AI Data Centers on Public Land

There's a phrase in the federal file I've now read about nine times,

and it gets worse every single time.

That's substantially the same.

On june twenty sixth, twenty twenty six,

the Bureau of Land Management,

BLM, the agency that runs the public acreage across the western part

of the United States, approved a data center on public land outside of Boulder City,

Nevada. eighty acres, one hundred and seventy megawatts,

the first

Data center ever authorized on Bureau of Land Management ground in

the history of the United States.

No new environmental assessment,

no public comment period. And here's how this was legal.

The developer, a company called Townsite Solar two,

already held a right of way grant on that federal parcel.

Got it in September 2023 for a solar project.

In June 2026, BLM amended the grant to allow a data center instead.

And treated the new project as substantially the same as the old one

for purposes of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA.

That's the 1970s law that requires the federal government to look before

it leaps on anything that it approves.

A solar farm, a 170 megawatt computing facility with its own backup fuel.

Substantially the same. Now,

the obvious read is that somebody was lazy.

Overworked field office, sack of paper,

initial, you know, your signature there and go home,

but I don't buy it and here's why.

The man who signed it, Bruce Silito,

manages BLM's Las Vegas field office.

He knows what a data center is.

And on september first, twenty twenty six,

an administrative judge at the Interior Board of Land Appeals,

that's the appeals body inside the Interior Department that reviews BLM decisions.

A judge named David Gunter stayed the whole project.

His findings were that BLM likely acted arbitrarily or capriciously because

the environmental review it leaned on had been done before

the project changed locations.

Different site, different type of facility entirely,

the same file. Two and a half weeks later that stay,

on september eighteenth, reported showing the administration weighing

at least twelve data centers and related infrastructure projects covering

at least seventeen thousand six hundred acres of

of BLM land across Arizona, Idaho,

Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

Most of them had never been disclosed to the public.

So that's the question we're going to chase today.

How did seventeen thousand six hundred acres of land that belongs

to every person listening to this podcast become the path of least resistance

for the most capital hungry industry on the planet?

And who benefits from a filing that calls a computing plant and a solar farm

the same thing?

This is the overlap.

The podcast where we talk about business,

labor, systems of power, and American injustice.

How are you, Joshua?

Just fine, thanks for asking. But let's hop into it.

So here's the episode in one sentence.

The federal government has decided that public land is the cheapest place

in America to put AI. And the people who live next to that land are about

to find it out about it after the fact,

and they're organizing anyway.

So let's give the strongest version of the case for actually doing this,

because it's a real case, and some of it actually

Holds a special place in all of our hearts.

Compute is infrastructure now,

right? The binding constraints on building it are land and power in that order.

And the West has federal acreage sitting next to existing transmission lines.

On November fifth, twenty twenty five,

the Department of Energy under Secretary Chris Wright,

picked four federal sites to invite private partners onto

the Idaho National Laboratory,

the Oak Ridge Reservation.

The Paducah gaseous diffusion plant and the Savannah River site.

Those are nuclear legacy industrial sites,

fenced, already degraded, already wired into the grid.

If you told me the choice was between a decommissioned uranium enrichment plant

and somebody's farmland in Virginia,

I'd take the enrichment plant every time.

And I wouldn't feel conflicted about it.

Right, and that's really the sales pitch.

It is the sales pitch partly. So what breaks is basically what we opened with.

The town site project is nothing like Paducah.

It sits on federal land at the edge of a very small Nevada city.

And the city council learned out about the approval after it was already signed.

And the mechanism that let that happen runs far past that one file.

Executive Order one hundred four three one eight signed on july twenty third,

twenty twenty five.

Defines a quote qualifying project for expedited federal permitting

at 100 megawatts and up. So the review you get out of scales with

the amount of power you need, the bigger the load,

the lighter the look. And by the end of this,

you'll know who signed the first one,

what statute he used, and which company holds the grant,

what machines that back these things up are earning for the people who sell them,

and what happened when 5,000.

Gallons of diesel came out of a data center tank in New Jersey twelve days ago.

You'll know about the number that has not been reported anywhere until this month,

which is the acreage.

from a news outlet in Washington DC.

They later sent a letter to BLM about it,

which was today, September twenty third,

twenty twenty six.

Which leaves the question of what it is about public land specifically that makes

it worth all this trouble. These companies can buy private land,

they do buy private land constantly.

So why the federal parcel and why the amended grant,

and why the review that was written for something else?

And that's because the federal parcel doesn't require something.

So let's break that down. If you start with the order,

because everything kind of downstream you know runs on it,

Executive Order 14318, Accelerating Federal Permitting

of Data Center Infrastructure,

signed into law July twenty third,

twenty twenty five, published in the federal register after that.

It creates a category called qualifying projects,

which sets the floor at a hundred megawatts of new load.

