PA Gov. Shapiro to summit with Trump & Dave McCormick, to push power plants motivated by AI hype fabricated demand and to shut out locals from what happens in our neighborhoods.
These boondoggles to build the data centers for the AI investment bubble seems at its root a reason to keep burning more fossil fuels.
Pennsylvania is trying to create a board of unelected people with heavy conflicts of interest to decide on energy projects in our neighborhoods.
The Allegheny Front - Pa. lawmakers consider new state board to fast-track electricity projects Julie Grant·June 27, 2025 “I came to this work doing exactly what this bill would strip away,” she said, referring to what she sees as the centralized authority of the state board. McDonough also fears that the board will expedite new fossil fuel projects, such as plants that burn natural gas from fracked wells in the region, and doesn’t think the risks are worth it. “You’re going to obliterate the remaining parts of southwest Pennsylvania [with fracking], is what you’re going to do,” McDonough said. “Just to have data centers for this fabricated demand.”
In the article it sounds like David Masur from PennEnvironment wants a state level board that can take away the rights of locals to protect their communities from gas burning and tire burning data centers just so that he could pave the way for solar developers to have nothing at all local ever stand in their way. Is he really an environmental activist, or is he a solar industry lobbyist? Or maybe he's just naive? Maybe he hasn't heard about what's happening in Memphis or in Carbon County Pennsylvania. Or maybe he has and he just doesn't give a shit. I don't know which. But I don't think RESET proponents are going to be putting up solar panels.
Image description: A post on bsky.social by Karen Feridun noting that Governor Josh Shapiro's "RESET" bill for an energy board, the R in the acronym stands for "reliable" and the Trump White House issued a statement that "green energy" like solar or wind is "unreliable".
It would certainly seem to suggest that Governor Josh Shapiro is not particularly interested in helping renewable energy with this so-called RESET board and it sure looks like a Trump connected scheme to bring back fossil fuel and block anything that's ever been labeled "green energy".
Karen Feridun of No False Climate Solutions PA told the Bucks County Beacon podcast that they intend to pack this RESET energy board making decisions on energy projects with the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry and the Pennsylvania Building Trades, which she says neither are accountable, because of course they're not elected. So why are they going to be approving energy projects in our neighborhoods? Why would you trust the building industry to decide whether something ought to be built or not?
"Nobody knows their local community like the local government and the people who live there. And so they know what they're concerned about, they know what they need to safeguard against you know they know what is going to happen to their property values if they bring these kinds of LULUs (locally undesirable land uses) to their communities. They know and so why would they be cut out of the process, in place of creating this board that has people on it who want to build stuff. I mean what project is the building trades going to say no to when it's about getting stuff built?" – Karen Feridun
And surprising no one, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is cavorting around at fossil fuel loving events with Republican Senator Dave McCormick, after all, Josh Shapiro greenlit TIRE BURNING at a data center operated by a crypto magnate who is an appointed director in the Trump administration's Dept of Energy. It's a bitcoin printing operation that provides no power to the community and was already burning coal waste, and possibly even construction debris. I wouldn't be surprised if Dave Mccormick's pal Democratic Senator John Fetterman is going to this Trump-Mccormick fossil fuel summit shindig too, even if he has to miss a beach vacation.
PRESS RELEASES 2025 | BetterPath Coalition FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – July 14, 2025 Environmental Advocates Oppose Shapiro’s Attendance at McCormick Summit 41 Organizations and Individuals Submit Letter to Shapiro “If there was any confusion about Governor Shapiro’s energy agenda, his participation in a summit organized by dirty energy devotee Senator David McCormick and attended by climate denier President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet should clear things up,” said Karen Feridun, Co-Founder of the Better Path Coalition. “And would somebody please take Shapiro’s copy of Abundance away from him?” “This is exactly the wrong direction on energy at this critical time.
Maybe voters need to tell Josh Shapiro to stop taking advice and money from all the billionaires, tech tycoons, and fossil fuel magnates altogether. Because that's who funds the Abundance Agenda bullshit – they're connected to Peter Thiel and the Mercatus Center. They're trying to gaslight us that it's not right-wing pro-industry, but I for one am done with falling for the woke-washing lies they use for all of their opposition to public health.
Governor Josh Shapiro has been actively betraying his own voting base right from the get-go.
AXIOS - Sneak peek: Trump, McCormick plan $70 billion in AI, energy announcements for Pennsylvania July 14, 2025 - Mike Allen In addition to Trump's attendance, McCormick has drawn energy and AI leaders from around the world, including over 60 CEOs, to showcase the economic and national-security benefits of building AI infrastructure such as data centers and power generation. (…) Among the CEOs expected to attend: ExxonMobil's Darren Woods, Chevron's Mike Wirth, BlackRock's Larry Fink, Palantir's Alex Karp, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Amazon Web Services' Matt Garman, Bechtel's Brendan Bechtel, Bridgewater's Nir Bar Dea, GIC's Lim Chow Kiat (Singapore), Brookfield's Bruce Flatt, CPP Investments' John Graham and EQT's Toby Rice.
