Erica: [00:00:00] Welcome to our next episode in the Environmental Justice season of the Gaze Podcast. I'm Erica Phillips and I am delighted to welcome Dr. Adrienne Hollis. Dr. Hollis is the Vice President for environmental Justice, health and Community Resilience and Revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation. In that role, she leads the environmental justice team to advance environmental and climate justice policy.

Programs while examining related health concerns. The environmental Justice program serves as a recognized resource for communities and other stakeholders. We're also delighted to have Dr. Khalil Shahyd. Dr. Shahyd is a senior strategist with the Green Finance and Economic Development Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council based in Washington DC.

He has a BA in history from Tulane University and MA in Sustainable International Development from Brandeis. A PhD in energy and environmental policy with a concentration in [00:01:00] urban political ecology from the University of Delaware, dr. Shahyd focuses on federal policy and national strategies that create just solutions for environmental and climate crises, specifically by integrating clean energy and energy.

With affordable housing and community development. He has more than 20 years of experience in community and economic justice, organizing, planning, and policy advocacy. So we've got a powerhouse team for you here today. So Dr. Shahyd, let me begin by asking you to talk a little bit about how you began doing the work that you engage in.

Dr. Shahyd: Wow, it's been a long journey. Let's start with that. For me, it really began with my upbringing and. The way that, that sort of raised me into consciousness about various types of disparities, social, economic, environmental disparities. And so, you know, my family, my mother moved us from Morgan City, Louisiana, where I was born, uh, to Lafayette, Louisiana.

[00:02:00] She was transferred. She was working for an oil company, which eventually became Chevron. I bought out a smaller company, and so she worked for many years with Chevron, retired as the head of environmental safety and permits from Chevron. So, but living in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was a very, a racially segregated city, when she first tried to go into Lafayette, no one would rent her an apartment because she was a single black mother.

She had to get one of her colleagues from work who was married to go around and put in applications for her at places to live. But being at a big oil and gas company, there weren't really black people. The woman she asked to help her was white. And this woman, she put the only places she put in applications were on the white side of town.

And so the elementary school I went to was called Plantation Elementary. My first baseball team was called the Rebel Reynolds. Our uniforms were based off of the Confederacy, so I essentially played baseball in a Confederate soldiers uniform living in the south side. And it wasn't until the fifth [00:03:00] grade that busing took effect, right?

And so we started to get bus students from the north side to come into Plantation Elementary, and that was when, you know. 'cause for the first three, four years of school, I was usually the only black kid in my class. It wasn't until fifth grade going into sixth grade when I went to middle school that we started to get more integration of black students.

I started to have more black friends. That moment really opened up this consciousness to me of what racialized inequality was and how it was related to where people lived. So since that moment, I've always been an activist. So I organized my first protest when I was 15 years old, a high school student, because one of the bus drivers called one of the students at N-Word and and I made all the black students boycott that bus that day.

For me, it really started in that moment, in that consciousness raising moment of seeing how spatialized disparities impacted our lives. Very early on.

Erica: You know, this is one time that I actually regret that we're not on video [00:04:00] because people will not understand that you are a relatively young person. This is not ancient history.

I'm not talking to somebody who is 80 years old. Dr. Hollis and I are speaking to a relatively young person who is sharing his experience with segregation, red lining. And the implications of racism so. I just have to say that to clarify for our audience that is listening to this and not watching you.

So please, Dr. Hollis. Go ahead.

Dr. Hollis: Well, I'd like to hear more about your activism, Khalil, and how it led you to the interest that you have in geography and energy.

Dr. Shahyd: Yeah, so when I graduated from high school in Lafayette, as quickly as I could, I got to New Orleans, you know, which is, you know, if you, if you in Louisiana, that, that's, that's the space that you know, you wanna be, you know, I had family there, you know, my grandmother, you know, graduated from high school there, lived there.

