Increasingly, communities are facing threats to clean water from large industrial projects such as data centers and carbon capture and storage, or CCS, facilities that are being proposed and constructed in communities across the United States. The question is how should decisions about these facilities be made? Should government officials privilege capital and financial investments? Should they balance investment with other considerations such as noise, water, and energy costs?

Of all the issues raised by these large projects, water is one of the most crucial for the simple reason that we cannot live without water. Given this necessity, access to clean water must be treated as a human right with governments charged with the ethical responsibility to serve as the trustees of water to protect it for present and future generations. This responsibility to protect access to clean water as a human right must guide their decisions on data centers and CCS facilities and other large industrial projects.

Data centers are buildings, sometimes the size of large warehouses, that can contain hundreds of thousands of computer chips that provide processing and storage for online data including data used for energy-intensive artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, as well as less energy-intensive activities such as storing websites and other data. Carbon capture and storage facilities capture carbon dioxide emitted from industrial facilities and store it underground to prevent the CO2 from escaping into the atmosphere where it would contribute to climate change. Carbon capture facilities can include factory-size machinery that removes carbon dioxide from industrial air emissions, pipelines that transport the CO2, and underground storage repositories. Data centers and carbon capture and storage facilities typically consume large amounts of energy and water. They commonly also have toxic emissions, posing further risks to air, water, and health.

People have a human right to a clean environment—an idea recognized by the United Nations and enshrined in the constitutions of multiple states including Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania. The provisions from Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania explicitly mention the importance of protecting water supplies. Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment says, for example: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people."

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