They say it many different ways.

“We’re water-neutral.”

“We recycle.”

“We use closed-loop cooling.”

Here is what’s not said: Most of the water a data center actually consumes never touches the building at all.

When a tech company tells a county board that its new campus will use, say, 2 million gallons a year for cooling, that number is real. But it’s only the direct water. They are talking about the water that runs through the chillers on site.

What that number leaves out is the indirect water. You have to account for the water consumed upstream at the power plant that’s burning coal or gas or splitting atoms to generate the electricity that data center needs, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

That indirect water, or the water used to make the electricity, accounts for about 80 percent of a data center’s total water footprint, according to industry analysis from Apstech Advisors.

Other research put it differently but lands in the same place. Indirect consumption runs more than 10 times higher than what happens on-site, according to analysis from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Another study from International Energy Agency in 2025 estimated that about two-thirds of all water used by data centers is linked to electricity generation, while one-fourth is tied to cooling.

Either way you slice it, the number a company puts in its press release is the smallest slice of the real footprint, and it’s the only slice anyone’s required to disclose.

Subscribe now

See it in the reports

I wanted to see this dynamic in action, not just in theory. So, I went and read Amazon’s own sustainability materials on data center water use, published earlier this summer.

Here’s what Amazon says about itself.

Its data centers used 0.12 liters of water for every kilowatt-hour of computing in 2025, a figure the company says is seven times+ more efficient than an industry average of 0.84 L/kWh.

Amazon says it’s three-quarters of the way to a 2030 goal of being “water positive,” returning more water to communities than it draws, and that in 2025 it returned three gallons for every four it used. It points to more than 50 water-replenishment projects and 26 facilities running on reclaimed wastewater instead of drinking water.

I didn’t read one sentence in Amazon’s public materials about the water consumed at the power plants generating the electricity behind those servers, or the 80 percent of the footprint that, by the industry’s own analysts’ estimates, actually matters more.

Amazon’s 2.5-billion-gallon global consumption figure, reported this year, is the company’s first-ever public disclosure of a total water number. It’s not a years-long track record, but rather a first draft.

You can access their full Sustainability Report here.

I looked at Google’s environmental reports, which show water consumption climbing from roughly 6 billion gallons in 2023 to 8.1 billion gallons in 2024 to 10.9 billion gallons in 2025, nearly doubling in two years, even as the company touts efficiency gains.

None of these companies’ headline efficiency metrics, the liters-per-kilowatt-hour numbers that show up in press releases and county board presentations, account for water used to generate the electricity that keeps these buildings running.

That’s the shell game, and it’s not unique to any one company. It’s the industry’s shared blind spot, and it’s the one number nobody’s required to hand over.

It’s also worth noting that these numbers come from voluntary corporate reports not audited filings.

I believe California Governor Gavin Newsom was wrong to veto legislation that would have required data centers in the state to disclose water consumption levels, as independent audits can offer a better understanding of what’s going on.

Why does this matter if the total national impact is small?

Nationally, direct data center water use is a rounding error.

By some estimates it’s around 17 billion gallons a year, or about three-tenths of one percent of the public water supply in this country. If you only look at the national average, you could convince yourself this whole fight is overblown. Some people may take that side.

But averages hide a deeper truth. Water isn’t consumed nationally. It’s consumed locally. It comes from your aquifer, your river, or your municipal treatment plant. In the towns where these campuses actually get built, the local numbers look nothing like the national ones.

Take The Dalles, Oregon, with a population of less than 16,000 people. It’s a town with real history. In the 1840s it was the end of the line for Oregon Trail wagons, the point where settlers had to raft down the Columbia because the cliffs made the route west impassable.

Nearly two centuries after pioneers ran out of road there, the town is now running out of water for a different kind of frontier.

Records released after a public-records fight between Google and The Oregonian-OregonLive show Google’s water consumption there grew roughly fivefold between 2012 and 2025 to about 550 million gallons a year.

One company now accounts for nearly 40 percent of an entire town’s water use. The city expects local water consumption to keep climbing in the next several years, with residents’ water bills projected to nearly double as The Dalles scrambles to upgrade its aging water system.

The city still won’t say how much of that rising demand is from Google. Officials point to confidentiality provisions and a promise they made to the company to keep the specific numbers secret. The public bears the cost of the infrastructure upgrade, but isn’t allowed to know whose thirst is actually driving it.

Oregon’s Gov. Tina Kotek said earlier this year that data centers’ impact on Oregon is “not sustainable” at the current growth rate, citing the industry’s consumption of water, energy, and community resources.

The same fight just played out in Virginia.

Google’s planned data center campus in Botetourt County near Roanoke has three buildings, three substations, more than 900,000 square feet, at least $3 billion in investment.

To supply its water needs, the company signed an agreement with the Western Virginia Water Authority, the utility that provides drinking water to customers in the city of Roanoke and the counties of Roanoke, Franklin and Botetourt, for up to 2 million gallons of water a day at the outset, with room to grow to 8 million gallons a day as the campus expands.

When the water authority handed a copy of that agreement to Virginia Business, the water figures were blacked out. The authority’s executive director said the numbers had been shared voluntarily by Google under a promise of confidentiality.

Henri Gendreau, founder of the independent outlet The Roanoke Rambler, sued in Roanoke Circuit Court, arguing the water figures weren’t proprietary and had to be released under Virginia's Freedom of Information Act.

A circuit court judge agreed and ordered the water authority to release the unredacted agreements. The water authority tried to get the ruling stayed while it appealed; the Virginia Court of Appeals declined, and the real numbers finally went public.

A local group, the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance, put it plainly once the documents came out. They were outraged that 2 to 8 million gallons of drinking water a day may go to a single private company.

After a year of litigation the community finally learned how much of its own drinking-water capacity has been quietly committed to one tenant.

It’s also worth noting what the water authority’s own director said about why the number was sealed in the first place. He signs confidentiality agreements tied to economic development projects a couple of times a year. What?!

Redacting water numbers for data centers has become routine administrative practice at a public utility, which means the Botetourt fight isn’t really about one company or one campus. It’s about how many other agreements, in how many other counties, are sitting behind the same kind of non-disclosure clause right now, waiting for someone to sue.

Here’s what the industry will tell you

The counterargument says something like, “It’s not fair to blame the data center for water used at a power plant miles away, any more than you’d blame your own house for the water your utility uses to keep your lights on.”

In a narrow technical sense, that’s true. The data center didn’t build the power plant. It just demands the electricity that keeps the power plant running flat-out.

But that’s exactly the shell game.

A company can announce record water efficiency at its “water-positive” campus, while its electricity contract is quietly driving up water withdrawals at a coal or gas plant two counties over, and nobody at the ribbon-cutting has to say a word about it, because that water isn’t in the data center’s numbers.

What to ask, if you’re at a zoning hearing or a public comment period:

Not “how much water will the facility use,” but “how much water will be consumed, total, including the electricity it draws”? Ask for direct plus indirect.

What kind of power is contracted to serve this load — grid mix, dedicated gas plant, nuclear — and what’s the water intensity of that specific generation source?

Is there an independent, ongoing water accounting requirement, or is the “water-neutral” claim a one-time press release with no audit behind it?

Is the company’s own total-consumption number a track record, or a first-time disclosure with nothing yet to compare it against?

Water usage legislation is gaining steam this year among state lawmakers.

Here’s one toolkit that states can use to address and mitigate the impacts that data centers have on their water resources. A new report also outlines how state legislatures are regulating the water consumption of data centers.

“AI is accelerating data center growth at a pace that traditional water planning was never designed to handle,” co-author Daniel Anderson, J.D., GWC Water Law Fellow said in a statement. “Whether you are a policymaker trying to protect your community’s supply, a researcher tracking utility trends, or an industry leader looking to mitigate risk, understanding these four legislative pathways is vital to navigating our shared water future.”

I’ve spent my career chasing the difference between what a company says on paper and what’s actually coming out of the tap or happening in your backyard. This fight is the same one wearing a new hat.

The water strain is real…. How about those numbers in the press release?

Want to learn more myths and facts about water use at AI data centers? You can check out this newly launched section of the Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting Map.

Want to hear me talk about other issues associated with AI Data Centers beyond the water? Check out my recent interview with Katie Couric.

Learn More About Closed-Loop Cooling Systems

Closed-loop cooling is often presented as the clean solution to data center water consumption. The reality is more complicated.

What is a closed-loop cooling system?

Traditional data center cooling uses open-circuit cooling towers: water is pumped over hot surfaces, some evaporates (removing heat), and the remainder is recirculated. Because water evaporates, it must constantly be replenished from local supplies.

A closed-loop system keeps the coolant (usually water or a refrigerant) in a sealed circuit. It never evaporates or contacts the outside air directly. Heat is transferred to a secondary system, such as a dry cooler (large fans blowing outside air over tubes) or a heat exchanger, and rejected without water consumption.

Some data centers use a hybrid approach: closed-loop primary cooling supplemented by evaporative cooling only during peak summer heat.

✅ Why Closed-Loop Can Be Good

• Dramatically reduces or eliminates water consumption — up to 95 percent less water than conventional cooling towers

• No cooling tower blowdown (wastewater discharge)

• No chemical water treatment required, reducing chemical runoff risk

• Less noise from water tower fans in some configurations

• Better for drought-prone regions where water scarcity is a real concern

⚠️ Why Closed-Loop Can Be Problematic

• Dry coolers require significantly more electricity to achieve the same cooling effect, especially in hot climates

• In extreme heat events, closed-loop systems may be unable to cool adequately, requiring backup evaporative cooling anyway

• Higher upfront capital cost, which some operators use to justify choosing conventional cooling instead

• Some companies claim “closed-loop” status but still use water in the secondary heat rejection stage

• The higher electricity draw of closed-loop cooling can increase carbon emissions depending on the grid mix

What questions to ask about any data center’s cooling claims

• Is the system truly closed on both the primary and secondary loops, or does the secondary loop use evaporative cooling?

• What is the facility’s water usage effectiveness (WUE) rating — ideally close to 0 for closed-loop systems?

• Is supplemental evaporative cooling used during peak summer temperatures? If so, at what frequency and volume?

• How does the increased electricity demand of dry cooling compare to the carbon footprint of conventional water-cooled systems on the local grid?

Learn more here:

Data’s Hot Secret: The Closed-Loop Paradox

Data Center Water Cooling, HyperFRAME Research, February 2026

Cooling Water Efficiency Opportunities for Federal Data Centers, U.S. Department of Energy

EESI, “Data Centers and Water Consumption,” June 2025

What’s happening in your town? Know about other places that had to sue to get water usage numbers? Let us know in the comments below.

In this live conversation, Rep. Vikki Goodwin and fourth-generation cattle farmer Clayton Tucker join us to talk about what that growth means for water, farmland, and the families caught in between, and what real accountability could look like.

The constant hum and buzz of data centers is not good for the birds, the bees, or the cattle. More and more people are showing up to city council meetings to their express concerns, but not every council is hearing them with open ears….

Public polling has shown that data centers are extremely unpopular amongst all Texans and especially those living in rural areas, nearly two-thirds of which opposed construction of the facilities in their community, according to a recent University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll.

Rep. Vikki Goodwin is serving her fourth term in the Texas Legislature, representing parts of Austin and the Lake Travis area, and is currently running for Lieutenant Governor of Texas. Raised in Dallas, she earned her BBA from the University of Texas and her MPA from the LBJ School of Public Affairs. As a member of the Appropriations Article III Subcommittee overseeing education funding, her legislative priorities include public school funding, housing affordability, water infrastructure, and access to healthcare.

Clayton Tucker is a 35-year-old, fourth-generation cattle farmer from Lampasas, Texas, and serves as secretary of the Texas Farmers Union. He is currently a Democratic candidate for Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. Tucker has been an outspoken voice on the strain that drought, land loss, and now data center development are placing on Texas agriculture, and has called for stronger state oversight of data centers’ water and power use.

Get more from Erin Brockovich in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

In March 2026, residents of a quiet valley in Fort Wayne, Indiana, learned that a limestone quarry, complete with an asphalt plant, a concrete plant, and a mini rail yard (a complex of 1,600 total acres) was headed for the land next to their elementary school, across from a brand-new hospital campus, and up against a protected wetland called Eagle Marsh.

Eighty-one days later, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted 4–0 to deny it. The developer withdrew everything else that same night.

The numbers you need to know: 12,842 signatures. 44 organizations. 1 unanimous vote.

We connected with Shawn McCarthy, one of the people who helped lead that fight, because this story is proof that ordinary people can beat a well-funded developer. I want you to know exactly how these fights get won, lost, and set up to happen again.

“We were told nobody wins these fights,” Shawn said. They won anyway, and it’s not over yet.

Whether you are dealing with issues from a data center, a quarry, an abandoned landfill, or some other pollution problem, this story can serve as your playbook.

Learn more at their website No Quarry on Homestead.

The company behind the plan

The developer was The Heritage Group, an Indianapolis-based conglomerate. Before residents ever got to the merits of a quarry in their backyard, it was worth asking what kind of neighbor Heritage had been elsewhere.

The record isn’t subtle. A Heritage Group subsidiary, Heritage Thermal Services, ran a hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. In December 2011, an explosion there killed a service technician and hospitalized another employee; four of the OSHA citations that followed were repeat violations.

In July 2013, a second explosion released roughly 800 pounds of arsenic- and manganese-contaminated ash into the surrounding neighborhood.

The EPA documented Clean Air Act violations across multiple years, and the Department of Justice described the pattern as systemic noncompliance, leading to a 2018 consent decree of nearly $600,000 combined in penalties and community lead abatement funding.

Fourteen more informal enforcement actions followed over the next five years.

Subscribe now

Heritage also founded and spun out Heritage-Crystal Clean, a publicly traded company in which Heritage Group held a minority stake. Heritage Group’s chairman since 1980, Fred Fehsenfeld Jr. chaired that company’s board from 2012 to 2023—spanning the entire period in which the violations occurred that led to a 21-count federal complaint, settled in December 2023 for more $1.1 million, for conduct that included operating a hazardous waste facility in Indianapolis without the permit required to do so.

This same company showed up to Shawn’s community promising hot dogs at school field days.

From alarmed to organized in 81 days

Shawn first learned about the quarry from a Reddit post, pointing to a local news story that aired in March 2026. The story featured a resident who’d spotted a reporter filming the valley and had pulled over and became the first person interviewed on camera.

HOA leaders nearest the proposed site had actually known slightly longer, as Heritage’s lawyers had contacted them in late February after survey crews were spotted in the valley.

What followed moved fast. A small gathering that residents still call “the barn meeting” happened within days of the news story. By March 16, a few dozen people were at the barn again to talk strategy. The next day, the local school board, tipped off by someone in the emerging group, put the quarry on its agenda.

A week later, the board convened a special meeting to formally oppose the project, packed with residents and, notably, Heritage representatives who Shawn says argued their case badly enough to generate even more press.

The next night, roughly 250 people showed up to a meeting at Lafayette Meadows Elementary, diagonally across the street from where the quarry would have gone. A small group had pulled together an agenda and a slide deck in a few days.

“By that point we’d made the shift,” Shawn said. “From March 6 to March 24, I would say we went from alarmed to organized, and we just kept getting more and more organized. I don’t think anyone anticipated the speed.”

The specifics of working a plan

The coalition that formed ended up calling itself “the Alliance,” and organized itself in layers. A small group of founding leaders, including an attorney, an HOA president who helped raise most of the money, and the resident who’d started the grassroots website, made top-level calls.

About ten people joined the effort to support them with the coordination work. A larger group of volunteers canvassed, postered, and posted. And the wider community showed up to meetings, signed petitions, and kept the pressure visible.

The work itself was sprawling: weekly planning meetings, a pressure campaign aimed at local officials and candidates, outreach to local businesses, and untangling two separate, overlapping government processes Heritage needed to clear.

The first was a Board of Zoning Appeals special-use approval to put a quarry in agricultural-zoned land. The other was a Planning Commission rezoning request to the county’s highest industrial classification, needed for the concrete plant, asphalt plant, and rail yard. Helping residents understand which process needed what kind of input, legal argument versus public pressure, became its own full-time job.

An early filing error by Heritage delayed their hearing by a month. At the time, organizers worried the delay would drain momentum. In hindsight, Shawn believes it did the opposite, giving the Alliance a full extra month to grow, organize, and fortify.

By the final hearing, moved to the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum to accommodate the crowd, 56 people spoke against the quarry and one spoke in favor. The opposition included two hospital CEOs, a county surveyor, a land use expert, a school district superintendent, and a hydrogeologist.

“It felt like a war council,” Shawn said. “Like chiefs of a tribal alliance planning an attack. We were essentially playing defense, but for some reason it felt like we were planning an attack rather than planning defense.”

What Heritage got wrong

Heritage’s public case, as Shawn describes it, leaned on minimization and misdirection: downplaying the eventual size of the quarry opening, glossing over the rail infrastructure, and—in a claim Shawn calls simply false—insisting there wouldn’t be silica dust in the air from a limestone operation.

The company commissioned a study claiming the quarry would raise nearby property values, a conclusion Shawn says relied on math that didn’t hold up. Executives leaned hard on jobs, despite the project promising up to 50 permenant positions across hundreds of acres.

The company routinely invoked “responsible regulation” in a state where, Shawn notes, quarry regulations are notably weak, and where Heritage’s own industry lobbies actively to weaken them further.

“They lied and misled and downplayed,” Shawn said. “It was clear they didn’t have a lot of faith in the intelligence of the community.”

Why the Board said “no”

Publicly, the Board of Zoning Appeals gave little away. Board members didn’t debate on the record, and the vote came without much theater.

But one member and a county land-use official did flag that the project didn’t fit with “All In Allen County,” the county’s long-range development plan, and that it threatened surrounding wetlands.

Shawn thinks something else mattered more: sheer scrutiny.

“For the folks in this process who were elected, or appointed by elected officials, I think they had a real reason to contemplate what the fallout would be from the mob, essentially,” he said. “And that’s what we created: a mob. One that was informed, motivated, perhaps a little scared, but damn determined.”

The ongoing fight…

Heritage can reapply to the BZA after a year. Shawn is blunt that the bigger threat isn’t this one project but the structural weaknesses in Indiana’s zoning appeals system that made this fight winnable by chance rather than by design.

He points to two fronts.

On defense: a state statute exempting mineral rights outside “urban areas” (currently defined, in part, by proximity to as few as eight houses that could be quietly loosened to let developers route around local zoning boards entirely.

