The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would kill public notification for data center air pollution and allow emission permits to be issued behind closed doors.
The datacenters are often sources of nitrogen oxide, which help form ozone, carbon monoxide and heavy metals, among other pollutants.
The Clean Air Act requires “minor” air polluters to disclose to the public via state agencies how much pollution their proposed project will release, but the proposed new rule from Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would dismantle that protection for datacenter proposals and make disclosure voluntary at state and some local officials’ discretion.
The move is likely intended to curb criticism and public oversight of datacenters, according to Joe Goffman, a former assistant administrator for the EPA’s office of air and radiation.
According to Goffman, without this data, communities won’t know what they’re breathing once a datacenter is built and will have less ability to fight back in court or in public relations battles.
“The administration is basically saying: ‘You all may have thought this(the Clean Air Act) was an ironclad promise, but it no longer is,’” Goffman added The move comes amid a national surge in datacenters that are an essential part of the artificial intelligence boom.
Many datacenter developers apply for minor pollution source permits for the dozens of diesel generators or gas turbines used to help power their facilities or provide backup generation.
The EPA delegates monitoring of “minor” pollution sources to state authorities, while it handles major polluters like gas plants. The “minor” designation means that a company is proposing to put in enough pollution controls that it will not release a level of emissions that requires immediate federal oversight.
Big tech often chops its datacenters pollution permit requests into individual pieces for each generator or turbine, so they fall under “minor” reviews conducted by states and avoid a larger costly and time consuming review by the EPA that could be difficult to legally defend.
Some of the largest polluting sources in the Midwest, including datacenters, “emit harmful air pollutants under so-called ‘minor source’ permits”, said Jessica O’Donnell, senior attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
“The public deserves to weigh in on such permits to ensure these industrial sources are given appropriate emissions limits and stick to them,” O’Donnell added.
Goffman said the flexibility could also be wielded as an incentive for states competing for datacenter investment and take the form of a “regulatory subsidy”. Datacenter developers often try to avoid scrutiny and regulation, so local and state governments eager to attract them could offer to waive the public notice.
“This proposal continues efforts by the current administration to turn its back on the fundamental EPA principle of transparency,” said Mike Koerber, a former deputy director of the EPA’s office of air quality planning and standards.