And directs federal agencies to identify federal land suitable for what

it calls expeditious data center development.

That's the architecture. A threshold,

a category, and an instruction to find land.

Then the energy department did its version on November 5th,

2025. Writes four sites: the Idaho National Lab,

Oak Ridge, Paducah, Savannah River,

all offered up to private sector partners.

For data centers plus the power to run them.

Now these are DOE, Department of Energy lands under DOE control.

And if that's where the story stayed,

this would be a completely different episode about a completely different

set of problems. BLM land is is a different kind of place from

a fenced federal reservation. BLM land is the land you drive past.

It's grazing allotments and desert and like the ridge behind a subdivision.

And BLM has one specific tool that it hands out constantly,

the right of way grant, authorized under Federal Land Policy and Management

Act of nineteen seventy six. That's FLPMA,

the statute that governs what BLM is and what it's allowed to let people

do on public land. A right of way is how a power line crosses public ground.

It's how a pipeline crosses, how a road crosses,

how a solar array gets sited out.

Townsite Solar 2, TS2, an affiliate of Skylar Capital Management,

and the name kind of tells you what it was originally for,

has held a right-of-way grant on 80 acres of federal land near Boulder City since

September of 2023. Solar and battery storage.

Totally normal. Thousands of those exist.

Now what ha watch what happens on the city side,

because that's the part that decides everything after it.

TS2

Also had an option to lease eighty-eight point five acres of land owned

by Boulder City itself, right next door,

you know, and in January of twenty twenty-six,

it applied to put the data center there.

Now city land means city process.

And in May of 2026, Boulder City's own planning commission voted six

to one against even adding data centers to the city's land management process.

That's the local rule book for what can be built and where.

Six to one.

A resident named Brynn Delorimer had organized a petition against it,

their neighbors showed up, and the commission said no.

And on june twenty sixth, twenty twenty six,

BLM amended the federal right of way grant on the adjacent parcel to permit

a one hundred seventy megawatt data center instead of a solar project.

Bruce Silito signed it, no new environmental assessment,

no public comment.

On the theory that it was substantially the same as the solar project that they

had already reviewed. And in early July,

when the federal approval was in hand,

TS2 withdrew its application to the city.

Same developer, a parcel, one fence line over,

and no local approval required because the land's federal,

and the city just doesn't have any jurisdiction on it.

I want to flag one thing right away because it's better to,

you know, say it up.

Front rather than catch it later,

but the the paperwork and the coverage give slightly different megawatt numbers,

right? Some documents say 167,

the developer filing says 170,

I've been saying 170. It's the same place either way,

and the gap really doesn't change anything.

It's three megawatts. But you should know that this record specifically

is not perfectly clean. But here's what I could not find,

and I looked for it, believe me.

What does TS two pay the United States for that acreage?

A right-of-way grant comes with rent.

There's a schedule. the public documents I could get don't actually state

the number on this one. Now BLM has it,

I assume, but BLM didn't post it and nothing required BLM to post it

in the approval that made this the first data center ever on American public land

that belongs to all of us.

So we know the acreage, we know the megawatts,

we know who signed it. The price is the thing that is not there.

And that gap is the oldest feature of public land law in this country,

which is why it doesn't read to me as an oversight.

~ the original arrangement was the general mining law of eighteen seventy-two,

way back in eighteen seventy-two.

~ the Congressional Research Service wrote it up late last year in a report

on hard rock mining. ~ the eighteen seventy-two law let individuals

and companies explore, develop,

and then actually purchase federal land containing mirror minerals through

a process called patenting. Not not don't think

Like intellectual property, it's a different process there.

but it was for nominal sums. Like I mean truly nominal,

like to pennies on the dollar.

~ you found something on public land,

you filed, you got title, you paid effectively nothing,

and there was no rent or no royalty.

That was what the eighteen seventy two law was working exactly as written.

I was basically

It was about gold, by the way.

right. ~ basically about encouraging people to to you know facilitate their

discovery of these r ~ resources.

The reform came in nineteen twenty.

Woodrow Wilson signed the Mineral Leasing Act,

which ended ~ patenting for oil and coal and replaced it with leasing.

So now under the 1920 law, you lease the ground,

you pay rent, and you pay the public a royalty on production.

Seems fair. ~ WyO History's account of that statute,

which draws on the public lands scholar John Leslie,

treats it as the thing that ~ changed Wyoming's economic destiny.

And the number that they use is Wyoming's federal mineral royalties.

Hitting $948 million in fiscal year 211.

So nearly a billion dollars in one year to one state because

in 1920 Congress decided the public was a landlord,

not a donor. So there are two available postures for public land.

He can give it away for a nominal sum and collect nothing,

or lease it and collect a royalty on what the land produces.

A right-of-way grant for a data center is neither of those.

It's a permission slip with rent attached,

and the rent is set against the acreage.

with nothing charged on what's produced on the acreage.

