this. But if we take every opportunity possible whenever we can to rid ourselves of these people and to stand in their way as much as possible, we can work our way back from the brink.
I'm not sure winning in the midterms will be a net positive for Democrats (barring an infeasible supermajority). Even if they stop everything Republicans want to do (which they won't even get close to), that's just going to become the excuse for the next Republican campaign to blame Democrats for a dysfunctional government, and there's a good chance Democrats would lose as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if it would actually turn out better for Democrats if they stay a minority so that they can't get the blame during the presidential election.
Republicans have been a buttplug in the political process for going on twenty years, and yet who has the majority in congress?
The left needs to stop giving the right a cudgel with which to beat them every election. It's a cudgel of culture-war memes and badvocate tik-toks that resonates with voters more than corruption, autocracy, debt, wars, and the dismantling of our democracy. Meanwhile the DNC gerontocracy hires an army of feckless corpo-humanoid consultants to issue press releases listing all the people Dems fight for - a list that happens to leave out men and white people.
It's fine though. It's fine.
Winning the midterms would make the house speaker a democrat, which would allow for the removal of both the president and vice president via impeachment such that the democratic speaker of the house becomes the acting president, effectively stopping the bullshit of this administration. The question then becomes if the amount of flipped senate seats + the number of republican senators voting yes on impeachment reaches a supermajority. Possible for Trump, highly unlikely for Vance. This was likely the angle Republicans plan to take, as that would make Vance the Incumbent in the 2028 elections, giving him a statistical edge. It also allows for the current republicans in office to look like they are trying to meet the demands of their constituents without giving up any real power and effectively not changing their agenda. A reminder that although Trump is a rapist, the fight against this administration will not end with him. Republicans will continue to employ smoke and mirrors strategies and lean heavily into value extraction from the US and global economy as has been occuring.
> Winning the midterms would make the house speaker a democrat, which would allow for the removal of both the president and vice president via impeachment
That's... not how it works. Democrats literally had a House speaker and the president was, as you could see, not removed despite impeachment.
Impeachment means nothing without convinction by a super majority in the senate. The republicans had a chance to convict trump and remove him from our politics right after he tried to murder them on Jan 6, but most of them were still to stupid or spineless to vote for it. No chance they are going to suddenly spring into action next year.
We're all stuck with two more years of an increasingly demented trump. The best Dems can do is highlight to incompetence/corruption, limt the damage, and get their own brand out of the mud so they can win a strong majority in 2028.
Unfortunately the answer is ”it requires effort”, or in other words: Vote (and hold them accountable after the ballots have been counted), Shout (literally), Protest (including civil disobedience), join any civil or environmental movement, help file legal challenges.
Democracy is for good and for worse not a one-and-done thing, it is a continuous fight.
The time cost to the thousands of people putting in long hours to organize against bad ideas is a measurable loss to the economy. It's very clear that the system itself is deficient because it massively rewards first movers, incumbents, and amplifies economic leverage rather than mitigating it.
"the economy" is not the only reason that we're alive or form bonds of association.
This doesn't seem like a very effective method. I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something. Literally shouting at a data center seems more cathartic than helpful.
It's about numbers. A small group isn't going to do anything directly to the data center, but it can raise awareness that other people do indeed care. This, in turn, can slowly (over multiple demonstrations) grow the size of the demonstrations to a critical mass that cannot be ignored.
> I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something.
How do you think you as a voter who presumably aren't a billionaire (or CEO of a mega corporation) with politicians on speed dial who will take the call get the politicians to pass those laws?
If the electorate is asleep at the wheel, the people pushing the politicians are all pushing them one way and the car isn't going in the direction that most of the electorate would necessarily want.
If you value your democracy you sometimes have to be an active participant in it and sometimes that means turning up more than once ever X years and ticking a box.
If such reviews are required by legislation then you stop it in the courts; approvals without legally required steps are invalid.
If they are not required by legislation then you just deal with the change.
