This week’s conversation is with Holly Jean Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo and former official in the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Buck got into the thicket of the data center siting debate this past week after authoring a polemic epistemology of sorts in Jacobin arguing against a national data center ban. In the piece, she called a moratorium on AI data centers “a massive strategic blunder for the left, and we should think through the global justice implications and follow-on effects.” It argued that environmental and climate activists would be better suited not courting a left-right coalition that doesn’t seem to have shared goals in the long term.
Her article was praised by more Abundance-leaning thinkers like Matthew Yglesias and pilloried by some of the more influential people in the anti-data center organizing space, such as Ben Inskeep of Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. So I wanted to chat with her about the discourse around her piece. She humbly obliged.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So my first question is kind of a broad one and perhaps a suitable polemic to open with: are data center moratoria (bans) “slopulism”?
Haha, oh no. I don’t know if I have a working definition of that term.
“Slopulism” is colloquially known as low-effort or performative populism slop that is focused on emotional gratification and elite resentment instead of substantive policy.
I think, sometimes? Moratoria have been proposed at a lot of different levels in a lot of different forms. With the national moratorium, as written in the AI Data Center Moratorium Act [proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], I thought from a rhetorical and textual standpoint it was a pretty amazing document. I just don’t think it’s a great policy proposal, so maybe that’s a little bit closer, but I don’t think people working on that theory of change would see it as slopulism. They’re thinking of this as a negotiating tactic and thinking, how do we leverage this moment and make it clear to the tech industry they don’t have social license?
I wouldn’t personally call it slopulism. I just don’t think it’ll work. I don’t think it's effective but I'm not big on labels.
Personally, I come down sort of where you’re at on the yes-and-no kind of tack. There’s definitely some vibes based stuff going on, which you address in your piece, but historically there’s a pretty long legacy of advocacy campaigns for, well, let’s ban this until we’ve finished regulating it.
You write part of why a moratoria push can be a dead end is that the right and left coalitions pushing to stop data centers have different interests on other issues and that it may not follow that stopping data centers will result in a clean energy buildout, or the social policies to address job displacement.
When you talk about the left-right coalition, help me understand what’s driving the opposition and why you think it’s happening the way it is?
I think there’s a lot of layers here. It’s pretty complex. It’s well established there are left-right coalitions. I don’t think we have a great body of social science research but I think that is a solid working assumption. So I think the people who are a part of this, it’s easy for them to come together and stop a thing that’s happening near them. But I don’t think they’re going to agree on how we build a decarbonized, resilient grid. The people in that coalition are going to have vastly different perspectives on whether we want to decarbonize, what measures are feasible and worth paying for to get there. Same thing when it comes to the thornier questions about AI governance. The solution set is just not something the members of that coalition are going to agree on.
So it feels maybe on the ground like this really cool moment about rising up against these big forces. It’s cool. I get it. I was actually very much on board with that a while ago. And my views on that have shifted. I don’t think it’s going to be productive unless it’s coupled with a lot of very real coalition building work I don’t see happening.
I’ve had conversations with environmental activists about that issue. I did a Q&A with someone from Public Citizen about this particular issue right after the national data center moratoria was introduced with Senator Sanders. I asked, do you have any concerns about pushing for a moratoria on new tech infrastructure when this tool is also used by those trying to stop solar, wind and batteries? Is there any concern that in some communities it’ll go from data centers to renewables?
I wondered reading your piece if this is part of what you’re getting at here, that this backlash doesn’t necessarily seem to be rooted as much in a transition away from fossil fuels or building lots of new renewable energy.
I think in the absence of systematic research, it’s one of these things where people can see it the way they want, through their own lens.
I’ve been following this in a few different places in the country, especially through online Facebook groups, and there is a noticeable overlap between some of those Facebook groups and the content and many of the anti-renewable groups I follow. Some of the themes remind me of this piece I wrote about para-environmentalism. There’s a lot of places where it dips into conspiracy and fears about new technology, electro-magnetic radiation, sorts of places where a data center is mundane but can take on creepy, supernatural overtones in some of these groups. Before I was studying para-environmentalism more generally I was thinking we really need this left-right coalition to rise up against these companies. Now I’m much more cautious about where it’ll lead.
