The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry recently called on supporters of a moratorium on data center development to take a No Technology Pledge that is not worthy of a hyperlink. The messaging surrounding the pledge, however, is worth calling out.
I am the Co-Founder of two statewide, frontline and grassroots-led coalitions, the Better Path Coalition and No False Climate Solutions PA. We have joined forces to fight data center development in Pennsylvania. Our first reaction was to laugh, imagining PA Chamber staffers in a conference room brainstorming all of the things they could call on supporters of a moratorium on data center development to disavow.
However, we believe the Chamber’s messaging must be called out.
Ever since the bottling and packaging industries aired their Crying Indian anti-litter ad on Earth Day in 1971, polluters and their enablers have been attempting to shift the blame for pollution from themselves to the public. Pay no attention to the smokestacks that appear in the background in some of the frames. (But if you do, please know that your insatiable demand for stuff is to blame for that pollution too.) Hear only the message actor William Conrad intones, “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The PA Chamber’s pledge relies on the same 55-year old playbook. It’s not us. It’s you.
But it is the pledge’s other message that is particularly worthy of attention. Since the data center boom began, proponents of development have conflated the hyperscale data centers at the heart of the boom with the thousands of data centers that support the many technologies the pledge lists. It’s like putting Walmart in the same category as a mom and pop corner bodega because they both sell things.
Hyperscale data centers should be in a category of their own. They should not be accepted as just the next round of data center proposals coming into our communities. Hyperscale data centers are unique in the unprecedented demands they put on our critical natural resources and the myriad threats they pose to all of us. Their purpose is not to provide you space to store your photos, but to train controversial Artificial Intelligence that is sounding alarms among experts and average citizens alike.
Distinguishing between the two has important policy implications. Municipal governments subject to the state’s Municipalities Planning Code believe they cannot ban an industrial use the state regulates. Whether that interpretation is correct is questionable. It stems from the “fair share” doctrine that pertains land use. According to Robert S. Ryan in Pennsylvania Zoning Law and Practice, cited by the PA General Assembly’s Local Government Commission, “A municipality must make provision not only for ‘basic forms’ of housing, but also for business and institutional uses that are not inherently objectionable,” due to factors like extreme noise or toxic pollution.
However, it is only possible to consider hyperscale data centers to be regulated by the state if they are considered to be the same as the hundreds of “old-school” data centers already in operation. Putting hyperscalers in a separate category where they rightfully belong could mean that, at present, there are no regulations specific to them, freeing municipalities to ban them. It is the kind of policy discussion the state government has never wanted to have.
Instead, legislators have been offering up weak-kneed bills that amount to nothing or even make matters worse. The same is true of Governor Shapiro’s Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) Standards he recently implemented via an Executive Order.
Environmental champion Senator Katie Muth introduced a bill calling for a 3-year moratorium on data center development. When Shapiro was asked why he opted for GRID rather than a moratorium, he said, “Um, I mean, look, people who call for moratoriums or pauses, they’re basically saying, let’s stop and figure this out. Well, we figured it out.” Our coalitions submitted a letter to Shapiro asking for him to respond to 40 questions GRID does not answer or, in some cases, prompts. We stopped at 40, but could have asked hundreds more. And others are asking questions we never considered.
There would be a lot more to be figured out if hyperscalers were recognized as the unregulated facilities they actually are.
A three-year statewide moratorium would give us the time we need to figure it it all out. It would give us time to study the issues and impacts and decide what, if any, role hyperscale data centers should play in Pennsylvania. If we decide to proceed with some amount of hyperscale data center development, we need time to develop regulations that are enforceable, not ill-conceived bills that take on issues in a random, scattershot fashion or a face-saving Executive Order that is more about politics than policy.
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