So, you know, I had ties back to that city and to me, new Orleans is always home. Once I got back to [00:05:00] New Orleans, I started connecting with elders in the community. New Orleans is a very vibrant cultural space. A very vibrant social space. We have very strong cultural networks, community networks of elders and leaders all throughout that city.

So I was able to connect with people who were really legends in our struggle from civil rights, black power to Black Panthers, all through that city. So I was able to find an outlet for what I had passion for, you know, you know, all growing up. But there was never any resources for me in Lafayette in New Orleans.

Those resources were abundant. So I, so you know, I first connected with a group called the African American History Alliance. And if, if anyone is familiar with them, we started off in New Orleans, we would do tours to popularize the history of the 1811 Slave Rebellion, which was the largest slave rebellion, you know, in US history.

Involved over 500 people, you know, who were marching, you know, from the La pla area of, of Louisiana. They wanted to take over New Orleans, [00:06:00] partly inspired by the Haitian Revolution to create a free Black Republic. But they were betrayed and ultimately defeated. That was where my activism started. It was really just trying to raise people's consciousness about, you know, the history of place, the history, you know, that was denied to us.

And, but then from there, you know, just started doing, you know, a lot of community organizing across the city. You know, youth activism, you know, but also did a lot of work, you know, organizing in public housing, project, project, you know, Magnolia Project. So, you know, really again, started to see how space and place really codified, you know, through loss, through the economy and just really wanted to try to, you know, better understand, you know, how our economic system embedded itself in different ways, in different manifestations, in different places.

And that activism, you know, led me to do solidarity work. I spent two summers doing solidarity work with. Zapatista communities in southern Mexico, [00:07:00] which was my first time coming outside of the us outside of like an urban environment with activism. And so working with rural indigenous communities in southern Mexico and, and kind of getting a, again, an understanding of how land and natural resources, you know, we're also involved in the struggle and how they were used with globalization and different types of systems of oppression.

When I came back from Mexico, having spent this time with these indigenous communities who were having these struggles, overland and natural resources, I wanted to know, well, do we have a counterpart to that type of action here in the us? I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Tulane. I was working at the Amistad Research Center, and I was given a box to archive from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, which was, you know, started in, I think 1967 or 68 as a farmer's cooperative.

There's really two organizations that merged into one. It was based initially in Alabama, but it's now headquartered in Atlanta, and I was [00:08:00] given this archive and I was reading through all this stuff about cooperative economics, black farmers and rural land, and I was like, wow, this is amazing. It was one flyer in there.

All these papers are really old stuff. It was going into the archive, but one paper had a phone number. Tried the phone number one day and somebody picked up. It was the administrator of the Rural Training and Research Center in Epps, Alabama, which is a small town community of about 200 people. He and I talked back and forth for months until finally he convinced me to move out there and take a job as a community land specialist.

I spent two years out on the farm in eps learning mostly from black farmers. We were. Trying to provide them different types of support, trying to, you know, offer different types of, you know, agricultural trainings and things like that. But I didn't know nothing about farming, so I was really learning from them about how to understand the land and our relationship to it.

And so it's really great.

Dr. Hollis: Oh wow, that's interesting. I'm so excited that you got that foundation in Alabama. Since I am from mobile, I like. [00:09:00] Recognize the importance there. You've touched on different aspects of issues that have coalesced into this, your general interest, and I wanted to know how all of this pointed you to an interest in political ecology and environmental economic geography.

From what I've read and from our discussions, how did all of that become that dissertation?

Dr. Shahyd: So when I went out on the farm, I really started to get much more interest in. Regional economy. It wasn't just looking at household economics or a labor economy. I was definitely much more of a leftist, a Marxist in my orientation.

My upbringing is through the Black Panther party, you know, two of my uncles, you know, you know what Panthers, I was very much following that movement. Um, and um, and you know, its ideas of how the Panthers organized themselves spatially and thought about politics spatially through their ideas. Intercomm communalism and, and, and looking at like, you know, community based struggles.