While you're thinking about this, realize even the Democrats are annoyed at how weaponized things like NEPA have become to slow down necessary changes.
Why do you want to stop this? Data centers are not some enemy of the people.
Thousands of people marching on data centers and taking them over at the same time.
Elections will never save you when the parties in power serve the billionaires.
The people in power are making a lot of mistakes right now. You ignore popular will at your peril. The more the bought-and-paid for Supreme Court and politicians weaken the power of the individual voter through shit like Citizens United and gerrymandering, the further they push people towards "uncivilized" methods.
1. Vote
2. Vote
3. Vote
4. Find every publicly accessible local forum with _your_ representatives at every level, and get on the mic. Tell your reps they will lose your vote and the votes of your entire network for complicity in harm against society on behalf of the billionaire class. Follow through on that threat.
Extreme option: Run for election yourself on the platform and get voted into office. The bar is lower than ever in some places.
Scrap the current forms of elected representation with one that encourages multiple parties instead of a forced dichotomy. Create some kind of constant recall mechanism for elected officials. And other things.
Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
Vote strategically.
Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
If you are in a D leaning district, then register as a D and vote in the D primary. Make sure the candidate you vote for is the most likely to win who isn't captured by big business.
A good example of a datacenter friendly dem that just won by the skin of their teeth is Crowley for governor in Wisconson.
We need ranked choice like yesterday. It's not a magic fix-it solution, but it is a giant step in the right direction. I'm so tired of the whiplash between these two parties.
> Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.
The only thing that matters is Democrats gaining control of Congress and state governments. The choice that isn't a democrat is the wrong one. The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
> The time to vote out an incumbent was the primary.
I agree, that's why I'm saying you should be involved in the primary and not just the general. Because, as I said, it's not the default position of the democrat party to be for regulating datacenters. I gave an explicit example of that where a dem is completely aligned with the republicans on DCs.
Dems win power, but they are still beholden to OpenAI, then they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
It's too late for 2026 and IMO you should vote for Ds wherever you are at. But if you want to affect change on DCs then voting in the primary for anti-dc dems is what you have to do. It's not enough to just vote in the general elections.
You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters. The sides are clear and bringing up primaries when it's too late is irrelevant.
> they'll be no better than the republicans on this issue.
There is no reason to think this is true. I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
> You're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters.
No I'm not. We can walk and chew gum. It's important to recognize when and how Dems fail and this is one case where more than a few are failing their voters.
> There is no reason to think this is true.
There is if people aren't involved. A Gavin Newsom president would absolutely be pretty happy to receive campaign funding from AI firms.
> I will eat a gas generator if a Democrat president orders his EPA administrator to break established rules and precedent like the current one is doing.
Break the rules, no that's unlikely. However, it's entirely possible that the same results and rubber-stamping happens with enough campaign contributions. You need to look no further than all the money that's been dumped into "clean coal" and "CO2 capture" boondoggles by democrats to understand how this sort of thing works.
I could completely see a democrat president allowing DCs to be built so long as they buy carbon offsets, which is every bit as corrupt as just telling the EPA to not regulate. It's simply just not as brazen.
But I don't think this is true of any or all democrat presidential candidates, just some. Specifically Newsom would very much pull this sort of shit.
We usually have had less than 30% participation for the local Democratic primary in off years (Republican primary in off-years is not much better). The complete lack of civic-mindedness is why the only strategy that works at the general election is "vote for the lesser evil." Note: that only include 2 viable candidates, a third party will never win the Presidential election without elimination of the parties themselves or implementation of rank-choice voting by a majority of states to counteract the anti-democratic (that's small "d") bias of the Electoral College.
If you still trust anyone just because they claim to be a Democrat, you haven't been paying enough attention.
That's not my claim.
Republicans just took a vocal public oath of loyalty to their President in which they promised to cheat in the the election. That happened. It's on video.
My claim is that you should vote for the other party. That sounds reasonable to me.