A hundred and seventy watt ~ megawatt facility could run compute compute worth

whatever compute is gonna be worth in twenty thirty on ground priced

is essentially desert land.

Yeah, so let's put a a tip to that to that pen,

if we will, in the eighteen seventy two comparison before we kind of lean harder

on it than the evidence might allow us to.

The number you hear thrown around for the the mining law giveaway is

two hundred and thirty one b b billion dollars.

The Cato Institute, now they're a libert libertarian think tank,

~ so they're pretty much pro development,

no, you know, friend to environmental litigation.

Published a policy analysis arguing that figure is unrealistic,

and estimating the actual subsidy across a hundred and twenty-five years

at somewhere between three million and sixteen billion.

Now that's a range so wide that it's almost a confession that like nobody

has any idea, right? At all. But the low end of it is three million dollars.

So if a if Cato is closer

to write than you know the environmental activists are,

then the eighteen seventy two law gave away two hundred and thirty

one billion dollars is a sentence I should stop repeating.

Okay, I'll take that. ~ and I'll keep the structural point because Cato isn't

disputing the structure. Nobody disputes the structure.

Patenting for n nominal sums with no royalty happened.

What's contested is how much it's worth and which is a different argument.

And the fact that the ~ data centers are not under either category,

right? Because you're not extracting something essentially from the land itself.

Yeah, it's not really I mean it's a it's a service really not a product.

And I'll I'll agree on that. Now the the part where somebody gets paid,

right, the because none of this actually runs on land alone.

A data center needs electricity every single second.

When the the grid has a hiccup,

when a diesel generator, you know,

carries the loads, when you see your lights flashing,

kind of, you know, blinking, that is one generator picking up where

the second generator shuts down.

Like that's a that's a pretty common thing.

But

All of these facilities also has a a whole tank full of fuel,

usually diesel, sometimes natural gas,

depending on where they are located in the US.

Caterpillar actually makes those generator sets and the turbines,

and in the second quarter of twenty twenty six,

Caterpillar reported twenty point five four billion dollars in revenue.

That is up twenty-four percent from year over year.

Their power generation retail sales grew seventy two percent year over year.

Nine point four billion dollars in orders in the quarter.

Order backlog is about seventy two point one billion and they're putting

two hundred seventy five million into expanding the plants in Lafayette,

Indiana to build more of them.

Cummins, you might

Nice pronunciation there.

yeah, you know you have to separate it.

~ Will and I both lived in Lafayette,

Louisiana, and it's very much a flat A.

Lafayette, ~ Indiana is a much different place and it's often confused when we're

telling it to strangers from out of state.

And they fancy up there.

Yeah. So Cummins, which you might be familiar with Cummins Diesel

or Cummins Trucking, ~ they're another really big name in that market.

And they posted record profits in the power system segment in the first quarter

of twenty twenty six, right? On data center backup demand.

So if you follow the money, right,

the land comes from all of us,

the public, at a price that nobody can know.

It's just a secret number except to a very select group of people.

Then the computing power belongs to whoever is setting up the data center.

In this case, maybe it's the equity partners,

maybe it's anthropic, maybe they're hoping to contract with Google.

Nobody nobody really can know that information because it's in

a contract somewhere that we're not allowed to see.

Right? And then the reliability,

right? Like the thing that makes the whole thing actually work gets bought from

Caterpillar with a seventy two percent sales jump and it burns diesel.

In whatever part of the US it lands in.

So I'm going try to build the case for for the data data centers in favor

of Davis data centers, because I think the people making it believe it,

and some of it's not wrong, right?

~ argument number one that they make compute is national infrastructure.

you can argue about whether the current AI build AI build out is a bubble.

~ maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

I mean, some chunk of it is probably,

who knows how much. But there's no version of the next 20 years where

the United States needs less computing capacity.

And the two things that can cap that are electricity and land,

power and dirt. So that's that's the first thing we need,

right? ~ argument two, federal industrial sites are genuinely the best place

to put it. Paducah gaseous diffusion plant enriched uranium,

the Savannah River site made weapons material.

Those places have transmission infrastructure,

security parameters, industrial zoning and everything but name,

and no neighborhoods outside inside the fence.

So putting a load-heavy facility there instead of on farmland outside

a growing town is the right call on the merits.

And I think it's defensible. Argument three is speed.

The full environmental review on a major federal action takes years.

~ and sometimes it's decades, it seems like.

~ the competitors, our competitors in the the AI race,

whatever that is, and wherever it ends up,

Yeah.

our competitors don't run a NEPA process.

If the choice is a faster review or no facility,

The fast review is the serious answer.

Finally

Hold on, I wanna I wanna hitch

up there just real quick. I think it's also important to remember that in

a place or I mean, and let's be honest,

our biggest competitor right now is China.

And and it's because they're producing AI models much faster than we can.

