@JunkScience
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Once again, I will be the only Senator going to the COP. There’s a lot to be said and done about climate, but my message in Antalya will focus on the three key essentials for climate safety. 🧵View quoted post on X
The Interior Department is drawing up lists of public land for AI data centers.
This is unnecessary, an inappropriate use of our natural heritage, and should be opposed by all conservatives.
BLM state directors got three days in September to name parcels that could host data centers, and at least 15 proposals for data centers and related infrastructure, covering more than 17,000 acres, are pending across six Western states. Developers want land near transmission, and a USGS report this summer found about 91 million acres of BLM land, nearly the size of Montana, within 10 miles of a high-voltage line.
We support building data centers responsibly, but our standard asks four things of them:
1) no net cost to ratepayers
2) no net water burden
3) protect valuable land
4) put communities first
Putting them on open public land fails the last two. Ranchers graze that land, hunters and campers use it, and federal law directs BLM to manage it for all of them. A solar lease on public land comes with reclamation requirements, so the ground can be restored when the panels come down. A data center campus is a permanent industrial site, and once it goes up, that ground is gone for good.
ACC spent this year fighting for permitting reform because America needs to build faster. Shortcuts like this one undercut that case and hand ammunition to everyone who would rather nothing get built at all.
Better land, including federal land, already exists. The Energy Department is partnering on a privately funded campus of more than $100 billion at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, a former uranium enrichment plant, with cleanup continuing alongside it.
Brownfields, Superfund sites, and retired coal plants come with roads, substations, and transmission already in place, and building there puts land that needs cleanup back to work.
Public land should stay public and working for the people who use it, and a decision this permanent deserves more than a three-day list.View quoted post on X
Greta Thunberg at COP31: “The planet is not dying, it is being killed.”
Thunberg rants: “We are heading towards a future of more genocides and more ecocides and the complete compromise of our basic rights and where basic necessities become luxury. And it is more clear than ever in spaces like these that the situation could not be less under control. The planet is not dying, it is being killed, and we know by who, and it is being killed by the very same people often thought to come to our rescue. No one is coming to our rescue. When our human rights are being threatened by states and other institutions, it becomes our duty, everyone’s duty, but especially the more privileged you are, the bigger your responsibility to stand up, to be the adult in the room, and to fight for the rights of our human rights and for everyone’s human rights.”View quoted post on X