I voted in the primary against the incumbent. The incumbent won. I will vote for them because the Republican opponent is a documented sexual predator. That is literally true.
These are the "two sides" we are dealing with.
It's even worse: Trump literally just promised during his midterm convention to pay everyone $5,000 should the Republicans win the midterms.
Note that this promise is itself illegal. It is a violation of 18 USC 597.
See: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=title%3A18+section%3...
That interpretation seems... odd. You seem to be implying that if your policy is to give everyone a tax credit (i.e. give them money) if you win then you're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
No.
He literally says he'll cut a check for $5,000 for every adult american if the Republicans win both the House and Senate in the midterms.
You don't have to take my word for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4NphZBfmnE
He's also stated that he can issue the money without help from Congress, which directly contradicts the idea that it's harmless bloviating about voting in a 120th Congress to implement specific policy:
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbLXAdvZcro&t=40s
... though that distinction shouldn't really matter.
The payout is very much a quid pro quo bribe for voters. No additional interpretation of his words is necessary: he's said it very directly himself.
The people that treat political parties like sports teams are awful and a big part of why we're where we are today, but with the current state of affairs and the choice being between essentially fascism (Republicans) and 1990s conservatism (Democrats), it's not a hard choice. I couldn't agree more with what I think you're implying though, which is that this is a shit state of affairs where we're constantly voting for the lesser of two evils. We need ranked choice and open primaries, imo.
> Elections have consequences. Vote democrat in November and again in 2028. When someone tells you both sides are the same tell them no, it's only Republicans that are allowing Datacenters to sidestep the law in order to poison us more efficiently.
It's not that simple. The Democrats are shit, and lost to Trump twice because of that shittiness. Perversely, Trump has allowed them to convince themselves that they don't have to reform.
I don't expect anything to change if the Democrats gain power, they'll curb only the most egregious abuses curbed a bit, while leaving the overall thing intact. Then they'll lose again because they're shit.
So the alternative is what?
This is a natural consequence of a two-party system: you will be forced to choose between two parties that both deviate from your political preferences. Casting a ballot for a third party, or abstaining from voting, are both effectively the same as voting for the party you hate the most.
You may feel some semblance of true choice by participating in primaries.
Otherwise, the only path to installing politicians you truly believe in is to change the system -- be it by reform or revolution.
So vote for Republicans because while the outcomes are worse, at least they aren't pretending they are going to make things better?
You've made it clear why you think people absolutely shouldn't vote for Democrats, but haven't really stated what people should do instead, just left the implication.
> So vote for Republicans because while the outcomes are worse, at least they aren't pretending they are going to make things better?
No, voting for Democrats isn't enough, because they're shit. They'll probably in better shape to be reformed that Republicans, but that's not saying much. I don't have a ton of hope based on what I'm seeing. I expect they'll either go back to the behaviors that enabled Trump, or commit some anti-democratic power grab more extreme than anything Trump has ever done.
IMHO, after someone like Trump, they need to reform themselves to be an actual-majority party that can competitive almost everywhere.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-proposes-streamline-sta...
There is a huge business opportunity to become the world leader in sustainable data center design. Whoever wins could one day have immense influence over every single data center in the world (or even out of this world, where efficient resource utilization would likely be essential). It’s disappointing to see the United States miss out: US companies and research institutions would actually be extremely competitive in this field with the right government incentives.
Sustainable design for datacenters is orthogonal to success in data centers. That's like saying a local bakery should become a leader in pet adoption - it'll score some feel good points, but is almost counterproductive to the actual mission.
A data center (right now) needs to be built fast, with a large amount of always-on power. Sticking a gas turbine behind the meter in the parking lot is one of the most practical ways to get there.
It’s not just a feel good thing. There are real resource limits, even if someone chooses to foolishly not believe that. If you can get more done with a given level of power and other resources, you get more out of your data centers.
I think most people who are working towards greater AI would consider that not an opportunity, but planning to lose in a game that is winner(s) take all.
