Let’s keep hysteria down and our eyes open, because knowing the players and what they want helps us fight for what we want.

The subtitle to Ted Gioia’s recent post, “Anti-AI Laws Now Get Unanimous Support from Left & Right,” in his Substack, The Honest Broker, pretty much says it all in his subtitle: “In just three years, Silicon Valley has destroyed its entire support network. It’s still in denial—but that won’t last.” The major AI companies that have become synonymous with Silicon Valley have indeed managed to frighten and/or annoy huge swaths of the public both here and abroad.

As Gioia writes:

AI backlash is a huge national issue, but it’s also the hottest local issue right now. Across the US, more than 300 bills restricting data centers have been introduced in states and communities. At least 14 states are considering total moratoriums. And in places where politicians hesitate, the public is stepping in—putting voter initiatives on the ballot.

Silicon Valley has totally lost public support, and now will get punished brutally with legislation. But litigation will be just as painful. Tech companies are now routinely losing jury trials—they are so disliked by the public that going to trial almost always ensures a loss.

Any AI babies being thrown out with the bath water can be blamed on the AI would-be tech lords, but let’s also admit there’s a level of Anti-AI hysteria running through the populace that is, as hysteria tends to be, more triggered response than substantive understanding.

First, a Moment of Housekeeping

Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker is a refreshing Substack, partly because of the quality of the writing and partly because of his wide-ranging purview focused, as it were, on the environments and practices of human creativity. How much do I like this Substack? Well, here in America we say “I love you” with money, and I’m a paying subscriber.

There’s another The Honest Broker Substack, written by Roger Pielke Jr. and I’d guess this one is better known in the climate change circles that I closely follow. Pielke is smart, but he sometimes irks me in his criticisms of climate science, where—spoiler alert!—sometimes someone gets something wrong. Pielke is especially on a crusade about imperfections in climate research, and this sometimes gives aid and succor to climate deniers and doubters, even though Pielke is not trying to do this; he’s trying to correct the record of what we actually know about climate change and how we know it. He’s also easily upset with the efforts and assumptions of many about climate change attribution, and he has a point that extreme weather happens and any specific instance of extreme weather cannot be definitively attributed to changes in climate. But in the grand scheme this is a minor point, since the evidence, to raise just one example, of the tie between climate change and worsening extreme weather and rates of extreme weather is in aggregate undeniable. Tomorrow’s massive deluge? Maybe, maybe not, but that warmer air holds more moisture and thus, with rising global temperature averages, more moisture means more deluges, that’s not a “maybe.” That’s simple enough to grasp even without a PhD in oceanic and atmospheric sciences. I wish he’d spend less time proving that he’s right and others are wrong, especially on particular points that the larger perspectives make moot. I’ve written about Roger Pielke Jr. a number of times. The following posts will be more than enough to satisfy your curiosity: “Let’s Not Worry So Much About ‘Climate Thought Police’,” from November 19, 2025, and “Statistics, Damned Statistics, and Common Sense, from July 3, 2024.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled programing.

Hubris, Tone-Deafness, Secrecy Dreams, and How to Foster Hysteria

You gotta admire the AI tech overlords, and the public electricity and gas utilities, and the fossil fuel industry: their intense focus on short-term gains blinds them to achieving their long-term success—or in the case of Big Oil, the long-term success of the Earth as a lovely place for human habitation.

The AI Tech Overlords

In the case of the AI tech overlords, their lust for massive and plentiful data centers has driven a market message that AI needs more and more and faster and faster. It doesn’t take a genius to see gaping holes in their wishes. For one thing, the general AI platforms of today still do not demonstrate successful business models. The primary argument is that AI can theoretically (or may someday) replace many humans who require salaries and paychecks, thus fulfilling the wet dreams of capitalists with huge cost savings. No one should be surprised that the vast majority of those who work aren’t thrilled by this vision. The AI dream, and especially the human-replacement part, is so fervid that AI corporations pursue staggering market valuations, while running huge development costs mentioned over and over again by the very same AI corporations as they seek to raise more and more capital. The sums chased are so large that they are regularly in the news and to such an extent that economic bubbles are also regularly in the news. Also in the news? The question of when such a bubble may burst and bring down the economy due to the huge sums of money being tossed at AI.