My [00:10:00] connection to what I was learning first from Zapatista communities and then from rural farm communities through the Southeast was trying to understand the relationship to land, nature and the environment and how control over those things really manifested in control over our economy and our lives.

And as I was always reading, reading, reading. You know, I found some work by these political ecologists, which, uh, political ecology is an attempt to merge, you know, geography, anthropology, political economy, to understand how environmental dynamics are related to power because. A lot of conservation environmentalists look at poor communities and say, well, poor communities are exploiting their environment.

They don't understand how to manage natural resources. These kind of things, and what the political ecologists were coming back and saying was that, no, actually capitalism is a problem. You know, capitalism is why Haiti is deforest it. It's not because [00:11:00] Haitians don't know how to manage trees. There was a lot of work happening in this space that I thought was really relevant to what was happening in our community.

When I was looking at environmental justice struggles and reading a lot of literature in the environmental justice movement, a lot of it was coming from the sociology space, environmental sociology, and those kind of spaces. But I wasn't seeing a whole lot of interaction with political economy, political ecology for me, fill that gap.

I begin to look at that stuff, the background for political ecology. Is really sort of credited with these two guys, Pierce Blakely and Harold Brookfield, who wrote this book, I think back in like the 1980s, called A Land Degradation in Society, which they sort of applied this political economic framework to understand, you know, why environments in West Africa was suffering from different types of deforestation, you know, et cetera.

And so they're kind of credited. With sort of creating the field of political ecology. But as I looked at it more, I said, [00:12:00] well, actually to me, the first political ecologist was Amilka Cabral, a revolutionary who led the revolution in the south. He was an agronomist, uh, natural resource economist, and he built his revolutionary movement of understanding the land, understanding agriculture in his community, understanding what the land yielded, understanding, you know, climate.

And weather, you know, across his, across his society. And so he used his understanding of nature and of land to create his strategy to gain independence for his country. So for me, he's actually the first political ecologist because not only was he the academic who studied it, but applied it to a revolutionary movement that is really the standard for what any political ecologist wants to be.

Erica: This is really fascinating. You know there, there's so many times when we speak with people, Dr. Shahyd, who don't consider themselves geographers, they go, well, I don't do [00:13:00] GIS, but GIS is just the tool. It's not the actual work. I'm sitting here and my jaw's dropping as I'm listening to the different things that you are weaving together, the social impacts, the environmental impacts, agricultural impacts.

I think this is. Absolutely fascinating.

Dr. Shahyd: I do understand GIS though I did train on GIS the first time I did GIS was while I was working on the farm in Alabama. Our forestry manager was a brother from Senegal. Amdu was his name. He was a great brother from Senegal and he came to us from Tuskegee where he did a master's in agricultural and Natural Resource Economics.

I would talk to him about his program. I was like, that sounds fascinating. I didn't know that you could study that. So much of my life was those kinds of accidental discoveries, especially when it relates to school, because I felt like all throughout my school career, no one ever pointed me like in a direction and said, oh, this is what you're interested in.

You [00:14:00] should study X, or you could actually do X. It was always for me to be like just really trying to figure it out. So I met him and when I left. The federation. I enrolled in that program at Tuskegee, his graduate program in agricultural economics. But I only spent a year there because I felt like the economics they were teaching was really like this sort of neoclassical, neoliberal economics.

I used to tell 'em, if we follow the model, black farmers won't exist in 25 years. Uh, we need something different. But it was there that I first got to do GIS. So I just remember we had a full class. We only had three computers. So we would all stand around and take turns on the computer trying to learn.

GISI later did some GIS courses with Esri at Santa Barbara. I spent 12 days doing intensive GIS courses with Esri.

Erica: I'm gonna ask this question, but in a way you've already answered it. The question was, where is geography and spatial analysis most influenced your thinking? But it sounds like everything in your [00:15:00] background has connected.