On offense: conflict-of-interest rules for who’s allowed to sit on these boards in the first place. One Allen County BZA member manages a contracting company that subcontracts inside quarries. Under current law, that’s not disqualifying, making the standard close to an overt quid pro quo.

Shawn and parts of the Alliance plan to push the Indiana Statehouse when it reconvenes in January 2027 to redefine conflict of interest to cover direct or meaningful indirect financial stakes in the type of development a board member is voting on.

“If someone would financially benefit from a certain type of industrial development, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say they shouldn’t have a say over whether that development is allowed,” he said. “That’s just common sense.”

What it cost, and what it gave back

Shawn put in more than 250 hours during 81 days. He also mentioned that he’d been laid off at the start of the year and was navigating that alone, with six kids depending on him. The quarry fight, he said, became something else entirely.

“It was a different kind of pressure—bigger, if not a little more existential of a crisis—but I wasn’t in the boat alone,” he said. “We had a crew fighting that storm.”

Shawn is a veteran, and he described the fight as giving him something he says a lot of people struggle to find after leaving the service. It gave him a restored sense of purpose and a role in something bigger than himself, in pursuit of justice for people who might not have gotten it otherwise.

The community, he said, showed him something too. In a place with real political and socioeconomic range, people set differences aside and stayed in it together for 81 days straight.

What Shawn wants other communities to know

The proposed site was, in his words, “a uniquely bad idea” with wetlands, a hospital, a school, homes, all within a few hundred feet. The community fighting it had real advantages: education, income, time, and existing relationships with local officials that many communities facing similar fights simply don’t have.

“That’s kind of one of the tragedies of the whole situation,” he shared.

A resident raised it with him directly during the fight, a wealthy, mostly white, suburban neighborhood turned this into a five-alarm fire. What happens when the next Heritage Group shows up somewhere without those resources?

His advice for communities without that head start begins with one question asked before anything else: How many people care about this issue?

Find your mob. Not how many people think you can win, but how many people actually care. Enough to canvass ten hours a week? Enough to call politicians, sit through hearings, chip in money if they have it?

Learn the process cold. What approval does the developer actually need? Who decides? Learn every decision-maker’s name, their job, their church, and whether anyone’s kid plays ball with theirs.

Build out from what you’ve got. Who do your people already know in local media, in local government? Earned media, Shawn said, did more for the Alliance than anything they paid for.

“If you can make enough noise, they may come and cover you,” he said.

And finally, a distinction he wants kept intact. This isn’t a call to fight every development everywhere. The country still needs aggregate, still needs infrastructure, still needs the industries these projects serve.

The fight is for the communities where a project simply doesn’t belong, and for making sure the deck isn’t stacked against them before the fight even starts.

Shawn McCarthy is a resident of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and an organizer with No Quarry on Homestead. Learn more at noquarryonhomestead.com.

Then, the construction began. They shut down the road to his home and his business. His well water turned brown. The noise became constant. Now 2,200 acres of data center are coming. He shares his story, talks FOIA requests, and offers advice for how you can get involved.

You can contact Austin here: austin.w.newsom@gmail.com

Get more from Erin Brockovich in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

It’s hot out, and the bugs are thriving.

Three stories broke this month, in three states, with three different causes. First, a lung infection spreading through rooftop air conditioning in Manhattan. Next, a drug-resistant bug tied to a Meta data center’s cooling system in Wyoming. Finally, a parasite on produce across 34 states causing explosive diarrhea.

On paper, they don’t have much to do with each other. But look closer, and they’re all the same story wearing a different hat—warm water sitting somewhere it shouldn’t and little organisms growing when nobody’s watching closely enough.

Subscribe now

The Cooling Towers of Manhattan

Let’s start on the Upper East Side in New York City where officials just spent the last two weeks chasing an invisible enemy through the air conditioning.

As of this week, health officials have confirmed dozens of Legionnaires’ disease cases tied to a cluster of buildings that includes the Guggenheim, a Whole Foods, doctors’ offices, and plenty of apartment buildings where people just wanted a normal July.

The timeline moved fast once it started. On July 2, the health department identified two Legionnaires’ cases close enough together to launch an investigation in Carnegie Hill and Yorkville. By July 5, a third zip code was added. As of July 9, the official count stood at 46 diagnosed cases—22 still hospitalized, 19 recovering at home, five never hospitalized at all. No deaths, this time.

This cluster follows a Legionnaires’ outbreak in Central Harlem last summer that sickened more than 100 people and killed seven. The Upper East Side got off easier, at least so far, in part because of how fast the city moved this round.

Legionella doesn’t come out of your tap. It grows in warm, stagnant water—the kind that collects in industrial cooling towers, the giant rooftop units that keep big buildings cool in the summer. When those towers aren’t maintained properly, they can turn into a mist machine for bacteria.

The city sampled more than 180 cooling towers across the affected zip codes and 31 came back positive on initial screening. Nineteen of those buildings had fully cleaned and disinfected their towers by July 10; the rest were ordered to finish by the next day.

But “positive” doesn’t mean “guilty,” and this is where it gets murky.

The screening test the city uses can detect Legionella DNA, but it can’t tell live bacteria from dead ones, and only live bacteria make anyone sick. The test that actually answers that question, a culture test, takes up to two weeks to come back.

The city is disinfecting first and confirming later, which is the opposite order of how it usually goes. Historically, cities wait for confirmation before spending the money and shutting things down. This time, every building with a positive screen got ordered to clean immediately, before knowing for certain whether that particular tower ever held a live, infectious bacterium.

Give credit where it’s due: releasing the actual addresses while the investigation is still open is new. City health departments don’t usually name buildings mid-investigation. They wait for certainty, which can take weeks. This time, the public got the list before the science was finished, which is a real change in posture, even if the source itself is still unconfirmed.

More About Legionnaires’ Disease

Legionnaires’ disease is a serious form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria, which naturally occur in water. Most people exposed to the bacteria do not become sick. People develop Legionnaires’ disease by breathing in small droplets of water containing live Legionella bacteria. The disease is not spread person to person.

Symptoms typically develop two to 14 days after exposure and include fever, chills, muscle aches, shortness of breath, and cough. Legionnaires’ disease can be effectively treated with antibiotics when diagnosed early.

Anyone who lives, works or has visited the affected area since late June and develops flu-like symptoms should contact a health care provider immediately. People at an increased risk include adults age 50 and older, people who smoke or vape, those with chronic lung disease, people with weakened immune systems and those taking medication that suppresses the immune system.

The Bacteria Nobody Ordered in Wyoming

Next in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a rare, drug-resistant bacterium turned up in the city’s water reclamation system, the reused water that irrigates lawns and supports industry, not the water anyone drinks.

The city’s utility board found it back in February during a routine sampling of its reclaimed water irrigation system. Residents didn’t learn about this issue until July.

After months of testing, officials discovered the source was Fortis Construction, a Meta contractor tasked with building a 715,000-square-foot data center known as “Project Cosmo” in southeast Wyoming outside the state’s capital.

So, the source traced back to a contractor testing the cooling systems for Meta’s massive new data center, which is the same basic engineering problem as those Manhattan rooftops, just scaled up to a server farm.

Cooling loops get flushed and tested before the machines go live, and this time, that test water carried bacteria you’d expect to find around industrial metal processing, not a reclamation plant in the High Plains.

Cupriavidus gilardii is known for its high resistance to metals, and research indicates that while infections are extremely rare, the bacterium may pose health risks to immunocompromised individuals and the elderly through direct exposure. To date, only a limited number of documented human infections have been reported worldwide.

When residents started asking questions, the mayor’s response was to suggest people were getting “caught up in the emotion of this,” which is a sentence I doubt will age well.

In addition, no one can say for certain what else was in that discharge, because, as one water researcher put it plainly, nobody required the kind of pilot testing you’d expect before new industrial systems get anywhere near a public water supply.

Let me just say that “trust us” is not a treatment plan.

I’ve heard this excuse before. Pacific Gas & Electric told residents in Hinkley the chromium was safe. Meta says an independent study found no impact.

Data centers are popping up across this country faster than anyone can regulate them, chasing cheap land, cheap power, and thirsty rivers.

Wyoming’s constitution all but guarantees new water rights get approved. Cheyenne’s mayor says the city needs the revenue. And yes, small towns get squeezed into these deals because they need the money or the jobs, and the company on the other side of the table has more lawyers than the city has employees.

Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities is now requiring separate storage tanks so cooling water never touches the sewer system again. That’s a good fix. It’s also a fix that should have existed before a rare bacterium ended up in the reclamation plant, not after four months of residents wondering why the reuse water got shut off and nobody would say why.

And now, with the company named and the violation notice issued, the answers keep running out.

One person wrote to me saying:

I’ve been digging through months of Cheyenne City Council, Planning Commission, and BOPU records.

What I found is that this wasn’t just a wastewater incident. BOPU revoked the Meta contractor’s sewer discharge privileges on March 24, but the public wasn’t told until late June.

During those four months, the City Council:

• amended the same wastewater code section the contractor was later cited for violating

• held a federally required public comment period that received zero comments because no one knew there had been a contamination incident

• continued approving major data center projects while repeatedly reassuring the public about water and environmental protections.

Yikes! Residents still don’t know where the contaminated wastewater was hauled after it was cut off from the sewer system.

Read more about what happened here.

The Salad Nobody Can Trace

And then there’s the lettuce.

Now technically this story is about a parasite, not a bacterium, but it is a microscopic organism that can cause illness. Cyclospora is a single-celled parasite that requires a host to complete its life cycle and reproduce, unlike bacteria, which can survive and multiply independently in soil, water, or the body. We liked the title so we went with it!

A Cyclosporiasis outbreak—the illness caused by Cyclospora, the parasite known for triggering “explosive,” relentless diarrhea—has now been reported in 34 states, with Michigan alone logging more than 3,300 cases in a state that usually sees about 40 or 50 cases a year. Health officials still haven’t found the source.

“Early information has shown lettuce as a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation,” said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) in a statement.

Past outbreaks have been traced to basil, cilantro, mesclun mixes, raspberries, and snow peas. All types of produce that passes through a lot of hands and a lot of water before it lands on your plate. This one’s still a bit of a mystery, weeks in.

Food picks up the parasite typically through water supplies that are infected with human feces.

Cyclospora is a parasite that infects the intestines and causes watery diarrhea, nausea, and stomach cramps. It is often contracted by eating or drinking something contaminated with the parasite.

It doesn’t rinse off easily. You basically have to cook it to death, which isn’t exactly the advice anyone wants to hear about their salad in July.

The timing between becoming infected and becoming sick is usually about one week but can range from 2 days to 2 weeks or more.

Cyclospora was one of multiple parasites made optional to track by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last year, according to the agency's website.

In July 2025, the CDC reduced the number of pathogens tracked by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet, from eight to two. FoodNet is a CDC collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and 10 state health departments.

The CDC noted on its website last week that it would be publishing data more frequently than in previous seasons given “the recent increase in cyclosporiasis cases.”

It's worth noting that federal law already requires farms to provide toilets and handwashing stations for crews working more than three hours a day, but that threshold is itself a loophole, and research has tied inadequate field sanitation directly to higher rates of intestinal parasites among farmworkers. The fix isn’t complicated. It’s enforcement.

The Common Connection

None of these outbreaks are the same disease, the same industry, or even the same kind of water.

A cooling tower, a data center’s cooling loop, and fields irrigated with who-knows-what. These places are where warm water sits, tiny organisms multiply, and testing is either an afterthought or a legal minimum instead of a real safeguard.

In each story, the public is dealing with the health consequences.

The epidemic here is not any single bacterium, but the lag time between “we knew” and “you knew.”

Every summer, as the heat goes up, all of it comes due at once.

We Can Make Changes To Protect Our Health

Cooling towers: Require every tower to register with the city and test for Legionella on a set schedule with results made public not just after someone gets sick. NYC has had this rule since its 2015 South Bronx outbreak, which is part of why officials could move fast this time.

Data center cooling systems: Require pre-operational testing of discharge water before a facility goes live and offer separate storage units so cooling water never touches public wastewater systems.

Produce traceability: This problem is mostly a federal issue, but cities and states can push for faster public alerts the moment a source starts narrowing, instead of waiting for FDA confirmation.

Farmworker sanitation: Close the loophole that lets employers skip toilets and handwashing stations for shifts under three hours, and enforce the existing ban on towelette substitutes for real soap and water. Intestinal parasites like Cyclospora have long been linked to inadequate field sanitation. The fix already exists, and it just needs enforcement teeth.

Who remembers Banarama? Doesn’t it feel more and more like we’re all being left on our own to figure out these problems?

What’s happening in your town or city? Do you feel safe? Let us know in the comments.

It’s so easy when covering hyperscale data centers to report on concrete and servers. Or cooling systems, megawatts, and zoning maps. It’s hard to picture the families it impacts or the backyards that get caught in the middle of an industry’s growth.

Today’s guest essay is from Madison Taggart, whose family is facing exactly that. A 185-foot power line is set to cut through the Virginia woods she grew up in.

What follows is a story about power lines, but it’s also a story about what a childhood home is worth, and what happens when it stands in the way of an industry that grew faster than anyone planned for. I’ll let Madison take it from here.

My backyard has always felt like a timeless space. Our house is at the end of a cul-de-sac in Loudoun Valley Estates, overlooking the forested hills of the Broad Run River Valley ringing around the back of the community. I could walk to my old high school from the property, if I was willing to get my shoes wet.

I know my backyard from the tall rolling hill where a birdfeeder currently sits, the sheer cliff decked in cedars, sycamore, and dogwood and yet more native brush plunging toward the stream, where lines of rocks I made with my father when I was younger make the river burble.

In the winter, the hill is perfect for sledding. In springtime, rains flood the stream and bluebells arise around the floodplain. My grandmother’s garden still stands as a living reminder of her puttering out to tend to the chives. Further back in the woods is a place named Picnic Park on Google Maps, where my dad has put down picnic tables, and is home to the high-school cross country team’s trails.

My parent’s home is the place we could run away to when the weight of modern life was heavy. But since 2025, the backyard is no longer just green space. It’s the stage of a legal and industrial war we had been blissfully oblivious to until a phone call changed everything in 2025.

The “call from hell” as my mom calls it came on a Friday the 13th. I was not home for the call, but I was there for the aftermath when my mom gave me the news, seething in anger and dread. Dominion Energy, our power company, asked if they could walk our property for an “alternative” Golden to Mars high-voltage power line called Route 3A.

We had heard of Golden to Mars. Our community had already been fighting another route following Loudoun County Parkway directly in front of us, listed as Route 5 in their plans. We previously learned they planned to have nine underground options alongside five aboveground options with an open house to weigh them.

Route 3A was different. It arrived with no public meeting and no advance notice. Until that call, none of us had known it existed.

Every part of this line is destructive.

It includes a 185-foot power pole, taller than most 15-story buildings and the Statue of Liberty, planted in the middle of our backyard. It calls for 500-kilovolt lines, a voltage typically found only near nuclear plants, running less than 100 feet from our neighbors’ windows. It cuts through miles of forested old-growth trees in the Broad Run River Valley, a corridor conservationists have flagged for its wildlife habitat and water quality. A total of 182 homes sit just 500 feet of Route 3A. We are not an isolated backyard. We are one of 182 homes—and that is just “direct” impacts.

All this destruction is to power data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, known by many as “Data Center Alley.”

That phone call was the start of our education into data centers and high-voltage power lines, a crash course we never asked to enroll in.

Our year has been filled with correspondence, research, and flooding the Virginia State Corporate Commission (SCC) in their website and their hearings with neighbors pleading to pick anything but these aboveground routes.

It has been a long grind, and it isn’t over.

As of June 29, the SCC issued its final order, deciding that Route 3A is the “best” route for the Golden to Mars project. In the order the commission says Route 3A is “clearly inferior” to the alternative route by “almost every objective measure,” as it is longer, costlier, and closer to more homes. They approved it anyway, citing an “urgent” need to keep the region’s power reliable.

Despite feeling disheartened, our community has chosen to continue resisting the order, and pushing for reconsideration, even if it means going to the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Hours after the order came down, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution demanding the route be reconsidered before July 20, the date the SCC loses jurisdiction and the order becomes permanent.

And in a move county officials are calling extraordinary, our HOA deeded 12 acres of land, directly to the Loudoun County School Board, hoping to hand the board the same leverage over Route 3A that it had used to block the commission’s preferred route months earlier.

As I write this, the School Board hasn’t officially decided whether to use it. We have until July 20 to find out.

So how did we get here?

Gem Bingol, a land use field representative with the Piedmont Environmental Council, has watched this unfold for two decades.

Ashburn became a data center magnet, she told me, because of Loudoun’s hunger for tax revenue, its friendly land-use rules, its proximity to Washington D.C., and a reliable grid to plug into.

“Initially, when data centers were approved, they were all within Data Center Alley, and there wasn’t much to pay attention to,” she said of the industry’s early years. The thinking then was simple; it’s all inside the building.

That thinking hasn’t aged well. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator responsible for planning power supply across Virginia and 12 other states, has its own long-term forecasts that show how badly the industry underestimated itself.

In 2022, PJM projected the Dominion zone, which covers Loudoun and the rest of Data Center Alley, would add about 5,700 megawatts of new load by 2037. Three years later, in 2025, that same forecast for the same year had quadrupled to more than 20,000 megawatts. Summer peak demand in the Dominion zone hit 23,905 megawatts in 2025 alone, which is 23 percent higher than in 2019.

The industry didn’t plan for its own growth and is now building through our woods to catch up.

My family drove past those data centers hundreds of times without a second thought. I noticed the trees coming down for gray concrete blocks but figured we all need somewhere to store our digital lives. Painted in muted reds and blues, ringed by shrubs and black fencing, they were built to look almost harmless. Almost.

Despite looking like office parks, data centers carry industrial power demands that rival heavy manufacturing, and the grid built to serve them is now cutting through neighborhoods, not just the alley that gave it its name.

Now that lack of planning is manifesting in power lines ripping through the community in the name of data centers.

By far one of the most crippling consequences of having so many data centers in the area is the sheer power demand, which takes us to Dominion Energy and how eminent domain laws have become their best weapon.

Dominion Energy has for years now been leveraging legal loopholes in eminent domain law and their own power in the government to get their projects through.

Data centers are private businesses, but the transmission lines built to power them aren’t treated that way. Under Virginia law, Dominion only needs the SCC to certify that a line serves “public convenience and necessity,” not that the data center itself benefits the public, and that certification alone hands Dominion the legal power to take private land through eminent domain.

We’ve also learned that Dominion operates by splitting communities apart. Once the application was filed, the utility layered on so many aboveground route options that different pockets of the neighborhood, and the school board, were pushed into arguing over whose yard should be sacrificed, rather than uniting against the project itself.

