Say no to the Big Boondoggle Bill privatizing public lands to put corporate welfare pollution in our communities.
They're trying to ram through "energy dominance" via data center power plants because they know nobody wants our community wrecked, and people are standing up and saying NO.
The Wilderness Society - 120 million acres of public lands eligible for sale in SENR budget reconciliation package June 13, 2025 The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee budget reconciliation bill text released June 11 includes a range of extraordinary giveaways aimed at privatizing public lands and advancing energy dominance at the expense of public lands and resources.
My letter to US Senators:
You need to strike the privatization of public lands in the Big Boondoggle Bill, that hands over corporate welfare to tech tycoons who make more shoddy crap that we don't want anyway. STOP THE BOONDOGGLES. NO pork barreling should be allowed where politicians do back scratching with corporate CEOs for projects which will harm our community with unchecked data center power plants seeking "energy dominance". Under no circumstances should rich corporations be handed public lands that are meant for the community.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
They're trying to ram through "energy dominance" via data center power plants because they know nobody wants our community wrecked, and people are standing up and saying NO.
They're planning more data centers next to the Berwick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. This is the same power plant in Berwick with a data center that led to an article with the headline: "Residents of small Pennsylvania town are being driven mad" and described people with walls vibrating in their house and such noise pollution that it wrecked the quality of life of people who live in this rural area expecting a quiet life. And now Amazon is planning to amp that up massively on hundreds of acres!
Philly Burbs - What is a data center? Amazon looks to Falls Township, Luzerne County June 11, 2025 Chris Ullery Bucks County Courier Times Luzerne County has a nuclear power plant - Salem might not have a massive industrial park under development, but it does have one thing Amazon would be hard pressed to find elsewhere: a nuclear power plant. Amazon previously announced plans to build a series of data centers near Talen Energy’s nuclear power plant, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, in Salem, according to reports from Luzerne County paper The Citizens’ Voice. Amazon had reportedly bought hundreds of acres near the power plant and purchased an existing 960-megawatt data center campus, located next to the plant, from Talen for $650 million last March. Talen sought regulatory approval to increase the amount of power the plant could directly produce for Amazon, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has twice denied that approval last November and this past April.
Even right-wing Republicans don't want their property values to plummet and their utility bills to skyrocket or to experience the various hardships being reported around data centers.
Amazon to Spend $20B on Data Centers in Pennsylvania, Including One in Bucks County The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has fueled demand for data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems. by AP | June 9, 2025 It has raised questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. For Big Tech, plugging energy-hungry data centers directly into a power plant can take years off their development timelines and is a much faster route to procuring power than having to connect to the congested electricity grid.
When they don't connect to the grid, they're just pure polluters; air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, all for no public benefit.
So the tech tycoons, the fossil fuel industry players, and the politicians playing ball on AI hype and crypto cons have had to move aggressively and start by putting it in places, like a poor neighborhood in Memphis, where the population has little political or economic clout, or by obfuscating the realities of it. But there's so much evidence now about the problems of these data centers, they can't hide it. I feel sure that the only thing that is needed to stop a data center is people knowing about it ahead of it.
Wired - Molly Taft - Jun 10, 2025 2:56 PM A Political Battle Is Brewing Over Data Centers An AI-related provision in the “Big Beautiful Bill” could restrict state-level legislation of energy-hungry data centers—and is raising bipartisan objections across the US. “This isn’t a conspiracy theory; this was a recent issue in my Congressional district,” he wrote of concerns over the placement of data centers. “It was resolved at the local level because local officials had leverage. The big beautiful bill undermines the ability of local communities to decide where the AI data centers will be built.” The same day, the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan group representing state lawmakers around the country, sent a letter to the Senate urging it to reject the AI provision. Barrie Tabin, the legislative director of the NCSL, told WIRED that the organization had heard directly from multiple state lawmakers who were concerned about how the moratorium may affect data center legislation. Laws passed by local legislatures, the letter states, “empower communities to weigh in on data center sitings, protecting ratepayers from increasing utility costs, preserving local water resources, and maintaining grid stability.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who admitted that she hadn’t read the provision in the bill when she voted for it, posted a long response to Massie in which she compared AI to Skynet, the fictional AI from the Terminator movie franchise. “I’m not voting for the development of skynet and the rise of the machines by destroying federalism for 10 years by taking away state rights to regulate and make laws on all AI,” she wrote on X. “Forcing eminent domain on people’s private properties to link the future skynet is not very Republican.”