Winning scenarios in AI don't include being accountable for sustainability and they don't include expertise being valuable. Winners will decide what sustainable means for them.
Winners don’t decide what is sustainable, the reality of the planet does.
The situation only has to be sustainable for those entities that get a vote that matters. I don't think they've given us any reason to believe they intend on that being a whole lot of people. In fact they've been quite up-front about saying they are concerned about the possibility of that number being zero
Winner take all is a farce. It didn't work for Uber when they tried to out-spend the competition, Lyft is still very much a thing, and so are taxis (the non-robo kind). There will always be many, many AI companies and trying to execute "winner take all" in this space is only going to make more problems and waste a shit-ton of money.
If you subscribe to an AGI/ASI view, the stakes are different than the network effects that Uber thinks they could get. Success here would mean you could theoretically pull away from the competition so far and so fast, whether that be at a company or nation-state level.
More likely all they’ll pull ahead in is making an even bigger mess.
Isn't the goal to power most non-earthbound data centers with solar? I am no scientist, but going out to space feels like it gets rid of most of the downsides to solar.
Sustainable business center design
Public comment is bad. It gives people with time to comment far more power than those who can't. It's one of the major reasons we can't building housing or high speed rail.
Executive Protection Agency
I'm glad to see this. Anti data center propaganda is rampant right now, with large amounts of it proven to be pushed by China to slow down American AI companies. We have tons of oil processing facilities, way more than data centers and they use way more water.
The US is in a new cold war. It's clear that the government has determined that who owns AI will be leaders in this century and they will do whatever is necessary to accomplish that - I mean in the 50s into the 90s we nuked our own soil - I don't know what we expect here.
which reality show host is running the EPA now?
The administration is way behind the curve on this one. Data center opposition is one of the rare areas that has bipartisan support.
> Data center opposition is one of the rare areas that has bipartisan support.
This is true. Although, I think resistance to datacenters is just a symptom of the majority of people being anti-AI.
You have to be really dumb not to view a devaluing of your skills is a bad thing.
Since when does this administration give a damn about what the "curve" is. They set their own agenda regardless of the curve.
There are a lot of things that a party does opposite to its messaging, in some cases shared by both parties.
This article seems incredibly biased. Is there a more balanced report of what is actually occurring?
So much for no taxation without representation.
I love this line:
>Last year, Lee Zeldin, who runs the EPA, said it was now the agency’s top priority to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” The 56-year-old agency was established in 1970 to protect the environment and public health.
lol, reminds me of those videos where a host will say one thing and then the cameraman pans to reveal the lie
That's a very strange goal for the EPA to have. I mean, it's a worthy goal, but it sounds very much like not their department?
Of course it is. The datacenters are running personalized cops, they will get their cut for sure. This is how we will transition to the new Slave Age.
"Slave Age"? Slaves were kept because they were economically useful. It's not clear Humans will be economically useful in the new age.
You can help me here. Maybe slavery as a word is not suitable.
I think they need humans to recycle money They need humans to run the green economy as the Afro-americans in the south They need humans as a hunting sport, how to make them do what we need. Let's play with them. The AI is not viable as a business model. So they will use it as a tool for their purposes as long as they can.
This just simply removes the last vestiges of the old Republic, and leads the way to the common deployment of Chinese designed AI reactors, which while designed by AI, are really for the burning of the sky in preparation of a Matrix future. It has been foretold: It is the way.
Did you miss some Terminator background color on your way to Albuquerque?
Just in time for midterms.
It’s strange because on one hand, people don’t want to live near data centers, but on the other: the rampant use of AI signals people really *do* want data centers.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
Funnily enough this probably the most safetyist thing the administration could do at the moment, since this will certainly autocatalyze more opposition to DC construction in a bunch of states and probably accelerate the state-level moratoriums. A big thank you to the White House for taking AI pause as such an urgent priority.
