The fight over electricity bills is creating new openings for environmental groups

There haven’t been many wins for environmental causes since Trump returned to office. His administration rolled back air and water pollution rules, opened federal lands to oil, scrapped climate regulations and pulled as much money as it could from Biden’s infrastructure law.

It has proven to be much easier, however, to get some wins with an anti-data center message that happens to have some environmental underpinnings to it.

Power hungry

The climate case has not been hard to make. The Energy Department expected data centers to double their electricity use by 2030, reaching up to 15% of U.S. supply.

Some utilities reconsidered plans to retire coal plants, and the Trump administration ordered a few to stay online. Developers have also proposed gas plants built exclusively to power data centers. BloombergNEF found these gas plants could raise U.S. power sector emissions by 20% to 33% if all were built.

The hyperscalers’ own numbers aren’t much better. Microsoft disclosed in July that its emissions jumped 27% in its latest fiscal year. Google and Amazon reported increases of 18% and 16%. Google’s emissions were nearly 81% above its 2019 baseline. This isn’t all due to data centers (supply chains and shipping count too) but all three companies point to the AI buildout as a major driver.

With data centers rising across the country at breakneck speed, the fight became local in a way climate change often doesn’t. People worried about what they would see from their porch and pay for in their energy bill. Some also feared AI would cost them their jobs or slip out of anyone’s control. Residents showed up in droves at council meetings to fight the projects.

The big groups saw both worries and moved in, adjusting their pitch to be part of the moment. The Sierra Club went into state utility filings and helped produce “large load tariffs,” which charge the heaviest users more so households don’t absorb the cost of new power. Twenty-five utilities have adopted or are considering adopting a large load tariff.

The Natural Resources Defense Council helped push New Jersey laws that limited rate increases tied to data centers. Earthjustice hired four staffers to chase air permit violators. Food & Water Watch led a coalition of more than 500 groups calling for a moratorium.

The wins followed. Gov. Kathy Hochul froze most new large-scale data center construction in New York in July. In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed state regulators to pause approvals of pending data centers while they audited every project seeking a grid connection.

At least $260 billion in data center investment was canceled this year after sustained local pushback, according to Heatmap, and about half of that came in the last three months.

Reds, blues and greens

All this attention on what had been a pretty boring industry had some people suspecting the backlash was bought and paid for. In August, X said it had flagged roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm that pushed posts about AI straining the grid and raising utility bills. The accounts were among 200,000 tied to influence operations.

House Republicans had already been asking. In June, the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested an FBI briefing on propaganda from China, Russia and Iran aimed at slowing down American AI progress. OpenAI said it disrupted two Chinese-linked networks the same month, though OpenAI said the campaigns failed to catch on.

Skeptics noted that the opposition cuts across party lines. “If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something, it’s probably not a Chinese psyop,” Jim Prosser, a communications consultant and former Twitter executive, told Axios.

In reality, environmental groups have always followed the public’s attention. The first Earth Day in 1970 drew an estimated 20 million Americans, many of them angry about smog and oil spills, and it helped lead to the Clean Air Act and the creation of the EPA. In the 1980s the fight turned to the hole in the ozone layer and ended in a global treaty.

Fracking was another attention-grabbing cause. In the 2000s, residents of small communities sounded the alarm about fracking, and national groups followed. Food & Water Watch built its network in response, and five states, including New York, eventually banned the practice.

Data centers are simply the latest in the whack-a-mole approach. Federal routes to other projects have mostly closed, and a cause that angered voters in both parties came with volunteers and, the groups hoped, donors.

It doesn’t mean it isn’t really an environmental movement. It just means the climate argument has to share a stage with the electric bill and a growing unease about AI itself.

—Jackie Snow, Contributing Editor