“We’re dropping 15 Empire State Buildings into a rural area. Make it make sense.”
That’s what a Virginia county supervisor said just before voting down one of the biggest data center proposals in the country. It’s a scene now playing out from Prince William County to Texas: communities pushing back against the facilities that power artificial intelligence.
The demand is real. AI runs on data centers, and data centers run on enormous amounts of electricity, water, and land. But the decisions about where they go, how they’re powered, and who bears the cost are being made project by project, county by county, often with no national framework to guide them.
This week’s guest, Bob Sussman, former Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, thinks it’s time to step back. In a recent article for the Environmental Law Reporter, he calls for a national moratorium on data centers, paired with a policy framework for what comes next.
In this episode, we ask:
What would a national pause actually allow us to do?
Who should be making these decisions, and at what level of government?
And who’s going to pay for all that power?
At Refounding America, we believe every policy needs an institution capable of carrying it out. The data center boom shows what happens when a fast-moving challenge outpaces the structures meant to govern it. Whatever you think of a moratorium, the question underneath it matters: are our institutions built to handle this?
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify:
📄 Read Bob’s article, “A Call for a National Data Center Moratorium and Policy Framework”: https://www.elr.info/articles/elr-articles/call-national-data-center-moratorium-and-policy-framework