To spatial analysis. Tell me more about how you see that influencing your work.

Dr. Shahyd: Yeah, absolutely. So I feel like it, yeah, and, and you know, in every space, and, and I should also mention, you know, there are like, you know, legends, like, like Ruthie Gilmore's work, people like that, you know. But I also mentioned Clyde Woods who did a lot of work.

On the Mississippi Delta. He was a personal mentor to me. He was an urban planner, but he was really a black geographer. He studied politics and economics. The political economic geographies of black communities is what he did. He really taught me how to be an academic, but also be an advocate for your people and not to apologize or ever to relent in that.

That was his lesson to me this whole time where space and geography has really influenced me the most was coming back to New Orleans after Katrina, I think is one big example [00:16:00] and being involved with, uh, a lot of the organizing around Katrina's recovery. There was a moment, immediate aftermath of that recovery within the first year.

Some of you may remember the Green Dot plan that I believe Urban Land Institute put together this recovery plan that, you know, recommended turning entire neighborhoods into wetland area park space as water catchment to prevent future flooding. And they called it the green dot plan because when you looked at it, it was a map of the city that basically had, you know, told neighborhoods just green dotted that we're just gonna turn this stuff into park space.

And people revolted against that plan, as you can imagine. After that, Ray Nagin, who was the mayor at the time, came back and said, okay, what we're gonna do is with citywide recovery planning process, every neighborhood is gonna do its own recovery plan. And so to me that. Comes into, okay, we need a spatial approach to this work.

At the time, I was reading this book called Spatial Justice by Edward Soja. I [00:17:00] know what economic justice is, I know what racial justice is. I know gender justice is what is spatial justice. So I'm getting into this book and thinking about spatial justice. His approach to spatial justice was really, you know, just thinking about it the way we think about justice.

In other contexts, we see disparity by race, gender, class, et cetera. There's also disparity by space, right? In this context, I was saying, how can we think about it in a more proactive sense? As organizers, we're thinking about racial justice. We organize racially, which means socially we're thinking about economic justice.

We organize, so you know, we're gonna do a labor union. And I said, okay, if we're thinking about our response to spatial justice, how do we organize spatially? We're looking at a neighborhood planning process that's spatial organizing. So how can we begin to think about how we organize in response to oppression?

Spatially, right? And so what that then requires is us to not think of our communities necessarily as black communities. Because when we think about [00:18:00] ourselves as black communities, then we assume that we all think alike, that we all face the same oppressions, that we all want the same things out of it.

But when we're organizing spatially, you have to be much more careful. You have to be much more nuanced and attuned in how you actually do that organize and how you recruit people to your movement. That requires thinking more consistently and much more deliberately about democracy, which is something that we often take for granted when we're organizing socially because we assume socially we already think the same.

We already have the same experience, so we don't really have to ask people what they think. We want to tell 'em what to be angry about and how we're gonna move against it. When you organizing spatially, you have to be very deliberate in organizing democratic processes to really understand and to get people to be engaged, to get people to think about decision making.

That was when I started thinking about spatial justice, not as mapping disparity, but spatial justice and how we organized and really shift and changed the way we think about activism. [00:19:00]

Erica: Wow. You know, I'm sitting here and my head is about to explode. I just spent two days at North Star's Annual Conference, and many of the things that came up were really under this umbrella of spatial justice, but I don't think it was framed in that way.

We were talking about. The geography of liberation. This dovetails exactly with what you are speaking about. Now, we would've really loved to have had you on the stage at the North Stark Annual Conference, and I'm making a note right now that we need to get you invited as a speaker for maybe 2026. Adrienne, I'm gonna turn back to you.

Dr. Hollis: Yeah, Khalil, bring us to data centers. Okay? Mm-hmm. So, Khalil. All of your work on around spatial issues and geography and considering how we are organized, it sort of leads me to find out more about how this is applied with a focal area that you and I've been sort of talking [00:20:00] about and I know you have always been extremely interested in, and I kind of wanna pivot a little bit to that.

