Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Environmental and economic justice advocates alike have been sounding the alarm for months regarding the Trump administration’s push to built massive data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency in communities across the United States—regardless of local opposition—and on Dec. 8 Congress heard from a coalition of more than 200 groups demanding action to stop what they called “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation,” Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8)
Led by Food and Water Watch (FWW), which originally demanded a moratorium on new AI data centers in October, more than 230 organizations have signed a letter warning that thus far, Congress has failed to take action to stop the rapid expansion despite the fact that “the harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive.”
The national and state groups, including Greenpeace USA, Oil Change International, and the Nebraska-based Save Rural America, pointed to a number of harms associated with the expansion of data centers in places including rural Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Virginia.
They warned that pushing the build-out onto communities—many of which have protested the approval of the centers to no avail—will lead to:
• Enormous electricity consumption, with a tripling of data centers in the next five years projected to result in the facilities consuming as much electricity as about 30 million households;
• Unsustainable water consumption, with those data centers requiring the amount of water normally used by 18.5 million households, just for cooling the computer servers;
• The worsening of the climate emergency, with 56% of the energy used to power data centers sourced from planet-heating fossil fuels;
• Surging electricity costs for people living in the vicinity of energy-sucking data centers; and
• Skyrocketing job losses as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs are projected to become obsolete due to the growth of AI and companies’ investments in the technology, even as corporations report they’re not seeing a significant positive impact on their bottom lines.
“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security,” the groups told Congress. “We urge you to join our call for a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment, and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting.”
The groups noted that electricity costs have risen 21.3% since 2021, a rate that “drastically” outpaces inflation, driven by the “rapid build-out of data centers.”
As CNBC reported in November, residential utility bills rose 6% in August compared with last summer, and though price increases can be due to a host of reasons, electricity prices rose “much faster than the national average” this year in states with high concentrations of data centers. Consumers in Virginia paid 13% more, while those in Illinois paid 16% more and people in Ohio saw their costs go up 12%.
See more Dispatches, with online links, at progressivepopulist.blogspot.com.
