The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution

Both bubble and Jenga tower are examples of unstable systems that can persist for an unexpectedly long time.

The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.

It’s a bubble. “AI” could be quite successful at this point, and the economics still don’t work out.

I mean, yes? Are you aware of the history of the industrial revolution?

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).

To be fair he didn't say who was getting rich, presumably the people making the deals, not the chumps left with the cleanup and the bill.

he doesn’t have to like you at all, you just have to bring a large white envelope or a thumb drive to mar-a-largo and you good

I just heard this last night: buried in the "support for small business" was the repeal (or effectively neuteringO of the Corporate Transparency Act's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

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

Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.

You can't give all citizens effective veto power and then expect it will only be used for good in cases where the law is behind.

I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.

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.)

At least in this instance it's a counterbalance against the psychopathic tech CEOs

> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.

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?

See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.

They became lazy and uncompetitive, and were eventually overrun by Japanese imports. It's probably reasonable to say they never really recovered.

It makes sense if you are a boomer wanting to extract everything possible for yourself with zero regard for even 10 years in the future where you will most likely be dead.

I was thinking they were trying to crash every currency, with the dollar only coming out barely on top because of oil

It doesn't serve any purpose to act like they were good at their jobs before. Returning to a status quo of 5 or 15 years ago is such a mediocre goal in this space that its arguably not worth spending political capital on.

Huh? Scientists in federal government were discussing the risks of CO2 and the greenhouse effect for 30+ years before that point. There's literal White House memos from 1977 calling it out. In that time we've cycled through R's and D's, the courts have swung left and right, but still nothing meaningful was done. It's hilarious the kneejerk recency bias people have with thinking that every failure of the government is because of Trump.

EPA is garbage, pray you never end up on the wrong side of one of their poorly written enforcement mandates. They will take down your life's work for something you have no control over.

Sick burn, bro. Have any recommendations on books about how functional the EPA was?

water pollution can be a global issue too.

From the article:

> 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 comment I was replying to was complaining about appealing to the masses, emotional arguments, and compromising on certain issues to get progress on other issues.

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.

They won't, it's hyperbole.

Wall Street will just move to Mars.

Currently there is no "Republican party" just Trump loyalists. In 2030 the party might still be called the same but I doubt it will have moved far from the principles of today.

Republicans have been a buttplug in the political process for going on twenty years, and yet who has the majority in congress?

Winning the midterms would make the house speaker a democrat, which would allow for the removal of both the president and vice president via impeachment such that the democratic speaker of the house becomes the acting president, effectively stopping the bullshit of this administration. The question then becomes if the amount of flipped senate seats + the number of republican senators voting yes on impeachment reaches a supermajority. Possible for Trump, highly unlikely for Vance. This was likely the angle Republicans plan to take, as that would make Vance the Incumbent in the 2028 elections, giving him a statistical edge. It also allows for the current republicans in office to look like they are trying to meet the demands of their constituents without giving up any real power and effectively not changing their agenda. A reminder that although Trump is a rapist, the fight against this administration will not end with him. Republicans will continue to employ smoke and mirrors strategies and lean heavily into value extraction from the US and global economy as has been occuring.

Two decades puts us back to the post-9/11 war on terror era, from which it seems like a fairly straight line to, for example, ICE murdering people in the streets.

So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.

I am so Le tired of hearing people give a damn about the state of the world. Why can’t you all just be more passive non voters like myself?

The world has not literally ended yet, so all concerns are overblown.

"the economy" is not the only reason that we're alive or form bonds of association.

It's about numbers. A small group isn't going to do anything directly to the data center, but it can raise awareness that other people do indeed care. This, in turn, can slowly (over multiple demonstrations) grow the size of the demonstrations to a critical mass that cannot be ignored.

> I would expect something more along the lines of developing laws around noise pollution or something.

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.

We need ranked choice like yesterday. It's not a magic fix-it solution, but it is a giant step in the right direction. I'm so tired of the whiplash between these two parties.

> Democrats aren't by default better on this issue vs republicans so you need to be more involved than just voting in the general.

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.

So vote for Republicans because while the outcomes are worse, at least they aren't pretending they are going to make things better?

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.

So the alternative is what?

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.

"Given level of power" is meaningless for data centers. If they can get 50MW of power, they'll obviously try to use it as efficiently as possible to generate as much compute/value.

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.

The situation only has to be sustainable for those entities that get a vote that matters. I don't think they've given us any reason to believe they intend on that being a whole lot of people. In fact they've been quite up-front about saying they are concerned about the possibility of that number being zero

If you subscribe to an AGI/ASI view, the stakes are different than the network effects that Uber thinks they could get. Success here would mean you could theoretically pull away from the competition so far and so fast, whether that be at a company or nation-state level.

> So if you really believe AI is gonna devalue your skills, you'd rather want data centers to be built in your country

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?

[dead]

Not in my lifetime!

It's not the only GW datacenter planned [1]. AFAIK, a majority of these big datacenters are going to produce their power via natural gas turbines. I don't know of any that are actually planning on powering themselves via renewables or even nuclear power.

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

A person who has never built anything before, who claims to be about to build the world's largest building, can be treated with some skepticism.

CO2, the stuff that has been buried for millions of years, and we're releasing all at once into the atmosphere? The stuff that is warming our planet faster than we, or nature, can adapt to? The stuff that is worsening global wildfires, flooding, retreating glaciers, heat waves, desertification, etc.?

Yeah, that stuff. And other nasty things in the exhaust as well.

> Water vapor? The stuff we drink?

This is really obnoxious coming as people are still missing after historic flooding in Asia (via lots of concentrated water vapor, I guess).

no, we already abolished all rule making and review about CO2, this is removing the EPA requirement to install scrubbers for removal of NO and NO2 given sufficiently large outputs, which cause acid rain and are linked to respiratory problems. of course it all depends on the dose, which is why there there is a review process, which I guess was just too inconvenient

Not all of your neighbors seem to agree

https://wjla.com/news/local/data-center-noise-fumes-create-f...

Material wealth is only part of the picture. I'd rather have a Honda Civic and a quiet, clean place to live than own a Ferrari and have to pick and choose when I can go outside so I avoid the noise and particulate pollution from a nearby data center.

The pre-AI datacenters where you live are very different than the Colossus-style methane turbine and inadequately soundproofed AI datacenters that are being built today.

> Your idea that datacenters are racists transitively is woke slop.

Your knee jerk reaction to refer to something as “woke slop” belies your privileged distance from anything remotely resembling hardship (I LiVe iN LoUdOuN) and an underdeveloped sense of empathy.

Anyway, we should be extremely skeptical of how infrastructure is built out in the US because of historical baggage. Poverty and industrial development create a vicious cycle that leads people to walk around with their thumb in their ass and claim that the poors just aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.