My letter to the governor and my state senator and state rep:
Some board of unelected people with industry conflicts of interest should not decide what data centers (or "energy projects") get built in our communities. We've already seen the Shapiro administration's approval of tire burning at the data center power plant run by a guy appointed a director at the Trump administration's Dept of Energy, a bitcoin printing operation that provides no benefits and all detriment to the community. It's almost preposterous that the existence of this "RESET" board is being considered at all, let alone to brazenly stack it with industry interests making the decisions. There should be nobody making decisions on building projects who have a direct interest in approving building projects so it's absolutely unthinkable that the RESET board should include the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry and the Pennsylvania Building Trades. The idea that the building trades industry would fail to approve any building project at all is ridiculous. This board shouldn't exist at all. The decision making for what happens in our community shouldn't happen from some corrupt central government and forced upon us destroying quality of life and property values for someone else's profiteering scheme.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
My additional letter to PA Governor Josh Shapiro, Senator John Fetterman, Rep Bridget Kosierowski, and PA Senator Marty Flynn:
Any Democrat going to a Trump Mccormick data center energy summit with their crypto corruption and all the rest of it should be ashamed of themselves and just resign now and stop betraying us all.
My letter to local officials:
Nobody voted for these AI tech "Solutions" that are obviously going nowhere because none of this chatbot stuff actually works as advertised. It's clear if you read the tech business news that the officials don't add up to make sense at all. I'm not sure why politicians are continuing to fall for this and falling to see this nonsense for what it is. If there's an AI boom, why do these companies need taxpayer handouts? Why are they trying to sell us on data centers claiming it "creates jobs". That's the most blatant lie because data centers don't have a lot of humans and the whole AI marketing to get companies to invest is the promise of replacing human jobs! They're promising an AI jobs apocalypse, you can' have it both ways! And that's besides that trickle down economics is a totally discredited idea. And the fact that we know these companies are just using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs to boost their stocks. But the bottom line is that people will regret letting huge data centers set up in our community. And especially so close to an affluent area. I'm worried but the people in a few miles radius, those fancy people are gonna be pissed when they get wind about how this is going to tank their quality of life and property values.
And I included copies of the piece Big Tech's AI Blackmail and a bunch of quotes from articles about all the communities having terrible experiences already with data centers.
The horror stories about these data center power plants just keep coming, like the latest story from More Perfect Union about Montana. And it’s all fabricated demand, a made up reason to set money on fire and pollute our neighborhoods in the process. All the arguments for this stuff is, as David Gerard calls it, “promotional mouth noises” and that’s it. And please spare me the trickle down economics they push about job creators. Politicians try to patronize us and celebrate corporate giveaways claiming it'll trickle down, but we know that trickle down is a thoroughly discredited right-wing economics theory, we've seen it and it's always a bait and switch that never works out.
And I can't help but notice that they keep trickling out stories about how recycled plastic bottles don't really get recycled. I feel like it's only a matter of time before we're convinced that we need to have data centers start burning plastic, that's a real thing that's happening in other parts of the world, and I would've thought that sounded outlandish until Governor Josh Shapiro said yes to a crypto operation burning tires.
I expect a lot more bait and switch situations where they convince people they really need carte blanche to do solar panels because of the anti-solar right-wingers, but then in comes some Amazon tire burning and plastic incinerating data center, or at best, methane burners. There's already been propaganda working at making a strawmanning argument to attempt to discredit people concerned about our living environment, by equating people who don't want their neighborhood filled with pollution as the same as people who believe in chemtrail conspiracy fictions.
And sidenote… why didn't I mention PA HB502 before now if this has been in the works for weeks? The truth is I didn't know about it until I happened to be suggested a 2-1/2 week old youtube video yesterday on a channel I'm subscribed to. There has been an op-ed about it, but it's behind a paywall of course.
For months I've been reaching out to all local organizing groups who are out doing all these protests, asking if anyone's organizing around data centers and I get no replies on that. I even asked the guy who writes at paenvironmentdigest.com and I was rebuffed. I can't tell anyone else things I don't know about, and more importantly, I can't complain to my reps if I don't know about things. The people in the neighborhoods for planned data centers probably don't know about these things either. Nobody's telling them. They probably think they're just buildings with computers. They have no idea their walls will be vibrating and data centers come with methane gas turbines. Organizers should be canvassing those neighborhoods. I've proposed sending postcards to people in targeted neighborhoods. But I'm just one disabled person with little means, there's only so much I can do. Even if someone can get on a podcast or a youtube channel to talk about this stuff like I have, everyone knows that certain topics are likely to not get a lot of clicks and not be lucrative for content creators. Sometimes people doing climate content get kicked off Youtube arbitrarily and mysteriously.
The right-wing and fossil fuel interests never seem to have this problem, have you noticed that? Tons of people making money in the right-wing information landscape. It's so very well funded they have made a whole economy around it.
Detroit Today: Author Sarah Kendzior explains why misinformation spreads so easily - August 22, 2023 She says lack of access to good information can contribute to the spread of bad information. “When well-researched investigative reporting is hidden behind a paywall, you’re going to end up with a population that — even if they’re making their best attempts to find the truth — is going to have a very difficult job doing so,” Kendzior explains.
So all the facts and important information is behind paywalls and often controlled by hedge funds, and all the propaganda and fakery is free. Not a great setup.