Pixabay
In March, Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Mark Huffman said, in reference to the twenty-eight planned and 40 active data centers in New Albany that “we are at the front of some very glorious times.” I’d like to take a look at what these “glorious times” actually entail.
To start, it should be noted that data centers require gas plants, which require energy, mainly in Ohio, from fracking. You cannot have the economic benefits of one without the environmental disasters from the other. By themselves, the three existing gas plants made to support data centers, along with this one, are projected to consume over 8.3 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, along with four hundred tons of PM2.5, particulate matter thirty times thinner than a human hair that is known to cause lung cancer and heart disease.
The natural gas needed to power these plants has been approved to be fracked out of over 22,000 acres of public Ohio land. Of this figure, 6,200 acres will come out of Salt Fork State Park (nearly a third of the park’s land), where our school field trips to and hosts LeaderShape.
A by-product of this fracking is radioactive brine, waste funneled into class 2 injection wells, of which Ohio has over twelve times the injection wells that Pennsylvania, which hosts four times the fracking operations Ohio does. We have allowed ourselves to become a dumping ground of radioactive waste, and we are already seeing the effects. In Marietta, a city in South-Eastern Appalachian Ohio, residents are and have been concerned about the safety of drinking water, as the seventeen injection wells stationed there have begun to leak into the soil and spew out of the earth.
Every project made to support the AI tech-boom in Ohio, spurred by the fact that Ohio lacks much effective environmental regulation, will only exacerbate these problems.
The Ohio government has sold its land and the health of its people off to AI companies, mainly OpenAI and Meta, trading the wellbeing of our environment and our fellow citizens for questionable economic benefit. In fact, our state government has attempted to hide this truth from us. Buried in House Bill 15, a policy allows AI companies to build data centers “behind the meter,” allowing them, if built on land owned by or leased to the company, to build without giving any notice to the public, holding no public hearing, and in as little as sixty days.
We are not at the front of any glorious times. We are facing a bleak, bleak future—one run by those to whom our governments have sold us out.
