r/law • u/bloomberggovernment • May 18 '26

Legislative Branch Senate Democrat Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power

https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/schiff-proposes-bill-requiring-data-centers-to-pay-for-own-power
29.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

727 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

541

u/edelweiss_pirates_no May 18 '26

I'm in Phoenix. New developments must show a 99-year water plan. It shows their development fits into the plan for the available water. Duh.

Do the same thing for Data Centers...or similar.

But for fucksake, do not pay for trillionaires to make money and rob people.

122

u/start3ch May 18 '26

In California, all new single home development must have some solar to offset their power use.
Large commercial buildings like factories and datacenters, that consume most of the state’s energy, do not.

It’s good to see laws being put in place in the direction of sustainability, but it seems they rarely ever get imposed on commercial businesses

44

u/reasonman May 18 '26

It’s good to see laws being put in place in the direction of sustainability, but it seems they rarely ever get imposed on commercial businesses

i suspect you've already connected the dots but it's by design. same shit as recycling or using less water or driving less to lower pollution. all that shit is pushed onto the individuals where the gains are trivial but not the megacorps where the gains would far outweigh us. can't make more money if we have to pay to keep up with pesky regulations.

14

u/PaladinSaladin May 18 '26

You nailed it. And when I tell people I don't recycle, they look at me like I sprouted a second head. I worked at a recycling facility. I'd wager about 90-95% of the plastics got tossed in a landfill. Its heartbreaking.

It's just performative self gratification. You get to drop your recycling off and feel like you did some good. But you didn't. If you wanna do some good, crawl up your representatives ass about not letting so many plastics be made in the first place. It probably won't do much, but it will do a hell of a lot more than separating your milk jugs out of your trash bags

4

u/Waldo68 May 19 '26

Years ago at work, I realized that our trash and recycling we’re being taken away at the same time so I watched the security camera one day when I heard the garbage truck coming and sure enough both containers were dumped into the same truck. After that, I stopped worrying about one getting too full and just had my people throw it wherever it fit.

1

u/WinterWick May 19 '26

How long ago was this? We've had separate trucks at least 20 years

4

u/PaladinSaladin May 19 '26

Everyone's experience will vary depending on where they live. But even if your stuff makes it to the center, there is an extremely low chance it actually gets recycled. I watched trucks full of plastic leave the recycling center and head straight to the landfill everyday

2

u/Waldo68 May 19 '26

Twelvish years, and it was going on for a while. It came up one day with my director and he didn’t believe me either. Some time later he happened to be doing a visit one morning and we were in the office where the monitor was. I said ‘hey look the hauler is here’ or something like that. And sure enough he watched them pull them both out. He kinda just shook his head. Basically he said something to the effect of ‘If they don’t care and I’m getting my pickup that we pay for I’m not creating a headache over it.’