Funny how the same people who spent years screaming about China stealing your data are now the ones handing your farmland to a Virginia corporation so it can build a server farm the size of 18 Walmarts. Ask yourself who benefits when the mayor and city attorney of Bessemer, Alabama sign non-disclosure agreements with QTS Data Centers before the public even knows what’s coming. Not you. Not the people who live there. The people who benefit are the ones who get to say “oops, it was a secret” after the deal is already inked.
Project Marvel. That’s what they’re calling it, because of course they gave it a superhero name. This thing would suck down at least 2 million gallons of water a day and burn through as much electricity as 760,000 homes. In a state where people already worry about drought and power bills. But Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, says your concerns are “bull crap.” His exact words. The man who couldn’t name the three branches of government when he was a senator is now telling public health experts and the people who actually live next to these things that they’re full of it.
Office of Jerry Carl (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s what the experts will tell you, if anyone bothers to listen. Kris Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi, says these facilities pump out nitrous oxides that cause respiratory problems. The closed-loop water systems QTS brags about? The pipes use corrosion inhibitors, and some of the common ones, in Zierold’s words, “can actually not be good for us.” There are zero population-based studies on the health effects of hyperscale data centers. Zero. They’re building them anyway. Funny how that works. The same crowd that spent three years demanding absolute certainty on every other public health question now says “just trust us” when a multibillion-dollar corporation wants to pour chemicals into pipes near your drinking water.
Justinn Overton, who runs Coosa Riverkeeper, put it better than I can. People in these communities “want to hear cicadas over the hum of generators. They want to see the night sky, not the lights of a data center.” That’s not a partisan statement. That’s a person who lives on dirt, not in a boardroom, talking about what it means to have a home.
JJ Cunning (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd the response from the establishment? Tuberville says we need data centers or “it will all go to China.” Classic move. Wave the China flag and hope nobody notices you just sold the farm. He also promised Alabamians wouldn’t “pay a single cent more” for energy. You believe that? A career politician who’s never paid a power bill in his life, promising you won’t feel the squeeze from a facility that draws as much power as three-quarters of a million homes. The math doesn’t work and he knows it. But he also knows you’ll vote for the R anyway, because that’s what you’ve always done.
That’s the part that should make you angriest. The Bessemer city council voted to pause the rezoning after residents raised hell. That pause happened because people showed up. Not because Tuberville rode in on a white horse. Not because the Republican Party suddenly remembered it’s supposed to care about rural America. Regular people forced their own government to slow down, and now the same party that claims to champion the little guy is calling their concerns “bull crap” on social media.
Brett Sayles / PexelsDoug Jones, the Democrat running for governor, proposed a one-year moratorium. One year to study the health and environmental impacts before you let a corporation build something that will “alter the environment and quality of life in the surrounding communities forever,” as he put it. That’s not radical. That’s what any sane government would do before rezoning farmland for a facility that drinks two million gallons of water a day. But the establishment treats it like a fringe idea, because asking questions about multibillion-dollar deals is apparently the real extremism now.
The Bessemer mayor signed an NDA with the developer. Let that sink in. Your elected official signed a secrecy agreement with a corporation that wants to build on your land, and you weren’t invited to the conversation. Ask yourself who benefits from that arrangement. It isn’t the cicadas.