That seems like an awfully defeatist attitude. With all the capital investment flowing into AI, there should be plenty of money to research and improve renewables (including fusion, fission, and battery technology) to meet the moment. After all, we need to move past fossil fuels and are already delayed on this path, so AI is a good catalyst (among many) to make progress.

On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.

> What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.

You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.

Advancing civilization will require increasing energy use, yes. That's always been the long-term trend of development.

The problem is that anyone who actually cares about such thing has like a dozen better venues to deal with it than data centers, yet they haven't in their lives thought of a single one.

What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.

The county is currently building a nuclear power plant