Yeah this is bad news from an environmental standpoint.
We can't stop our status symbol consumption and travel lifestyles. This is just more people to feed, which in our current broken system means more consumption and waste at insane scales.
Functional years are a big concern. A lot of people, especially self inflicted diabetics, spend the last 20ish years of their lives at home doing nothing because their self inflicted disease makes it hard.
Same with most diet or stress caused illnesses, like cardiovascular diseases or lung diseases.
Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.
When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.
Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been.
And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).
Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".
It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".
At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol
Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.
It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food you see these days.
We can't stop our status symbol consumption and travel lifestyles. This is just more people to feed, which in our current broken system means more consumption and waste at insane scales.
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