~ and it's but it's for for public from their perspective,

public good goods purposes, right?

They don't have a NEPA process because ultimately their entire nation takes

I mean they're communist, so they take part in the active

profit of these AI data centers,

of these AI models, that is complete public ownership of those facilities and those,

you know, capabilities. So I I do want to point just add that in there

to the point three.

Yeah. Unfortunately those costs don't fall equally across the entire population.

They tend to fall on the people that ~ have the bridges or buildings collapse

on them or the ~ glaciers melt and form a tidal wave.

But ~ neither here nor there. Argument four,

~ this is the last of these arguments that are often made in favor of data centers.

~ this is the one actually supported by evidence rather than just vibes.

there's a peer-reviewed analysis written up in the conversation this year,

finding that data centers do measurably help local economies.

Employment up about 0.9%, wages up 1.1%,

business establishments up 1% in the first three years,

growing to roughly 3.5%, 5%, and 4.7% over the longer run.

That's a published result from people with no brochure to sell.

So anybody telling you these facilities are all cost and no benefit

is arguing against it. Now, whether that's enough benefit,

is another part of the debate,

but at least there is some some economic value there.

~ and in Boulder City specifically,

the city stood to receive almost one point five million dollars from the lease,

plus property taxes, permit fees,

and administrative charges, roughly two point three million a year in new revenue,

which in a city that size pays for police,

fire, emergency response and utilities.

So that's the case in favor of data centers.

And I'm gonna say which of the legs of that argument just broke because argument

two and argument three are load carrying for me and one of them cannot hold on,

cannot hold the weight. the second argument,

put it on degraded federal industrial land,

requires that somebody actually evaluate whether a given part of parcel

is degraded federal industrial land.

That evaluation is the environmental review.

It's the thing that distinguishes Paducah from the ridge behind somebody's house.

And my third argument, speed, is an argument for removing exactly that evaluation.

So I've been holding them attention,

~ both arguments and tension, but they really don't fit.

If the review is what makes the site defensible,

then a threshold that exempts the largest projects from review takes

the defense away. ~ so I'd rather just say which leg broke than pretend

I mean something narrower.

Sure. And the the evidence on that is is actually from a USGS,

US Geological Services Report,

or government services report,

sorry, which might actually be useful because no one actually reports on that.

~ so July twenty-second, twenty twenty-six,

the United States Geological Survey publishes Scientific Investigations Report

2026-5035, titled Co locating

AI data centers with

energy infrastructure on federal public lands.

Not only is that a mouthful, I think it's it's pretty interesting that

it tells it all right there. So it's that's government scientists

axy asking where this stuff like is,

like actually. And the findings were that six percent of the AI data centers

in the Western part of the country and 22% of the Western power plants

sit either

on or directly within one mile of BLM land.

Like 22%. That's almost a quarter of the power generation in the western part

of the United States is already sitting on or propped right up against

the land that is owned by all of us.

So when the executive order says fine federal land for expeditious data center

development, the natural target is the ground where the power already exists,

right?

Which is the ground that people already live next to.

Four fenced nuclear sites are a very small slice of that.

And that's unfortunately where the argument collapses,

because the clean version where we're talking about just the Paducah sites described

four sites. The actual program,

as of reporting on September eighteenth,

is at least twelve projects. So going from four to twelve,

tripling the number of projects on at least seventeen thousand

six hundred acres across six states.

I have a list, right, because that's where this stops being kind

of a policy argument and turns into something funnier and dumber at the same time.

RIA data filed with BLM's Four Rivers Field Office in Idaho

in August of 2025 for a large scale data center campus with its

own power plant built on the public land right next to it,

like directly alongside it. Prometheus hyperscale.

Submitted right of way proposals in Wyoming for an access road,

a telecommunications line, and a water pipeline across public land

to support data centers. And the biggest one in Utah,

Valar Atomics, or Valor V A L A R Atomics,

applied for survey access on ten thousand two hundred acre federal site near Green

River for nuclear power development and a data center.

Ten thousand two hundred acres.

of public land for a nuclear reactor to run a giant AI computer.

And the company is named Velar Atomics,

which is from Tolkien, right? The Velar are the gods.

~ so we I think we know who's behind that.

Yeah, ~ it's pretty much always the same guys.

We did a whole episode about them.

Palantir, you know. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's it's all from the eBay from the eBay acquisition.

The the other one is actually Prometheus,

right? The titan who stole fire from the gods and had his liver eaten

by an eagle every day until Heracles freed him.

Right. Prometheus hyperscale is asking for a water pipeline,

which is appropriate, I think.

A across the desert, right? Just so you know.

~

Yeah.

and and Rhea, who by the way is also a Titan.

Rhea was the mother of Zeus, once her own power plant,

and the gods of the West want ten thousand two hundred acres in Utah.

