Some products sell themselves. If it looks good, smells good, sounds good, tastes good, feels good and is somehow good for you, too, consumers will line up to buy it.<\/p>\n
A product that has none of these upsides and is obviously, expensively, historically bad for you is bound to be rejected by even the most easily conned customers.<\/p>\n
Imagine being tasked with selling such a fabulous disaster to an informed, ornery public that\u2019s been swindled too many times to fall for yet another smash-and-grab robbery tarted up as a \u201cgolden opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the dilemma facing invasive data center developers and the \u201cexperts\u201d and attorneys they pay to persuade a target audience to embrace being targeted for the exploitation and annihilation of their hometown.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s like coaxing a trout to leap into your boat while holding a crudely drawn picture of a worm in one hand and a fillet knife in the other. No fish would fall for that. Most humans are smarter than fish.<\/p>\n
As I watched representatives of Essential Energy LLC flounder on the stage of the Valley View High School auditorium on Thursday night, I was struck by the absurdity of Archbald Borough Council\u2019s second \u201cconditional use\u201d hearing for a project an overwhelming majority of Archbald residents don\u2019t want under any conditions.<\/p>\n
In this case, it\u2019s a 400-megawatt natural gas power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road, coincidentally across the street from developer Jim Marzolino\u2019s proposed Project Boson \u2014 a 620,000-square-foot data center at the site of the former Highway Auto Parts junkyard. Marzolino is also a principal of Essential Energy, and like his other data center-related proposals in the Midvalley, he routinely sends representatives to testify about projects they seem to know less about than the general public.<\/p>\n
As the first witness, traffic engineer Ian Preston, prattled on about minimal increases in traffic the power plant would create as if it were being built in a vacuum and not to power data centers across the street, my mind drifted to imagining what an honest pitch for erecting mammoth concrete mausoleums and natural gas power plants next to homes, schools and public green spaces might sound like:<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends, have we got a deal for you! First, we\u2019ll replace acres of useless trees with miles of towering power lines and drive the wildlife into your backyards and onto your roads while snarling traffic with fleets of trucks and heavy equipment for a number of years we haven\u2019t even tried to accurately calculate! Speculation is our specialty. In our experience, studies and reports with hard, verifiable numbers are costly roadblocks to progress! Who needs \u2018em?<\/p>\n
\u201cNext, we\u2019ll gift your community with hundreds of tractor-trailer-size diesel generators to ensure that the air at your Little League and youth soccer fields has the right blend of oxygen and toxic emissions. State-of-the-art microscopic particulates will toughen up young lungs that otherwise would stay soft and pink and vulnerable to real threats like hantavirus, hay fever and bubblegum-flavored vape pens!<\/p>\n
\u201cResidents will also be treated to a wide variety of noises unavailable to citizens of backwards places that don\u2019t have data centers, from a constant, buzzing hum to a low-frequency thrumming you can feel in your bones!<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand that some of you are concerned about water consumption, but why let something as basic to life as water stand in the way of progress? About 71% of the Earth\u2019s surface is covered with water! We\u2019ll never run out!<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, your utility bills will soar while your property values sink, but it\u2019s a small price to pay for the safety and security of your digital identities! We promise to collect and keep your every click, keystroke and public and private online act in perpetuity, which is a fancy word for \u2018forever.\u2019 (Our market research shows that fancy words work wonders on simple folk who don\u2019t think, read or talk good.)<\/p>\n
\u201cSign up today and as a bonus, we\u2019ll throw in an army of drones and robot guard dogs (already deployed at data centers nationwide) to terrorize nosey old folks and keep the rowdier kids (the vape pen crowd) in line!\u201d<\/p>\n
Such an honest approach would fail miserably, of course, so we are stuck sitting through marathon hearings in which developers\u2019 \u201cexpert\u201d witnesses drone on about minutiae that reveals as little as possible about their projects while trying in vain to blot out the big picture.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s hearing was another tiresome rerun. Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Lesnefsky expertly reported all the important details, freeing me to stick to my specialty \u2014 pelting easy targets with juvenile wisecracks and snarky but fact-based commentary.<\/p>\n
As usual, Justin Richards, the attorney representing Stop Archbald Data Centers, and Tamara Misewicz-Healey, a founder of the grassroots resistance group, peppered the witnesses with questions they either couldn\u2019t answer or answered to disastrous, self-owning effect.<\/p>\n
Apparently unsatisfied with offering dubious testimony related to her specialty, air quality expert Nicole Wilson tried her luck at noise pollution, comparing the Essential Energy project to a power plant built 30 years ago. In Ireland.<\/p>\n
I am not making that up.<\/p>\n
Under cross-examination by Richards, it was revealed that Wilson knew more about the Irish power plant than Invenergy\u2019s Lackawanna Energy Center. In Jessup. She knew next to nothing about either.<\/p>\n
I am not making that up.<\/p>\n
Before Thursday\u2019s hearing, I hadn\u2019t been formally introduced to Richards. Afterwards, I shook the attorney\u2019s hand and complimented him on yet another lopsided victory over deliberately sketchy nonsense tarted up as \u201cexpert\u201d testimony.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t take this the wrong way,\u201d I said, \u201cbut this is the easiest money you ever made.\u201d<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, is a product of the Reagan \u201880s. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some products sell themselves. If it looks good, smells good, sounds good, tastes good, feels good and is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1590,2116,182,3052,139,1559,1560,28,30,29],"class_list":["post-201673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-local-news","tag-midvalley","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}