Ask Lemmy

Curious who "they" is ? Whoever told you that thinks they're doing you a favor "Don't spend days writing a thesis because we won't really know what to do with it".

You'll get a lot further by talking to your representatives on the council. Here in Australia they're very accessible, they publish an email address and phone number and are fairly responsive.

You basically want to tell them that you have some concerns and ask where they are in their approval process. There's a range of possible answers which will be disappointing. One is that they already did environmental and social assessments and approved the development a year ago. Another is that the land is already zoned for this use and they can't block or approve any specific plan for the property.

That said, they might tell you that there's an upcoming request for public comment, or that there's a semi-formal group of people that have already expressed some concerns and you might be able to slot in with them.

Alternatively, ask them whether they have any concerns, and what benefits they think the centre will deliver. At least then you can address your letter to the rep you spoke to and speak directly to the benefits they're seeking.

They said they won't read a big long letter with citations and everything

So basically they dont give a fuck and dont want to represent their community aka: do their jobs.

There’s a good short Business Insider YT video on data centres that you can send them.

they won’t read a big long letter with citations

That's not unfortunate, that's downright lazy and really shitty of them. That says to me that they see being on city council as a job, not as a public service.

Anyway, the main reasons would be water usage and contamination. Any water used in the data centres will likely be contaminated with PTFEs because that's really the only kind of hose they can use to move water around all the electronics, AFAIK. Also the massive amounts of electricity that would be used, not sure where you get your electricity though.

I suppose there could be more reasons, but those would be specific to your area.

The obvious ones are noise (well documented for crypto, not 100% on data center but wouldn't be shocked.) and electricity rates going up for everyone because the data center hogs the juice. Less obvious is the lack of jobs it would bring. Construction would be nice but once its operational? Dozenish jobs or something paltry like that.

Here's a few of the biggest concerns, at least from what I've read about from people's experiences living near existing ones.

• Water usage (can drain local groundwater, drive up water prices)
• Power usage (can drive up electricity prices, burns more fossil fuels or shifts clean energy to itself making other people now reliant on fossil fuels)
• Noise (people even at fairly large distances away can often still hear the sounds from the datacenter, it never stops and runs 24/7, can often give people nonstop headaches)
• Pollution (many datacenters have generators they can use, and they pollute the local air. Even if not run regularly as part of primary operations, many datacenters do tests anywhere from every month to every year to make sure the generators and backup systems work as intended, can suddenly generate a lot of air pollution without warning)

And that's not to mention secondary effects, like how it can do things like draw in crowds of temporary workers that then incentivizes short term rentals (i.e. Airbnb's) in the local area over actual homeowners, and can drive up housing costs, or how it can attract local subsidies that would otherwise go to smaller businesses that actually really need it.

You need to find some extremely rare & endangered species of plant or animal there, so that the place gets protected immediately.

So you want to block a data center but you have no reason to be opposed to it?