I know Twitter isn’t real life, but the discourse around your work – those who have criticized it – are saying, why can’t we do both? Why can’t we go after the data center sector without potentially heading towards that form of politics you’re afraid of?
I don’t think it's the moratoria necessarily but the left-right blocking approach.
There’s a couple things I want to make discernments about. I want to make a discernment between people who want to stop a data center and a moratorium that’s more of a blanket, larger regional or national thing. I do think there are data centers being sited in really bad places, under really bad agreements. They shouldn’t move forward.
There’s bad data centers and there’s okay data centers and we need to be discerning between them. There’s also normal processes in this country for siting large facilities, whether they’re county level zoning commissions and something else.
But to your question of why can’t we do both, we could have a viable left-right anti-tech organizing that makes real demand for how we go about the lithium and AI age if people were investing in the social infrastructure necessary to make that happen. We’re very far from it because the framing of stopping a thing… We need people who are convening real conversations about what to do. I think they’re focused on stopping a thing.
I don’t know if they’re focused on whether we need universal basic income, a public wealth fund or something else, in a way that’s across the aisle. That would be a whole movement building infrastructure and it’s one we need if we’re going to decarbonize.
But that’s not what I am seeing – I’m seeing NGOs funded by wealthy and non-transparent donor-advised funds focused on some parts of the country and not others. We’re not getting to having those conversations happening or even having a shared media reality.
Can you go a bit deeper on how a situation where there is a national moratoria results in equity concerns? How are those less fortunate hurt by that?
There are three things I am concerned about. The first thing is that people who are better organized because they have more resources say we need a national moratoria which pushes development to regions with weaker organizing. Maybe they have weaker environmental and social regulations. I’m concerned about that because there’s a huge history of that happening across different regions and industries.
The second thing I am concerned about is driving up the cost of computation in ways that would make AI less affordable and accessible for people who may be able to use it for a variety of things. I realize that’s controversial for the segment of the population who thinks AI is useless but I think it’s tremendously valuable and I want a world where everybody has access to these capabilities and I think it’s made less likely by making computation less expensive.
The third thing, which I didn’t have room in my piece to address, is to what extent this moment is about the data centers. This is a new focus for the climate movement, which is understandable because there’s been a sideshift away from climate and the Trump administration has put everything in such a dire place that they need wins to hold on to. I’m worried about whether that displaces energy and funding away from other environmental issues. Are we taking space away from other priority areas? I’m not saying we know about those things but these are concerns we need to focus on. And if they’re not concerns, that’s good news. But we should think of them.
On that note, on the bigger question, do you believe artificial intelligence and these data centers are a net positive or a net negative for the effort to solve for climate change?
I think it’s too soon to say what the net effect will be and that net effect will be indirect. We can count the carbon emissions from these and say, great we have a whole new industrial sector to contend with among all these other industries we’re trying to decarbonize. And it’s bad from that point of view.
Then you have efficiencies that AI might discover. I have no clue about the extent of that.
Then you have AI impacting the information ecosystem, what they want to believe and what they want to do. Maybe the greatest impacts of AI will be it causes people to take climate more seriously. Or ways through social media that convince people it is a hoax.
It’s hard to measure all these factors and speculations against each other. So I have no idea what the net effect will be on climate and I don’t believe anyone who says they know what it’ll be at this point.
But the data centers – from your perspective, is this boom helping or hurting?
I think it’s definitely a setback. But if I look at the whole picture of climate change I think this is more tractable than some of the challenges we have with decarbonization. Number one, we know how to decarbonize data centers. It’s a lot harder than something like cement where we don’t know how to stop the emissions themselves. I think agriculture is really challenging to decarbonize – it’s mixed up in what people eat and land use. Data centers is a problem. But it seems tractable because of that.
We also have all these people working on this. All of these climate professionals who’ve pivoted to framing their work into being about AI. I think we have the knowledge and the personnel to do it. If I compare data centers to other parts of decarbonization, it’s not on the top of my list of things I’m worried about. But it is tough – we knew we had this many tonnes to deal with and now we’re adding things. It’s a challenge but I want to have perspective about the challenge.
Can I close on a fun question?
Sure.
What’s the last song you listened to?
Oh, gee. It was some terrible ‘80s song because my kind is really into that kind of music right now. The one that sticks out is “Sunglasses At Night,” which is always playing in the Buffalo airport.