It is argued by some impressive people—I’d point to Tony Fadell in a recent Podbean podcast episode, “Breakthrough Technology  Dialogues with Tony Fadell,” appearing on Wednesday, April 15, 2026—that the current fixation on massive data centers is a problem. If you don’t know Fadell, look him up, but here’s the CliffsNotes: Godfather of Apple’s iPod; Co-creator of the iPhone; Co-Founder of Nest (The Learning Thermostat), which sold to Google for $3.2 billion, give or take some millions; perennial possible Apple CEO candidate (although never the bride); and as of 2017, Fadell has been running a venture fund originally called Future Shape, now called Build Collective. [Full disclosure: I worked for Tony at Fuse, a 1998 start-up aimed at network-connected consumer electronics that went away when the venture capitalists vanished during Dot.Com, when shortly he was off to Apple and the iPod. Years later, my daughter started with Tony at Nest as Assistant to the Founders, leaving the company sometime post-Google purchase, having become a product manager for the Nest thermostat.]

Podbean has Fadell talking about AI “on the edge,” by which he means, as best I can follow, that with powerful processing in our own devices, much of what we want from AI will be handled less in data centers and more in what is in your pocket or your corporate server. This may be related to the I/O challenge of data center AI, or I may be conflating the podcast here with some article or other read recently, but if you’re coming to me for analysis of computing technology and practice, stop reading now. The main point I’m making is that there are some very real questions about how AI will present in the world, but you wouldn’t know this if all you go by is the current AI corporations’ frenzy to establish huge fleets of data centers.

The Public Power Utilities

While the news from the kingdom of AI is all about fierce expansion of data centers to run all those servers stacked with  Nvidia chips so that the AI companies can charge for usage, all the while requiring significant electricity supply and water supply for cooling. For public utilities—both electricity and natural gas—all this represents gobsmacking opportunities. Not that power utilities can deliver the power in a sufficient or timely way, at least not with the way utilities have been deliveing electricity  for decades upon decades. Today, power utilities face grids constraints, electricity capacity hard limits, interconnect planning delays, and supply chain problems, but that doesn’t stop the utilities from dreaming. Of course, what the utilities really want is to build more generators, more distribution and transmission lines, and more other capital-intensive infrastructure to meet the new demand, because the capital spending they undertake gets them a guaranteed return on investment. This model is still today’s bread-and-butter profit mechanism for these public monopolies, especially investor-owned utilities.

By the way, there are plenty of well-understood and “shovel-ready” ways to increase actual electricity capacity that are less capital intensive, mainly through grid and supply digital management to extract huge gains in efficiency and flexibility. These include smart meters, smart panels, smart appliances, or the various ways to gradually incorporate distributed energy recourses (e.g., community and utility-scale solar, wind, and batteries systems, electric vehicles as batteries, etc.). There are also better ways to manage grid responsiveness and stability via grid-facing inverters, digital transformers, utility-level real-time sensors, and approaches like virtual power plants, where home solar/batteries are aggregated to serve as electricity generation for the grid for the benefit of contributing households and for improved overall grid supply. If you really want to learn about all this stuff and the lion’s share I haven’t mentioned, check out David Roberts’s Volts.

The point here is that there are lots of ways we can improve and expand the grid without huge spending, but the current hype about AI fits nicely into the way utilities prefer to make money today.

Big Oil is Hoping AI Goes as Big as Possible and to Hell with the Climate

Back on January 29, 2026, I posted “AI is Giving Me Gas.” The subtitle: “Behold the wonder of climate denial in the planned expansion of new gas generation plants.” The opening paragraph follows:

I’ve been saying that AI’s projected electricity demand is celebrated by fossil fuel companies because this growth in electricity demand provides an anchor for Big Oil to keep selling natural gas for decades to come.

Big AI is in bed with Big Oil and a glance at the headlines just about any day shows this clearly. Well, “clearly” may not be the best descriptor, since Musk and Zuckerberg and who knows who else seem happy enough to get their data centers rolling without waiting for the grid to supply the needed juice. There are lawsuits and entirely reasonable climate justice fights about data centers polluting neighborhoods through the use of fleets of big diesel-fueled generators and natural gas generators, whether for primary electricity source or for backup.

