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> 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.
There are plenty of major industrial powers with very clean industries who used to have very dirty industries in previous decades or centuries. I can't think of any nation at all that developed while maintaining a firm commitment to clean industry trough the process of industrialization (though, there are a few places that never industrialized and developed a service economy directly, especially tax havens and financial hubs).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
"Great" news indeed.
Trump is running a spoils system. You don't obtain favor through reasoned argument. You obtain favor by making him like you personally.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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 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...
A lot of industry regulation has basically been regulatory capture since the start
I can surely squirrel away a couple of GPUs into any random closet and rent out the capacity.
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".
Gosh, they were such a paragon of environmental protection, effective and well organized in the last 40 years.
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...
The last time the federal government had an agency that fit that description it was the Hoover FBI.
Critics on all sides have ample ammunition AFAIK
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's "regime" or "fascism" when you don't.
If you view a regime as fascistic, you still need to be able to do all the above.
Nazi Germany was defeated by an alliance of communists and capitalists who immediately started a Cold War when the Nazis were defeated. That required compromise, propaganda, and all the other distasteful things I called “all politics”.
Dealing with existential risk will require collaboration on a similar scale.
It's just to mobilize NIMBYs, a thing everyone was against when people were trying to protect their neighborhood against construction projects that would increase noise and stress the local public infrastructure, like high density housing.
But now that there's a different noisy project stressing public infrastructure, NIMBY seems like the right move, I guess.
yes, most people don't belong to that cult
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.
I get one small comfort knowing that Wall Street will be increasingly under water as the climate disaster progresses (remember Sandy?).
I was in BPC during Sandy, never lost power, never had flooding. Stayed around to help get our servers moved over to DR. So yes, I remember.
Thankfully, people are seeing how bad NY and CA State governments are and are wisely moving what they can out of it. https://www.txse.com/
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/RAliBRyq_1c?is=iYxwnVjT8No9qm8-
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.
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.
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.
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.
But that's not what anyone means when they're talking about sustainability for data centers in terms of power usage: they're either talking less power (ie less value) or power from renewable sources, which can't compete with sources like gas turbines across a mix of setup time, consistency, and power/$.
If solar and batteries were available sooner than gas turbines, GE wouldn't have a multiyear waiting list. If solar/batteries were cheaper than gas turbines after accounting for land/permitting/maintenance, every DC would be buying the empty land next to them for an eventual switch to solar. Notably these many-million dollar investments aren't doing those things, and I guarantee you they have tried every angle imaginable to get power to the DC as quickly and cheaply as possible.
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.
We obviously want clean air and water, but this is the wrong battle to fight. It’s a fantastic way to divide humans though and distract them with their political team rivalries.
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.
So if you really believe AI is gonna devalue your skills, you'd rather want data centers to be built in your country and potentially get dividends/UBI rather than in another country and have your job decimated by international competition and get nothing in return.
This makes no sense. It's just as true for the reverse assertion "If you really believe that AI won't devalue your skills, you'd rather want data centers to be built in your country". If it's true for both assertions (very big IF), then why state it?
> rather than in another country and have your job decimated by international competition and get nothing in return.
Again, this assertion makes absolutely no sense. You don't see why citizens would protest against local companies, companies which are the recipients of the value created by local taxpayers, devaluing their skills?
It's also really odd that you think they'll get anything in return. What makes you think this? Has this ever happened in the past, in the US, when too-big-too-fail companies laid off all their staff? This unwarranted optimism is the stuff of science fiction.
=================
TBH I can't really tell where you're going with this. You appear to be implying that either:
1. The objectors don't really believe that AI will devalue them, or
2. That you believe that AI won't devalue them, or
3. Perhaps you want to indicate that their jobs are going to be decimated anyway, thus they shouldn't be objecting anyway.
Which is it?
>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
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.
The proposal to put data centers in space doesn’t seem too far fetched.
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.
And a return to voluntary membership in the Paris Agreement?
- 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.
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.
but of course a lot of permanent damage can be set in motion in that time
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.