EPA Is Limiting Public Input on Data Centers

Current conditions: A sleepy Atlantic hurricane season just snapped to attention as two tropical storms started forming near the Caribbean and off Africa’s coast • Southern California is bracing for a week of triple-digit temperatures • The Hawk Fire has forced 42,000 people to evacuate an area near Reno, Nevada.

THE TOP FIVE

1. EPA is limiting public input on data centers

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to repeal a federal rule requiring states to publicize and solicit comments on applications for air pollution permits for various industrial facilities, including new data centers and power plants that provide the electricity they need. The move, The New York Times cautioned, “could prevent residents from raising concerns about — or even learning about — data centers before permits are approved and construction starts.” Three-quarters of Americans now oppose data centers built near their homes, according to the latest polling from Heatmap Pro. That’s up from less than half last year.

The Trump administration’s effort to curb public input comes as local opposition to data centers reaches an intensity that frequently draws comparisons to a moral panic. In a post on X last week, one commentator compared the backlash to a 2004 newspaper clip in which a pregnant woman photographed smoking a cigarette complains that the sound of jackhammers from construction on her block posed a risk to her unborn child. A video circulating on Facebook this week showed the former mayor of the Upstate New York town of Massena, where census data shows one in four residents lives below the poverty line, pleading with residents to consider the benefits of data centers. “They’re data centers. They’re being built somewhere. Communities are accepting these things,” he said, urging residents holding protest signs to listen with an open mind to experts about how a proposed facility would be built. “I know for a fact we have aging infrastructure. It’s just going to get worse. How do you fix that? We’re losing people left and right in this community. Look at the number of boarded-up houses. Look at the number of businesses that are going out of business … You can’t afford the time it’s going to take to research for three years when these things are being built today.”

2. Nevada launches a legal war against Trump’s Colorado River cuts

As you may recall, the Trump administration last week imposed harsh water cuts on the three states in the Lower Basin of the Colorado River: Arizona, California, and Nevada. This week, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, a Republican, announced litigation filed in federal district court challenging the Department of the Interior’s plan, arguing that the cuts unfairly harm downstream states like his. The lawsuit makes Nevada the first of the three states to launch what E&E News called a “legal war” against the policy. Under the Trump administration’s proposed plan, southern Nevada could lose more than 70% of what Lombardo called its “already meager Colorado River allocation,” even though Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming “are not required to contribute a drop.” The governor, who is up for reelection, continued: “This isn’t about political posturing; this is a matter of survival for a community that represents about two-thirds of our state’s citizens and the lion’s share of its economy.”

3. Trump’s new tariff war with Canada threatens to hike electricity prices

Between 2010 and 2024, the United States imported about 59 terawatt-hours of electricity per year from Canada, and exported roughly 13 terawatt-hours back north across the border. America’s appetite for Canadian electricity is only likely to increase as our northern neighbors build more nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, and offshore turbines in areas such near the Northeast, among (I say, haughtily clearing my throat as a fourth-generation New Yorker) the most densely populated and culturally powerful parts of the entire U.S. Now that’s under threat as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney plays hardball with President Donald Trump in floundering trade talks. After summoning home its trade negotiators over the weekend, Ottawa announced retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. on Tuesday, slapping levies of up to 50% on about $20 billion in goods. On Monday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said his province could cut off electricity and critical mineral exports to the U.S. “We power 1.5 million homes and businesses,” Ford told the Associated Press. “Everything’s on the table. I’ll do whatever it takes.” While the BBC reported that “squeezing the U.S. on energy is not a current countermeasure,” it also said that such a response “hasn’t been ruled out.” In statements to Utility Dive, the grid operators in New York and New England said new tariffs would not affect reliability, though the latter region cautioned that it could face problems during extreme weather events.

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4. European LNG prices soar to highest levels since 2023

European buyers of liquified natural gas paid $22.83 for a million British thermal units at the start of this week, more than double the price a year ago and the highest since 2023, according to the Financial Times. The surge came as Iran struck an oil tanker trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz, damaging its engine room and halting the ship. Trump said Tuesday that all underwater mines the Iranian military had laid were now cleared from the waterway. Tehran is set to begin talks with neutral Oman on a route for fully reopening the strait, the Oman Observer reported.

The spike in European LNG prices serves as a reminder of the benefits for the U.S. of becoming the world’s top producer of natural gas and exporter of the version that’s super-chilled to a liquid state for more efficient transportation. LNG, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in February, “is the ultimate bogeyman” for many progressives and climate activists. But the American industry, transformed by the fracking revolution over the past two decades, had more than enough supply to help Europe stay warm and keep the lights on in 2022, when Russia started throttling the pipelines selling gas to Ukraine’s allies after the start of the war. “The world is going to keep needing natural gas at least until 2050, and likely well beyond that,” John Hebert, a senior policy adviser at the advocacy group Third Way who is pushing for Democrats to embrace LNG, told Matthew. “The focus, in our view, should be much more on how we reduce emissions from the oil and gas value chain and less on actually trying to phase out these fuels entirely.”

5. The race to build the next Dutch nuclear plant is between France and the U.S.

Borssele.Philippe Clement/Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

When I visited the Netherlands’ lone nuclear power station in 2022, the single-reactor plant, called Borssele, stood alone next to a demolition site dismantling the power station. But soon the country plans to finally expand its atomic power sector. On Tuesday, NucNet reported that the Dutch nuclear energy agency had signed contracts with France’s EDF and the U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Company for design studies on at least two new reactors. The advancing plans are a sign of how quickly things are changing in the region. At the end of my visit six years ago, I stood atop a high berm — classic Dutch engineering to reclaim the land and keep the floodwaters at bay — at the end of the facility and caught a glimpse at northern Belgium. Back then, Brussels was shutting down its own nuclear fleet. Now, as I reported earlier this year, the country has nationalized its reactors and plans to revive its industry.

THE KICKER

Wildfire smoke is nasty stuff. That’s not news to anyone living in the American West, but we in the Northeast learned the hard way just how harmful it is when Canadian smoke poured into our cities this summer and in 2023. But that smoke can have a benefit, at least when rain carries it into soil: It acts as a fertilizer. A new study found that smoke-rain events can deliver large bursts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as black soot in the air mixes with water droplets. “It’s important to remember that what goes up must come down,” Alexandra Ponette-González, an urban ecologist at the University of Utah and Natural History Museum of Utah and the lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “There’s so much focus on what goes up and how that affects human health. We’re interested in everything that falls out of the atmosphere and lands on ecosystems, and what that means for our environment.”