| > These buildouts have been receiving scrutiny and often refusal across the US for some time now. Yes but the crux of your reading of my comment is you think I'm trying to downplay the opposition to buildouts. Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated? What I've seen is the usual tech skeptical online publications have made a big deal about this issue, the usual pro tech sources say nothing about it. Anti tech politicians have run photo ops in anti tech publications, and pro tech politicians have done the same. Big newspapers like the NYT have run the occasional article about opposition but have largely left the issue alone. > But none of that stands counter to the reality that there is currently broad community pushback across the US and that it is indeed the associated political processes that determine what is and isn't allowed. The populace is well within its rights to deny the construction of datacenters regardless of if such an outcome is a wise course of action. Is it broad? Has anyone shown how broad it is? I sure haven't seen a march on DC about it. Before the YIMBY movement organized, this is exactly how housing issues used to be covered on progressive media btw. Protests of 30 people in a community of thousands used to get amplified to galvanize anti-housing support. To some extent this is the job of media, to give editorial voice to sympathetic concerns, but as someone now involved with housing politics I've come to realize that the truth of the scale of opposition to local builds like this can has a lot of incentives around every motivated actor to inflate their support. Community surveys are the only thing I've seen that works and even then advocates will show up to meetings and shout at the opposition claiming that the survey results are rigged. As far as the "associated political processes" this depends heavily from state to state and county to county. Opponents to UC Berkeley's student housing tried to block housing by claiming humans are noise pollution. This only works because California has CEQA. Residents of Texas could not sue on those grounds. If you ask me, the fact that we're playing politics to litigate building shows we're lost. We can't leave every piece of infrastructure to the vagaries of the masses. As usual the rich and politically well connected will win and the poor will lose. Building needs to be ministerial. |
> Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated?
No, no idea, and no idea. But I don't think that actually matters with regards to our point of contention.
Recently there have been many concrete examples of people showing up to raise objections about data centers with their local politicians and regulatory bodies. This has been well documented in the media whether or not a particular outlet such as the NYT has chosen to draw attention to it. The companies themselves point to the permitting process when explaining their own recent behavior. It is thus IMO facetious to question the claim that widespread political opposition exists.
Your housing example illustrates my point perfectly. I completely agree that the situation with zoning and permitting is absurdly dysfunctional and almost entirely to blame for high housing costs. But it is also clear that there is broad opposition to building more housing for one reason or another. You might view the influence of a particular group as outsized. It would not be unreasonable to be of the opinion that the political process gives too much weight to the naysayers and is in need of reform. But when opposition is successfully blocking something across wide swaths of the country then the statement "there is broad political opposition to that in the US" is correct more or less by definition.