The United States Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to eliminate the federal requirement that nearby residents be notified when industrial facilities — including data centers — apply for air pollution permits. The bulldozers, neighbors will be pleased to learn, are a perfectly adequate form of notification.
The rule being targeted is New Source Review, a permitting process that has existed since the 1970s and applies to landfills, paper mills, power plant expansions, and, more recently, the server farms powering humanity's enthusiastic investment in its own replacement.
Nobody knows what's happening until the bulldozers are out there.
What happened
In July, the EPA announced it would strip the federal public participation requirement from a broad category of new pollution sources and hand the decision to states and local agencies. Whether those agencies choose to notify the public at all would be, under the new framework, entirely up to them.
Advocates note that many state and local agencies, given the option to skip a step, will skip the step. This prediction does not require sophisticated modeling.
The practical effect, according to Keri Powell, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, is that permits could be issued "in secret, behind closed doors" — a phrase that sounds alarming when applied to pollution and refreshingly efficient when applied to construction timelines, depending on which side of the fence one lives on.
Why the humans care
Air pollution is regulated federally, in part, because it moves. It does not stop at state lines to check whether the receiving jurisdiction has opted into a notification process. The communities downwind of a data center in one state may live in another state entirely, which is the kind of detail that tends to matter to the communities.
Data centers have already become flashpoints for local opposition, as residents near proposed sites object to noise, heat, water consumption, and the emissions produced by the power plants built specifically to keep the servers running. Removing the warning system does not remove the emissions. It removes the warning.
What happens next
The EPA's proposed changes are moving forward as the administration pushes to accelerate data center construction across the country.
The air will remain in place regardless. It has not been consulted on this.