Dominion’s public materials leaned hard on the number of homes affected and the cost of each option, which became their main argument against burying the line. The only way we found the fuller picture was for our community to band together and dig for that information ourselves—asking questions during open houses and reaching out to people who’ve already been fighting the power lines and data center’s unregulated growth.

As we’ve fought, I’ve seen two main camps of advocates emerge.

There are people like my mom, who are always proactive and throw themselves into fighting against the power lines in collaboration with people like Gem who know more about the far-reaching issues of the power line. My mom has lost sleep as she’s spent almost every day emailing journalists to spread awareness of our fight, rallying support in our community, setting up websites and funding, and gearing for what is inevitably going to be a prolonged fight.

On the other end of the spectrum, my dad has fallen into cynicism. They still help when asked, but our progress to him seems minimal, and he seems convinced that the power line will go through. And it’s hard not to blame him. Data centers and their corporate and governmental backers wield a lot of financial and legal weight.

But this work is far from hopeless.

We’ve found organizations like the Piedmont Environmental Council, who have been generous with their resources and knowledge. Even inside a system stacked toward development, we’ve found lawmakers who recognize the problems with the system and are willing to work with communities. We had the pleasure of working with Delegate JJ Singh and State Senator Srinivasan to pass legislation to regulate power lines.

We have also found allies in the school board, who have been blocking the Golden to Mars routes that would endanger students in Rosa Lee Carter Elementary School and Rock Ridge High School and agreed to stick with us.

None of the ground we’ve gained came for free. It came from banding together in our community, fighting Dominion’s use of eminent domain in every hearing and filing available to us, and refusing to back down. My job in all of it has been the unofficial communications officer: writing to public officials, alerting journalists to hearings, and writing essays like this one.

Our main goal now is to keep interest high, and get people motivated to support our push as we angle to convince the Virginia State Corporate Commission to reconsider their decision to pick Route 3A.

Some nights I try to picture what the backyard might look like if this project goes through. I envision the massive power lines I’ve seen from the car windows countless times, only grander in scale. Rakish metal poles with esoteric metal wings hanging from them, akin to an invasive species of warped Eiffel Towers, each stringing along black wires all to power an unseeable industrial machine quite literally next door to our community.

The image is hard to get into focus. I’m gripped by the existential dread that the place I’ve spent all my life in could be torn down.

Instead of trees that wait patiently in winter then grow green and majestic in spring, there’ll be nothing but buzzing, alien monoliths weaving webs of wires. There won’t be a red brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac with blooming flowerbeds lovingly tended by my mother or a humble park in the woods built up by my father. Just a half-dead lawn under wires that were never meant to answer to us.

It’s not a sight I ever want to see become my childhood home. It should not be what anyone’s backyard looks like. And this is a future that I will fight against, so no one goes through the same nightmare we have.

Madison Taggart was born and raised in Ashburn, Virginia, for 20 years and counting. She graduated the University of Pittsburgh in Biological Sciences and Public & Professional Writing and is a graduate from the Johns Hopkins Science Writing program. She is now looking to get her second masters in Integrative Neuroscience from Georgetown University and continuing to write on Medium and Substack.

For years, scientists struggled to understand why otherwise healthy coho salmon were dying before they could spawn in streams throughout the Pacific Northwest, including waterways that feed into Puget Sound. Researchers Zhenyu Tian and others at Professor Ed Kolodziej's lab traced the deaths to an unexpected source—a toxic chemical called 6PPD-quinone, formed when a common additive in car tires breaks down and is washed from roads into waterways during rainstorms.

Inspired by this challenge, Lakshmi Agrawal looked at the NOP process used to convert bio-waste into cellulose nanofibres (also known as hydrosponges), developed by Professor Benjamin Hsiao.

The novel question she asked was: could these cellulose nanofiber hydrosponges be used to remove the toxic chemical 6PPD-quinone from water? Her novel experimental methodology showed the answer was yes.

These biodegradable sponges made from agricultural jute waste remove up to 80 percent of 6PPD-quinone from contaminated water. The material also captures heavy metals and other pollutants commonly found in stormwater runoff.

What makes Lakshmi’s work especially compelling is that it addresses a largely invisible pollution problem with real ecological consequences. Rather than simply studying the issue, she set out to create an affordable, sustainable tool that could potentially help communities and ecosystems impacted by tire-derived pollution.

Lakshmi was recognized at the 2026 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world’s largest international STEM research competition for high school students, where nearly 1,700 young scientists from more than 60 countries, regions, and territories showcased original research tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. She won $75K.

What strikes me most about her story isn’t the prize money. It’s what she said when I asked about what gives her hope for the future. She talked about how we need to listen to one another and the collaborative nature of science.

In fact, her own efforts were truly collaborative. She organized between the two labs across the east and the west coast, designed and coordinated the experiments, arranged for the preparation and shipment of samples, and is currently working on a research paper.

She is one of several young environmental innovators emerging from this year’s competition. In addition to Lakshmi’s work on tire-derived pollutants, other award-winning students developed technologies to improve plastic recycling, protect pollinators without traditional pesticides and monitor water quality through novel approaches to environmental sensing.

I thought Lakshmi’s story might resonate with all of you too. If a young scientist can learn about pollution in her own backyard, study an emerging contaminant, and become a problem-solver, I know each one of us can make a difference using our unique gifts as well.

Q: What sparked your love for science and your excitement for environmental science?

Lakshmi: Duringthe summer after 8th grade, I volunteered as a Nature Camp Counselor at Islandwood. On one particularly hot summer day, I brought my group down to the lake to observe aquatic species.

It was then that I noticed an oil sheen on the surface of a pond, and I remember just standing there, wondering how that would affect all the various aquatic organisms that relied on this natural ecosystem.

How would the water striders walk across the surface of water? What was actually happening chemically? Would that understanding help keep the water safe for all the ecosystems and communities around the lake?

I was curious, so I went home and started experimenting. Initially, I was simply trying to track surface tension and evaporation rates.

However, I then started adding variables and studied the correlation of the critical micelle concentration in terms of evaporation and surface tension.

Since then, every project has started off from a small and visible problem, that’s turned into a 007-esque chase for an explanation: Bellevue City Council water reports highlighting near-EPA limit levels of trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids or 6PPD-quinone killing coho salmon in the PNW region.

Discovering solutions to my community’s problems also addresses the global issue of how we protect our planet’s freshwater.

Q: Tire pollution is largely invisible to most people. How do you think we can get more people to care about toxins they can’t see?

Lakshmi: The hardest part about conducting scientific research is convincing people to care enough about your work to understand its importance. Using statistics, facts,
and ultimately logos doesn’t pull on heartstrings.

Almost nobody can picture 6PPD ozonating to form 6PPD-quinone, but almost everyone can picture a dying coho salmon in a stream, or picture that their own driving puts something into the water they can’t undo.

So, a lot of my outreach, presentations at the American Chemical Society and the American Water Works Association, talking to my local council about environmental protections, founding my school’s Science Research Club, has been about effective scientific communication that transforms invisible chemistry into a story that people can relate to and care about: salmon, drinking water, the orcas that depend on salmon, the communities whose livelihoods depend on a $1.5 billion fishing industry.

Faced with existential crises, such as climate change, I genuinely believe that the bottleneck isn’t a lack of concern, but rather, a lack of understanding.

Q: You developed a biodegradable sponge made from agricultural jute waste. Tell us more about how you discovered this solution and how it works.

Lakshmi: Since January 2025, I’d been learning about how 6PPD, a tire antioxidant, reacts with ground-level ozone to form 6PPD-quinone, which kills coho salmon before they can spawn. I couldn’t stop thinking about removing it after the fact, since
reformulating every tire in the world isn’t realistic on a short-time scale.

That question followed me into my Simons Research Fellowship at Stony Brook, where I read through an immense quantity of literature and kept coming back to cellulose nanofiber hydrosponges, a material Professor Hsiao’s lab makes from jute fibers through a patented, zero-waste nitro-oxidation process.

Nobody had ever tested them against tire-derived pollutants. I proposed connecting the two labs and have worked on the project ever since.

The “how it works” part comes down to surface chemistry. Jute-derived cellulose nanofibers (CNF), made via a zero-waste nitro-oxidation process that leaves them carboxyl-rich and negatively charged, have huge surface area and tunable porosity. I cross linked them with aluminum and citric acid to compare two binding chemistries: citric acid adds extra carboxyl groups for electrostatic capture, while aluminum binds through metal coordination.

Both create a pore network that grabs contaminants two ways at once: physically trapping tire wear particles, and chemically binding dissolved 6PPD/6PPD-quinone to the CNF surface.

Since the whole process starts from jute agricultural waste and stays cellulose-based, the sponge itself is biodegradable, so the cleanup material doesn’t become another pollution problem.

Q: You won $75,000 at Regeneron ISEF. What’s next for your research and this project?

Lakshmi: I’m back at Stony Brook at the moment to finish up this project! We have a few more tests to run before the paper’s ready to publish.

As a technology, the applicability of hydrosponges is expansive: the same adsorption mechanism can be applied to other tire-derived contaminants like benzothiazole and DPG, and PFAS and microplastics down the line.

For me personally, this is the project that’s taking me into a chemistry/chemical engineering degree at MIT, and I want to keep building toward a PhD in chemical or environmental engineering. I see this award as a stepping stone to a bigger, more impactful career.

Q: What gives you hope for the future?

Lakshmi: The collaborative nature of science. People often view science as an elitist sport, where the only competitors are intellectual PhDs in lab coats.

However, science is about curiosity, not credentials. The 6PPD-quinone problem was first brought to light thanks to citizen scientists around Seattle who observed dead coho salmon.

What gives me hope for the future is the larger integration of interdisciplinary fields working together to effectuate theoretical ideas into deployable solutions.

Ultimately, the better we listen to each other, the better we collaborate.

I’m so inspired by Lakshmi’s work. Her story really speaks to how one person can take something they are curious about in their backyard and make an impact.

Subscribe now

Yesterday, the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection announced a $450 million settlement with Chemours for poisoning the Cape Fear, Delaware, and Ohio rivers with PFAS, in some cases without required permits, and in other cases in violation of those permits.

Some might call this kind of settlement historic, but adjusted for inflation that $450 million is worth less in real dollars than the $333 million PG&E paid in 1996. You might remember the settlement was the one turned into a movie with my name on it, and that was 30 years ago.

If you want to get more technical, the $450 million Chemours settlement includes both the $22.5 million civil penalty and the cost of injunctive relief (cleanup, clean water supply, and pollution controls). The actual cash penalty is much smaller. PG&E’s $333 million was a direct settlement payment to those impacted.

Chemours generated nearly $6 billion in revenue last year. The penalty portion of yesterday’s federal settlement, $22.5 million, is what they earn in about 36 hours.

The settlement agreement is “the latest progress delivered under the Strengthening the Long Term pillar of Chemours’ Pathway to Thrive strategy, which includes the Company's sustained efforts to address legacy PFAS and other environmental claims,” according to the company’s own press release.

It represents what Chemours has already done. What I’m watching closely is what Chemours, and the PFAS industry, plans to do next.

Now before we go any further, I want to make sure you remember Chemours.

Maybe you know it as the company that spun off from DuPont in 2015, a corporate sleight of hand that conveniently separated DuPont’s profitable specialty chemicals business from its mounting PFAS liability.

Maybe you've seen Dark Waters, the film about Rob Bilott, the lawyer who spent years fighting DuPont over PFAS contamination in West Virginia communities.

Maybe you just know the name from the headlines about the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, where Chemours' Fayetteville Works facility has contaminated more than 7,000 drinking water wells with PFAS emissions.

Subscribe now

The AI data center boom is creating a massive new demand for PFAS. And Chemours is positioned to supply it.

Hyperscale data centers, the physical infrastructure that powers everything from Google searches to ChatGPT, are proliferating across this country at a staggering pace. Texas alone has more than 248 proposed new projects.

These facilities run hot, around the clock, and they need to be cooled. Increasingly, the industry is turning to a technology called two-phase immersion cooling, and it uses PFAS.

As we continue to cover data centers, it’s important to note that Chemours is one of the largest global producers of PFAS and one of the biggest suppliers of PFAS materials for data center coolants and semiconductor production (semiconductors are used to make the microchips deployed in data centers in vast quantities).

“The company aims to expand production of its PFAS materials, in particular resin for semiconductor manufacturing, to accommodate the growth of data centers across the country,” according to this 2026 report.

Let me say it as clearly as I can. The same company that just settled for $450 million in PFAS contamination damages is planning to make more PFAS to feed the AI boom.

It's not just the coolants. Data centers are also significant sources of PFAS through their fire suppression systems, and through the extraordinary volume of semiconductors they burn through as the industry races to build faster chips. Those discarded chips, full of PFAS, often end up in landfills.

The contamination pipeline runs from manufacturing to operation to disposal, and at every stage, communities near these facilities are at risk.

And we can’t even get straight answers on how much water these places are using, let alone their chemical footprint.

In Texas, state legislators recently learned that less than a third of data center companies responded to a survey about their water and energy use. The Texas Water Development Board has been sending mandatory water consumption surveys to data centers since 2023, and in 2025, only 17 percent responded.

The penalty for noncompliance? A $500 fine. The industry calls its operational details “trade secrets.”

Uh oh. That sounds a lot to me like the Halliburton loophole. For those that need a refresher, that loophole exempted fracking from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The provision, passed by Congress as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, was endorsed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who formerly served as the CEO of Halliburton, allowed fracking companies to hide the contents of the toxic chemical solutions that they pump into the ground. Fracking fluids became protected under law, and so doctors responding to health complaints can’t access the data showing what chemicals their patients have been exposed to.

In Wisconsin, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Water Policy published a paper last year on the “hidden environmental costs” of AI data centers. Hidden, they explain, means both literally hard to obtain and deliberately obscured.

Even an academic research center with dedicated staff and institutional access struggles to get concrete numbers on how much water and electricity any particular data center is consuming.

In 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water directly, but when you add the indirect water required to generate electricity for these facilities, that number balloons to 211 billion gallons.

If we can’t track water, the most basic, visible resource these facilities consume, what chance do we have of tracking PFAS?

The EPA’s answer, so far, has been to make it easier for the industry, not harder.

In September 2025, the U.S. EPA announced plans to fast-track the review process for chemicals used in data centers, with an explicit goal of making the U.S. the “AI capital of the world.”

The President issued an executive order directing multiple federal agencies to expedite permitting for data center materials, including coolants, semiconductors, and fire suppressants. The same EPA that just took Chemours to court for PFAS violations is simultaneously clearing a faster path for PFAS-laden data center materials to enter production and deployment.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the moment we’re in.

We know what PFAS does. We’ve known for decades, in some cases, industry knew before the public did. We have a $450 million settlement to prove it.

And yet here we are, standing at the edge of another wave of PFAS proliferation, driven by the insatiable resource demands of AI, with regulators being told to get out of the way.

I’ve spent my career watching this pattern play out.

Industry expands, corners get cut, communities are contaminated, decades pass, settlements are reached, and by then, the damage is already done. The communities around Fayetteville Works didn’t ask to have their wells poisoned. The families along the Cape Fear River didn’t consent to be part of Chemours’ production equation.

It’s been nine years since local news first started reporting that DuPont/now Chemours had been dumping unknown manmade chemicals into the Cape Fear River that couldn’t be filtered out before entering public water systems. Steps have been taken to limit human exposure to those toxic chemicals, but we are still learning about the lingering impacts of the widespread contamination on human health and the environment.

The work of cleaning up this legacy contamination and the cost to local governments and utilities dealing with the existing pollution continues.

“This deal does nothing meaningful for North Carolinians,” said North Carolina Governor Josh Stein. “This EPA, which has already weakened protections against chemicals like GenX, is now allowing polluters to pick and choose how and where they’ll fix their contamination, leaving North Carolina with no guarantees.”

The communities now living next to proposed data centers, in Texas, in Wisconsin, in Virginia, and in every state where this buildout is happening, deserve better than to be the next chapter in this story.

We need mandatory, enforceable water and chemical use reporting for data centers.

We need PFAS-free alternatives to be a prerequisite for permits and tax incentives, not an afterthought. We need the Chemours settlement to be a signal, not an exception.

Yesterday’s news is important. But the fight isn’t over. It’s just getting started.

Today, we have a guest essay from our friend Susan Wind, a mom and environmental advocate, who has been bringing attention to public health problems associated with toxic coal ash since her daughter was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 16.

When she learned that most of her neighbors had cancer too, she decided to do something about it. She sees a real connection between what happened in her neighborhood and what’s happening right now with hyperscale data centers going up in communities across the country.

We talked with Susan in 2021 so if you want to hear more of her story, check out this interview:

For years, I’ve been encouraging people to get plugged in to local politics. One of the best ways to get involved is to simply to show up to your public meetings, whether that’s city council, a board of supervisors, a public works commission, or any town hall meeting.

Decisions about local policies, whether it’s raising taxes, funding new parks, or approving new water treatment techniques, are made at these meetings.

We need to show up!

Most of these meetings involve a few elected or appointed people talking to themselves. A small group deciding on issues for the whole town? That’s where I’ve always thought we could have more influence. Tell them what you care about.

Now, more people are showing up. But guess what? We are discovering a lot of corruption and/or elected officials that don’t want to listen to the people. They have signed NDAs. They paperwork is already signed and construction has started.

We need more transparency as people show up to discuss issues with massive AI data centers in their communities—from persistent noise pollution to dwindling water supplies to sky-high energy bills.

Susan’s essay explains exactly what’s at stake when it comes to hiding information. And believe me, the truth always comes out.

Subscribe now

Same Playbook, Different Poison

by Susan Wind

Watching everyone in our country fight massive AI data centers being shoved into their communities hits a nerve. Residents didn’t ask for them. Yet, industry executives and politicians keep brokering these deals behind closed doors with zero regard for the people they’re supposed to represent.

I know this story because I lived it. In Lake Norman, North Carolina, I exposed how Duke Energy sold toxic coal ash as construction fill from the 1990s through 2014. Developers used it to build neighborhoods, putting this waste under schools, homes, parks, and businesses with no regard to human health.

State records from the 1990s prove it: agencies were told by the utility it was “safe and beneficial for all parties.” Politicians rubber-stamped it. The price was poisoned soil, poisoned water, and families left to fight cancer.

I did not ask for my kid to get cancer.

Ask anyone: Do you want toxic coal ash laced with radium and arsenic in your yard? What will they say?

Ask them: Do you want sewage sludge in your yard? What will they say?