So we've essentially got a pantheon of ~ would be Greek gods sitting

up on Mount Olympus or wherever they sit,

~ applying for rights of way at a field office.

Right. And and here is the piece that kind of wraps it all up because

I can't do better than the reality that we're living in.

But Valar Atomics withdrew the application after press scrutiny.

The ten thousand two hundred acre nuclear data center campus on public land near

Green River, Utah was actually stopped by news coverage before NEPA.

A hearing or the Interior Board of Land Appeals ever touched it.

That's the part who should that should bother the people who design this.

If your process is so light that journalism is the binding constraint,

the press is doing the review.

Right. And and the quiet part is that we only know about the twelve projects

and the seventeen thousand six hundred acres because of that reporting,

right? BLM

Yeah.

didn't like announce it, which brings us back to the letter that went out today.

Stanton, Kelly, Gallico, Ansari,

and Grijalva. All Democrats, all representing Arizona,

writing to ask BLM ~ for details on four of those proposed twelve data

centers in their own state.

that they only read about in a Washington D C based news organization article.

Nothing like our legislators finding out from the the local paper.

But I want to be precise about who's doing what here,

because the record is lopsided and I'd rather acknowledge that up front.

The executive order is this Republican administration's.

The energy secretary picking sites is this administration's.

The BLM approval is this administration's.

The letter demanding answers came from five Democrats.

And then the local picture flip flips completely.

On June 24, 2026, voters in Spartanburg County,

South Carolina, and Calvert County,

Maryland threw out incumbents over data center fights.

And in Spartanburg, that was Republican voters removing Republican officials,

after which the county withdrew the tax breaks it had offered and moved toward

a 12-month moratorium. In Tulsa,

the City Council voted unanimously for a nine-month halt on

new data center construction. And Councilmember Jackie Dutton said she'd support

an indefinite one.

I'm sure you could speak to that more than I ~ but and in July twenty twenty

six New York became the first state with a data center moratorium when Governor

Kathy Hochell, a Democrat, signed an executive order pausing state permitting

for up to a year. So at the federal level this is a one party's program.

At the local level, the revolt is bipartisan in the most literal sense.

People in red counties and blue states are doing the same thing for the same reason.

Yes, they are. And then of course

Nimbi Nimbi is bipartisan.

right. And then of course is the jobs argument,

right? Since w you talked earlier about employ employment numbers,

we're gonna give some data on that,

right? Good jobs first. A research outfit that that tracked corporate subsidies

for decades. That's the name of the organization.

Good jobs first. I mean it's it's simple,

but sure, it works.

They identified the largest per job data center subsidy in the country

was in your wonderful state, North Carolina,

to Apple,

Mm.

like the you know, the one who makes half of you people's phones,

because I use an Android, at six point four million dollars per job.

That based on every job they created,

North Carolina granted them

A six point four million dollar per person tax break

in order to build in North Carolina,

right? That is what one state agreed to pay per position to host servers.

And I'm gonna let them hold on to that argument because the number,

if as extraordinary as those numbers are,

they don't kill it. ~ the peer-reviewed result still stands.

Employment wages in new businesses do rise in host communities.

~ what the $6.4 million figure tells you is about the price paid for that rise,

and also tells you something the study itself says,

which is better off metro areas capture more of the benefit than rural regions do.

Both things can be true at once.

Facilities help. The states are paying an extraordinary amount for the help.

And both can be true.

Okay, so let's go where the fuel is.

Because that's where this stops being about acreage and starts being about air.

Loudoun County, Virginia, known globally as Data Center Alley.

Julie Bolthouse is the director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council,

a Virginia nonprofit that tracks development in that part of the state.

And she has been counting generators.

Her number is roughly 4,700 diesel generators across Loudoun's data center.

four thousand seven hundred generators.

Those

Yes.

generators exist for emergencies,

which is the entire justification for them,

that the thing that runs when the grid fails,

which is supposed to be rare. In 2025,

a substation fire knocked out power,

and Loudoun's data centers ran on backup for four to five days straight.

Residents reported the smell of diesel exhaust in a Walmart parking lot.

Somebody described the noise as planes landing constantly

for over twenty-four hours.

And inside climate news reported in December ~ twenty twenty five that while this

was happening

Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality,

the state agency that writes air permits,

was weighing whether to allow expanded runtimes for those generators.

So that's the sequence you need to hold on to.

The emergency equipment ran for the better part of a week.

The neighbors could taste it in the air,

and the regulatory response under consideration was should we allow them

to run more?

Yeah, it never looks good when you look at it from these angles.

And then September eleventh of this year,

you know, twenty five years or how how long has it been?

Yeah, twenty five years since September eleventh,

which is I guess twelve days ago now.

~ Equinix, which is one of the biggest data center operators on the planet,

has a facility in Secaucus, New Jersey.

Two fuel filtration valves failed.