When you can't tell if it's profit motive or the AGI has already taken over.
IMO, capitalism is itself an unaligned artificial intelligence, with its own logic and goals orthogonal to human life. All “ex risk” paranoia is a projection of sublimated anxiety about capitalism.
It's paperclip maximization either way.
The crazy part is that everybody in the US calls this "data center pollution". Over here in Frankfurt/Germany, we have data centers in the middle of the city, right next to residential housing. You don't smell anything, you do not hear anything.
A data center can simply put the heat pumps onto the roof or in the backyard pointing away from housing. Humans have developed noise protection systems for ages. All this stuff is available.
This is just end-stage capitalism giving a sh*t about humans, burning fossil fuels without any filters of any kind next to kids playing outside like it's the year 1920.
It's like we're on a 100 year cycle over here, gilded age part 2 and a return to letting those who aren't rich eat straight industrial pollution so the rich can keep getting richer.
So plan for a heavy crack down or a severe rule change after this probably short-lived partisan deregulatory action?
And a return to voluntary membership in the Paris Agreement?
This is the missing context for NIMBYism. The legal mechanisms used to stall construction in San Francisco were created because of an explicitly racist plan to demolish people’s homes to build freeways. The people building datacenters should stop, take a breath, and think a few moves ahead about how to get to real agreement and mutual benefit with surrounding communities instead of just driving a truck over them. Nobody’s going to be happy with the consequences.
Has capitalism ever stopped and thought instead of hitting full throttle at any cost?
Not in my lifetime!
Other datacenter concerns in other communities?
- water usage
- water pressure
- water contamination (from evaporative cooling towers concentrating metals)
- purple pipe water
- heat waste from air cooling
- corrosion from evaporative cooling
- decibel levels (due to 60 Hz AC, air cooling fans, evaporative coolers,)
- electronics recycling
- non-sustainable and near-conflict chip inputs
- PFAS in waste process water
- energy usage
- emissions from nonrenewable electricity sources
- compact fast diesel for the generators
Constraints to solve within would help solve.
Here's another example: "EPA to Weaken Rules on Methane Pollution From “Stripper Wells”" (2026) https://www.propublica.org/article/methane-gas-epa-proposal-...
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas; it's worse than CO2.
Wells leaking methane cause it to be hotter.
We need to cap wells that are leaking methane.
We should pay for regular aerial methane surveys.
Well, that's not gonna happen, under the administrative procedures act they'll have to open it up for public comment, which opens it up for lawsuits.
"for the next 800 days" (this is what I say in my head everytime I read a horrible headline)
but of course a lot of permanent damage can be set in motion in that time
So-- basically until the next administration. Interesting timing.
At which point installations can be grandfathered in under previous rules. It would be so unfair to the corporations to suddenly have to meet the stricter standards that came out of nowhere.
Goddamnit this is the worst possible administration to have while we’re having this massive buildup of data centers. Any reasonable government would have done what Massachusetts did and stipulated that you can build a data center, but it needs to be powered by renewable energy so build out your own energy sources, which would have been a win-win for everyone but instead we get this. Also, if the Democrats were in power, I hope they wouldn’t succumb to a minority in their base and just ban data centers and completely take us out of the race.
> I hope they wouldn’t succumb to a minority in their base and just ban data centers
The most recent set of polls I saw said that 71% of Democrats and 64% of all Americans support banning datacenter construction. It's not merely a majority, at this point it's a pretty significant supermajority. There are good recents not to ban DC construction but at this point it's pretty clear it's what the people want and letting construction go ahead is, in some sense, undemocratic.
This doesn't scrap public review. It scraps federal mandates requiring public review. The states can decide for themselves if a public review is required. This is a good thing. As the ability for highly motivated activist groups to veto projects is a major strategic impediment for the economic expansion of the United States.
Trump and co have done so many awful things that I forgot about their gutting of the EPA. There is no punishment fitting for him and the idiots who voted for him. A significant amount seem to prowl around HN I'll add. They can read and write but can't think apparently.
