Sigh: The crusade against data centers is exhibiting all the scientific acumen of the war on fracking and the climate-catastrophe con.
In this country, only superstitious backwaters like New York and California bought the anti-fracking line; the climate con had wider success that is happily now beginning to fade — but being proved wrong doesn’t deter the hysterics in the least.
They just ignore the truth and move on to new lies.
Data centers and AI will use up all our water, yell the greens. *They’ll consume all our farmland! *
The fearmongering has already convinced Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign New York’s first-in-the-nation “” on most new data-center construction (and everyone involved knows full well that the state’s anti-scientific fracking ban began with a similar “”).
Similar efforts are underway in Pennsylvania; Georgia, Maine, Michigan and Oklahoma are all dabbling in it; the “save the farms” battle cry is great at making it seem nonpartisan in red states.
And the hysteria’s only begun: Kansas recently saw a local protestor arrested for disrupting a meeting on the issue.
Yet these predictions of doom and devastation are transparently wrong. Start with the water-use lie: All US data centers used no more than 250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023 — just 0.2% of a nationwide total consumption of about 132 billion gallons a day.
And the vast bulk of that was for electrical turbines for generation to power the centers. The facilities themselves consumed just 50 million gallons, or .04%.
That equates to 3% of the water used by the US golf industry to keep the putting green . . . green.
And AI, the big villain in the new green story, only used 20% of that .04% — .008%.
Which means that, assuming AI-driven water use goes up 100-fold over the next decade, it will still be under 1% of total.
What about eating our land?
Data-center-friendly Northern Virginia now hosts 13% of the entire world’s capacity, mostly in Loudoun County. Yet that uses under 3% of Loudon’s total land — and generates close to 40% of the county’s general-fund revenue.
And as the tech improves, those numbers will get even better: The same physical footprint (and the same water usage, for that matter) will power an even greater capacity.
Yes, centers can strain local power grids, but that’s purely a technical problem, readily solved by improving the grid and generating more electricity; most plans for new centers come with provisions for on-site power plants.
The crusaders refuse to see any of this, and they can rely on media that are themselves dominated by scientific ignoramuses who (for example) still think the world must worry about “The Population Bomb” and similar apocalypses that never came.
Remember: Two decades ago, Al Gore was insisting our coasts would all be underwater by now if we didn’t take drastic steps to stop climate change — steps we didn’t take, and look what didn’t happen.
Belatedly, even UN climate bigwigs are admitting their “models” were bunk, though countless nabobs still jet to conferences to bemoan the way the selfish hoi-polloi continue to consume.
Today’s progressives hate progress, and fearmonger ruthlessly to block it.
They never seem to pay any political price for being so completely wrong — but if we heed them and block data centers, the AI they power and the material abundance this progress means, then we’ll pay a very high price indeed.