Google’s AI Overview for the query “Court cases involving diesel fueled generators for data centers” answers this:

Court cases and legal battles involving diesel generators at data centers primarily revolve around federal environmental xAI violations, local permitting disputes over emissions, and litigation brought by residents and environmental groups regarding public health. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Notable Cases and Legal Disputes

• • xAI Colossus 2 Power Plant Lawsuit (Southaven, Mississippi): The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Earthjustice filed a major lawsuit against xAI, challenging the company’s use of unpermitted gas-turbine power plants to run its data center. The coalition (representing the NAACP) argued xAI bypassed federal Clean Air Act requirements and created a de facto power plant that emits smog, soot, and formaldehyde without proper public notice or health mitigation.
  • Markley Data Center Expansion Lawsuits (Lowell, Massachusetts): Residents and environmental justice advocates launched the first data center lawsuit in Massachusetts, challenging a state permit that allows a data center expansion to operate backup diesel generators. Filed with the help of the Yale Law School Environmental Justice Clinic, the suit charges the state with ignoring carcinogenic diesel exhaust and failing to conduct cumulative health impact analyses in an Environmental Justice population.
  • Independence AI Data Center Contract Battles (Independence, Missouri): A sprawling legal battle involves a $6.6 billion AI data center proposed on a 400-acre site. Neighbors and local groups are opposing the development—which is slated to rely on extensive diesel generation—bringing zoning, environmental, and development contract battles into circuit and county courts.
  • Quantum Loophole / Aligned Data Center Exemption Denials (Maryland): State regulators and local councils denied Aligned Data Centers an exemption that would have allowed them to operate 168 diesel backup generators at a massive data center campus in Frederick County, Maryland, prompting significant development and zoning pushback. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Regulatory Pushback and State Precedents

Beyond direct litigation, communities are actively fighting permitting processes and appealing to environmental boards regarding diesel use:

• • Port Washington (Wisconsin): Residents petitioned the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to deny air quality permits for 45 backup diesel generators, citing concerns about localized particulate matter and nitrogen oxide emissions.
  • Hilliard (Ohio): The Ohio EPA faced pushback and held hearings over draft air permits allowing an Amazon data center to run 158 Tier 2 diesel generators. Residents and local officials have called for cleaner Tier 4 standards to limit carcinogenic emissions.
  • Bay Area (California): Environmental groups petitioned the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to tighten regulations, arguing that decades-old emergency rules for diesel generators are inadequate for the massive scale of modern hyperscale data center operations. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Resources for Tracking Ongoing Cases

You can follow these developments and access case documents through environmental advocacy and legal tracking sites: [1]

• • Southern Environmental Law Center: Provides ongoing litigation updates, news releases, and filings regarding the xAI turbine case in Mississippi.
  • Yale Law School News: Offers details and court documents concerning the Lowell, Massachusetts environmental justice lawsuit.

There’s also a trend toward behind-the-meter AI data centers that aren’t connected to the grid at all, like some of the examples listed above. One worry is that gas-fired generators will get built to support the data centers by producing private electricity without having to wait for the public grid to develop the means to supply the power and/or without raising the utility’s rate for existing customers. The issue of “affordability” is also as a big play for behind-the-meter approaches. The affordability issue, however, doesn’t really get addressed by the behind-the-meter approach, although it sure sounds good, doesn’t it?

Keep in mind that while behind-the-meter power supply doesn’t have to be gas-fired and could be solar, wind, and/or batteries, there are a hell of a lot more plans in the works today for fossil fuel-based behind-the-meter generation. Here’s the AI Overview to the query “With behind the meter data center electricity, how many being planned use fossil fuels and how many use renewable energy?”:

Recent analysis of behind-the-meter (off-grid) data center developments indicates a heavy dominance of fossil fuel generation in immediate construction plans, despite widespread corporate sustainability pledges. [1]

Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables in Behind-the-Meter Plans

• • Fossil Fuel Dominance (~75%): An analysis of permit documents and equipment deals for upcoming behind-the-meter projects identified approximately 23 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity. Of this identified equipment, nearly 75% is powered by natural gas.
  • Renewable “Exceptions”: Genuine renewables-first behind-the-meter projects are currently rare exceptions rather than the rule. The most prominent example is Switch’s Citadel Campus in Nevada, which utilizes 127 MW of solar paired with 240 MWh of battery storage.
  • “Gas Now, Clean Later” Strategy: While many developers publicize “all-of-the-above” strategies involving nuclear or renewables, the actual infrastructure being installed for 2025 and 2026 operations is almost entirely gas-fired. Commitments for renewable capacity are typically scheduled for 2028 or later, with nuclear options often projected as being a decade away. [1, 2]

Specific Behind-the-Meter Fossil Fuel Projects

Several massive gas-powered projects have been announced or are in development to bypass grid connection delays:

• • Texas (Permian Basin): FO Permian Partners and Hivolt Energy announced a 5 GW off-grid natural gas power solution for data centers.
  • Wyoming: Prometheus Hyperscale and Engie are planning a 2 GW facility with onsite gas-fired generation.
  • New Mexico: Oracle and OpenAI are developing the “Stargate” project, which is expected to rely on massive natural gas systems for off-grid power.
  • Pennsylvania: International Electric Power is planning a 944 MW gas plant specifically to power a data center while avoiding the PJM grid interconnection but not convenient for the rest of us, though. queue. [1, 2]

    

Well, isn’t that convenient? And do you think such fossil fuel-based generation won’t run on for decades, even if in the long run renewables will prove far cheaper? But then, of course, these data centers will have built the gas generators and won’t likely wish to build a whole new renewable generation plant. The whole data center power supply scheme seems custom built for Big Oil to sell more and more fossil fuel for more and more decades.