These kinds of comments incite frame wars and are not really suitable for HN.
Do not be so hard on his voters.
I'm pro-information and believe generally that anti-data-center activists are chasing a Glonzo on par with anti-5G electrosensitives. That said given the tide of opinion I'm overjoyed that Trump and his allies want to step into the fusilade to defend the unpopular.
That data centers need a lot of power and some cases a lot of water isn't some sort of conspiracy theory. When you have data centers like the box elder county DC that is planed to consume more power than the entire state of Utah and it wants to do that by burning natural gas, that's not some sort of conspiracy theory that it would be tremendously bad for the environment and the regional gas and electric bills (particularly since a decent amount of power already is generated via natural gas there).
I'm not wholesale against data centers, but there are more than a few projects that are downright irresponsible.
I figured that one was non-serious and just used as anchoring and to take the heat whilst other large ones were ok to go under the radar.
It's not the only GW datacenter planned [1]. AFAIK, a majority of these big datacenters are going to produce their power via natural gas turbines. I don't know of any that are actually planning on powering themselves via renewables or even nuclear power.
The sub 100MW data centers are mostly relying on the grid, but even a number of them plan on having natural gas turbines.
[1] https://cleanview.co/data-centers/us
The way to regulate that impact is with a wellhead severance tax, though. The whole fact of the data center is incidental.
I agree, that'd be a great way to approach things. The problem is a lot of the regulators are instead looking at doing tax breaks for these data centers when they should be taxing them (and other businesses) for the externalities of the problems they'll cause.
A person who has never built anything before, who claims to be about to build the world's largest building, can be treated with some skepticism.
I have no idea and one can trace a parallel between the construction of resource hungry data centers and 5G crack pots.
Trump really works for billionaires only. 33% of the public in the USA still do not understand this.
I'm of the opinion that billionaires are good for the economy. Wages in the US are about double what they are in the EU.
There are some aspects in which the EU provides a higher quality of life, but those have nothing to do with tax rates or the concentration of billionaires. They're more related to things like good city planning allowing for pedestrian and biking-friendly neighbourhoods (E.g. 50% of commutes to work in Copenhagen are by bike, where in the U.S. it's less than 1%.), old cohesive cultures, and better, more developed culinary traditions.
The billionaires here are just a scapegoat because the rent-seeking parties need a target that is naturally unsympathetic for the public to direct its anger toward. The National Education Association is the largest union in the US with three million members. 99% of its campaign contributions go to the Democrats. I haven't seen a single policy that it advocates that is actually good for society. If you look at the jurisdictions where the teachers' unions hold the most sway, they make the least efficient use of public money. New York spends three times more than Florida per pupil on public education and has slightly worse academic performance.
I'm sure this will stop all the public opposition to data centers! /s
This type of thing will just enrage the opposition more, give them far more fuel, and attract far more people into opposing data centers.
The ruling regime is used to controlling a subservient political group that always, 100% falls in line to marching orders. Now that they control the entire country, they either need to have oppressed tho populace enough that all objection gets arrested or is subject to immediate political violence. But that's not going to be possible with how unpopular they have made themselves.
The nonsense about 'using all the water' and datacenter protests has to be a Chinese psyop. It's so fantastically stupid to protest someone taking an empty field and paying local taxes on it and employing dozens of highly paid people in the middle of nowhere. There's literally no downside. There is effectively no pollution. There are jobs for every level of education, from security guard to the people installing hardware. There's no toxic runoff, no danger of a chemical explosion, and no carcinogens being dumped. This is the only rural industry you can say that about.
Water is a renewable resource. I know you folks in California can't comprehend this, but in the parts of the country where it actually makes sense for humans to live water just falls from the sky multiple times per week. We get so much water the problem is making sure we get rid of it safely, we don't have to fight over who has the most senior claim to it or decide whether we want to have endangered species or almonds more. Our streams don't run dry 4/5 of the year. We don't have to check about water restrictions when we water our lawns because there are never water restrictions and we never have to water our lawns.
