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.

> 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

>(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.

This seems like yet another piece in a build up to a civil war. And those in governance know it.

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.

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.

Environment Pollution Agency

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

Sustainable business center design

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.

> 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.

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?

Did you miss some Terminator background color on your way to Albuquerque?

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.

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.

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.

So-- basically until the next administration. Interesting timing.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.