It's about five thousand to fifty five hundred gallons of diesel.

basically leaked out of a tank into Anderson Creek,

which feeds the Hackensack River in the Metallands.

Bill Sheehan runs the Hackensack River Keeper,

a watershed ag v advocacy group that's been on the river for decades,

and he went out and looked at it.

He watched containment booms get laid across the creek.

What he was told initially was that a computer glitch caused the spill.

Gothamus later reported the actual cause two failed valves

in the fuel filtration system.

Equinix self-reported it and hired Clean Harbors,

a national environmental services contractor,

who showed up with vacuum trucks and absorbent pads.

Sea Caucus Mayor Michael Gannelli's reaction,

reported at the time, was to assume there'd be like a giant fine

for something like this. You would think,

right? Like both ~ Will and I lived in Louisiana during the big BP oil spill.

Right.

It was

a very big deal. ~ But

Yeah.

The number that was probably the most staggering is the retail value

of the diesel that went into that creek,

right? So if you if you do the math then,

it was about thirty-one thousand dollars.

Now if you look at the the average cost of a gallon of diesel right now,

which I believe is over six dollars,

let's just cap it at six bucks.

That's where we get the number from.

Thirty one thousand dollars worth of current fuel.

Yeah.

So ~ it's staggering.

Which is go ahead.

Yeah. It really is. And it's

I mean

the pattern under all of those.

Exactly and and it spills into this this little,

you know, tributary of the Hackensack River.

And it's just a a line item on Equinix's books,

which is essentially the price of like,

you know, a Tacoma. Something by Toyota,

maybe a a you know, a a newer model ~ of a of a sedan.

More brand new Mac Studio.

Yeah, well, you know a maxed out Mac Studio for sure.

~ but the fuel is cheap, the cleanup is contracted out and the fine

is assumed rather than known and the creek is the one thing in

the transaction that can't send an invoice.

Alright, so I kinda I want to give you the part that that kind

of counts against this. And I I kinda wanna give it where it costs something because

we just made that spill sound like an ecological catastrophe.

Because it was. But New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protections,

the DEP, said that the spill was contained.

It said it had not impacted the Hackensack River.

There were no reported wildlife impacts,

no drinking water intakes in that area.

Officials said the fuel stayed in the creek.

Equinex reported it themselves and they had a remediation contractor working with

ours. And there's more. The Better Data Center Project,

which is a critic of this industry,

notes that most data center

Yeah.

diesel leaks are pretty small,

under 200 gallons. Now, if you drive a truck,

that's like a full fuel fill-up.

But they consider that small. Fortune cited that this month,

actually. So a $5,000.

gallon release is a pretty big outlier.

Well off of, you know, your typical tiny couple drops a year or whatever.

But if somebody says data centers are are constantly dumping fuel into waterways,

the actual record doesn't actually support that.

And i I'm not gonna, you know prop it up to make it sound more dangerous

or more, you know, often than it actually really is.

Well I wish I had a clean answer to that for ya.

~

Ha.

But really the accident was never the point.

I mean it's i the spills are vivid,

right? That's where you kind of get a it just hits you in the face when

you see or imagine five thousand gallons of diesel turning a creek into

a like raging diesel river. But the thing that stays behind when you get

rid of that the spills is still forty seven hundred generators in one county.

Running four to five days on a substation fire,

with the state considering longer permitted hours.

That's the designed operation of the equipment on a permit in public

air and nobody has to spill anything for it to happen.

And I noticed that the permitted version generates almost no coverage,

while the five thousand gallon version generates a week of it,

right? So the the newspapers are following this big spill for a week,

but then they take no note of the generators running constantly for five days.

So the thing that's easier to point at is the the thing that matters the least,

but that's just the way it goes sometimes.

Yeah.

So I guess honestly, you know,

two guys on a podcast don't necessarily have a fix for this.

I I don't know the answer. The goal is ultimately awareness and solidarity.

That's kind of the goal of this podcast.

So I'd rather, you know, put that part into the episode toothless than

not actually tell our audience the the real issues here.

Yeah.

I agree. So let's let's turn back to Nevada where the cost is really

the linchpin here. ~ Bryn Delormier or Delorm Delorimer lives in Boulder City.

It's probably Delorimer.

probably. sorry, th that that Cajun French sneaking in on me again.

This is Nevada, so

Yeah, that's that's a good point.

when when T S two,

which remember was solar, ~ originally the developer was s for a solar plant,

~ wanted City land for the project,

she, Miss ~ Delorimer

organized a petition against it.

Neighbors signed it. In May of twenty twenty six,

her city's planning commission voted six to one against opening the door

to data centers. By every measure available to a resident of a small city,

she had won. I mean that's that's not the this under underdog story we all love,

but not the one you hear very often.

Then on June twenty sixth, the BLM approved the same project on

the federal parcel right next door,

and her wind essentially ev evaporated because the acreage that mattered

was never under her city's control.