Now ask them: Do you want a data center in your backyard? What do you think they’ll say?

We never get a choice about what’s forced into our neighborhoods.

For once, in a country torn apart for years, people from all walks of life agree on something. We don’t want a damn AI data center in our backyard.

The resistance is growing, and it’s crossing every line politicians use to divide us.

Just this week, residents and lawmakers gathered at the Michigan Capitol for a “People Over Data Centers” rally, demanding transparency as data center proposals multiply across the state. The rally was led by Republican legislators pushing for a one-year moratorium on new data center development.

You know who showed up? Liberals and conservatives, farmers and environmental advocates, city people and country people.

“True progress does not require us to sacrifice our peace, our natural resources, and our need for transparency from local government,” said Marshall resident Holly Harnden who attended the rally.

These are not fringe voices. These are neighbors who found out about decisions that would reshape their communities only after those decisions had already been made.

Sound familiar?

The same playbook is running again.

Data center giants and elected officials are selling the lie that they’re “safe,” and they bring “revenue and jobs.” They promise the water stays clean, bills won’t spike, and health won’t suffer. Just a little noise from generators screaming 24/7.

Every town in the U.S. gets the same script, and the people find out last.

When the fallout hits—contaminated groundwater, a collapsing grid, health crises—we know what happens next. Government and industry dismiss, deny, and delay.

Then the lawsuits come. Lawyers promise life-changing money. But the fine print never changes, and the real payout goes to the firms. The families get scraps.

The EPA has checked out, announcing it will not set national standards for data centers. No one’s watching.

The message we’re sending to society is you’re on your own.

Why do we keep repeating history? How many more towns will be sacrificed to backroom deals between government and industry?

I don’t remember any of us voting to put a data center in our backyard.

I was blindsided when I learned Lake Norman was built on coal ash. We thought we bought homes. We inherited a cover-up. We bought into a lie.

The coal ash fight is ongoing. Just last week, U.S. senators sent a letter to the U.S. EPA criticizing the agency’s reversal on coal ash regulations.

Today, families continue to be blindsided, only this time it’s a data center in their backyard. Same shock. Same playbook. Same silence from the people who were supposed to protect us.

If we don’t force transparency now, we’re building the next Lake Norman, and burying the next round of excuses with it.

If you’re ready to fight back, here’s where to start.

You are not alone, and you are not powerless. The number of active grassroots opposition groups across the country more than doubled in just the first quarter of 2026, to more than 833 groups operating across 49 states. Communities from California to Missouri to Indiana to Maryland are stopping planned data centers and passing legislation to prevent new ones. The playbook is real, and it’s working.

Find out what’s happening near you. I’ve heard from thousands of people across all 50 states and launched a new section on my map all about Communities & Legislation, drawn from those reports and verified news coverage, to see how communities are pushing back at planning boards, the ballot box, and in the courts, and how that grassroots pressure is turning into actual laws. Check it out here.

Show up before the decision is made. The single most effective thing communities have done is show up early to planning board meetings, zoning hearings, and town halls, before permits are approved. In some cases, opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed; the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance. Don’t wait for a construction sign to appear.

Connect with organizations already in the fight. The Stop Data Centers Coalition now includes more than 500 organizations with members in every state. Food & Water Watch has a free community toolkit with concrete steps for fighting a local proposal and contacting your members of Congress. Halt the Harm offers answers to your questions about data center impacts and access to important tools and experts who can help.

It’s never too late to plug in and help make a difference.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was supposed to be ready for its close-up.

It was freshly renovated at a cost of more than $14 million, according to federal contract records. The basin painted a proud “American Flag Blue” was ready for the nation’s 250th birthday bash. The pool was set to gleam beneath the July 4th fireworks like a patriotic mirror to the sky.

Then, it turned green.

Photos showed National Park Service workers wading in to battle an algae bloom that took over the historic landmark.

According to reports, workers started pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water as part of algae-control efforts, a treatment that, if the concentration is wrong, can cause skin, eye, and respiratory irritation to anyone who wanders too close.

Sounds like the cities that spend millions renovating a water treatment plant, only to use cheap fixes (ahem, chloramines) months later to deal with ongoing issues. Many leaders don’t get to the root of the problem when it comes to water issues. You have to know what’s in the water, so you can treat it more effectively instead of creating a chemical cocktail mix.

But this story isn’t about a botched renovation.

Subscribe now

Mother Nature Doesn’t Care About Your Renovation Budget

The Department of the Interior announced that “nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom.” But environmental scientists are less celebratory.

“The Fourth of July is probably the worst time of year because that’s when the temperature is highest,” Hans Paerl, a research professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY. “It’s Mother Nature that’s really running the show.”

The math here is pretty unforgiving. Algae thrive in warm, stagnant water loaded with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

Washington in July is famously swampy, surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Potomac River, and NOAA is forecasting another above-normal-temp summer.

The Reflecting Pool isn’t special. Algae are everywhere this summer.

Harmful algal blooms, or HABs, are rapid overgrowths of cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae, in lakes, ponds, rivers, and reservoirs.

Editor’s note: Review your HAB FAQs and these Healthy Water Habits to help protect yourself.

HABs love exactly what summer 2026 is serving: warm water, abundant sunlight, and nutrients washing in from agricultural runoff, lawn fertilizers, and septic systems.

The earliest ever harmful algae bloom was confirmed in April at Cayuga Lake in New York due to heavy rainfall and nutrient runoff. It’s the earliest bloom on record since 2018, when the Community Science Institute (CSI) began its HAB Monitoring Program.

In Oregon, the monitoring season began in May, and you can track advisories here.

Record heat is accelerating the problem, warming surface waters faster and creating conditions that researchers say are driving increases in HAB frequency, duration, and geographic range.

The Reflecting Pool’s algae is an aesthetic headache, but in swimming lakes across the country, the stakes are considerably higher. First, the economic impacts of HABs to fisheries and recreational areas can be extensive. And of course, they also impact our health and the health of our ecosystems.

Cyanobacteria produce toxins, cyanotoxins, that can cause liver damage, neurological injury, and in the worst cases, death. Dogs are especially vulnerable; they drink directly from water bodies, ingest large amounts relative to their body weight, and can die within hours of exposure to certain toxins.

Anatoxins, which target the nervous system, can kill a dog within minutes to hours.

These cases happen every summer at lakes and swimming holes where families have visited for years without incident, because HABs can develop within 24 to 48 hours when conditions are right.

Children are also vulnerable. They can swallow water when swimming. They stay in the water longer. Their developing organ systems are more susceptible to toxin-induced damage. Skin contact alone can cause rashes and blistering. Inhaling aerosols from HAB-affected water, the kind you get jet skiing or waterskiing, can trigger respiratory irritation and asthma attacks.

The water doesn’t have to look dangerous. Some blooms are invisible. Others develop within 24 to 48 hours. A lake that was fine last weekend may not be fine this weekend.

Look before you leap!

The rule is simple: if in doubt, stay out.

Do not swim in, wade through, or let your pets drink from water that appears green, blue-green, or pea-soup colored, or has surface scums, foam along the shoreline, or an unusual odor. That rule applies to familiar places you’ve visited for years. HAB conditions can develop overnight.

Before visiting any lake or swimming area, check your state health department’s website. Most states with active HAB monitoring programs post current advisories by water body. Look before you go. You can find more resources here.

If your dog swims in or drinks from water you’re even slightly uncertain about, rinse them immediately with clean water and watch for drooling, staggering, convulsions, difficulty breathing, or sudden weakness. Any of those signs means an emergency vet visit. There is no antidote. Supportive care must begin immediately.

If you or your child develops skin rashes, eye irritation, nausea, vomiting, or muscle weakness after swimming, seek medical care and tell your doctor about the potential bloom exposure.

The Pool is a Mirror

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was built to reflect something. Right now, it’s reflecting a truth we’ve been slow to reckon with. U.S. waters are under stress, and cosmetic fixes don’t address the underlying conditions driving that strain.

Nutrient pollution. Rising temperatures. Aging water infrastructure. Budget cuts. These forces are turning water green from the National Mall to the swimming holes where families have gathered for generations.

The pool is just a very large, very public illustration of a problem that’s been building for decades. Toxic algae blooms have increased 30-fold since the 1960s with more than 300 coastal systems impacted and nearly every state in the U.S. experiencing HABs, according to the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS).

So, the emergency response? The expensive equipment? The confident statements about problems being solved? It’s all been played out. Next comes the quiet acknowledgment, months later, that nothing fundamental changed.

Keep your eyes on the water.

Have you encountered a harmful algal bloom yet this summer? Leave a comment below with your location and what you saw.

The numbers don’t lie. In the first two months of 2026, the data center industry spent more than $36 billion on new construction in the United States, according to an April report. That’s just in January and February. For context in those same two months in 2025, the industry spent $1.4 billion.

That’s a land rush with 67 percent of it is headed for rural America, for the communities with the fewest resources, the least regulatory protection, and the most to lose.

The worst part? Most people don’t know they’re coming until it’s too late.

These massive facilities consume as much electricity as 80,000 homes each, drain hundreds of millions of gallons of water annually, run diesel backup generators that pump toxic pollution into the air, and drive up utility bills.

In many communities, they can be (and have been) approved without a single public hearing, without a single elected official casting a vote, and without anyone living in the community getting a say.

As more people understand the bigger picture on data centers, more communities are showing up and using their voices. Here’s what we’re seeing right now.

First, the push for state moratoriums is struggling.

The statewide moratorium movement sits with New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul right now. Earlier this month, the New York State Legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one-year moratorium on data center permits for any facility drawing more than 20 megawatts of peak power.

If Governor Hochul signs it, New York would become the first state in the nation to enact such a freeze.

The bill also requires a local public hearing before construction and a statewide environmental impact report within 18 months. It’s a direct response to what’s been happening on the ground with data centers proposed across upstate communities from Niagara County to the Hudson Valley, local planning boards overwhelmed by developers and their lawyers, and residents having nowhere to turn.

“The burden of rigorous analysis and defense against billionaires and their white-shoe law firms should not be put on volunteer planning board appointees,” Gay Nicholson of Sustainable Finger Lakes said at a press conference. “We need state-level intervention.”

The New York bill didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built on years of exactly the kind of local organizing I’ve been advocating for. Towns like Oneonta passing their own 12-month moratoriums after residents showed up to planning meetings and town halls. New York shows what’s possible when local momentum reaches critical mass.

Now, the state needs to follow.

Meanwhile, Maine's veto override failed. State lawmakers failed to override a veto from Governor Janet Mills on a bill that would have made Maine the first state in the nation to impose a temporary ban on data center development.

In Mills’ veto message, she acknowledged concerns about data centers but said the pause would block the redevelopment of a former paper mill, a $550 million project its developer claimed would create more than 100 permanent jobs. House Democrats and a few Republicans voted to override, arguing the veto left Mainers vulnerable to developers and big corporations. It wasn't enough.

Minnesota's bills have died. A bill to impose a statewide moratorium until Minnesota had a regulatory framework in place was widely and heatedly discussed but never put to a vote. An NDA bill that would have banned local elected officials from signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with developers passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was blocked in the tied House. A water protection bill requiring large industrial water users to obtain their own DNR permits advanced in both chambers but couldn't cross the finish line.

Subscribe now

Vermont’s veto override fell six votes short despite tripartisan supermajorities.

Vermont Governor Philip Scott issued a statement saying, “I understand the potential impacts of data centers, but this bill creates an unacceptable precedent which will have much broader consequences for economic opportunity and long-term competitiveness in Vermont. We cannot afford policies that risk driving current or future jobs and investment to other states, when we already have regulations and policies in place to address our concerns about data centers.”

Smaller, more nimble governments are moving faster.

Cities and counties are outpacing states by a wide margin, and they are finding new tools beyond the moratorium.

The most significant development came from Monterey Park, California, a city in the Los Angeles region, where residents became the first in the country to vote on a permanent ban on data centers through a ballot initiative. The result was a landslide.

More than 86 percent of votes counted (in early returns) were in favor of the ban. The city council had already passed an indefinite moratorium in April after growing community anger toward a developer pushing to build a facility covering nearly 250,000 square feet.

Organizers had just two months to run a campaign. They printed 10,000 flyers and turned out thousands of voters.

The ballot initiative is a key consideration for other cities and towns.

A vote of the people carries far more legal and political weight than an ordinance passed by city council members, and the developer in California apparently knew it. After threatening to sue over the moratorium, they backed down once the ballot measure passed.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the city council voted unanimously this month to implement a 150-day moratorium on new data centers after months of community pressure, including thousands of petition signatures to block a proposed facility near the Reedy Creek Nature Preserve.

Supporters in the council chambers broke into applause and chants of “a people united will never be divided.”

“This is not a partisan issue when it comes to protecting our neighborhoods,” at-large Councilmember Dimple Ajmera said. “This is not a blue or red issue. This is about quality of life. This is about clean air, clean water.”

Charlotte joins Durham, Apex, Canton, Chatham County, and Gates County, which have recently passed their own moratoriums in North Carolina. That’s a cluster, and clusters are worth noting.

Minneapolis, Denver, Baltimore, Reno, and more than a dozen Michigan townships have all gotten something done. Local governments can act on shorter timelines with far less lobbying pressure than state legislatures face.

Narrower, more defensible framing is winning.

The bills that are getting signed such as Florida’s SB 484, Oklahoma’s HB 2992, Washington’s SB 5982, aren’t moratoriums.

They are ratepayer protection and cost-allocation laws. Framing the issue as “data centers shouldn’t pass their costs onto residents and small businesses” is proving more politically durable than broader bans. Concrete harm to identifiable people is more actionable than abstract environmental concern.

Water and utility costs are the stickiest arguments. Florida’s law specifically tightened aquifer permitting alongside the ratepayer rules. Both water resource protection and electricity cost allocation give legislators and local councils the most defensible ground to stand on.

Momentum is contagious at the local level.

The pace of new pauses quickened through late May and into June, according to research. Once a few neighboring jurisdictions act, others follow.

Michigan has cluster of more than 20 local moratoriums. In Illinois, the twin cities of Bloomington and Normal are debating data centers together. Though we’ve heard from locals that the mayor of Bloomington is ignoring community members. Not a good look!

Coalition-building between adjacent communities can be a real accelerant.

Monterey Park’s ballot initiative is already being watched by communities in Port Washington, Wisconsin, Janesville, Wisconsin, and Augusta Township, Michigan, all of which have their own ballot measures in the pipeline.

A national Gallup poll released in May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local areas. This movement is not fringe. You are the majority.

What’s losing.

Broad constitutional amendments like the one in Ohio is far short of the signatures needed for its proposed amendment to ban data centers over 25 MW. Outright statewide bans have stalled in governor’s offices.

Editor’s note: Live in Ohio and want to join the effort? Go here.

Any measure that gives developers a clean legal target is vulnerable. The Hill County, Texas lawsuit is a warning sign about how quickly a local ordinance can land in court.

The through-line is clear. Protect the ratepayer and the aquifer, not the abstract principle, and work locally until the state-level window reopens.

What to Watch Out For

Don’t let them define “data center” broadly. Some developers try to fold gas turbines or other onsite fossil fuel power generation into the definition of “data center” so it gets approved alongside the facility. Your zoning ordinance’s definition should be specific to computer systems and directly associated components.

Don’t let them postpone public hearings without scrutiny. Developers sometimes ask to delay scheduled hearings because they want more time to lobby the governing body. Know your local rules about when and how hearings can be removed from the agenda and watch for procedural maneuvering.

Don’t let the tax revenue argument go unchallenged. Developers will always lead with job numbers and tax projections. Ask them to show you the full cost picture: infrastructure upgrades, utility rate impacts, water system strain, emergency services, road damage from construction traffic. Those numbers belong in the conversation too.

Credibility is everything. In a public process, your word is your most valuable asset. Verify every factual claim before you make it. Inaccurate statements can undercut your credibility and, in some cases, expose you to legal liability. Stick to what you can prove.

Additional Resources

• Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC): selc.org

• Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development: www.datacenterresponsibility.com

• Better Data Center Project: betterdatacenterproject.com

• Halt the Harm Network: datacenters.halttheharm.net

• FracTracker Alliance: fractracker.org

• Data Center Moratoriums: www.datacenterbans.com

• Ban Secret Deals: bansecretdeals.org

Help the Nashville Zoo!

Learn more here: Why Nashville Zoo is fighting a proposed data center next door

How can you help?

Zoo leaders are speaking regularly with city leaders, they are also asking the community and anyone interested in supporting our fight to sign our petition declaring that you oppose the data center being built near the Zoo and our surrounding community.

After signing the petition, please contact the Metro Nashville Council Members and Nashville’s Mayor, sharing your support for the Zoo and encourage them to pass the Metro Nashville Government Legislation SB2026-1391.

Lastly, please plan to attend the Planning Commission Public Hearing on Thursday, June 11 at 4:00 p.m., located at 700 President Ronald Reagan Way, Nashville, TN 37210.

Parking is FREE. At the planning commission, they will call out a series of bills. You need to let them know you are there to speak in support of council member Rollin Horton’s legislation BL2026-1391. Each person will be given two minutes to speak.

We've Been Swallowing This Long Enough. The EPA Needs to Act on Microplastics.

For the first time, microplastics have made the U.S. EPA’s official list of unregulated contaminants being considered for future drinking water regulation.

We’ve written about microplastics here:

The draft Sixth Contaminant Candidate List (CCL 6) includes 75 chemicals, four chemical groups: disinfection byproducts (DBPs), microplastics, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and pharmaceuticals, along with nine microbes.

Starting June 15, and continuing through the summer, an EPA Science Advisory Board committee will hold five public meetings to discuss which contaminants on that list move forward toward rules.

These meetings matter. But so does the fact that the EPA has published five lists before, and not a single contaminant from list 5 has been regulated.

Public pressure isn’t optional. The first meeting is on June 15 at 12 p.m. E.T.
Show up. Stay engaged. Make noise.

Tell them the people drinking this water are watching.

The more you know: What is the drinking water CCL?

The drinking water CCL is a list of contaminants that are currently not subject to any proposed national primary drinking water regulations but are known or anticipated to occur in public water systems.

Contaminants listed on the CCL may require future regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). SDWA requires EPA to publish the CCL every five years.

SDWA directs the agency to consider the health effects and occurrence information for unregulated contaminants and further specifies that the agency place those contaminants on the list that present the greatest public health concern related to exposure from drinking water.

EPA uses the CCL to identify priority contaminants for regulatory decision making and information collection.

What’s happening in your community? Let us know in the comments below. Remember: this is a community space to share information and strategies or ask questions.

