On Wednesday, Lackawanna County started a doomsday clock for invasive AI hyperscale data center developers.<\/p>\n
Commissioners Bill Gaughan, Thom Welby and Chris Chermak unanimously approved<\/a> a contract for a scientific, data-driven forecast of the impacts the data center invasion would impose on the roughly 215,000 residents of the county and their neighbors throughout Northeast Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n The county will pay EmPower Analytics Group a flat fee of $165,000 \u2014 about 0.0912% of the county\u2019s $181 million budget \u2014 to conduct the study, which will have a broader scope than the firm\u2019s original proposal, an all-important examination of the cumulative health and economic effects of blighting the county with coughing clusters of data centers and natural gas power plants.<\/p>\n The version<\/a> approved Wednesday also will detail impacts on individual communities. The report will be invaluable to municipal governments and citizens groups when most if not all of these benighted projects are tried in the courts. The resistance will have hard data to make their cases. So far, developers have shown a comical ineptitude at selling their toxic products to laymen and women. Judges are the toughest customers to convince.<\/p>\n Even the dimmest developer grasps this. As I opined<\/a> in August, the developers\u2019 best weapon is widespread public ignorance of the negative impacts of their ruinous, cartoonishly speculative industry. EmPower\u2019s report will present a \u201cBig Picture\u201d perspective impossible for even the most jaded bystander to ignore. The more humans learn about the health, economic and environmental costs of invasive data center development, the more determined they become to keep it out of targeted communities.<\/p>\n EmPower was co-founded by Michael Cork, Ph.D., an environmental health scientist and biostatistician with a doctorate from Harvard. In July, Cork delivered a report<\/a> commissioned by the crowd-funded grassroots group Stop Archbald Data Centers<\/a>. The scientist focused on the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus, the most objectionable of six data center projects competing to erase Archbald.<\/p>\n Cork translated health damages into money \u2014 estimating an annual added cost between $3 million and $124 million, depending on how often and how long the project\u2019s 588 \u201cbackup\u201d diesel generators run and what mitigating technologies Brooklyn-based developers Cornell Realty Management LLC might eventually choose to use.<\/p>\n Cornell \u201cexperts\u201d tried to discredit Cork\u2019s testimony with semantics and misdirection<\/a>, one of countless clumsy missteps the developer\u2019s team made during the marathon conditional use hearing on the project. When trying to sell the ridiculous assertion that 588 diesel generators and millions of gallons of fuel stored onsite would pose no threat to neighbors, saying \u201cTrust us\u201d over and over just doesn\u2019t cut it.<\/p>\n Cork\u2019s original report considered the impacts of one data center proposal. Lackawanna County is targeted by more than a dozen such proposals and the power plants and other infrastructure required to feed data centers\u2019 insatiable appetite for electricity, water and other precious resources.<\/p>\n When news of Cork\u2019s report landed on traditional and digital doorsteps across the county, spooked citizens pressured Welby and Chermak to join Gaughan \u2014 who reached out to EmPower with their blessing \u2014 in commissioning a countywide study.<\/p>\n Welby and Chermak expressed \u201cconcern\u201d over invasive data center development, but dragged their feet on securing a study, citing cost and lack of governmental authority to intervene as obstacles. Their votes Wednesday signal a shift in official attitudes that should be celebrated by citizens and feared by the developers targeting their communities.<\/p>\n The early cheerleading for data centers and the stubborn \u201cbystanderism\u201d that replaced it have succumbed to the practical and political realities of the moment. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to data center development, and even perceived support for it is toxic to politicians who want to win offices or hold onto them.<\/p>\n Gaughan thanked his colleagues for finally seeing the forest for the clear-cut trees and rightly acknowledged citizens who so far have shouldered and funded the resistance without uniform support from elected officials who swore oaths to serve the public interest.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernment did not lead you here,\u201d Gaughan said. \u201cIn many ways, you led government here. Today is not the end of this fight, but it is a really important day, because from this point forward when somebody tells the people of our county that there\u2019s nothing to worry about, we will be able to say, \u2018Don\u2019t tell us, show us.\u2019 And this time we will have the science, in 90 days, to decide for ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n EmPower\u2019s report should be delivered by Christmas, an invaluable gift to the resistance and a mountainous lump of coal for developers. Their best weapon is widespread public ignorance of the negative impacts of their ruinous, cartoonishly speculative industry. While belated, the EmPower study couldn\u2019t come at a better time.<\/p>\n Gaughan pointed to an April report<\/a> by the American Lung Association that pegged data centers as a growing source of air pollution across the nation and warned that \u201ccommunities located near large data center clusters often experience higher localized pollution burdens than regional averages.\u201d He also noted that on Monday, President Donald Trump\u2019s corrupt (redundant?) Environmental Protection Agency completed its repeal<\/a> of Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants.<\/p>\n At a time when governments at every level should be heightening and tightening environmental guardrails, the Trump administration is tearing them down for billionaire tech \u201cbroligarchs\u201d who view everyday Americans as lower than cockroaches. The cavalry isn\u2019t just sitting out the war, they\u2019ve saddled up with the enemy.<\/p>\n I commend commissioners Welby and Chermak for voting to approve the EmPower contract. Better late than never. It was moving when Welby drew on personal experience to illustrate his support for the study. His nephew, Paul Welby, a Pennsylvania Army National Guard master sergeant who was exposed to toxic smoke from \u201cburn pits\u201d in Kuwait, passed away last month after a battle with esophageal cancer that spread throughout his body.<\/p>\n Paul Welby was 43.<\/p>\n In March 2004, then-Sunday Times Photo Director Mike Mullen and I spent a month embedded with Pennsylvania Army National Guard soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq. We saw and smelled the burn pits firsthand. It was obvious then that military personnel and civilians were being poisoned 24\/7.<\/p>\n