Data Centers Are the Next Big Front in Environmental Wars

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the underappreciated and outsize significance of local environmental battles: small-town fights over development plans whose outcomes affect both the health of the community in question and the broader tallies of the energy transition. What do those look like in practice? This week, Bloomberg’s lengthy feature on a fight over a new data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, offers a reminder that new iterations, new industries, and new face-offs are always right around the corner.

Pipelines are some of the more famous and recognizable examples of how local fights come with national ramifications: The protests and legal challenges to the Dakota Access Pipeline have become an iconic symbol of Indigenous resistance to the fossil fuel projects that are damaging culturally and religiously significant sites and endangering water supplies. The cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in 2020 due to rising costs, after numerous marginalized communities along its planned route challenged the project in court and through protests, likewise became a case study in how local battles over the health and safety of a given community can affect emissions at the national level, as well: Some estimates suggested the ACP would have been responsible for emissions roughly equivalent to 20 new coal plants, while Clean Water for North Carolina calculated that the unintentional, leaked methane from the pipeline alone might increase the atmosphere-warming effect of national methane emissions by over 13 percent.

Pipelines are far from the only example. For a different type of local environmental fight—and one that confounded expectations of ordinary red-blue divides—read Colin Jerolmack’s piece a few years ago about predominantly conservative Grant Township’s efforts to restrict fracking-related pollution, which escalated to the point that it put residents in conflict with state authorities.

There have long been similar efforts underway against petrochemical plants. Larger philanthropic organizations and national nonprofits have only recently begun supporting the tireless efforts of local groups in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where numerous refineries, as well as chemical and plastic plants, are situated perilously close to the low-income, majority-Black communities where cancer rates are estimated to be 95 percent higher than in the rest of the country. New measurements taken this summer in southeastern Louisiana found levels of carcinogenic ethylene oxide in the air that were as much as 10 times higher than EPA-recommended limits.

Then there are fights over concentrated animal feeding operations that, again, disproportionately pollute low-income, nonwhite communities while also contributing to land use problems, biodiversity crises, emissions, and more. Here too, the contours of environmental justice battles are ever evolving: The current hype around biogas—a way for industrial meat producers to make money selling animal waste by-products for fuel—and the tax incentives supporting it, have spawned new twists on old environmental fights over industrial agriculture. In May, NC Newsline reported a former mayor’s dismay that, despite his town of Turkey, North Carolina, banning hog farms within city limits, a biogas plant using the very same hog waste the town had wanted to keep out was setting up shop just east of him: “I never imagined they’d bring the manure to us.”

On first glance, community opposition to a new data center might seem much different from these battles: The primary reason for opposition is not the near certainty of pollution that you get with these other installations. (As Nick Martin wrote at TNR in 2019, reviewing pipeline spill data, “The simple fact is that it is a matter of when, not if, a series micro-fractures or a loose bolt or a lightning strike will send the pipe’s contents into the ground.”)

Yet look a bit closer, and familiar dynamics emerge. Data-center developer QTS and its new asset manager–owner Blackstone, Inc., came in promising rural Fayetteville something simple: money. It’s the same way that pipeline or biogas pitches to towns tend to start: with promises of economic benefit, including via jobs—although the promised number of jobs often turns out to be exaggerated or only refer to temporary positions. In the case of Fayetteville’s data center, “the portion of QTS’s taxes going to the county board of education this year will cover the equivalent of some half a dozen teachers’ salaries,” Bloomberg’s Dawn Lim and Josh Saul report.

But in a manner similar to how these negotiations have played out with pipeline or fracking plans, the residents of Fayetteville quickly began to feel they had been misled. They say they were told the data center wouldn’t need more electricity than what was already available from the local grid and could use “existing transmission lines.” (QTS disputes this.) The actual power needed turned out to be about twice what one report suggested, with new power lines needing to be built. That’s where the problems started.

The power company serving the area, Georgia Power, then tried to secure new land for power lines, but residents weren’t wild about being paid a couple grand in exchange for trees being cut down and giant new transmission lines being installed on their property. Georgia Power accordingly started offering much larger, six-figure sums of money. Now residents fear their neighbors are being bought off and that their lands could be “seized” by eminent domain if they themselves refuse.

This small fight is part of a larger national—and even global—battle over the giant environmental costs of big tech and, specifically, new forms of artificial intelligence. The data center, Lim and Saul report, is part of Blackstone’s quest to become “the largest financial investor in AI infrastructure.” Microsoft, which like many tech companies is betting big on AI, will reportedly be one client for the new data center.

Liza Featherstone wrote earlier this year about the enormous energy and water demands from AI data centers “endangering the energy transition” that is desperately needed to avert climate catastrophe. There’s already evidence that AI energy demands are keeping high-polluting coal plants running past their planned retirement dates. While tech companies and their advocates have been quick to argue that AI tools could help meet environmental goals rather than derail them, an estimate this fall from Bain & Company suggested data centers for AI could make up 44 percent of U.S. electrical growth in coming years, requiring utilities “to boost annual generation by up to 26% by 2028.” Tech companies have been keen to insist that this demand can be met with new nuclear energy. But there isn’t much evidence to suggest that this can be done in the short term—and when it comes to the climate crisis, every additional day burning fossil fuels comes with steep costs.

As Bloomberg’s feature indicates, data centers are worth watching as a major emerging field for environmental battles, much like power plants and pipelines have been for decades. And while the industries may differ, these fights are likely to follow familiar patterns.

Good News/Bad News

Five young Hawaiian crows—extinct in the wild—were recently released in Maui, after careful raising and “anti-predator training” using cats and owls.

The once-frozen Arctic tundra is now releasing more carbon than it stores, due to thawing.

Stat of the Week
3,400

That’s how many fewer premature deaths per year we might have in this country if all households were to switch from fossil fuels to heat pumps and electric appliances, according to a new study. (This would also save $60 billion in energy bills each year and cut 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to The New York Times write-up, but it’s the 300,000-ton drop in fine particulate matter that would make the big difference in saving lives.)

What I’m Reading

CNN’s Leah Dolan profiles Barbie-loving photographer Anastasia Samoylova, whose “subtle, anxiety-inducing images of Florida’s collapsing pastel-pink landscapes” are suffused with an acute awareness of climate change.

Samoylova moved to Florida in 2016, where she was struck by the state’s severe weather events and aging infrastructure.… The insidious, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it approach to her observational photography is intentional. Several years of capturing political extremism, gentrification and environmental disintegration has given Samoylova time to think about how to package disastrous messaging. “How do you communicate these very complex subjects and make them relatable?” she asks. “The trickiest part is to not make them off-putting.” Come for the pink sidewalks that characterize the streets of Miami—as many tourists do—and stay for the subsequent feelings of existential dread. It’s a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, she says. “(Climate change) is stigmatized, and it’s become divisive, at least where I live in the US, especially in Florida. And who knows, it’s likely going to be erased from the conversation again.”

Read Leah Dolan’s full profile at CNN.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.