Want to know what it's like when a data center secretly comes to your town?

Today we're talking with organizers from Farmington, Minnesota, a small community of 25,000 that woke up to a 350-acre hyperscale data center approved near their homes.

Kris Akin is the Outreach, Communications and Partnership Director for the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development. Matthew Shaw is a Virginia-based volunteer researcher, who tracks data center opposition movements nationwide. Their story is one you need to hear, and their fight may be coming to your backyard next.

Farmington, Minnesota, sits on the outer ring of the Twin Cities suburbs. It has the kind of community life that people move toward with a historic downtown and 48 miles of nature trails.

What it doesn’t have, since December 2019, is a grocery store. Residents drive to neighboring Lakeville or Rosemount to buy food. So, when the golf course southeast of town went up for sale, people were hoping a developer would build homes.

What they got instead was an almost 350-acre hyperscale data center with massive buildings, some rising 50 to 80 feet, planted between four established neighborhoods just 1.9 miles from downtown. The project was approved in November 2024. Non-disclosure agreements had been signed. The identity of the end user still hasn’t been revealed.

This community’s story shows what happens when neighbors refuse to be steamrolled. We spoke with Kris and Matthew about what they’ve learned, what’s at stake, and why Farmington’s fight may matter far beyond Minnesota.

The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is a citizen-centered community working together to mitigate the impact of data center installations on electric grids, land use, conservation, and water resources.

Kris, take us back to the beginning. Tell us about Farmington and what life was like before the data center.

Kris: The community still retains its small-town character with a historic downtown, county fairground, and pioneer village. The land to the south and east is mostly farmland. It felt like our small town was growing and moving forward with the pleasant community life we were used to.

The golf course southeast of Farmington in Castle Rock Township was for sale as the owners were ready to retire. Our neighborhoods surrounding the golf course expected a new owner to purchase the business or a housing developer to create a new housing development there.

Our community has been without a grocery store since December 2019. Farmington needs more “rooftops” to support one, according to market studies, and a housing development would have helped create more of a market for it.

The political landscape in Farmington is ugly, and public support has eroded with the resignation of the mayor after an outburst by him when he announced a limit on public comments to 5 minutes to preserve “decorum.”

He has been very passionate about this project and our community. Public data requests by our Coalition revealed that the planning commission director has asked for coaching on how to talk to the public and that a city employee had joined our email list only to then share it back with others at city hall.

How did you first learn about data centers coming to your area?

Kris: When the data center discussions surfaced publicly in the spring of 2024, I initially trusted that our city leadership would thoroughly vet a project of this magnitude. Annexation, rezoning, and the transformation of a long‑established residential area are not small matters. I believed the city would either reject the proposal or relocate it to a more suitable site.

I was wrong. The city notified neighbors that lived directly near the golf course but not residents that lived across the street about a public hearing.

Our neighborhood started holding discussions, attending city planning commission meetings as well as city council meetings. We expressed our concerns from May to November of 2024, protesting outside of City Hall, meeting with the Mayor and City Council members, printing and posting yard signs and working to make others aware of what was happening.

November of 2024 the proposed development was approved for a 350-acre data center on the golf course property between four neighborhoods just 1.9 miles from our downtown area.

As I did some more research wondering why our city leaders would support a hyperscale data center, it became clear that something fundamental had shifted at City Hall. Key staff positions were new. The Community & Economic Development Department had changed and restructured to consist entirely of City Council members.

Few cities in Minnesota operate this way. Most maintain a balance of residents and elected officials to ensure transparency and accountability. Farmington moved in the opposite direction.

This restructuring matters. It concentrates power. It narrows perspectives. It makes it far easier for major decisions to move forward without meaningful public involvement.

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) were signed by some City of Farmington staff and information about end users of the hyperscale data center have not been revealed or released.

Editor’s note: What is an annexation agreement? Minnesota keeps a database here.

There are about 20 proposed data center sites in Minnesota alone. Does your fight in Farmington feel like it could set a precedent for those communities?

Kris: Yes! Our neighbors organized a 501(c)(4) organization. We believed that people would think we were “NIMBYS” (not in my backyard) folks and overreacting to the location of this hyperscale data center.

We quickly learned about the scope and size of a facility like this and felt that it was not the proper place to support this industrial infrastructure.

We filed a lawsuit in January of 2025 and began lobbying at the city, county, and state level to bring awareness about this rapidly growing industry that needs some guardrails, policies, and guidelines to keep people and our planet safe.

We also organized as a 501(c)(3) under the same organization name. Our lawsuit has been challenged twice with a motion to dismiss by the City of Farmington, and the developer (TRACT) and a judge has rejected their motion and said our case has merit. We are in discovery now with a court date of May 2027.

Since we started our website and Facebook page, we have heard from so many people across the country that are experiencing the same issues with NDAs, questionable tactics, rush to approval, and vague information.

If we can get our day in court, spread sunshine on how this happened and win, it would set a precedent and send a message to Big Tech hyperscale data center developers that the people and the planet come first.

The main legal claims outlined in this lawsuit are:

1. Breach of Contract (Count I): The City of Farmington allegedly violated the Orderly Annexation Agreement (OAA) with Castle Rock Township by rezoning the Subject Property without the Township’s consent and failing to engage in the required dispute resolution process.

2. Declaratory Judgment under Minn. Stat. Ch. 555 (Count II): Plaintiffs seek a declaration that the City of Farmington’s rezoning of the Subject Property is prohibited by the OAA and is arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and unlawful.

3. Judicial Review of Zoning Decision under Minn. Stat. § 462.361 (Count III): Plaintiffs argue that the City’s zoning determination was inappropriate for the proposed Data Center’s scale and use, violated the OAA, and was arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and unlawful. They seek to reverse the zoning determination and declare the ordinance void.

4. Declaratory Judgment under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA) (Count IV): Plaintiffs allege that the Data Center project will pollute, impair, or destroy natural resources protected under MERA and seek a declaration that the project violates MERA.

5. Injunctive Relief under MERA (Count V): Plaintiffs request temporary and permanent injunctive relief to prevent the Data Center project from proceeding until compliance with MERA is demonstrated.

Castle Rock Township has also filed a lawsuit regarding their Orderly Annexation Agreement.

You’ve been working toward a statewide moratorium. What would that look like, and how close are you?

Kris: We have been meeting weekly with lobbyists and staff from about 20 other organizations in the Minnesota area that support clean water and our environment. We have had sit down meetings with reps from the House and Senate.

We have had two rallies at the rotunda inside the capitol and shared literature with all legislators and the governor.

We supported 3 bills at the State level:

1. The bill to impose a statewide moratorium on data-center development until Minnesota has a regulatory framework in place was widely and heatedly discussed among legislators but was never put to a vote.

2. An NDA bill would have banned local elected officials from signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with developers. That bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was blocked in the tied House.

3. A bill aimed at better protecting Minnesota’s water supply by requiring large-volume industrial water users to get their own permit from the Department of Natural Resources rather than hide behind municipal water permits advanced in both the House and Senate but wasn’t able to cross the finish line this session.

How have you built your nonprofit and worked with others to move your cause forward?

Kris: We have filed the necessary paperwork with the IRS, Minnesota Secretary of State and Minnesota Attorney General. We have joined the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits to receive important information about nonprofit boards and organizational procedures. We have developed relationships with 20 different non-profit organizations in the state.

We have a volunteer researcher from Virgina (Matthew), who is providing support and research and connections. Some on our team visit online or by phone with other Minnesota folks fighting hyperscale data centers in Hermantown, Pine Island, Monticello, and Rosemount.

Data centers are often talked about as invisible infrastructure. What do you want people to understand about their physical footprint?

Kris: Hyperscale Data Centers are larger facilities than the legacy data centers built and maintained from years back.

The proposal in Farmington will be 342.81 acres with 12 large buildings and two admin buildings. Some buildings are 50 to 80 feet tall. There will be lots of concrete and asphalt parking lots. Rainwater will warm up as it runs off the buildings and parking lots and will run into our groundwater and nearby trout pond.

The power and water consumed by a hyperscale data center this big will be as much as our community uses. A new additional water tower and an electrical substation will be required. The City of Farmington has agreed to provide the water to the data center.

Diesel generators will be placed on the tops of buildings for a backup and will need to be tested regularly to assure they are working. Extra diesel fuel will be stored on site in large tanks. During the construction phase of 5 to 7 years, there will be up to large gravel and sand deliveries daily, increased construction equipment, and crew traffic.

Reports from Ellendale, North Dakota, where a data center is being constructed, indicate that residents stay off the roads during morning and late afternoon to avoid the heavy traffic.

Matthew: Our data is often thought of as floating in the “Cloud,” an ethereal and nebulous phenomenon that has nothing to do with the real world. I like to think of data centers as part of the Data Center Industrial Complex (DCIC), first termed by Mél Hogan. This concept encapsulates not only the data centers themselves but the supply chains, end users, and environmental impacts from development, use, and e-waste.

It begins with extractive industries: copper, cement, rare earth minerals, lithium, etc., all of which must be dug up, refined, and transported around the world. This brings direct harm to the people living in those areas, often in poor and/or indigenous communities.

Next is the fossil fuel industry, with data centers consuming 4.4 percent of total energy demand in 2023; they are expected to grow to up to 12 percent by 2028.

There is also the risk of increased nuclear proliferation with larger plants, such as Three Mile Island, and smaller modular reactors becoming a popular option for the tech giants who need constant energy but don’t want the CO2 emissions.

Data Center water consumption is typically only measured in direct usage, not indirectly from power generation. Data Center water consumption is centralized, often affecting already water-stressed communities, which exacerbates local water insecurity.

Noise and light pollution from data centers are harmful to people and animals. First, it is harmful to the employees; it can directly damage their hearing. Next, it affects the community with a hum/buzz, which can cause headaches, stress, and sleep issues. Lastly, it affects wildlife, causing new migration patterns and habitat development in birds, butterflies, bats, etc.

Matthew, you’re based in Virginia, one of the most data-center-dense places on Earth. What made you want to volunteer your research skills for a fight happening in Minnesota?

Matthew: First, some background on me. I have BA degrees in political science and public policy, and since then have been working for a contractor for HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). Everything I say is my own and doesn’t reflect my employer or HUD, to be clear.

We host data and case studies on all things housing, and I help do quality assurance, write short summaries, and work on the help desk. I am also starting my master’s program in international relations (IR).

During the past year, I kept hearing stories from an IR perspective about how the U.S. needs data centers to defeat China. Big Tech would come into a small/medium-sized town, sign NDAs, and then there would be a community opposition movement to stop development.

This immediately interested me from an “underdog” perspective. It also interested me because I see parallels to other industries like nuclear and fossil fuels, where communities are placed in the position where, for “national security,” they must suffer the consequences to “win.”

I wanted to create a nonprofit which would be like HUD’s PD&R but for communities facing data centers. I originally was going to do this myself and started creating the dataset to do so. As I was making the dataset, I stumbled upon CRDCD, which hosted local information but also had a goal to create nationwide information, such as the 101 guide on how to start a data center opposition movement, and after reaching out to Kris and meeting the rest of the team, we all decided I would be a good fit.

I benefit from learning from CRDCD about their firsthand struggles, and CRDCD benefits from my work through media coverage, finding new community groups, NGOs, and other resources.

The data centers have won in Northern Virginia; they have local politicians in their pocket, but they have been slowed down by interconnection delays. They don’t want to wait 7 years in Virginia when they can do it elsewhere.

What’s the one piece of research or data that you think every local official should have to read before approving a hyperscale data center project?

Matthew: The thing about data center development is that there is (usually) no single issue. It is context-dependent and multifaceted.

Take Pine Island, Minnesota, where they are planning on building one of the largest battery facilities for backup power generation, but may not have adequate firefighting resources if there were to be a lithium battery fire.

There needs to be comprehensive planning coordination across all governmental agencies, particularly public health, water, and energy, at the local, county, state, and national levels, and that just isn’t happening right now because the administration wants full speed ahead,

Big Tech comes into town offering jobs and taxes, and rushes through planning without community input.

If I am talking to a council member, I would tell them about AI Now’s North Star Data Center Policy Toolkit.

If I had to pick for an academic, it would be this journal article on the making of critical data center studies: .

If I were speaking to a scientist, I would say read the latest doomsday clock report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and ask how data centers are involved.

To an economist, I would refer them to building a solidarity ecosystem for AI.

You’ve held two rallies at the state capitol. Can you talk about how you organized for those rallies for maximum impact.

Kris: Boy! It was a lot of work, but the message was carried out through our promotions, media releases, advertising and at the event. At the rally, we had speakers, tables with information and lots of signs and banners.

Some meetings with legislators were scheduled after the rally the same day. After the events, the message was carried on through newspaper, radio, and digital sharing of the event. A video was created both times to share with the public.

We made a lot of good noise!

What’s your message to people in other states who are watching similar projects proposed in their backyards?

Kris: Get informed. Read research and factual stories about the harms and impacts that these huge facilities bring to a community.

Look and find published research and studies. Look for public information that shares the processes and planning that went on before the project was announced.

Request public data from your local units of government.

Schedule meetings with your elected officials where you can speak to them face to face.

In this new digital world, use digital tools to share images and information. It seems so ironic that the very tools we all use are supported by data centers, but they can be designed and built with more time provided to protect people and planet!

Adopt all that Erin Brockovich’s experiences and story have taught us!

What do you need most right now and how can others follow along?

Awareness and building support for civic engagement is difficult these days. We are grateful for people like Erin that have joined the fight. It will help—if people follow her call to get involved.

Our biggest need is our fundraising for the lawsuit. Our legal fees are expected to total around $250,000.

Some folks think we are suing for money or for our homes to be bought out, but we are challenging the process and the location and care about the safety of our water, air, and environment.

We have raised $100,000 through a bike ride, dinner and silent auction, and personal donations. Twelve families have been sharing the burden of frequent donations.

We have multiple ways for others to donate and donations to our Coalition for Responsible Data Center Fund are tax deductible as a 501(c)(3).

The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is based in Farmington, Minnesota. Their interactive map of opposition groups nationwide, monthly research reports, and a community toolkit for organizing are available on their website.

Learn more about Farmington Technology Park here.

What This Fight Can Teach Your Community

1. The process matters as much as the project. It’s not what they’re building; it’s how they got it approved. NDAs, restructured oversight bodies, selective public notification, rushed votes. When your city is moving unusually fast and unusually quietly, that’s your first warning sign. Request public data early and often. You have that right. Use it.

2. Know what you’re dealing with. A hyperscale data center is not your grandfather’s server farm. We’re talking hundreds of acres, buildings five stories tall, diesel generators on rooftops, water consumption equal to an entire city, and years of heavy construction traffic through your neighborhood. Get the physical facts on paper.

3. The NDA is a red flag, not a formality. When elected officials sign non-disclosure agreements with developers, you lose your right to know who is coming, what they’re building, and why. That should make every single one of us angry. Push back on NDAs at every level. Farmington’s coalition nearly got them banned statewide.

4. Find your people. As of May 2026, there are more 345 opposition groups with more than 428,000 members fighting these exact battles across the country. Most formed in the last year and don’t even know each other yet. Reach out. Connect with communities near you. Share what works. That’s how movements grow.

5. Get your legal footing early. Lawsuits are expensive and they take time, but they create accountability that rallies and yard signs alone cannot. Farmington’s coalition survived two motions to dismiss. Their case has merit, a judge said so. Start building your legal strategy before you need it and support the communities already fighting.

6. Go to your state capitol, not just city hall. Local decisions can be shaped by state policy, and state policy can be shaped by you. Farmington’s coalition helped advance three bills in a single legislative session—a moratorium, an NDA ban, and water permitting reform. None crossed the finish line this time. But legislators are paying attention, and that pressure doesn’t go away.

7. Use every tool you have, including the digital ones. I know the irony isn’t lost on anyone. The very tools we use every day are powered by the data centers we’re fighting. Use them anyway. Video, social media, email lists, digital organizing. Make noise, make connections, and make yourselves impossible to ignore. That’s exactly what Farmington did, and they’re still standing.

In my more than 30 years of working with communities, I’ve learned that when my email inbox starts to clog up with the same message, something is up.

That’s how this whole map project got going. It’s always about the PEOPLE. You had concerns and I wanted to make sure we create some kind of civic infrastructure to track what’s happening.

We have more than 3,000 reports and thousands more submissions that I’ll be sorting through this weekend.

https://brockovichdatacenter.com

Let’s keep talking about this important issue. Stay loud!

Get more from Erin Brockovich in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I have spent my career listening to the people, especially those who were told to sit down and be quiet, who were told their backyard was safe, and that the water was safe to drink….

I’ve shown up to community after community across the country for decades because the people who live in these towns invite me. I get hundreds of emails every single day, and what they say boils down to two little words: help me.

So when I started hearing from people about AI data centers appearing in their communities with little to no notice, I paid attention.

On April 27, I put out a simple ask: if you have concerns about an AI data center near you, tell me about it. I expected some response. What I got was a flood.

We started with 30 reports on the map at BrockovichDataCenter.com. In a month, 3,862 residents submitted reports. The map now has 2,716 pins and represents 49 states. The single most common concern—more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills—is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency.

Residents are using words like silenced, ignored, secretive, and not seen and not heard.

They write about back-door deals and NDAs. They describe showing up to planning meetings only to find out the decisions have already been made.

They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values. These complaints are not small. They show a national pattern.

Subscribe now

When you hear about issues in one community here or there, it looks bad. But when you line these communities up side by side, you see the larger picture.

So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?

The Scale of What’s Being Built

To understand what communities are dealing with, you first have to understand the scale of what is being constructed, and how fast it’s all happening.

I’m not talking about a handful of buildings going up quietly in industrial zones. What we’re seeing is a wholesale remaking of the American landscape, town by town, county by county.

In the flatlands of northeast Louisiana, know for soybean fields and dense clusters of rivercane, Meta is building a 4-million-square-foot AI campus called Hyperion. When finished, it will consume more electricity than the entire city of New Orleans and cover a footprint the size of lower Manhattan.

“Meta’s investment establishes the region as an anchor in Louisiana’s rapidly expanding tech sector, revitalizes one of our state’s beautiful rural areas and creates opportunities for Louisiana workers to fill high-paying jobs of the future,” said Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in a press statement. “I thank Meta for their commitment to our state.”

Diane Cobb, a resident of Holly Ridge an unincorporated community in Richland Parish, said she found out about the data center the way everyone else in her community did—when they started digging.

“Nobody told us anything,” she told New Orleans Public Radio. “They supposedly had a big meeting. The whole community was supposed to come. Nobody knew anything about it. Ever.”

