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.
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.
> 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.
>(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?
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)?.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two decades puts us back to the post-9/11 war on terror era, from which it seems like a fairly straight line to, for example, ICE murdering people in the streets.
So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
CO2, the stuff that has been buried for millions of years, and we're releasing all at once into the atmosphere? The stuff that is warming our planet faster than we, or nature, can adapt to? The stuff that is worsening global wildfires, flooding, retreating glaciers, heat waves, desertification, etc.?
Yeah, that stuff. And other nasty things in the exhaust as well.
The global problem of CO2 is something separate than the hyper local "problem" of CO2.
The "other stuff" is lower than the emissions in cars "other stuff".
If you are rallying behind "Natural gas generators are poisoning our town" you are 100% guaranteed to look dumb upon any rational analyses. Its a bad angle and should be abandoned. Go after noise if anything.
A data center drawing 5 GW is the equivalent power of 278,000 cars driving at highway speed. Even if these gas generators are cleaner (we don’t know because they are not regulated or measured), that is an insane amount of exhaust to locate near residential areas.
no, we already abolished all rule making and review about CO2, this is removing the EPA requirement to install scrubbers for removal of NO and NO2 given sufficiently large outputs, which cause acid rain and are linked to respiratory problems. of course it all depends on the dose, which is why there there is a review process, which I guess was just too inconvenient
idk where you've been but the standard for AI datacenters buildouts right now is power-plant size turbine operations up to 1GW in size. not 2KVA Honda generators. notably they are single cycle and not combined cycle used in actual plants which requires burning up to 3x the methane for the same power output. none of this is a big secret.
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.
I live in Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the United States. The amount of lamborghinis and Ferraris on the road around here is obscene. You know what else we have a lot of? Data centers. Loudoun County is also the data center capital of the US. Your idea that datacenters are racists transitively is woke slop.
Material wealth is only part of the picture. I'd rather have a Honda Civic and a quiet, clean place to live than own a Ferrari and have to pick and choose when I can go outside so I avoid the noise and particulate pollution from a nearby data center.
You missed my point. I work in the tech industry. I hate the data centers. Everyone I know who lives around here also (mostly) hates the data centers. Everyone here also makes 6 figures or more. The point I'm making is that data centers are not "transitively racist". They build them in wealthy areas as well as poor areas.
The pre-AI datacenters where you live are very different than the Colossus-style methane turbine and inadequately soundproofed AI datacenters that are being built today.
No, they're not. The data center buildout in Loudoun County has not stopped. They're continuing to build them out. They're getting bigger and more pervasive everywhere. It is my intention to eventually move out of the county because they're an eyesore and they've swallowed up just about every bit of available land here. The point I was making to the original poster is that datacenters are not "transitively racist". They are built in both wealthy and poor areas.
> Your idea that datacenters are racists transitively is woke slop.
Your knee jerk reaction to refer to something as “woke slop” belies your privileged distance from anything remotely resembling hardship (I LiVe iN LoUdOuN) and an underdeveloped sense of empathy.
Anyway, we should be extremely skeptical of how infrastructure is built out in the US because of historical baggage. Poverty and industrial development create a vicious cycle that leads people to walk around with their thumb in their ass and claim that the poors just aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.
You're not responding to their point, though. If data centers were built only in poor areas because of classism, they're correct that there probably wouldn't be a lot of data centers in one of the richest areas in the country. And there are. So if you want to make a convincing argument that data centers are classist you should probably have a response to that beyond "well you just don't have any empathy."
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 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.
> the jenga tower
I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh yes, the well-known path to riches by being a toxic dumping 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)"
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
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
"Great" news indeed.
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.
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.
Critics on all sides have ample ammunition AFAIK
I get one small comfort knowing that Wall Street will be increasingly under water as the climate disaster progresses (remember Sandy?).
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.
I can surely squirrel away a couple of GPUs into any random closet and rent out the capacity.
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.
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.
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.
That's... not how it works. Democrats literally had a House speaker and the president was, as you could see, not removed despite impeachment.
So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.
The world has not literally ended yet, so all concerns are overblown.
Democracy is for good and for worse not a one-and-done thing, it is a continuous fight.
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 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.
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.
Elections will never save you when the parties in power serve the billionaires.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
And a return to voluntary membership in the Paris Agreement?
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.
- 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.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
but of course a lot of permanent damage can be set in motion in that time
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.
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.
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.
I'm not wholesale against data centers, but there are more than a few projects that are downright irresponsible.
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
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.
Second, why is the article trying so hard to make datacenters out as racist?
The article is from Capital B, which focuses on news affecting the Black community.
Yeah, that stuff. And other nasty things in the exhaust as well.
The "other stuff" is lower than the emissions in cars "other stuff".
If you are rallying behind "Natural gas generators are poisoning our town" you are 100% guaranteed to look dumb upon any rational analyses. Its a bad angle and should be abandoned. Go after noise if anything.
A data center drawing 5 GW is the equivalent power of 278,000 cars driving at highway speed. Even if these gas generators are cleaner (we don’t know because they are not regulated or measured), that is an insane amount of exhaust to locate near residential areas.
Also noise is pollution too.
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.
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://wjla.com/news/local/data-center-noise-fumes-create-f...
Material wealth is only part of the picture. I'd rather have a Honda Civic and a quiet, clean place to live than own a Ferrari and have to pick and choose when I can go outside so I avoid the noise and particulate pollution from a nearby data center.
Your knee jerk reaction to refer to something as “woke slop” belies your privileged distance from anything remotely resembling hardship (I LiVe iN LoUdOuN) and an underdeveloped sense of empathy.
Anyway, we should be extremely skeptical of how infrastructure is built out in the US because of historical baggage. Poverty and industrial development create a vicious cycle that leads people to walk around with their thumb in their ass and claim that the poors just aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.
Also the article is trying to connect gas turbines from 2 years ago with cancer rates..
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.