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Environmentalists' new battle is AI

Environmental groups are gaining momentum as concerns over rising electricity bills, pollution and AI fuel bipartisan opposition across the U.S.

Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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There haven’t been many wins for environmental causes since Trump returned to office. His administration rolled back air and water pollution rules, opened federal lands to oil, scrapped climate regulations and pulled as much money as it could from Biden’s infrastructure law.

It has proven to be much easier, however, to get some wins with an anti-data center message that happens to have some environmental underpinnings to it.

The climate case has not been hard to make. The Energy Department expected data centers to double their electricity use by 2030, reaching up to 15% of U.S. supply.

Some utilities reconsidered plans to retire coal plants, and the Trump administration ordered a few to stay online. Developers have also proposed gas plants built exclusively to power data centers. BloombergNEF found these gas plants could raise U.S. power sector emissions by 20% to 33% if all were........

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