Maybe Public Hysteria about Data Centers Has a Point

People are right to worry. I was on a Zoom call with others in a climate action group and the prospect of adding a new project to organize a statewide AI ban was on the agenda. Not only are increased pollution and higher greenhouse gas emissions and global warming likely consequences if most of the planned the behind-the-meter electricity supply for data centers go forward, but there are real concerns for water resources becoming compromised and communities made worse, including with noise pollution.

But there are other economic costs for the public that put lie to the behind-the-meter “affordability” issue. Our current grid—in most places, anyway—is under-used. By adding digital intelligence (oh, the seeming irony!) and distributed energy resources to the grid, there are more users of the public grid when data centers get their electricity from it. More users mean more widely distributed costs carried over more parties, which lowers each user’s own bill.

Weird, huh?

The more data centers opt out of participating in the grid, the less efficiently the grid is used, bringing higher grid and generation costs to be paid by fewer customers. If there is a legislative program, perhaps banning data centers outright would miss an opportunity to have them located fairly and properly, accounting for projected water use by developing additional water resources, or even tying data center cooling demands to thermal heating and storage networks to reduce heating loads in cold climates. Data centers could also be part of establishing more clean energy, which is cheaper to build these days and far cheaper to run over its expected lifecycle compared to a fossil fuel generation plant. Data centers can also contribute to advances in and implementation of grid efficiency and digital management of loads and demands, reliability, and grid balance and voltage regulation.

Of course, the AI tech lords will tell you that data centers must be built today and up and running tomorrow. Since AI is racking up tremendous investment liabilities with every new dollar added to the cause, I can see why they’re impatient to shake a leg. I’m less clear about why we need to put ourselves on their schedule, especially with all the existentially negative aspects of rushing.

Weird, huh?

Jerks R Us Interuptus

What may be the biggest prod to the widespread public AI backlash, as Gioia writes, is the AI tech leaders’ tone-deafness and astounding isolation from the real world. “These folks are living in an echo chamber—and they reveal their disconnect with the public almost every time they open their mouths,” he says. Commencement speakers mentioning AI are literally getting laughed out of the room.

Gioia continues:

In an odd twist, it’s actually getting harder for politicians to run on this issue—because their opponents are running on the same issue. In 2026, only oblivious tech bros are willing to stand up and praise AI. And when that happens, the booing begins instantly.

Let me put this in economic terms. Tech companies have spent more than a trillion dollars on AI and have only succeeded in becoming the most hated businesses in the world. Spending another trillion dollars—or (most likely) more—will only intensify the public’s antipathy.

It’s easy to see where this is leading.

History teaches us that you can only push people so far. Most of the time, they let things slide. But there are limits—and Silicon Valley has just slammed into them. People aren’t going to sit by silently while tech companies eliminate their jobs, hurt their kids, slopify the culture, and use up scarce resources.

They will fight back—and that’s the phase we’ve just entered in 2026.

Sooner or later, even the most clueless tech CEOs will realize that they need to slow down and address public concerns. My best guess is that we’re still 12-18 months away from that. But that’s only because Silicon Valley is so out-of-touch with the rest of world—they block out the boos and live in their own fantasy world.

Amen, brother.

Of course, it may turn out that in 12-18 months our understanding of AI and how best to platform it may present another world the tech bros can ignore for a while more. Or perhaps in 12-18 months’ time, today’s staggeringly large AI investments will be past due and the dear AI tech lords will be busy dealing with market corrections of their own making.

Meanwhile, and from here on out, let’s give a hoot and don’t pollute, and I don’t just mean the carbon emissions factor but also our very culture with AI slop threatening to become a self-reinforcing GI/GO problem, but don’t worry: the Tech AI lords are paying some people $20 an hour to keep this from happening, so relax.

Or maybe stay tense. The obtuseness of AI tech lords, the old lazy habits of power utilities, and the never-ceasing greed of Big Oil needs to be countered less with hysteria and more with a clearer and cleaner sense of how to build our world’s better future.

Can I have an Amen?