At a meeting at Diane’s house in February, local community members brought their questions.

Why does their water sometimes turns brown?

Why has their electricity has been shutting off without any notice, sometimes for days at a time?

Why does everyone seem to have gotten sicker since Meta showed up?

In West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet’s Google has started construction on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history, a multibillion dollar campus on 1,100 acres of scrubland.

In South Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk converted a vacant Electrolux factory into his Colossus supercomputer in just 122 days. He is now building a second, larger version targeting a million GPUs, has acquired a third building to expand further, and purchased a former Duke Energy power plant to keep it all running.

Microsoft has invested more than $7 billion in its data centers in Racine County, Wisconsin.

“In the heart of the American Midwest, a modern marvel is rising,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. “We’re in the final phases of building the world’s most powerful AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin—part of a region forged by generations of hard work and ingenuity.”

Meanwhile, environmental groups are pursuing legal action and policy advocacy.

“Transparency cannot depend on a company’s goodwill or public relations strategy, according to a 2026 statement released by the org. “Rather, transparency is foundational to democratic decision-making and community trust, especially for projects with environmental impacts as significant as large-scale data centers. These facilities will place enormous demands on our water supplies, electricity grids, and local infrastructure. Communities have a right to full, timely, and meaningful information before decisions are made—not after deals are signed behind closed doors.”

In rural Indiana near the banks of Lake Michigan, Amazon has transformed 1,200 acres of farmland into an $11 billion facility called Project Rainier.

Hundreds of data centers are already operating in Texas with hundreds more on the way. Concerns about water consumption at these facilities is rising as the state stares down a major water shortage due to prolonged drought, population growth and industrial demand that outpace existing supplies. Texas will need at least $174 billion in the next 50 years to avoid a major water crisis, according to a new state analysis.

I could go on, and on, and on. Read more here.

U.S. data centers also consumed more than 4 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2023, according to the MIT Energy Initiative. That number could more than double to 9 percent by 2030, the research group projects. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.

Meet the Messengers

As residents across the country have begun pushing back, they’ve started encountering a well-funded counter-effort, and it’s worth knowing who is behind it.

NetChoice is a Washington, D.C.-based trade association whose members include some of the biggest names in the tech sector: Amazon, Google, Meta, and others. It’s funded primarily through membership dues and sponsorships paid by those same corporations.

The association’s stated mission is to promote free enterprise and free expression online. NetChoice lobbies against regulations its corporate members find inconvenient, litigates against state laws those members oppose, and runs public campaigns designed to shape how communities and lawmakers think about technology policy.

One of those campaigns is called “Data Centers Help Local Communities.” Maybe you’ve seen an ad on YouTube? It promotes the economic benefits of data centers and encourages states to offer tax exemptions to attract them.

The messaging emphasizes job creation, tax revenue, and broadband expansion. It does not emphasize community consent, environmental impact, or the right of residents to know what is being built next door before the permits are signed.

This effort is not put out by an independent research organization or a neutral policy group. It’s an industry lobby funded by the very companies building these facilities, running ads and campaigns designed to smooth the path for their members’ projects.

When you see messaging about how data centers are good for your town, it’s worth asking: who paid for that message, and what are they selling?

The economic arguments NetChoice makes are not fabricated. Data centers do create some jobs. They can generate tax revenue. In places like Loudoun County, Virginia, that revenue has been genuinely significant. But an industry lobby will always lead with the benefits and bury the costs.

It will not tell you about the strain on your power grid, the draw on your water supply, the noise that doesn’t stop, or the back-door deals your local officials may have already signed before you heard a word about it.

Communities Are Pushing Back —> & Winning

The good news is that when communities organize and show up, conditions can change.

In Monroe Township, New Jersey, residents began packing planning board meetings after discovering a proposed 1 million-square-foot data center and 522,000-square-foot warehouse on 172 acres of vacant farmland.

People raised concerns about electricity consumption, water usage, and noise. Officials heard them.

By April, Monroe Township passed ordinances banning data centers entirely. When developer Hexa Builders’ application was subsequently denied as incomplete, the ban took full effect. You can read the Mayor’s full statement about it here.

Monroe Township is not alone. Pemberton Township in Burlington County passed what advocates say was New Jersey’s first municipal data center ban in February.

Advocates are now pushing for a state moratorium on new data centers.

Kassi Solberg a mom in rural Montana made national headlines taking on a proposed 5,000-acre AI data center near her property. At a recent town hall meeting, she asked if anyone on the town council had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the developer that would keep them silent about the project.

The mayor replied that the council wasn’t obliged to answer the public’s questions at the town meetings, according to what the town’s lawyer had told him.

“I think they count on us being dumb country people and us not pushing back,” she told The New York Times. “But by the time you figure out what these companies are planning to do, they’ve got the data centers built already.”

In Utah, Kevin O’Leary’s massive proposed facility is facing mounting community opposition.

The pattern is consistent. When communities are informed and organized, they can change the conversation. They can take action.

What Transparency Looks Like

I want to be clear. I’m not making a blanket argument against data centers or against the technology they support. Some communities have welcomed these facilities after genuine public engagement, honest disclosure of impacts, and real negotiation of community benefits. When that happens, that’s democracy working the way it should.

What is not acceptable is the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.

A company can be planning something the size of lower Manhattan in your county, drawing more electricity than a major American city, backed by hundreds of billions in borrowed money, and the people who live there may have no idea it’s coming until the trucks arrive.

Transparency means notifying residents before decisions are made, not after. It means public hearings with real, complete information about energy consumption, water use, noise levels, and effects on local infrastructure. It means elected officials who answer to their constituents first, not to the corporations seeking tax breaks and zoning variances.

When a company the size of Meta or Amazon wants to put a billion-dollar facility in a town of less than 20,000 people, give the people who live there a seat at the table. It’s that simple.

Subscribe now

What You Can Do

The map at BrockovichDataCenter.com exists because of you. Every pin represents a real person who refused to be silent. A new feature where you can upload photos and videos is coming soon, which means the documentation will only get stronger. Get your phones out and start showing us what your water looks like, what your neighborhood sounds like, or any other visual changes in your neighborhood.

If there is a data center issue in your community, report it.

Attend your local planning board meetings. Ask your elected officials what they knew and when they knew it. Ask whether any NDAs were signed. Ask for the full environmental and energy impact assessments, and if they don’t exist, ask why not.

The race to build AI infrastructure is unfolding town by town across this country. In some places, it is welcomed. In others, it is being forced through the back door.

The difference, in almost every case, comes down to whether the community was informed, whether they organized, and whether they showed up.

To all of you who have already submitted, thank you! Keep it coming.

Note: We have about 4,000 data centers operating in the U.S., many built before the AI boom. The map isn't intended to show every data center. It's focused on locations where community members are actively voicing concerns.

Report your AI data center concerns and view the full map at brockovichdatacenter.com.

Want to learn more? Need more support?

🚨Resource Alert 🚨

Halt the Harm has a Help Desk where individuals can request help and they will respond within 48 hours. They can help in a variety of ways: information sharing, strategy development, connecting community members to experts, financial assistance, and often times just being someone to listen and be thought partner.

Join the Free Webinar:
200 Feet Away: One Family’s Unexpected Fight Against a Data Center

Join Halt The Harm for a conversation with two community advocates from Wilmington Residents for Responsible Development, who never expected to become experts in zoning fights, public accountability, and data center development, but whose experiences have lessons for anyone facing a similar fight.

When: Thursday, May 28 at 6pm ET
RSVP: https://luma.com/hhn-2aek

I’ve been doing this work long enough to know what a con looks like.

It doesn’t announce itself. It comes dressed in words like “gold-standard science,” “legally defensible,” and “practical implementation.”

It arrives with press releases and officials standing at podiums. It sounds almost reasonable, if you don’t know what to look for.

They Call It “Making America Healthy Again.”

This week, the Trump EPA announced what it called a “comprehensive strategy” to address PFAS, the forever chemicals that have contaminated the blood of virtually every person in the U.S. today, even newborn babies. The announcement came with $1 billion in grant funding, talk of cutting-edge destruction technologies, and solemn promises to follow the science.

If you need a PFAS primer, go here.

Buried in the careful language of a press release was the gutting of protections for 4 of the 6 chemicals that the previous administration had finally, FINALLY, after decades of industry obstruction, brought under enforceable limits. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you can catch up on the 2024 ruling here.

The EPA is now proposing to withdraw regulations for PFNA, PFHxS, GenX and PFBS, chemicals its own scientists have documented as serious health threats, on the grounds that the previous administration made a procedural error. And for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied forever chemicals, water systems can now apply for a two-year delay, pushing compliance to 2031.

Delay. Delay. Delay.

Communities across this country have been drinking PFAS-contaminated water since the 1950s and 1960s, when companies like 3M and DuPont began releasing these chemicals into the environment while hiding what they knew about the consequences. They kept their own science hidden from the public and paid legal fees instead of pulling harmful products from the market.

By consequences, I mean cancer, immune suppression, and other health issues.

PFAS are toxic even at low levels of exposure and can build up in the body.

Very low doses of PFAS have been linked to suppression of the immune system. Studies show exposure to PFAS can also increase the risk of cancer, harm fetal development, and cause other serious health problems.

In my 2024 New York Times op-ed leading up to the last election, I wrote about Amara Strande, who grew up near a 150-square-mile plume of contaminated groundwater in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro, the direct legacy of 3M’s decades of dumping. She testified before Minnesota lawmakers in support of legislation she believed could save people like her from the rare liver cancer she was facing. She died at 20, weeks before that law passed bearing her name.

There are more people like Amara, who are sick and dying because of these chemicals. A 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.

How can we afford to delay regulations and enforcement while contamination continues? What about all the people who don’t even know if their tap water contains PFAS yet?

Share The Brockovich Report

A 2-Sided Agency

Now let me tell you what else I know, because the press release doesn’t tell you this part. The people currently running the EPA’s chemical safety operations are not neutral public servants.

Nancy Beck, now a senior EPA adviser, came directly from the American Chemistry Council, the most powerful lobbying force in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.

Lynn Dekleva, who spent decades at DuPont before joining the ACC, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market, and federal reports documented retaliation against employees who raised concerns.

Steven Cook, who built a career representing PFAS polluters, is now working to dismantle the very rules that would make those polluters pay for cleanup as a principal deputy within the EPA.

The revolving door between the chemical industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it isn’t spinning anymore, it has been left open.

The money behind this effort is staggering. Since 2023, the coalition against PFAS regulation anchored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent nearly $273 million on lobbying. In the first half of 2025 alone, industry groups spent tens of millions lobbying the EPA and the White House specifically on PFAS.

When the EPA subsequently asked a federal appeals court to throw out four of the Biden-era PFAS water regulations, internal documents leaked to the press revealed the agency had changed its position after meeting with industry representatives.

Connect those dots yourself.

The Project 2025 Connection

None of this should surprise anyone who read Project 2025 carefully. Most people glazed over it or assumed it was too extreme to take seriously. But it was a blueprint, and we are now living inside it.

The Project 2025 chapter on the EPA mentions PFAS twice. The first mention sounds almost reasonable, it calls for revising groundwater cleanup regulations to better reflect the challenges posed by persistent contaminants. Fine.

But the second mention is where the ideology reveals itself: it calls for revisiting the designation of PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under Superfund law. That designation is not a bureaucratic label; it’s a legal mechanism that makes polluters pay.

Without that designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, suddenly taxpayers, ratepayers, families who had nothing to do with creating the contamination become financially responsible for cleanup.

Stripping it away doesn’t just weaken regulation. It transfers the entire financial burden of decades of corporate malfeasance onto the communities that were already victimized by it.

When I read that, I thought about Amara Strande. I thought about the families in Minnesota’s eastern Twin Cities metro who spent years not knowing why their water was making them sick. I thought about the 3M executives who knew what their chemicals were doing and kept dumping anyway.

Project 2025 looked at that history and decided the problem was that the polluters were being held too accountable.

Now we see that blueprint being executed, agency appointment by agency appointment, proposed rule by proposed rule. These personnel decisions are not coincidences or accidents of a chaotic transition. They are the deliberate installation of industry operatives into the positions with the most power to dismantle the regulatory architecture that Project 2025 identified as the obstacle.

The press release talks about science and legal defensibility. The appointments tell you whose science and whose legal interests are being served.

The Water Crisis On Top Of It All

What makes this moment particularly ruthless is the financial trap it exploits.

America’s water infrastructure is in crisis that has nothing to do with PFAS. The American Water Works Association estimates that drinking water utilities need up to $2.4 trillion dollars in infrastructure upgrades through 2050.

Without massive new investment, water rates will more than double, pushing affordability beyond the reach of millions of households. Water systems are not imagining their financial distress. It is real, and it’s enormous.

So, when the EPA offers a 2-year compliance extension, many utilities will take it, not out of bad faith, but out of genuine desperation. And the industry knows it.

The financial pressure on water systems is the mechanism by which delay becomes acceptable, even welcomed.

It’s business as usual for the manufacturers and the lobbyists of these chemicals. It’s how the PFAS industry has delayed, weakened, and killed protective legislation across the country, state by state, year by year.

Listen, environmental failure is bipartisan, and I will say so as long as I have a voice. But what is happening right now, with these specific people in these specific positions doing these specific things, is not a failure of competence or resources. It is a policy choice. It is a decision made by people who know exactly what they are doing and who wrote down what they intended to do before they ever took office, to subordinate public health to industry profit.

The Data Center Connection & Playbook

Meanwhile, in Farmington, Minnesota, 30 minutes south of the Twin Cities, a group of families organized themselves into a coalition to fight a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on property bounded by a trout stream. They have raised and spent a $100,000. They have filed lawsuits, organized rallies, worked with lobbyists, and shown up.

They are fighting not just for their neighborhood but for the 20+ other proposed sites across Minnesota, and for every community in this country that is about to discover what it means to have industrial infrastructure imposed on them without transparency, without consent, and without any honest accounting of what it will cost the water, the land, and the people.

Their fight and the PFAS fight are similar. They both show who gets to decide what goes into the water. They highlight whether the people who live somewhere have any real power against the industries and governments that want to use that somewhere for profit. They are about whether the law means anything when the people enforcing it came from the industry being regulated.

Plus, more research is showing that data centers are contributing to PFAS pollution.

I get emails every day from people who want someone to fight for them. They think I am a lawyer. I am not. What I am is someone who has spent decades watching the same con run by different actors, and I am not willing to pretend the new costumes make it a different show.

The EPA’s announcement calls its approach a “comprehensive, lifecycle-based strategy.” I see it more as a decision to let 176 million people in the U.S. continue drinking contaminated water, while the people responsible for that contamination write the rules about how long they get to keep doing it.

How do we know it’s 176 million people? That’s thanks to the EPA’s own tests of the nation’s drinking water supply conducted as part of the Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5, which requires U.S. water utilities to test drinking water for PFAS compounds.

Project 2025 told us this “reframe” was coming. The appointments confirmed it. The proposed rules are just the paperwork.

We deserve better. We have always deserved better. The first step is refusing to be fooled by the language of people who are counting on our exhaustion and our confusion to keep us quiet.

The EPA press release said, “When a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) is rushed, it minimizes the opportunity for meaningful public comment.” We’ve been dragging our feet on this issue for decades. This is not a rush job. It’s a hit job.

What You Can Do Right Now

I know how overwhelming this information feels. People write to me every day feeling helpless, and I understand why. The money is enormous, the machinery is entrenched, and the people running the agency that is supposed to protect us came from the industries poisoning us.

Protect your own water first. Don’t wait for the EPA to act. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon filtration systems are the most effective methods for removing PFAS from your tap water. If you can install one, do it.

Make noise where it counts. Contact your elected representatives. Your senators, your House member, and your state legislators. Demand they investigate the legality of what the EPA just did. The anti-backsliding provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act explicitly prohibits reducing health protections. What the EPA is proposing may violate federal law. Your representatives need to hear that their constituents know that, and are watching.

Follow the money in your own state. Ask your city council, your water utility, or your school board who their lobbyists are and what other clients those lobbyists represent. The Bad Chemistry report documented 132 local governments share lobbying firms with PFAS industry clients. Your community may be one of them. Demand disclosure. Demand that your institutions adopt policies prohibiting contracts with firms that lobby for PFAS polluters.

Support the people on the front lines. In Farmington, Minnesota, a coalition of families has spent $100,000 of their own money fighting a proposed hyperscale data center near a trout stream, with a court date looming and $150,000 more in legal fees ahead of them. Groups like theirs exist in communities across this country. Find them. Fund them. Show up for them. The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is one place to start.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of loud. You don’t have to be a lawyer or a scientist or an advocate with 30 years of experience. You have to be a person who is unwilling to be quiet to these issues. That is enough.

I am not quiet. And I don’t think you should be either.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Do you see the same playbook being run in your backyard, whether it's PFAS, data centers, or something else entirely?

The political will to confront nuclear danger abroad seems inexhaustible. Washington has been consumed by Iran’s nuclear program for decades.

The will to confront it at home? That’s another matter entirely.

While the U.S. negotiates a fragile ceasefire on the specter of nuclear weapons in Tehran, the radioactive legacy of our own nuclear weapons program sits beneath apartment complexes in suburban St. Louis.

Children played in it. Families lived on top of it. And for decades, the government that built the bomb looked the other way.

While we spend billions policing Iran’s enriched uranium, we have spent 80 years ignoring our own.

The contamination near Coldwater Creek, a Missouri River tributary north of St. Louis that was polluted by nuclear waste from the development of the first atomic bomb, is one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, impacting three generations and thousands of people across the region. So why have so few of us heard about it?

Subscribe now

Moms Cleaning Up Nuclear Waste?

For more than a decade, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel have been doing what moms do: protecting their children. The threat wasn’t a person or a policy they could march against. It was radiation, and the silence around it.

The U.S. government spent decades trying to hide the radioactive waste buried beneath the streets, schools, and backyards of north St. Louis County.

Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has announced it will demolish a former apartment clubhouse in Hazelwood, Missouri, because the ground underneath it tested positive for nuclear contamination.

It’s a validation the women of have fought years to receive. And it is also a warning that the worst may not be over.

A Secret Buried Under Suburbia

The story begins with the Manhattan Project. During World War II, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium ore for the first atomic bombs at its downtown St. Louis facility. The radioactive byproducts were stored at a site near the St. Louis airport, at the headwaters of Coldwater Creek, and the waste spread into the waterway and beyond.

