Robinson Meyer
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Robinson Meyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so it does seem to be AI data centers specifically that are picking up the backlash.
It can be hard to talk about this because every project is different.
And so I hesitate to say, well, this claim is overstated because you can point to this particular project or another particular project.
I would say that my reading of the research here as well is that water tends to be where there are the most, let's say, like folk claims about data centers floating around that are not true.
people have this idea that every time they use ChatGPT or Google something, now a whole water bottle is being poured out from some precious ecosystem.
That probably isn't true.
In fact, the tech companies are very attentive to the water concerns in part because they are so unifying.
I think one thing we see in our data is that Americans across political parties, across age cohorts, agree that water and power prices are a problem.
Then we get into these questions of electricity and potentially also local air pollution.
To some degree, those questions are linked.
I mean, I think what we haven't yet seen in most of the country is data centers driving up power prices.
with one exception, which is in the mid-Atlantic, in the electricity market that covers New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and goes all the way out to Chicago.
We actually do have pretty good evidence that local data centers have driven up power prices, and that's partially because of how that electricity market is designed.
But
Outside of that, we actually don't really see yet evidence in the past that data centers have driven up power prices.
What we do believe will happen is that they will increase in the future as data centers basically bid for power.
what could be quite scarce power over the next four years.
I think where data centers can be said to have a negative influence on the environment more broadly is on climate change.
And that's just because they're a big electricity user and we haven't decarbonized the electricity system yet.
I think what's
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