‘Progress’ can be dirty business. Our climate writer looks into the tradeoffs.

Episode transcript

Clay Collins: If you can remember a time when regular power lines out in the countryside were considered obtrusive, you might be surprised by an encounter with data centers. Those are clusters of windowless warehouses that process enormous volumes of information. That takes power: lots of electricity running through half million volt transmission lines, lots of water for cooling – and land. Sometimes farmland.

Progress in the form of newer technologies like generative artificial intelligence and digital currencies comes at a cost. Data centers are one manifestation of that.

Climate writer Stephanie Hanes went back to the site of her grandparents’ farm in Maryland awhile ago to report a story on data centers. Stephanie joins me today for a conversation that went well beyond data centers – into a discussion about some of the places where the effects of this building boom ripple, and into broader issues of technology and sustainability.

This is “Why We Wrote This,” back after a hiatus. I’m Clay Collins. Stephanie joins me today. Hey, Stephanie. Welcome back.

Stephanie Hanes: Thanks so much. How are you doing?

Collins: Good! So first, can you briefly lay out the scope of this data center growth phenomenon and why the times seem to require these places?

Hanes: Sure. Data centers are, like you said earlier, these really big warehouses of computers and the equipment necessary to keep those computers cool. And what we have to remember is when we’re thinking about all of the digital things that we do in our lives, whether it is ordering food online or online shopping, or turning on your oven from your phone, or using cryptocurrency, all of this actually happens in a physical place.

And the data centers are in some ways the epicenter of this. These are the servers that keep all of this digital world going, and as our digital lives have expanded, so have these “computer hotels” that fuel this digital world.

Collins: I love [the image of] “computer hotels.” I was talking to our producer before this show about kind of an annoying use: the creation of those AI things where everyone turns themselves into action figures – and [even] that activity is happening in one of these giant centers.

Hanes: All of it’s happening. Everything is going through these centers. Your Amazon orders, when you type in a question in ChatGPT, or when you’re mapping where you’re going in your car – all of this stuff runs through physical infrastructure.

Collins: And they’re big enough – and I guess numerous enough – that they can’t just occupy abandoned shopping malls and industrial centers. They land in agricultural spaces.

So it’s not yet directly affected, but what was it like being on your grandparents’ farm, where things are also beginning to change?

Hanes: Sure. You know, my grandparents lived in a place called Carroll County, which is about an hour outside of Baltimore. It’s a Maryland county. It’s super agricultural. There’s not a lot that goes on there that would hit the news. As I say in my piece, that’s what people like, that’s why they’re there.

And there aren’t data centers in Carroll County right now, but there are a lot of data centers sprouting up in Northern Virginia, which is a couple of counties away.

And the reason why I went back to my grandparents’ old farm and visited some of my relatives who are still there and the neighbors who we’ve known for years and years and years, is that this explosion of data centers in Northern Virginia has this ripple effect. It’s even getting to a place like Carroll County, where you feel really far away from the high-paced technological innovation of the world.

You see this in Maryland because you have these big power lines that have been proposed to carry electricity from the Pennsylvania border across Maryland towards Northern Virginia, where there is a huge need for power because of the data centers. They have been expanding as they’ve filled up that area, and now they’re often really close to residential neighborhoods where they don’t look particularly attractive, and some people complain about noise.

Collins: Right. So aside from the fact that these places are objectively not so pretty, they are power hogs. And there’s a lot of discussion nationally now about how to meet power demands. The current president talks about a national energy emergency, about the need for more coal and oil.

As you’ve written, the United States is producing a record amount of power. It’s a net energy exporter, natural gas, renewables becoming cheaper than coal. Does that mean alternative sources might be enough to power the future, including this growth in data volume and the rise of electric vehicles, or you know, do we need all forms of generation, including ones we’re still developing?

Hanes: This gets at a really interesting question and something that I’ve been talking to a lot of people about in my work, and as you say, we don’t have a power problem, right now, at least not countrywide. Our power system is really complicated, and there certainly are regions that are trying to figure out how to update the electric grid so that the power needs are met in the appropriate way right now.

But writ large, we’ve got enough power. The problem is that we don’t have enough power for the future, if you believe in the projected spike in power hungry things, and that includes data centers, it includes artificial intelligence, which uses even more data and more electricity than our current digital landscape uses, and it includes a whole host of electrification.

It certainly seems like that is what’s going to happen, but we also know that technology changes and so all of it is a little bit of a future question mark.

