About this episode

The episode discusses the environmental impact of data center development and community resistance in Tulsa.

We chat about Ed’s engagement with communities pushing back against data center development in Tulsa, plus some major reporting showing the sheer scale of fossil-fuelled data center development in the United States. We’re talking more than 120 GIGAWATTS of new gas-burning power plants in development just to electrify data centers. There’s simply no way to equivocate about this amount of new pollution — new smog, new acid rain, new environmental health crises — being emitted for the purpose of spinning up more GPUs so that some of the most noxious companies in the world can become even more, well, noxious. ••• AI Data Centers: The Frontier of Capitalist Extraction — Live Event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY0XnY0DA7U ••• How Data Centers Broke American Politics https://www.wired.com/story/how-data-centers-broke-american-politics/ ••• no data centers in my backyard https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard ••• Trump’s Vision for A.I. Dominance Comes With Major Air Pollution https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/climate/data-centers-pollution-trump-ai-energy.html Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s book…

People in this episode

Hosts: Jathan Sadowski, Edward Ongweso Jr.

Topics covered

• data centers
• fossil fuels
• environmental impact
• community activism
• pollution
• AI

Keywords

• data centers
• pollution
• fossil fuels
• community activism
• environmental health
• AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Patreon, Wired, New York Times

Places: Tulsa, United States

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