The Trump administration expressed its vision of AI infrastructure in the United States last week. It is a dream for fossil and chemical industries – and a nightmare for wind and solar energy and the environment.
An “AI action plan” and a burst of management decrees that Donald Trump signed last week has read as manifests to make AI less “awake” and less regulated. They are filled with head proposals to erode the environmental protections of the rocky substratum in the United States, in addition to incentives to companies to develop new data centers, power plants, pipelines and computer chips as quickly as possible.
It is a wave of deregulation and a massive document with fossil fuels, all in the name of the AI.
What the AI plan “really concerns” is “to use unprecedented emergency powers to grant new massive exemptions for data centers and in particular fossil combustible infrastructures”, explains Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Consumer Advocacy Group Citizen. “I think they have a real interest in welcoming Big Tech priorities. But this is an opportunity to marry their priorities for Big Oil. ”
“This is an opportunity to marry their priorities for Big Oil.”
The data centers are notoriously eager for energy and have already led to an increase in new gas projects intended to reassure increasing demand. But many technological companies have sustainability commitments that they have undertaken to meet using renewable energies, and as wind and solar farms have generally become cheaper and easier to build than fossil fuel power plants, they have become the fastest growth sources of electricity in the United States. Now Trump wants to turn this on his head.
He signed a decree of July 23 intended for “accelerating[e] Federal authorization for the infrastructure of the data center. “He indicates that the Secretary of Commerce” launch an initiative to provide financial support “for data centers and related infrastructure projects. To be considered repairable, operators must be able to crawl the production of electricity from top to bottom, so this excludes intermittent renewable energies such as solar and wind energy which naturally fluctuates with the weather and the time of the day.
The Trump AI planning document indicates in the same way that the administration will favor the deployment of distributed energy sources and that “we will continue to reject radical climate dogma”. Already, Trump has treated killers to solar and wind projects by hiking pricing and reducing tax credits from the Biden era for renewable energies. The executive order of the AI will go even further to refrain from dependence on fossil fuels and make more difficult for new data centers to operate on solar and wind energy.
“For the moment, you are not admiring an accelerated processing if your data center proposal has a wind and a solar. It is excluded from favorable processing,” said Slocum. “So what is the declaration for the market? Do not trust wind and solar.”
It is not only without environmentally friendly friends, it is ineffective – given the current backwards for gas turbines and because fossil power plants are generally slower and more expensive to build than wind and solar farms. “It is not an abundance of energy program. This is an energy idiot program, ”adds Slocum.
The Trump administration wants to accelerate things by rewriting the environmental laws of the rocky substratum. Trump, still the dissatisfied real estate tycoon, has taken care of environmental criticisms which, according to him, take too long and cost too much. He has already worked to reduce dozens of environmental regulations since his entry into office. From now on, the decree directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to modify rules under the Clean Act Act, Clean Water Act, Superfund Law and Toxic Substances Control ACT to accelerate permits for data center projects.
“It’s horrible … these [laws] protect our public health. They protect our children. They protect the air that we breathe and the water we drink, ”explains Judith Barish, director of the coalition of Communities United chips, a national coalition which includes groups of labor and environmental.
“This is an idiotic energy program.”
The coalition met to fight for protections for workers in the flea and neighboring communities industry. The manufacture of semiconductors has a long history of the leachate of harmful chemicals and exposure of employees to reproductive health toxins. Santa Clara, California, houses Silicon Valley, has more toxic superfund sites than any other county in the United States accordingly. The coalition wants to prevent the story from repeating itself while the United States is trying to revive the manufacture of national fleas and dominate the AI market.
The AI requires more powerful chips, and Trump’s decree in federal acceleration allowed for data center projects includes semiconductors and “semiconductor materials”. Barish says that “a flea plant is a chemical factory” due to all industrial solvents and other manufacturers of chemical semiconductors. This includes “Forever Chemicals”, for which the Trump administration began to loosen the regulations on the quantity authorized in drinking water. Companies including 3M and Dupont had to face a pursuit of prosecution on products that are always linked to cancer, reproductive risks, liver damage and other health problems, and subsequently made commitments to eliminate or eliminate chemicals. Now manufacturers jump on the opportunity to produce more chemicals to feed the enthusiasm of the AI.
Ironically, we could see data centers and related infrastructures arise on polluted sites that Silicon Valley has already left in its footsteps. Trump’s executive decree commands the EPA to identify the polluted sites of the superfundes and industrial wasteland which could be reused for new data center projects (and indicates to other agencies to browse military and federal land for appropriate locations).
Office buildings are already located or adjacent to the old Superfund sites where cleaning is underway; Google workers were exposed to toxic vapors from a superfund site under their office in 2013. Since it can take decades to fully resolve a site, surveillance is essential. “For superfund sites in particular, these are the most contaminated sites in the country, and it is important that there are complete criticisms for people working on sites, as well as for people around them,” explains Jennifer Liss Ohayon, scientific researcher of the Silent Spring Institute who studied the re -evolution of superfund sites.
But Trump wants to erode the monitoring of new data center projects that receive federal support – adding “categorical exclusions” to the typical assessments of the national law on environmental policy. The environmental examinations that take place could also be limited by the lack of power of people in federal agencies that the Trump administration hacked in pieces, including EPA.
“America needs new data centers, new semiconductive and flea manufacturing facilities, new power plants and transmission lines,” Trump said before signing Decrees in AI last week. “Under my direction, we will do this work and it will be done with certainty and with the protection of the environment and all the things we have to do to do it correctly.” Good luck.