Mm-hmm. I wanna, I wanna talk about the application of this, your work in geography and spatial analysis in the concerns or the issues around artificial intelligence data centers, which you know, is a incredibly hot topic right now in the environmental justice space. Can you talk a little bit about that?

About your work and your concerns?

Dr. Shahyd: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The data center issue as it emerged, really did bring me back into this mindset because we're seeing these huge hyperscale data centers go up in communities across the country and increasingly around the world, and particularly when you get to the local level, oftentimes these data centers are being propositioned as tools, as you know, investments in local economic development.

So again, it, it brought me back to my dissertation research in [00:21:00] environmental economic geography, which at the time was a new space within economic geography. The idea of economic geography is to understand the economy within a spatial context. You know, because most economic papers and most economic thinking that, that you read, and economic, economic geographies, that as a saying, you know, most economists treat the economy as if it happens.

On the head of a pin, you know, as if, as, as if space has no relevance to it, you know? But we understand, and this is again, when I started thinking about this when I was in New Orleans doing organizing, when you think about the distribution of economic activity, you know, whether it be at a city or or regional level, can't be everywhere all at once.

And so, you know, pockets of disparity are gonna exist unless we're really paying attention to that. With the data center piece, it started bringing me back into that mindset because we're seeing issues of siting these facilities. We're seeing issues of agglomeration economies. We're seeing all these same economic geography issues.

I used [00:22:00] to study and read about in my doctoral program. But also you're seeing those environmental issues emerge, so you know what's happening now with this new phase of data center growth. And so we're transitioning from the more traditional data center economy, which was cloud-based computing, which is, you know, us, you know, being able to do this zoom call your, your email, your phone, you know, if you play video games, any of those things you streaming.

Apps, you know, all of those things are more traditional, smaller, cloud-based data centers. But now we're developing new data centers, bigger data centers, you know, with a single purpose of, of amassing enough compute capacity to develop artificial general intelligence. We're seeing new issues emerge from the consumption of energy and water resources to the use of diesel generators to fuel them during peak hours.

We're seeing a lot of those same issues emerge where the previous generation of data centers, you know, we didn't see [00:23:00] the type of environmental justice, you know, concerns in terms of citing because they needed to be where the fiber optic cables were. Our communities don't have fiber optic cables, right?

So they weren't cited in our communities. But I think with this new generation, there's a risk that we're gonna see much more targeted sighting to our communities because most communities don't want them. So they're gonna go to communities of least resistance, of least capacity to resist. These things are so massive and there's so much money behind them.

That they enable the build out of the infrastructure that they otherwise had to chase. Even if there's no fire rocket cable out in farmland, territorial, or wherever they're siting, they will justify the build out of that cable if necessary. They're much more open about where they can locate and their primary siting issues or land cost, and where there's least capacity for communities to resist.

Those two things are an appetite for them targeting distressed, devalued communities. [00:24:00] Communities that just don't have the power to resist them.

Dr. Hollis: Okay. Thank you for that explanation. I think a lot of us don't understand, I like how you talked about data centers in the past, how we thought about them, our phones and how they are colossal and that, you know, that we all are following.

But it sounds a lot like the way. Siting occurred in the beginning, when environmental justice issues about siting in communities and not in my backyard and all of those sorts of things. So, so it, it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that data centers siting is happening.

It's occurring in our communities now. So it seems like, as with past EJ experiences, those who are considered to be voiceless, they are not voiceless. Are the ones who have less resources to push back, and so those are the areas where it's going to occur. That leads me to this important question for our audience and others for activists such as yourself, what do we do?

[00:25:00] Mm-hmm. How can we play a role? What role can we, since it's happening without us, what's our role?

Dr. Shahyd: Yeah. It's a tough question. What I learned and appreciated most from the environmental justice movement. Is it can be seen as a burden, but it also gives the movement a sense of clarity about the world that a lot of other spaces don't have.

