Yeah, I

loved it.

I loved it.

And yeah, I think that it's been puzzling to me to watch critics respond and Part of me is I'm a climate journalist.

I've been a climate journalist for 10 years.

Some of the jokes in movies do feel written for me specifically about how we handle the climate crisis and some of the climate politics.

But I also just think it is a really interesting meditation on what art means in terms of political protest, how we value the truth, and what kinds of villains we as audiences find easier to digest.

And Molly, what did you mean in your wired piece by saying Digger changed your mind about what a climate movie should even be trying to do?

Tell me a little bit about what got you interested in covering this.

A lot of us environment and climate journalists were put on this beat a little bit earlier than everyone else.

I got to Wired about a year and a half ago, right when the Trump administration was newly in power, and there had been obviously data center development bubbling up before, but I think what we had in DC was a cohort of powerful men in tech who wanted the AI revolution to proceed even faster and who had the ear of the administration in a way that they might not have had with a, a Harris administration.

Um, and we started seeing a lot of full-throated endorsement of AI from the Trump administration, and that started translating to a lot more construction and emphasis from the administration on getting data centers up very quickly.

So when I got put on this beat, a lot of the data center opposition started off as in opposition to environmental effects, and I think [chuckles] what's really been wild is how fast things have progressed.

I remember last May, I was calling a couple of local politicians, um, in, in state legislatures, especially in Virginia-

Why are people resistant to data centers being developed near where they live?

I think that you can ask 10 different people why they're opposed to data centers.

Mm

... reasons why they oppose them, right? They're kind of a, a hard sell.

It's a, a really big facility that does use a lot of energy, sometimes a lot of water, being built very rapidly.

Like, getting, getting kind of runway to be built in ways that other infrastructure that might be more useful to people, like housing or, you know, uh, facilities that create new jobs, might not be going up as fast.

Um, and then there's this sort of s- cult of secrecy that's surrounded a lot of these local projects.

A lot of developers have used NDAs to push these through.

Um, so it's, it's a little bit of a hard sell.

And like you say, the surprise was that it really came from a wide variety of grassroots people who really had no central organization and don't still today really seem to have any central coordination.

And that, that is, that raises a whole other set of concerns.

concerns.Absolutely.

I think that's a really important point to make.

I'm glad Danny brought it up.

Uh, when people ask me, like, as an environmental reporter, what my biggest environmental concerns are around data centers, I say the number one thing is absolutely the fossil fuel build-out.

Um, as you mentioned, it's not only diesel backup generators, which have...

Uh, communities have a lot of concerns about local air pollution.

Mm-hmm

County in particular.

Loudoun County in particular, and also the front lines of receiving, you know, there is like significant amount of money from some of these build outs.

Right.

But like they, they have been also very concerned about things like noise, things like water use, their electricity bills.

And there have been some scary statistics around Virginia, although that's a muddy issue.

So, you know, a lot of us came into this.

And I also think if you are a climate reporter, um, One thing that I have noticed in many others, a lot of this aligned pretty closely sometimes with the pushback to renewable energy.

We don't even begin to understand how bad it could get.

Only at Dick's.

Yeah, I think, and I think, you know, there's so much to say on that.

I think, first of all, it's also important to note that like Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders have been on the same side of like a lot of the AI safety conversations that have gone on in the past year plus.

They've signed on to similar pledges.

They've made similar asks, you know, pointed out they've had like, they've, within the same day have spoken to the same experts.

You know, I think one thing that sort of is interesting about looking at politics through exclusively DC lens and especially like, you know, with the Democratic Party, they tend to see kind of whoever is allied with Trump as an opponent is to kind of remember that tech and the White House and tech and the right are like a pretty recent political alliance.

And a lot of what I heard reporting this article is that a lot of the populist base on the right I have deep memories for things like during the pandemic when Facebook censored a lot of accounts that were posting about the vaccines and the COVID conspiracy theories.

And I was like, whoa, are we really there? But talk about that a little.

We thank everybody who's supporting this podcast for their support, and we look forward to it developing and growing over time because the issue is so important.

Yeah.

I think, and I think, you know, there's so much to say on that.

I think, first of all, it's also important to note that, like, Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders have been on the same side of, like, a lot of the AI safety conversations that have gone on in the past year plus.

They've signed on to similar pledges.

They've made similar asks.

You know, pointed out they've had, like, they've, within the same day, have spoken to the same experts.

Are, are, are we really there?" But talk about that a little.

Give us the big takeaway to get people thinking about this story and enticing them to read it, because I think it's really important.

Yeah.

Gosh, there's so many things going on.

I think one big takeaway is that when we're talking about opposition to data centers, when I pitched this story back in January, I was noticing a lot of folks in the AI space and in the energy space dismiss data center opposition as just nimbyism.

It's like, oh, people just don't like new things in their backyards.

People are really concerned about electricity.

They're erroneously concerned about water.

So, I mean, do you think it is indicative of how those same what would otherwise be opposing camps might unite on some other issues, even if unite might be too strong of a word, but that it's going to realign the political coalitions in ways that you wouldn't guess? Yeah.

What changed? How did this go?

Yeah.

Man, I sit up at night thinking about this, to be honest, which is maybe a bad sign.

Um, so, you know, most data centers in the US before basically, [laughs] like, two years ago, they were being built kind of, like, outside of DC and Silicon Valley were the, the two big places.

And so, you know, there had been a couple of local environmental groups, especially in the DC area, where there were increasingly more and more who were starting to point out, like, some of the, the environmental issues with this.