When TS2 withdrew its city application in July,

her response was that the developer had a had not actually heard the community.

Then the city council. July fifteenth,

twenty twenty six, they voted unanimously to appeal BLM's approval,

arguing the agency had departed from its own precedent and procedure for

a use ~ precedent and procedure for a use that had never before been authorized

on BLM land. And the statute they're arguing under is the FLPMA

you mentioned before, the nineteen seventy six law.

~ Sherry Jorgensen, the mayor pro Tem,

~ put it plainly.

We're taking on a giant. Now that's that's a city mayor talking,

right? ~ the sentence that sentence is the accurate description of the situation.

Because a city poun council with a city attorney's budget appealing

a federal land decision inside a federal appeals body against a project backed

by an executive order. That's worse than David and Goliath.

~ that's like David and and all Goliath and all of his brothers that

he brought those stones for, ~ if you remember that that story.

~ then

Or like Iran versus the US

Navy.

Yeah. maybe. that that could actually work out in in their favor.

th but that sentence is an accurate description of the situation,

right? and they got somewhere.

The the Center for Biological Diversity appealed too,

so they've now got some people jumping in as well.

And I'm sure they'll have some some friend of the court filings as well.

but Patrick Donnelly is the Great Basin director and on September first Judge Judge

Gunter granted a stay. So with both the city of Boulder City and

the Center for Biological Diversity appealing the BLM's decision,

~ they got a stay on the the project.

So the project is halted and a new environmental review is possible now.

I think it's important to point out here though that a stay is really just

a temporary pause button on this project.

And that doesn't mean we can, you know,

move on to something else because it will come back.

It means that that BLM may actually have to do the review it skipped.

And if it does the review and reaches the same conclusion,

then the project just goes forward and and continues on,

and the the appeal will have bought Boulder City a delay and a paper trail without

actually addressing the problem.

Just a little bit of whiteout on the process.

Yeah.

And here's what neither of us can tell you because it isn't in the record.

We don't know what TS2 pays the federal government for that right-of-way.

We don't know how much diesel will be stored on that site or how much water

a 170 megawatt facility there would draw,

because the environmental assessment that would have been that would have examined

those questions was written for a solar project in a different location.

BLM would have those figures or would have had to generate them.

But the approval made that made this the first data center on American public land

didn't require them to be public.

So when somebody in Boulder City asks what this

thing

will actually do next to their houses?

The answer in September 2026 as we sit here is that the document that will answer

your question does not exist yet and the project was approved anyway.

So I guess I want to kind of return back to the substantially

the same phrase because the opening was a little off,

right? I read it as though it was a lie.

But somebody typed that phrase out so they could throw it over the wall into someone

else's silo. And the longer we've spent uncovering this,

the more I I think it's the most honest sentence in the whole record.

Because ask what category BLM was actually filling out,

and the answer is the right-of-way category.

And

In a right of way grant under the FLPMA,

what BLM is authorizing is just a a private use of public acreage,

described by its footprint and its its length of term.

A solar array is a private use of public acreage.

A one hundred and seventy watt ~ you know,

megawatt, sorry, not watt, megawatt data center is a private use of public acreage.

In the box the agency wasn't filling in,

those two things are not the same thing.

And that's why Judge Gunter's pause reads kind of the way it does.

He found that the agency leaned on a review written before

the project actually changed locations,

right? His finding was about the location that they had initially submitted it for.

Whether a data center is a different animal from a solar farm

was never asked because the form doesn't have a line for it.

So the phrase I opened on is is the agency telling you exactly

how this country categorizes its own land,

right? A grant, stakes mark in the plot,

a lease term, and a rent price set on public property.

Whether the thing on top pulls one hundred and seventy megawatts

or stores a thousand gallons of diesel and runs the most valuable computing

in this economy is for permitting purposes,

just a filled in line on a form in Washington DC.

And that's the assumption the whole fight depends on.

The reason that should this go on public land is a hard question at all,

is that the public's acreage is priced as permission rather than as production.

~ rent on eighty acres of Nevada Desert with no royalty on what what

on what 170 megawatts produces.

Congress has done the other version.

It did it in nineteen twenty for oil and coal,

and you can see the reason the result in a single number.

~ arguably nine hundred and forty eight million million dollars

to Wyoming and federal mineral royalties in fiscal twenty eleven.

interior writes rent schedules.

Congress writes royalty regimes.

For compute on public land, neither one has written anything.

Now let me run the two things people actually want to do about this,

past the question of who they cost and ~ because I don't think either

one does what its supporters hope.

So moratoria first. Hochle's New York pause up to a year

Tulsa's nine months, Spartanburg's moving towards twelve,

those are real and they're the only lever a local body actually has.