You have to be holistic, intersectional in the way we approach these things, and that is both in space and scale, but also in the issues we talk about. I think no one has had to do that to the degree no one does it, as well as environmental justice groups and folks on the ground. And I would say, you know.

This data center issue? You know, I think it's important to say because both of us, you know, work with big green organizations, we were not the first on the scene to understand this stuff. You know, this came from frontline communities that were experiencing this stuff on the ground. I was not aware that any of this [00:26:00] stuff was happening until I saw Keisha Pearson and those folks in Memphis stand up and rise up against that XAI facility.

In Memphis that just blew the lid off of this thing, that this stuff is happening and it's already here and the rest of us are trying to play catch up with it. Right? The first thing is to educate ourselves to discuss what's happening because there's a lot of misinformation when people use the term ai.

It is deliberately confusing about what that means. The best analogy I've heard that I can, that, that I can give is, you know. You know, when they say ai, AI is an umbrella term, that can mean a great many different things. It can mean some things that are very useful to us, but it can also mean some things that can be potentially harmful.

Karen Howell, who wrote the book, empire of ai, which is the analogy of transportation, saying the term AI is like saying the term transportation. Transportation can mean many things. It could be a bike, it could be a skateboard, it could be a car. It could be a horse. Perfect. And so, you know, if you need to [00:27:00] get from your house to downtown and you need transportation, it could be public transportation, it can be in car.

But what the tech sector is saying, okay, you need transportation to get from your house to downtown. I will build you a rocket. I don't need a rocket, right? I just need a bus, you know, a function of metro system, or I need a car. And they're like, trust me, you're gonna love the rocket. Just give me enough money to build you the rocket, and you're gonna love the rocket.

That's not what you asked for. And so that's kind of what's happening with ai. And so we have to really understand what's happening. A lot of the misinformation that's misinformation, particularly at the local level when it concerns economic development, these things, you know, they don't bring jobs, they don't bring a ton of tax breaks out.

Looked into Loudoun County, Virginia, the data center capital of the world. Loudoun County has more than 200 data centers for fiscal year 2024, which is the last year that we had numbers on. You know, the county, about a third of the county budget now comes from taxes from data centers. Most of that is from sales taxes because the computer equipment, [00:28:00] the chips, they burn 'em up so quickly because these things are running 24 7, that they have to replace them every two to three years.

And so they got like $800 million just from sales taxes, from the, from the computer equipment. And they got about $90 million from property taxes. But they got 43 million square feet of data center. In Loudoun County, so it comes out to about $20 per square foot. Wow. That's less than what you'll get from a Walmart.

You know, that's less than what you'll get from an apartment building, you know, in, in taxes. So they're not getting a whole lot per square foot in property taxes and they're not getting the jobs. And they'll often tell you that, oh, well, you know, this is your opportunity that, that this is your gateway into the digitally economy.

That's not true, especially with these hyperscale facilities. So like, you know, that's what they say in Memphis, that, you know, this X AI is gonna generate other opportunities in the digital economy. But this Colossus facility is a one gigawatt data center that you have no access to. You can't use the compute [00:29:00] capacity of that data center only devoted to one purpose.

So it's just a big box. In this neighborhood that has zero relationship providing zero services to the city of Memphis. It's just there for extraction, and that's why, you know, this AI economies is being compared to a new colonialism because it's just extraction from our communities.

Erica: You know, for another episode, I think we might wanna delve further into this issue because.

Everybody's looking at the cost of energy, right? What does this mean for me as a consumer? And these data centers are consuming so much energy? What is the impact on individual consumers? Not being able to access that energy and what is it going to do to our cost of heating our homes and having electricity in our homes when we're competing with these big data centers.