After the war, the waste from Mallinckrodt was trucked to the north side of the airport property, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, where it sat in the open for years, dispersed by wind and rainwater. As early as 1949, Mallinckrodt itself discovered that the radioactive waste in deteriorating steel drums risked leaking into the creek, but nothing was done.

The waste ended up at West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. The entire time, local residents had no idea. Read more about it here.

Subdivisions went up. Children played in the creek. Families planted gardens, built lives, and had babies. No one told them what was underneath.

Decades of Fighting

The women of JustMomsSTL did not start this fight. They inherited it.

The earliest effort to document the contamination was led by environmental activist Kay Drey in the 1970s, followed by a landmark seven-part investigative series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989 that raised serious public concern and prompted initial federal action. The Missouri Coalition for the Environment sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers as far back as 1985 demanding acknowledgment and cleanup, a demand that went largely unanswered for decades.

The fight never stopped. It just kept finding new people willing to carry it.

Karen Nickel’s parents moved to the banks of Coldwater Creek in Hazelwood without knowing the area was contaminated. Karen later raised her own family in nearby Maryland Heights, just 1.5 miles from West Lake Landfill, again unknowingly living near radioactive waste.

In November 2012, after learning the truth, she started a Facebook group about the West Lake Landfill, where she connected with Dawn Chapman.

In March 2014, the two founded JustMomsSTL, a grassroots organization dedicated to raising awareness about radioactive material in the St. Louis metro area as a legacy of the Manhattan Project.

They were not scientists. They were not politicians. They were mothers with binders full of government documents and a refusal to be quiet.

They were also not alone. A parallel grassroots group, Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts Please, worked to educate the community and healthcare professionals, and to fight for community inclusion in federal compensation programs. The STL Toxic Waste Alliance brought together community groups, concerned citizens, advocacy nonprofits, and decision-makers focused on the West Lake Landfill, Coldwater Creek, and Maline Creek, all contaminated by the same legacy waste.

State legislators including Rep. Cori Bush and state Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark became vocal allies, pushing for full creek testing and legislation to formally notify residents of their exposure.

In 2021, Chapman and Nickel got passed a trove of more than 15,000 government documents. The two women spent the next year analyzing and organizing them before turning the records over to journalists, leading to what became the most definitive public accounting yet of what really happened around Coldwater Creek.

The Science Caught Up

For years, families were told the risks were minimal. Official government studies downplayed the connection between the creek and the cancer clusters neighbors had noticed for decades. The coalition never stopped pushing back.

They were right to push. A landmark study published in JAMA Network Open found that children who lived near Coldwater Creek from the 1940s through the 1960s were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer over their lifetimes than those who lived farther away. The study’s senior author, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Weisskopf, described the findings as “quite dramatic” with not only elevated cancer risk, but one that increased steadily the closer childhood residents had lived to the creek.

Compared to those who lived 20 kilometers or more from the creek, those who lived less than one kilometer away had a 44 percent higher risk of developing any type of cancer.

Appendix cancer, also called appendiceal cancer, affects about 1 in a million people. Close to 200 cases of this rare cancer have been documented in the ZIP codes surrounding Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill.

The Bomb Was Built On Someone’s Back

The nuclear chain that contaminated St. Louis didn’t begin in Missouri. It began on Indigenous land.

Between 1942 and 1985, Navajo tribal land became contaminated through the mining of more than 30 million tons of uranium ore, first for the Manhattan Project, then for the Atomic Energy Program. The U.S. government failed to tell the Navajo people their water was contaminated. Many Navajo homes were even built from uranium mine debris.

The EPA has documented more than 15,000 sites associated with uranium mining across the United States, including more than 4,000 mines in the Navajo Nation, of which more than 500 are abandoned. The communities harmed at every step of this chain, from extraction to processing to waste storage, were, by design or by indifference, Indigenous, of color, poor, or rural.
Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

St. Louis is no exception. Research from Washington University’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic has found that Black St. Louisans are exposed to considerably greater environmental risks than white residents. A 2016 study found a consistent pattern for 30 years of placing hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live. In the U.S., race is the single biggest factor that determines whether you live near a hazardous waste facility.

This is not an accident of geography. It’s the feature of a system. We see the same pattern playing out with data centers right now.

Dawn Chapman understood the impact of this systemic issue when she stood alongside Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren at the signing of the renewed RECA legislation. Together with activists from across the country, they celebrated the renewal and expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but the moment was shadowed by grief for those who had already died waiting.

“There are so many people that should be behind us, that have already passed on,” Chapman said at the news conference in 2025. “Our government made it harder. They did everything they could to hide the truth from us.”

The poison runs through different communities in different forms. The negligence and the cover-up is the same.

A Demolition & A Warning

This month’s announcement that the Army Corps will demolish the former clubhouse of the French Quarter apartment complex in Hazelwood is a milestone. The ground beneath the structure tested positive for radioactive contamination linked to Coldwater Creek’s nuclear waste. But for Chapman and the broader coalition that has fought alongside her, it is a bitter victory.

“There’s nowhere else in the United States where something like this is happening in a residential area,” she said. “This radioactive waste was already out and contaminating that whole area, and only now is it being looked for. This has had the chance to hurt this community for decades.”

The Army Corps is also planning to expand its cleanup area to 750 more acres and 600 more properties along Coldwater Creek, a scope that speaks to just how far the contamination spread, and how long it was ignored.

The cleanup is estimated to cost $400 million (and counting) and take up to 15 years, all for contamination that has sat there poisoning a community for 8 decades.

What You Can Do

The North County Community Advisory Group holds monthly public meetings to keep the community informed. Their next meeting is June 4 at 6:30 p.m. at the Black Jack Fire House in north St. Louis County.

To learn more or get involved, visit justmomsstl.org and moenvironment.org/our-work/hazardous-waste.

I can’t sugarcoat. It sucks when you’ve been working on a cause, trying to stop something terrible in your community, and it doesn’t go your way.

We do our best here to offer support, tips, and resources. We give a voice to thousands of communities across the country who feel silenced and feel like no one is listening to them.

In 2023, we featured a group of Colorado residents who were working to protect their families, homes, schools, neighborhoods, air, water, and community reservoir from the risks of fracking.

Save the Aurora Reservoir

Rachel was one of those people, who has been fighting for more than three years.

She and the rest of the group did everything right. They showed up to public hearings and navigated the labyrinthine machinery of oil and gas regulation. They fundraised and rallied public opposition to the project.

At the end of April, in a narrow 3-2 vote, the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission approved a plan to drill 24 wells on the State Sunlight-Long drill pad.

Fracking will proceed roughly 3,000 feet from the Aurora Reservoir and the families who live nearby.

Her email to us was short. She called it “a devastating update.” She wasn’t sure of next steps. She wanted to say thank you.

I’ve been thinking about her email ever since.

Kermit the Frog once lamented that, it’s not easy being green. I’d add that, it’s not easy being an advocate either.

The people I know who are fighting for their communities are not doing it from positions of comfort and abundance. They are doing it in the margins. In the hours between work and dinner or between school pickup and bedtime. They are doing it with bake sales and Facebook pages and borrowed expertise. They are doing it because nobody else will.

STAR, Save the Aurora Reservoir, organized nearly 2,500 active citizens. They raised more than $100,000. They hired legal representation. They brought in nationally recognized experts. They showed up, en masse, to every opportunity the process afforded them.

And they still lost.

There is a particular kind of grief in that loss. It’s not the grief of having failed. They didn’t fail. It’s the grief of having succeeded at everything within your control and discovering that the system itself was designed to produce a different outcome.

As STAR put it in their statement: “If a community is able to step up, learn about O&G in Colorado, figure out all of the agencies involved... and still have no ability to protect their families, then the system is badly broken.”

That’s not defeat talking. That’s clarity.

So why keep going?

Because even the commissioners who voted yes are watching.

Because Commissioner John Messner, who voted against the permit, said plainly: “I think this will create change. The amount of public interest, the amount of participation, is the same that ultimately created Senate Bill 19-181.”

That bill, the landmark 2019 legislation that reoriented Colorado’s oil and gas regulation around public health, didn’t come from nowhere. It came from communities like this one, from losses like this one, from people who refused to let a setback be the last word.

The record exists now, and that’s not for nothing. More than three years of testimony, expert analysis, and documented community harm will become the foundation the next fight is built on.

I think now about all those people in Aurora who know each other. They know how to organize. They know the regulatory process. They know their opponents’ arguments and how to counter them. Their knowledge doesn’t expire.

Community power, once built, doesn’t simply dissolve because a commission voted the wrong way.

Movements are not sustained by victories alone. They are sustained by the culture of people who keep faith with one another through the losses, who don’t disappear when the news is bad, and who hold the thread so the next person knows where to pick it up.

The fracking will likely move forward near the Aurora Reservoir. That is a real harm, and it deserves to be named as such. The families who live nearby will bear a risk they didn’t choose and couldn’t prevent even with extraordinary effort. We should be honest about that injustice and not rush past it toward a tidy silver lining.

But STAR said it themselves: “The people of our state are not done.”

If Rachel's story lit something in you, don't let that feeling sit idle. Find the issue in your own backyard—the zoning meeting nobody's attending, the permit application filed quietly on a Friday afternoon, or the neighborhood group that needs one more person to show up.

Democracy is not a spectator sport, and the corporate interests making decisions that impact your life are counting on your exhaustion. Disappoint them.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Share your thoughts on setbacks and what motivates you to keep going.

I’ve spent decades fighting for communities left in the dark about the very pollution destroying their health. They had no idea they were being poisoned. When they asked questions, they were told that what was happening in their water, their air, their soil was fine. It wasn’t fine then. And what’s happening right now, town by town across this country, deserves the same scrutiny.

The race to build AI infrastructure is real, and it’s moving fast. Data centers are going up in industrial parks, on the edges of neighborhoods, sometimes right next to schools. Some communities are welcoming them. Others are fighting back.

A whole lot of people in between don’t even know what’s happening, until the permits are already signed.

That’s exactly why I launched the AI Data Center Reporting Map yesterday. Within hours of going live, we were flooded, and I mean flooded, with submissions from communities across the country. So many people reported in so fast that the system briefly couldn’t keep up. That response tells me this issue is far more widespread and urgent than anyone in power is admitting.

This new map is intended to give us all a bird’s-eye view. It shows where these centers are operating, where they’re being built, and where communities like yours are already raising alarms. Go look at it. Report your concerns. Because the first step to protecting your community is knowing what’s in it.

Learn more here —> Brockovich Data Center

What’s the Problem, Exactly?

A data center is a physical facility that houses and runs large computer systems. Right now, Virginia, Texas, and California lead in the number of data centers they house. Companies choose data center locations based on many factors, like the availability of power and water, properly zoned land, and high-quality network access.

Let me be clear about something: this is not about attacking AI. AI isn’t going away, and honestly, it can be a powerful tool, even for answering some of the very questions we’re raising here.

The issue is about living in communities that support our well-being. We need to make sure that the infrastructure powering AI doesn’t come at the expense of the people living around it.

Here’s what I’m hearing from communities coast to coast:

Energy. These facilities consume enormous amounts of power. That doesn’t just mean higher utility bills; it means pressure on the grid, and in some places, pressure to bring in more fossil fuel generation to keep up. In Maine, the prospect of spiking electricity rates was one of the biggest reasons lawmakers moved to pump the brakes.

Water. Cooling systems for data centers can require staggering volumes of water. In drought country, such as California and the Southwest, that’s a major concern. And it’s not just the quantity. Remember Hinkley? The contaminated water that ran through those swamp coolers? Data centers are already being flagged for emitting PFAS plumes. We’ve seen this movie before.

E-waste. The hardware inside these facilities gets upgraded constantly. What happens to what’s left behind? Not enough people are asking that question.

Fire and safety. A fire at a lithium battery storage facility near Monterey reminded everyone: these aren’t neutral facilities. They need buffers. They need distance from homes and schools. They need to be somewhere that, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t become a community catastrophe.

Jobs vs. resources. Here’s the math that nobody wants to say out loud: data centers consume huge amounts of local resources including power, water, land, and they create very few permanent local jobs. Communities deserve to weigh that trade-off with open eyes. When developers come to your town promising an economic boom, ask them how many permanent positions they’re actually committing to. Then get it in writing.

What Can You Actually Do About It?

Here’s where I want to talk directly to city councils, county commissioners, and every concerned community member who thinks they don’t have any power. You have more power than you think.

Zoning and Land Use — Your Most Powerful Tool

Cities decide where these facilities are allowed to go. Full stop. You can restrict data centers to industrial zones only. You can require conditional use permits (CUPs) that force case-by-case approval, giving your community a seat at the table for every single project. You can set distance buffers, keeping these facilities away from housing, away from schools, away from sensitive areas. This slows projects down and gives you leverage to impose conditions. Use it.

Water Permitting, Especially if You’re in California

Water permitting authority is enormous, and in drought-affected states, it may be the single most effective lever you have. Cities can limit or deny high water-use cooling systems. You can also require that facilities use only recycled or non-potable water. Cap water usage and force detailed impact studies before a single permit is issued. Require air cooling or closed-loop systems. In the right circumstances, water restrictions alone can stop or redirect a project entirely.

Environmental Review

In California, CEQA exists for exactly this kind of situation. Projects can be challenged on energy use, emissions, water consumption, and noise because yes, data centers run fans around the clock, and that’s not nothing for the families living nearby. Environmental review won’t always stop a project, but it can delay it by years and force meaningful redesigns. That time matters. Use it to organize.

Power & Grid Accountability

Your city doesn’t run the electrical grid, but you influence the approval process for what’s built to support it. Require proof that new facilities won’t be powered by new fossil fuel generation. Push utilities to disclose the source of electricity going to these facilities and the projected impact on local rates. Some states are already exploring requirements that new loads must be matched with clean energy. Find out where your state stands and push it forward.

Tax Incentives — Don’t Give Them Away for Free

A lot of these projects depend on tax breaks and fast-track approvals to pencil out financially. You can refuse those incentives. Or you can attach strings: local jobs guarantees, renewable energy commitments, and contributions to local infrastructure. Make them earn it. Maine just passed a law prohibiting data centers from accessing the state’s business development tax incentive programs, and it’s a model other states and localities should follow.

Show Up & Speak Out

I cannot overstate how much community pressure matters. More than 140 local groups around the country have managed to block or delay more than $64 billion worth of data center investment, not by hiring expensive lobbyists, but by showing up.

Attend the public hearings. Bring your neighbors. Make your city council understand that their constituents are watching. The elected officials who sit on those councils are accountable to you, and you can remind them of that.

Maine: A Lesson in How Close We Can Get

Maine’s legislature made history earlier this month. Lawmakers gave final approval to a moratorium on data centers larger than 20 megawatts, what would have been the first statewide ban of its kind in the country, blocking new projects until November 2027. The bill passed with bipartisan support. That alone should tell you something: this isn’t a left or right issue. It’s a people issue.

The debate focused on the real trade-offs. On one hand, there were the potential benefits to a former mill town desperate for economic reinvestment, and on the other was the documented impacts on electricity rates, water supplies, and communities across other states where these centers have already landed.

Then the governor vetoed it.

Governor Janet Mills said she would have signed the bill, she called a moratorium “appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” but vetoed it because the final version lacked an exemption for a specific project in the Town of Jay, a former mill community still reeling from major job losses.

So let me be clear about what happened in Maine: the governor didn’t say the moratorium was wrong. She said the bill needed one carve-out, the legislature wouldn’t add it, and she pulled the plug. Maine Conservation Voters said she was “siding with AI data center developers over the bipartisan will of the Maine Legislature.” Source: Maine Public

That’s not a reason to give up. That’s a reason to get more organized. Because the next vote, in Maine or in your state or city, could go the other way.

Even a governor who vetoed the moratorium felt compelled to sign legislation stripping tax incentives for data centers and promised to establish a commission to draft new regulations. The pressure is working. Keep applying it.

Without a statewide moratorium, data center proposals are now moving forward in multiple Maine communities with local residents left to fight these battles one permit at a time. That’s exactly the situation we’re trying to prevent everywhere else.

Don’t wait for your state to act. Start at your city council. Start tonight.

A Note on What Comes Next

Some of these fights will end up in court. If your community has already experienced pollution, contamination, or health impacts tied to a data center, document everything. Future litigation around data centers is coming. The pattern is too familiar.

For our friends in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the same dynamics are playing out in your communities too. The goal isn’t to ban these facilities outright.

The most effective strategy, everywhere, is to slow the expansion and force it to be done right: conditional use permits, strict water limits, distance buffers, and environmental reviews. Find the balance.

Don’t let urgency become an excuse to skip accountability.

Take Action

Report & Track

• Brockovich Data Center Map — report your community’s concerns and see what’s happening nationwide

Toolkits & Organizing

• NAACP: Stop Dirty Data Centers — community benefits agreement templates, guides, and the People’s Report

• Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development — free Data Center Resistance 101 Toolkit and connections to other fighting communities

Read the Research

• Data Center Watch: The $64B Pushback — case studies on how communities have successfully blocked and delayed projects

• Harvard Gazette: Why Communities Are Pushing Back — expert analysis on the jobs myth and the transparency gap

• CNN: The Moratorium Movement — how the fight went statewide

Track Legislation in Your State

• MultiState: State Data Center Policy 101 — updated 2026 guide to moratoriums, tax incentive battles, and zoning fights across all 50 states

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Go to brockovichdatacenter.com, check the map, and report what you’re seeing. We’ll keep updating on you on everything we learn and ways to continue to advocate for sustainable, secure, and efficient AI data center practices.

The 1960s were a decade of upheaval with civil rights battles, political assassinations, and a deeply unpopular war, and by the end of it, many Americans felt the country was coming apart at the seams. Out of that turbulence came something else: a reckoning with the world beneath our feet, above our heads, and running through our cities.

It started with a book. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a damning indictment of the chemical industry and its assault on the natural world. It was controversial and it was attacked. But it also lit a fuse.

Seven years later, a river caught fire.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, was so choked with industrial waste and sewage that, as Time magazine put it, it “oozed rather than flowed.” When it ignited in 1969, the images were impossible to ignore. How does water burn? The question forced a nation to confront what it had been willing to look away from for generations.

The outrage that followed was real and swift. The Clean Water Act passed. Environmental protection agencies were created at the state and federal level. On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans took to the streets, college campuses, and town halls for the very first Earth Day, the largest environmental demonstration the country had ever seen.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the event’s chief architect, said the goal was simple but audacious: to generate “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy” and force the issue permanently onto the national agenda.

It worked. The question now, more than fifty years later, is whether we’re willing to be shaken again.