Collins: It’s great to think that people can be anticipatory in that way, but you know, the climate story is ongoing and climate and the environment are just not huge stories right now in the public consciousness. Even though CO2 levels grew last year at the fastest rate in recorded history, there’s just so much else to focus on, and a lot of it seems pretty existential.

What’s it like being a climate reporter right now?

Hanes: Climate has always been a really interesting topic for me because it’s an odd one. It’s the air, literally. Right? It’s the way that we live on Earth. And so while you’re absolutely right, a lot of the conversations around climate change and the impact of that have both changed and also gone to the back burner in a lot of ways – these big questions of how do we live sustainably on this planet that we share with lots of other species?

That’s still, to me, really front and center, and you see this in these questions about how do we supply the minerals that we need to create a clean energy economy, and also this new 21st century digital economy?

You see these in questions about what do you do with the climate impacts of global warming. The same questions are still really there. It’s almost that there’s been a little bit of a narrative shift and these questions of how do we live and what decisions and tradeoffs do we make are front and center when we’re talking about everything from deep sea mining to data centers.

Collins: You’ve talked on this show and elsewhere about approaching your work as not being about left versus right and political brinkmanship, but about new ways to think about what we collectively value.

It sounds like that’s what you’re referring to now. Can you say more about that and whether you see that happening?

Hanes: Yeah, that is really how I try to approach it, and it’s one of the things that I love about the way that the Monitor covers this issue. It doesn’t have to be a left versus right issue and I don’t think it is Carroll County, Maryland, where I went back to my grandparents’ farm to tell this story.

That’s a very right-leaning county. Those are not people who would identify themselves as left or progressive, anything like that. But when they criticize data centers, they’re coming at it from not a leftist point of view, but from a conversation of: What is progress? What do we wanna save? Is sustainability driving an electric car, or is it stewarding land that’s been in a family farm for generations?

And so it’s all about this – what does it mean to have progress? What do we care about? And those questions really cross political lines, and there’s a lot of common ground there.

Collins: It’s interesting. There are mitigation technologies, right? You think that all sides could get behind some of those? I was reading about a Louisiana direct capture plant that’s being developed – or was being developed – to pull CO2 out of the air. And projects like that could theoretically be job-developers, right?

But the Department of Energy seems keen to kill it. I mean, are there specific areas that are both promising and getting broad buy-in?

Hanes: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I’m actually just reporting a story right now about critical minerals, which is a big issue with both the administration and with people who are trying to find more sustainable ways of providing those minerals, which are critical for 21st century technology. And, you know, questions like, do we try to recycle batteries more.

I mean, those are things that do have potential that people on both sides could get behind. I also think there are these questions about do we have to rethink consumption patterns and do we have to question this idea of perpetual expansion and growth? And that can be a really tricky question, and you can get people on both sides of the aisle debating that. But I do think some of those bigger questions are coming up along with these technological developments.

Collins: You brought up rare earth minerals. Something I wanted to bring up – another extractive industry, another complicated situation. It involves international trade, US and China. It’s also another area where we think about progress, and that can mean green technology. Staples like EV batteries, which you just mentioned, and solar panels, and they all seem to require some dirty work.

What I think I hear you saying is that we’re not just trading old, dirty technologies for new dirty technologies, and that this somehow is a bridge to a better and cleaner future.

Hanes: We have a lot of choices to make when it comes to how we live. And there are people…this gets back to your point about are we really talking about left versus right? You know, I’ve done some work recently also on agricultural communities, and there’s a lot of conversation about what does it actually mean to live sustainably?

Like does trading in your second or third car for an EV and then driving it all around while you’re buying things from overseas? Does that make you more ecologically friendly than a farmer who has one diesel truck and lives a much more local and less consumptive life?

You know, these are big questions and so I don’t think it is all about just trading one technology for another, but it’s going to require a broadened aperture where we listen to different perspectives. I think there are some ways that that conversation did get really partisan where there were right positions and wrong positions, and one of the opportunities in a really complicated time right now is that perhaps the conversation is going to be opening more to different perspectives about what sustainable living actually can be.

Collins: Well, thank you Stephanie, for staying on these big questions and trade-offs and gathering all these perspectives and stories, and so many others.

Hanes: Oh my gosh, it is my pleasure and thanks so much for talking about it.

Collins: To our listeners, thanks for listening. You can find show notes with links to the stories we just discussed and to all of Stephanie’s work, including past appearances on this podcast at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis, we recently shifted production from weekly to something more ad hoc. If there are Monitor stories you’d like to hear talked about, please let me know at collinsc@csmonitor.com. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineers were Noel Flatt and Alyssa Britton. Original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2025.