Because the public is affected? If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected. Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
An abstract concept is being affected in unspecified ways by a generalized category of activity?
> If they were to run a highway through the middle of San Fransisco, a lot of people would also be affected.
Right. That's why they'd need to do all of the hard work to acquire all of the necessary property rights, easements, contracts, etc. from those people in order to undertake such a project.
Are data centers being constructed on other people's property without their consent? Are the actual negative externalities that impact specific people -- not the vague, all-encompassing notion of "the public" -- not being addressed within their context? I'm not aware of any of that happening.
> Like in Eastern Oregon a data center used agricultural water for evaporative cooling. The remaining water that was pumped out has nitrate levels over 5x the legal limit. Enough to cause cancer and miscarriages in nearby homes.
This is a good argument to back up the proposition that fertilizer-rich water from agricultural sources shouldn't be fed into municipal water supplies for use as tap water. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this proposition holds regardless of what intermediate uses the water may be put to as it travels from the farm to your kitchen faucet.
It's a terrible argument to back up the proposition that people shouldn't build data centers. It would be akin to citing the MV Dali incident a few years back (in which a cargo ship with improperly maintained power systems collided with a bridge) as an argument against the use of containerized logistics.
> Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
Yes, that's what we'd hope for. Would you rather that they weren't?
Our environment and communities are being treated as economic externalities.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
- https://idahoconservation.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-data-cen...
- https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-w...