The Myths We Need to Leave Behind

The environmental movement has never been more necessary or more misunderstood. A stubborn set of myths continues to cloud public conversation, slow meaningful action, and let the industries most resistant to change off the hook.

It’s time to name them, examine them, and let them go.

Myth 1: The movement is for “saving trees.”

The “tree hugger” label has long been used to dismiss environmentalists as sentimental and out of touch. Protecting the environment has always been about protecting people, and nothing makes that more clear than water.

In Flint, Michigan, a cost-cutting decision to switch the city’s water supply exposed tens of thousands of residents, mostly Black and low-income, to dangerous levels of lead. Children suffered irreversible neurological damage. Families couldn't drink from their own taps. It wasn’t a nature story, it was a human rights crisis. And it happened here in the United States (under a Democratic president).

Air pollution remains the leading environmental risk factor for death around the world, contributing to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, with the largest health impacts seen in low- and middle-income countries where people have higher exposures and limited access to healthcare and other services.

In the U.S., nearly half of us breathe unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. The report finds that 156 million people live in communities that received an “F” grade for either ozone or particle pollution. Extreme heat and wildfires contributed to worse air quality for millions of people across the U.S. as well.

Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate aren’t fringe concerns, they are fundamental human rights.

Myth 2: Environmentalists are out-of-touch elites.

I’ve met a lot of people in my work and most of them would not identify as “environmentalists” or “activists.” However, people’s perspectives change rapidly when they can’t drink their water.

One of the most contentious talking points from the current administration is the idea that the environmental movement is a product of rich elites and that regulations hurt working-­class people.

I speak with these same people every day, and I can tell you that they are not suffering because of regulations. Instead, they have been harmed by neglected infrastructure updates, corporate misdeeds, and bureaucratic hurdles.

The environmental movement’s most powerful voices have long come from frontline communities bearing the heaviest burden of environmental harm. The environmental justice movement emerged in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, when a predominantly Black community rose up against a hazardous waste landfill being built in their neighborhood.

Myth 3: Environmentalists want to drag us back in time.

This concept may be the most backward myth of all. Environmentalists aren’t trying to reverse progress. We are working to accelerate it beyond the limitations of outdated and polluting infrastructure.

Consider water treatment: modern filtration systems, green infrastructure like wetlands restoration, and smart monitoring technologies can deliver cleaner water more efficiently than aging industrial-era systems that leak, corrode, and contaminate.

The movement champions innovation. Solar panels, wind turbines, and advanced water purification aren’t a retreat from modern life.

They are modern life, upgraded.

Myth 4: Environmental protection kills economic growth.

I’ve never understood the idea that we must choose between a healthy planet and a healthy economy. Clean water itself is an economic engine. Tourism, fishing, agriculture, and real estate all depend on healthy waterways.

In 2025, global renewable energy generation surpassed coal for the first time, with roughly 91 percent of new renewable projects now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.

Bill Mckibben has been writing about it in his Substack.

“…solar last year supplied more power to the Texas grid than coal for the first time, and that new plans have been announced for a 21-gigawatt solar and battery project in California, much of it on land that’s been ruined by over-irrigation, and that coal generation has now fallen in India and China for the first time in a half-century.”

Clean energy jobs in the U.S. now outnumber oil, gas, and coal jobs by more than three to one. The cost of inaction is becoming impossible to ignore: weather-related disasters caused $55 billion in damages in 2025 alone.

The real economic risk isn’t going green. It’s waiting too long to start.

Myth 5: Going green means giving up.

Environmental action is too often framed as sacrifice. But in most cases, greener choices are simply smarter ones.

On water alone, the math is striking. The bottled water industry record $29.9 billion in sales in 2025. We spend billions each year on bottled water to avoid tap water we don’t trust, while generating mountains of plastic waste that end up back in our waterways.

Investing in clean, reliable public water systems and carrying a reusable bottle isn’t deprivation. It's a better deal. The assumption that our current way of doing things is optimal mistakes the familiar for the ideal.

Reusable water bottles, food containers, and shopping bags aren’t just for reducing waste; they also help us avoid microplastics that harm our health.

Myth 6: One person can’t make a difference.

It’s easy to feel small in the face of a crisis this large. But individual action is not just symbolic, it’s structural.

The Clean Water Act was born from public outrage. Ordinary citizens showed up to city halls, wrote letters, and marched through the streets until their government acted. Research published in Science suggests that when a committed minority reaches roughly 25 percent of a population, it can shift majority behavior.

Every conversation about water quality, every vote cast for infrastructure investment, every demand for corporate accountability over a polluted river or aquifer moves the needle.

Progress, however imperfect, compounds. Inaction, however comfortable, also compounds.

The Truth These Myths Are Hiding

These myths don’t circulate by accident. They serve the interests of industries resisting change and politicians avoiding hard choices. For everyone else, they simply delay solutions we already have.

The environmental movement has never been about going backward. From the burning of the Cuyahoga River to the crisis in Flint to the clean energy and clean water innovations underway right now, it has always been about building something better—a future where people and planet can thrive together.

The only thing standing in the way is what we’re willing to believe.

The Environmental Movement Is For Everyone

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, people from every walk of life from farmers and ranchers to faith leaders and scientists to students, families, and communities on the frontlines of environmental disasters, have driven action that prevented countless illnesses and saved millions of lives worldwide.

Economic prosperity and environmental protections are not competing goals. They are part of the same path forward.

Clean energy and sustainability have already created millions of jobs, lowered costs, and delivered healthier air and water. Governments will delay, corporate interests may distract, but they cannot ignore an organized, determined public.

Losing Our Right to Protest

We’re now facing a new and serious threat. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies have spent the last decade quietly working to make protest itself illegal.

Eighteen states have passed laws making it a crime to demonstrate near oil and gas pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.” Five states have approved legislation that can define an active protest as a “riot.”

Congress is now considering proposals that could criminalize protestors who wear masks, block traffic, and impede pipeline construction. Offenders who aren’t citizens could be deported. Nonprofit groups supporting protests could lose their tax-exempt status.

This wave of legislation traces directly back to the Standing Rock protests of 2016, when Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national and international attention, cost its developer billions, and briefly succeeded in halting construction.

The industry’s response was to buy influence in state legislatures, using groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to spread model “critical infrastructure” laws across the country.

Most recently, a North Dakota jury handed down a $660 million verdict against Greenpeace, later reduced to $345 million, for its role in supporting those protests. If Greenpeace is forced to pay, it could end 55 years of environmental advocacy. The message being sent is unmistakable: speak up, and we will bankrupt you.

The right to protest has always been one of the most powerful tools in the environmental movement. Earth Day itself was born from it. Protecting that right is now inseparable from protecting the water, land, and climate we march for.

Earth Day’s enduring legacy is people working together to shape a livable future and to never doubt that a dedicated group of people can change the world. That legacy depends on those people still being allowed to show up.

To learn more, check out the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), a Washington-based research group that tracks legislation in the U.S. that criminalizes public dissent.

This essay was inspired by this one from earthday.org and this piece from Circle of Blue.

Which myth about environmentalism did you once believe, and what changed your mind? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.

Ever wonder why good bills pass but nothing really changes? You might have an industry lobbyist to thank for that.

For decades, cigarette companies employed lobbyists who also worked for hospitals, medical associations, and cancer research groups. The arrangement wasn’t accidental. Tobacco lobbyists played both sides enjoying access to health-focused legislators who might otherwise have shown them the door.

The deal was transactional and corrupt. Ease off on the smoking bans, and they would help get funding for that hospital in your district.

That same dynamic is playing out today with PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” that have contaminated our water, our food, and our blood. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This family of manmade chemicals are known for their stamina, stain resistance, and more. They persist in the environment and in our bodies for decades or longer, accumulating over time, raising long-term concerns for ecosystems and public health.

Subscribe now

A new report by the watchdog organizations F Minus and Mothers Out Front, titled Bad Chemistry, has mapped the web of lobbying conflicts at the heart of the PFAS crisis in extraordinary detail. What they found should make us all furious.

The report looks across states and in Congress at lobbying firms representing the industries fighting to keep PFAS in our consumer products and working with the hospitals, water agencies, local governments, school districts, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are paying the price for that contamination.

Sounds like a double standard, right?

Take a look at the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, which in 2025 collected $520,000 from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), one of the most powerful forces in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.

That same year, Holland & Knight collected $80,000 from the City of Philadelphia.

Those two clients were not working toward the same goal. The Philadelphia Water Department had a $2 billion plan in place to comply with Biden-era drinking water standards for PFAS, standards that the ACC was simultaneously lobbying the Trump administration to roll back. The ACC won. The EPA weakened those standards in May 2025.

Philadelphia’s residents, who had been promised cleaner water, are now on the hook for whatever contamination costs follow.

Holland & Knight never had to choose sides. The firm didn’t have to, as no law requires it. It simply cashed checks from both sides of the issue.

This arrangement is a business model, and it is the central mechanism by which the PFAS industry has successfully delayed, weakened, and killed legislation that would protect public health across the country.

The new report documents the full scope of it, and the picture it paints is a direct echo of one of the darkest chapters in American lobbying history.

The Firms Playing Both Sides

The numbers are stark.

132 local governments and government agencies, including the cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, share lobbying firms with PFAS industry lobbyists, even as those local governments face staggering future clean-up costs that could be passed on to residents through higher taxes and utility bills.

11 public school systems in areas with PFAS-contaminated water are in the same boat.

26 hospitals and healthcare systems share lobbying firms with the trade associations fighting PFAS regulation, as do major cancer organizations including the American Cancer Society, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Don’t forget that a 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.

Even 15 wildlife conservation groups are unwittingly entangled, sharing lobbyists with the industry coalitions that are letting PFAS leach into the ecosystems these groups are trying to protect.

As mentioned above, Holland & Knight lobbies for the ACC but also the City of Philadelphia, Atlanta Public Schools, the American Cancer Society, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Brandeis University, Case Western Reserve University, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, and the National Parks Conservation Association.

And that’s just one firm.

The American Chemistry Council’s Web of Denial

The American Chemistry Council has long served as the command center for PFAS denialism. Emboldened by the Trump administration, which has appointed multiple former senior ACC staffers to key positions at the EPA, ACC now openly supports federal preemption of all state PFAS laws and regulations.

The revolving door is not subtle. Nancy Beck, a current senior EPA adviser on chemical safety, is a former ACC director and lobbyist. In a prior EPA stint, she worked to weaken regulations that track PFAS health consequences.

“Nancy Beck, E.P.A.’s ‘toxics czar’ during the first Trump Administration, is back to fulfill the chemical industry’s wish list,” Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told New Edge Times in 2025. “The weakening of health protections” from toxic chemicals “is just around the corner,” he said.

Lynn Dekleva, another former ACC lobbyist who spent more 30 years at DuPont, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market at the EPA, and federal reports documented that she retaliated against employees who raised concerns about chemicals she wanted to greenlight.

Steven Cook, a former lawyer representing PFAS polluters, now works as a principal deputy within the EPA and is actively seeking to scrap the “polluter pays” rules that would hold PFAS manufacturers financially responsible for cleanup.

The financial firepower behind this effort is staggering.

Almost 20 industry trade groups and companies representing PFAS polluters, the fossil fuel industry, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s pro-PFAS deregulation coalition collectively spent up to $60 million lobbying the EPA and more than $12 million lobbying the White House on PFAS-related issues in just the first half of 2025 alone, according to a September 2025 analysis by Food & Water Watch.

Since 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce coalition against PFAS regulation has spent up to $272.8 million in PFAS-related lobbying. Major PFAS producers increased their EPA-focused lobbying spending by 25 percent compared to the first half of the prior year.

In September 2025, the Trump EPA asked a federal appeals court to throw out the regulations limiting four types of PFAS in drinking water, regulations that the Biden administration had spent years developing.

Internal EPA documents leaked to the New York Times revealed that the agency changed its position after meeting with industry representatives. The public will be left footing the bill for cleanup costs, and polluters are off the hook.

What This Looks Like on the Ground

The Bad Chemistry report traces these conflicts state by state, and the examples are damning.

In California, an estimated 25 million people are exposed to PFAS through their water systems, with health impacts costing the state between $5.5 billion and $8.7 billion annually.

When California’s legislature advanced SB 682, a bill that would have banned PFAS in several categories of consumer products, lobbying firms were simultaneously lobbying for the bill on behalf of water agencies and against the bill on behalf of chemical industry clients.

KP Public Affairs, for instance, lobbied for the PFAS clean-up fund on behalf of Western Municipal Water District while opposing the PFAS ban for the California Restaurant Association.

It collected $281,400 from the City of Los Angeles, a city with a 30 percent PFAS contamination rate in parts of its water system and $73,700 from its chemical industry clients.

California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 682 in October 2025, allowing those double-dipping lobbying firms to claim a win with both sides.

In New York, five PFAS-related bills passed the State Senate overwhelmingly in 2025, one of them 53-0, only to die without a vote in the Assembly, blocked by Speaker Carl Heastie. Chemical and plastic industry lobbyists were widely blamed.

The firm Ostro Associates lobbied against a PFAS consumer products ban for the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, while simultaneously lobbying for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The firm Actum lobbied for the Cookware Sustainability Alliance while also representing DoorDash, meaning a firm working to keep PFAS in cookware also represents the company delivering food in containers that may be contaminated with PFAS.

In Oregon, lobbying firm Tonkon Torp opposed a bill that would have phased out PFAS in consumer products (HB 3512) on behalf of Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a position co-signed by the ACC. At the same time, a Tonkon Torp lobbyist testified in favor of a bill to fund newborn disease screening.

The irony is not lost on anyone who has read the science: a January 2025 study found that exposure to PFAS in utero and through breastmilk is associated with birth defects, reduced birth weight, diminished immune response, and increased risk of cardiometabolic problems in children.

Tonkon Torp is helping to fund tests for one set of childhood diseases while working to block legislation that would reduce children’s exposure to the chemicals causing those diseases.

In Michigan, where PFAS contamination in drinking water is widespread and school districts sit within miles of contaminated military bases, the lobbying firm Kelley Cawthorne represents both the ACC and the Michigan Chemistry Council, and also represents multiple public school districts, Wayne County, and the Michigan Council on Foundations, which has called clean freshwater “essential for our health, environment, and economy.”

Michigan’s lobbyist disclosure laws are so weak that the full extent of these conflicts can’t even be fully documented.

Minnesota Showed What’s Possible. Now Industry Is Trying to Dismantle It.

Minnesota passed Amara’s Law, the strongest ban on toxic PFAS in the nation, in 2023. By January 2025, the law began implementation. Its goal: eliminate nonessential PFAS use by 2032 and create a public reporting system so consumers can know what’s in the products they buy.

Minnesota is not a fringe state acting recklessly. Japan, England, and France have sent documentary filmmakers to study Amara’s Law. Lawmakers from New South Wales, Australia have come to learn from Minnesota’s approach. The state has become a global model for confronting PFAS contamination at its source.

And yet, since the law passed, industry groups have been working methodically to dismantle it. They’ve pushed for loopholes, exemptions, and extended timelines, arguing for “flexibility” and “feasibility” while the chemicals keep contaminating groundwater and bodies.

State Representative Josh Heintzeman is carrying a bill that would further delay implementation of the requirement that companies report PFAS content in their products, information that is supposed to be publicly available so that parents can make informed decisions about what they bring into their homes.

The industry argument always looks the same. Delay, obscure, exempt, and run out the clock. Meanwhile, communities need new water treatment systems, filtration upgrades, and landfill mitigation. Taxpayers foot the bill to clean up contamination that manufacturers knew about, in some cases for decades.

Internal documents from multiple PFAS manufacturers show that companies knew these chemicals were toxic and persistent and continued to produce and sell them anyway. PFAS is, in the most direct sense, a Minnesota-made problem: 3M pioneered these chemicals, and Minnesotans are still living with the consequences.

Delaying Amara’s Law won’t make contamination disappear. It won’t make cleanup cheaper. It will only guarantee more exposure, more illness, and a larger tab for taxpayers.

The Disclosure Problem

One reason these conflicts have gone largely unexamined is that state lobbyist disclosure laws are profoundly weak.

Only 16 of the 36 states tracked in the Bad Chemistry report require lobbyists to disclose the specific bills they lobby on. Michigan discloses no compensation figures and no bill numbers. Oregon requires no disclosure of bills lobbied or positions taken, and its compensation disclosure system is described as confusing and opaque.

Even in California, which has one of the better disclosure systems in the country, lobbyists are not required to disclose what position they take on each bill, making it easy to play both sides without being caught. F Minus discovered firms lobbying simultaneously for and against SB 682 only by filing a public records request with the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.

This opacity is not accidental. The regulatory environment is often shaped in part by the very industries that benefit from secrecy.

What Can Be Done

The Bad Chemistry report ends with a clear prescription: local governments, public school districts, hospitals, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are clients of PFAS-lobbying firms have the power to disrupt this dynamic.

By adopting policies that prohibit contracting with firms that also lobby for PFAS clients, these institutions can force lobbying firms to choose sides. That choice, multiplied across hundreds of clients, will impose real economic and reputational costs on firms that continue to represent the industries driving the contamination crisis.

That is how Tobacco’s double-agent strategy eventually broke down. It can break down here too, but only if the institutions being harmed by PFAS stop funding the firms fighting on behalf of the polluters.

We need the political will to hold the responsible parties accountable and stop letting them play both sides of the table while communities drink poisoned water and pick up the bill.

Subscribe now

Go to the Sources

F Minus and Mothers Out Front, “Bad Chemistry: The PFAS Lobbyists Who Also Lobby For PFAS Victims,” March 2026

Food & Water Watch, “PFAS Lobbying: Mid-2025 Update, September 2025

Clean Water Action, “Lobbying in PFAS: Big Money is Poisoning our Water,” April 2026

In Other News…

The EPA wants to weaken protections for groundwater near coal ash dumps.

Coal ash, the toxic waste from coal-fired power plants, is stored in massive unlined pits that leach arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and other heavy metals into groundwater, rivers, and lakes. U.S. coal plants produced roughly 63 million tons of it in 2024 alone, according to industry estimates.

The agency’s proposal, made at the behest of electric utilities, would allow site-by-site exemptions from national standards, eliminate volume limits on coal ash spread on land, push groundwater monitoring points further from the pits, and grant more time to remove ash from waste sites. The EPA is already structuring the rule to be legally “severable,” so that courts can’t strike it down all at once.

You can fight this. Public comments are open through June 12. Submit yours at regulations.gov, docket number EPA-HQ-OLEM-2020-0107.

Alright, everyone. That’s a lot to digest! Be kind in the comments to one another, and let us know if you have questions or just want to keep the conversation going down below.