10/16/2026
The math here is not complicated—and that is precisely what makes it so damning.
Big Tech is constructing massive data centers across the United States, powered predominantly by fossil fuels. And the communities bearing the cost of that construction are not the shareholders collecting the profits. They are working families already struggling to pay their utility bills. Did you know that one in six American households, nearly 50 million people, are already behind on those bills? This is before the additional burden of Big Tech’s energy demands lands on their doorstep. Unless we act now, the impact and harm of data centers will become irreparable. Let’s Address This.
A Public Health Catastrophe
The public health consequences are not abstract. Experts estimate that the carbon pollution generated by these facilities produces up to 595 premature deaths every year from air pollution alone—a 20% spike in carbon emissions that is not a market externality to be footnoted in a quarterly earnings report, but a death toll with names, families, and communities attached to it. The annual public health cost of that toll? $5 billion. With a B.
As a civil rights lawyer, what I find most constitutionally and morally unconscionable is this: four million Americans live within one mile of these facilities. They were never consulted. They were never warned. They were simply assigned the pollution—and then handed the bill.
This is not a policy disagreement. It is environmental racism and economic exploitation operating in plain sight, dressed in the language of innovation and progress.
But we are not hopeless, because the resistance is working.
The Fight Back
From Minnesota to New York to Oregon, communities are organizing, showing up to public hearings, and winning. States are prohibiting data centers from passing their infrastructure costs onto consumers. Mandating clean energy sourcing. Requiring transparency that corporations have spent considerable resources avoiding. In my own community just outside Chicago, we fought to ban data centers at the local level—and we won.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this fight is who is fighting it together. MAGA hats and DSA stickers. Rural conservatives and urban progressives. Evangelical Christians and secular humanists. All showing up to the same hearings, on the same side, because polluted air and a $900 electric bill do not discriminate based on how you voted.
This is what a genuine people’s issue looks like. And we must continue to double and triple down to advance this fight and protect our communities.
The Simple Acts That Matter—And Work
Here is what you can do right now. Tag your member of Congress. Call your local elected officials. Show up to a public hearing in your community. Make them hear you—the way we are forced to hear these facilities poisoning our air and inflating our energy bills without our consent.
Big Tech and Big Oil manufactured this crisis. It falls to us—organized, persistent, and united across every political line—to dismantle it.
Read full piece here: https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/the-math-on-data-centers-doesnt-add
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