Here's the cost. Boulder City's Revolt,

which I admire, cost Boulder City almost $1.5 million from the lease

and roughly $2.3 million a year in total new revenue that would have gone to police,

fire, emergency response, and utilities.

That money came off the city's own books,

and the residents who pay for those services are the ones carrying the bill.

And the developer's cost is just a delay in a different county.

Caterpillar's $72.1 billion backlog does not move because Tulsa said

no for nine months. The generator sets ship somewhere else.

Second, litigation. The Interior Board of Land Appeals stay is

the best outcome anybody in this story has achieved,

and what it produces is a redo.

A better environmental assessment on the same parcel for the same tenant

at the same rent. It costs BLM staff time and it costs TS2 a calendar year,

but it doesn't change a dollar of the arrangement.

The change that would cost the people at the top something is the

one nobody has proposed. Pricing public acreage and public power against what gets

produced on it. And putting permitted generator runtime on

the operator's meter instead of the neighbor's lungs.

That takes Congress for the first part and state environmental agencies

for the second. Virginia DEQ is sitting on exactly that question right now.

I'm not going to tell you it's likely.

I'll tell you that every fix currently on the table leaves the rent schedule alone.

And it leaves the seventeen thousand six hundred acres still on the table.

Exactly. And here's the position that I came in with that I'm leaving with because

I've been turning it over for forever now,

it seems like it hasn't resolved.

Messina, New York. Little town,

North Country, and its town board voted three to two against a six month data center

moratorium. Residents testified in favor of the data centers.

The reason they gave, reported by WWNY on September sixteenth,

is that Messina has been economically depressed for years and this

is industry coming back.

I'm not gonna call those people confused or say they've been marketed.

~ they live in a place that lost its employers and they're not

and they're being offered the only thing anybody's offered them in thirty years.

And the entire apparatus we described,

NEPA, FLPMA, the Interior Board of Land Appeals,

the Stay, the Appeal, the letter from five members of Congress,

none of it hands missing an alternative.

It can slow down a project, but it can't put anything in its place.

So I'm holding

two things in tension as we end this this episode.

The people who live next to a thing should get to decide whether it's built,

and yet a town with no other offer on the table is not really making

a free decision when it says yes.

I know how those two sound together,

but I don't have the third sentence yet.

Essentially we have to I don't know,

demand more from the press, like the media to report these sort of things.

They should be all over these dockets,

right? And sometimes they are.

Every right-of-way application on a BLM land,

you know, goes into a public planning system and is organized by a field office.

The RIA data application in Idaho went to the Four Rivers field office

in August in twenty twenty five and just sat there,

right? The Prometheus Hyperscale proposals for an access road and a

A telecom line and a water pipeline went into Wyoming.

And the Valar Atomic Survey request for ten thousand two hundred acres near Green

River, Utah went in and came back out after the press asked about it.

Those files are public before anybody gets approved,

and they're they're public in the name of a field office most people around there

have never heard of. The other docket is in your state's air permits.

Virginia DEQ has been weighing expanded runtime for data center generators

and state environmental agencies have taken written comment from anybody

on that kind of proceeding. You don't need a lawyer or a connection or

a weekday off to file a comment on a runtime rule.

But I don't know how much those comments actually matter.

And the third one is is the one that that already worked,

right? Spartanburg County, South Carolina had offered tax breaks for a data center.

The tax break is a public agenda item with public documents,

and after residents got into them and voters removed the incumbents

in office in June, the county clawed back the breaks.

What happened at ~ a county council meeting on paper anybody could actually read?

And if you want to put all the absurdity in one sort of nice package,

it's a single 12-day sequence in September.

September 11th, 5,000 to 55,500 gallons of diesel out

of one facilities tank into Anderson Creek,

and the retail value of that fuel is only about $30,000.

September 18th, reporting reveals at least 12 projects

on 17,600 acres of public land across six states,

most of it never announced.

Then finally on September 23rd,

today, ~ five members of Congress write to ask the agency what's happening

on public land in their own state because they read about it in a newspaper.

That $31,000 of diesel got cranes,

vacuum trucks, absorbent pads,

and a state agency statement and a week of coverage on the major media outlets.

The 17,600 acres got a letter.

That's how this runs. The arrangement responds to the small visible spill

and ignores the large invisible transfer.

And if you're designing it to work that way,

it would look exactly like that.

Yeah. Well look, thanks for spending a an hour on public land use with us.

If you if

Hey, when the data

center shows up in your backyard you'll be glad you heard the story here first.

We hope. If you if you want to listen to the show,

right, it's at FOF. foundation,

you can find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And that's where we're putting the sourcing as well.

You includes the USGS report number two twenty twenty six dash five zero three five.

If you want to read what government scientists found about how close all

of this is already happening to the land that you already own a share of.

And our collective vote is what made this happen.

So be kind to each other, help out where you can.

Like we always say, Bye.

Aye.