Dr. Shahyd, you and I are both in the DC metro area. I don't know if you've seen it, but there are a lot of ads running on television right now talking about how these data [00:30:00] centers are creating jobs so I don't have to travel four hours to get. To my job, I can now work closer to home. So they're creating this perception to voters that these data centers are going to be a net positive.

And if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the exact opposite of that. The jobs are not there, the revenue is not, there more is being taken out than is being brought into these communities. I'm fascinated to hope that we'll have more discussion around just this issue in the future. We are coming to the close of our time together today.

I'm hoping you will help us to include some of the books that you mentioned today. We can share that out with our listeners. We're also putting your attention to the North Star website. We're going to be publishing some maps where we know there are data centers and they will be interactive maps that will allow you to overlay your own data to see where debt centers are located and the demographics around those [00:31:00] data centers.

You used the term the communities of least resistance. I think that's a really interesting way to describe these communities. It's not that they don't want good things, it's that they often are burdened with other issues that may take priority, and so they're not resisting this issue. While I'm trying to make sure I've got food, I've got healthcare, I've got transportation.

Do you have some concluding remarks or questions for Dr. Shahyd?

Dr. Hollis: Yeah. I do have one big question, Khalil, if you could succinctly explain for our listeners, when it comes to data centers, generally what is it, how does it affect me, and what can we do about it? If someone just come up to you and asked you that industry.

Dr. Shahyd: So again, we would talk about data centers. We're talking about hyperscale data centers. These are data centers that are a hundred megawatts to. [00:32:00] A gigawatt to two gigawatts. If we're talking about data centers that use more energy than an entire city that use more water than an entire city, these data centers are training for artificial intelligence.

If you're like a digital entrepreneur or if you're a city who wants to use digital tools to enhance city services, you can't use that compute power to do any of those. This is just a box to create artificial intelligence. What we need to do is, one, understand what's happening. We need to talk to our public officials very early because they are under a lot of pressure to accept these deals because there's a lot of money involved.

This industry is awash with money. Over the last three months, the top four or five tech companies that spent close to $200 billion. For the entire year, they're gonna spend upwards of $400 billion on data center infrastructure over the course of 2025, and they're planning to spend even more next year.

So this stuff is coming. Get with your local officials, [00:33:00] understand your local zoning code because they are taking advantages of blue polls and zoning to site these facilit. Talk to your public officials and understand the misinformation about jobs, tax breaks and, and tax benefits. A 250,000 square foot data center will employ at max 50 people, and half of those might be remote workers, and the other half might be contractors.

Right. Really understanding a lot of the misinformation here is gonna be key. Pushing those levers, you know, to be able to push back. Cities like Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, for example, just recently passed. Preemptive community benefits ordinance that says any data center that wants to come into Lancaster County, you have to uphold this standard of community benefit and tell us how you're actually gonna help us meet these community goals.

The state of Ohio just passed a tear, which requires data centers to pay 85% of their energy costs upfront. Just doing that alone, shut down half of the permit requests. In Ohio for data centers, because what also happens a lot of time is the same company will put in permits [00:34:00] in multiple states all at once because they're trying to see who's gonna give 'em the best deal.

And that spikes utility costs, which have already gone up between seven to 10%. Regionally and nationwide and are expected to go up by about 30% by 2030, just from these data centers. So those are different ways people can fight back. Ultimately, make yourself aware of what's happening. There are resources out there, people are organizing and you know, it, it's gonna be tough to stop.

But I think, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's only as tough and the effort we put into it.

Dr. Hollis: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Shahyd. I do wanna say that in an effort to educate communities. Shahyd will be a guest that the National Wildlife Federation's Environmental Justice Program is having on data centers, a two-part series.

The first one should be in January, and he is our guest speaker. You'll learn more about data centers and their effects on communities, particularly related to health and economy, so thank you so much.

Erica: I can't wait to listen to that. Dr. Shahyd, thank [00:35:00] you so much for your time today. This has been a fascinating discussion.

Dr. Shahyd: Thank you. Great.