So when I got to Wired, you know, those groups had been getting a little bit louder as there were more and more data centers that had started being built.

So I started kind of tracking them, but, you know, it's, it's been interesting because this is really s- an area where, uh, politicians in Washington were not aware of what was going on at all until it seems like maybe the past six months, right? People are so mad about this for, like, multiple different reasons, and I remember asking a colleague in the newsroom, like, "Do you think this could be used to block, you know, state level policies on data centers?" 'Cause there were some states where local lawmakers, again, in Virginia, a big one, were starting to be like, "Hey, the power on these things is crazy.

It doesn't feel like there's this strong coalition of people that are advocating for the data centers except for the very, very tech elite, and those people are themselves so unpopular that it just feels [laughs] like this whole issue has become kind of radioactive.

yeah i want to get to that but i'm wondering like we hear a lot about oh they use so much energy they use so much water noise uh light pollution like what are the downsides and upsides just on a practical level for people who maybe live or work around an ai data center

Totally.

I get this question all the time.

As an environmental journalist, I always say my number one concern with data centers is the possibility that they could up our CO2 pollution, our carbon emissions.

Again, these are really energy intensive.

In a perfect world, we would build them all with renewable energy.

We would use, you know, the opportunity presented by data centers to build all sorts of renewables across the country.

What's the through line here? And how are communities responding? Is it more with like, hey, let's pause and take a minute? Or is it more like, let's just, none of them here?

Mm.

Now, what that's going to mean regionally, like, really depends on a whole lot of factors.

Um, there's all sorts of complicating factors here.

Um, but, you know, there's also, there's very smart people also talking about ways to make all this demand work for the grid, making, uh, tech companies pay for upgrades, making, you know, kind of rearranging some of the rules that we've had in place to better accommodate these large loads.

We just haven't really seen a huge amount of demand from pr- private customers like this before.

So some people are thinking that it really will mean an opportunity for us to get a better grid out of it.

You know, I have to say there's often a disconnect even in tech companies between policy people who are really focused on finding solutions that work for everyone, that are better for, for the grid, and, you know, the infrastructure teams who are just kind of working as hard as they possibly can to, again, build these things really quickly.

[laughs]

But how much has that become the norm? And also, how is that campus operating today? I feel like it's gotten so much scrutiny, but it seems like it's still thriving.

I have thought about this for a while, and I have heard rumblings from the industry that, like, this did cause, like, a massive problem because it really put attention on this data center for polluting this neighborhood correctly.

I think one distinction that we have to understand when we're talking about data centers that, like-I don't see happening with a lot of other infrastructure is the amount of money and power that is being put behind to build them quickly.

Like, that is the number one goal for a lot of these companies, is to get these things up as fast as possible.

We're in a race, right? Like, we hear that all the time.

We're in the AI race, and, you know, the big bottleneck for a lot of these companies is building compute.

And so I have to say, couple weeks ago, Anthropic announced that they are going to be renting space in the Colossus ONE campus, which is the campus that has gotten so much negative press attention.

Let's also look at, like you said, like, mass production and, like, of fast fashion and do you see that spilling out, or do you think that this might sort of take a lot of the energy out? I, I see a lot of other responses that are like, "Well, everything uses power, so who cares, and what can we do?"

So the question I've got for you is, If you're a betting woman, based on the reporting that you've done for the stories like this, how much of the data center load, say five years from now, is powered by renewables versus powered by nukes versus powered by gas? Just if you had to guess.

Man, I think that's like the question that like literally at least everyone I speak to for stories like these is asking.

I think if we were going down a logical path like storage, renewables, storage and some gas makes a lot of sense.

Right.

And I think that a lot of very smart people in this space see that as the clearest path forward.

I don't think nuclear is going to be ready for the next couple of years, even though people want it to be.

What I am worried about in this reporting that, you know, XAI really set the an example for other data center developers as you can do this very quickly by bringing in basically whatever turbines you can find.

Is there any other really significant factors that you think complete the dashboard of the factors that are going to really determine the next five years from now?

What does the energy consumption of a data center look like, and are we talking about just energy? Are we talking about water?What does it look like?

So large data centers, they're- there's a lot going on inside of them, right? They need cooling systems, they need to keep the lights on, they need to run their network equipment, that all creates a lot of energy.

They don't run at the same energy level all the time, they often run in cycles based on when there's more queries.

You know, they'll take a break at night when the queries are lower.

And the environmental footprint of a data center also depends on what type of energy they're hooked up to.

If you're hooked up to a dirtier grid, a grid powered by fossil fuels, you're gonna create more emissions.

A data center that runs on solar power or wind power will have a lower environmental footprint.

Fingers crossed.

So, what regulatory protections are these AI companies seeking to roll back?

There's a lot of environmental asks, but one specific protection, um, that caught my eye was a very specific ask around a section of the Clean Water Act, which is known as a 404 permit, which is named after the section of the Clean Water Act it refers to.

So, if you're building anything that will impact a federally protected waterway, if you're building a road across a wetland, if you're building a building that nudges up into a protected stream, if you're altering the course of a river, you're gonna need a permit.

It can be a pretty cumbersome process.

It can be, uh, expensive and add a couple of years onto a project.

Um, what the federal government has done is said there's, there's a set of activities that we will just say, "Okay, you don't need to go through this cumbersome permitting process.

You can just get a blanket permit." And what the tech industry is asking for is for data centers to be included in this list.

And what are the industries saying about why they need this permit? What argument are they making that the benefits, uh, here outweigh the potential environmental risks? Are they making that argument?