There are entire areas miles across in this country where if you drive through it you might throw up from the smell. The ponds full of animal feces make the air un-breathable. Where is the protest over that? You realize that this literally does ruin ground water and poisons surface water? Where are the people coming out to say they have to live 4 miles from oceans of pig feces and when the wind blows their way they can't go outside? Yet the media is able to find the 4 people on earth that want to say a building full of computers is 'loud' and that computers use lots of water? When was the last time you filled the water tank on your computer? Yet people are very quick to believe that somehow a warehouse with a bunch of computers in it somehow destroys water?
When did datacenters start using up all the water? Nobody seemed to worry about this until the US and China were fighting for AI dominance, then suddenly datacenters use water and are so loud people go insane from them. What is the first time someone mentioned datacenters using water and causing pollution?
It's absolute group psychosis. Are you actually so dumb that you don't notice that a thing that has been around for 50 years suddenly is a threat to our survival? Were you born yesterday so you don't remember 2 years ago when nobody had ever realized the existential threat of building datacenters in America? Why didn't anyone notice that datacenters were pumping the wells dry in 2021? Maybe they weren't and still arent...
The article is about air pollution.
Also, your last two paragraphs are completely bogus because you overlooked something important: scale.
AI data centers are being built at a massively higher rate than data centers were being built a few years ago, and an AI data center uses 5-10x more energy than a non-AI data center.
It is quite common for something that is not a big problem to become a major problem when scale massively increases. You can't simply dismiss concerns because they weren't concerns a few years ago. You will have to actually do the analysis to determine if they are legitimate concerns now.
First of all, what is datacenter pollution?
Second, why is the article trying so hard to make datacenters out as racist?
The pollution is the immense amount of exhaust from the power generation equipment being installed on site at data centres.
The article is from Capital B, which focuses on news affecting the Black community.
We're in a county with a coal plant and an oil refinery. Somehow people are more concerned about potential data center pollution.
Read up on Musk's Tennessee data center for an example of the kind of pollution under discussion.
Pollution happens when you don't have enough power in the grid so you will bring either diesel generators or methane turbines to make power.
Also noise is pollution too.
With diesel over $6/gallon now that's probably not too attractive. Natural gas probably more likely, and less polluting at least as far as particulates go. CO2 still created.
Are all new data centers being built with on-site power generation (for regular operations, not just emergency backup)? I'd assume they'd prefer utility power where they could get it.
Diesel generators are mostly for emergencies. Natural gas turbines (many of which are or are derived from jumbo jet engines) are for on-prem power generation.
> Second, why is the article trying so hard to make datacenters out as racist?
AI Datacenters are classist.
Because of their negative externalities they will always be constructed near the poor who have the least political power.
Humans are racist.
So there is a strong systemic correlation between that group of disenfranchised people and people of color.
The most directly harmful impacts of datacenters are racist, transitively.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260811-memphis-ai-da...
Yeah, but just being a human is enough to qualify for not living in a smog cloud.
Also the article is trying to connect gas turbines from 2 years ago with cancer rates..
This is really bad news. Here's a good look at what infrasound is doing to humans near datacenters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Perhaps the next administration will drop a few cluster bombs on some hyperscaler data centers. The air force needs targets to practice on, after all. Then throughout the land there will be much rejoicing and feelings of justice done, as trillions of dollars of GPUs go up in smoke.
Good. Public review is nonsensical anyway. The public always “wants everything in one bag but the bag shouldn’t be heavy”. Elected representatives, and a set of rules with enforcement are a far better system than discretionary review.
We can’t have everyone extracting rent from all productive pursuits. If the public has their way they’d prefer to have the right to vote on who gets to be their neighbor.
Public review is the only way the public has to counter a public official acting on their own behalf instead of the constituents before election day.