Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.

There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...

Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.

This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !

Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else

People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.

It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3

because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't

and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place

like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).

Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).

The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.

So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.

[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...

[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...

I was unaware it was optional.

I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.

Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.

Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.

- They already invest in new power plants and connection infrastructure when they bring in new datacenters - Electricity for datacenters is based on capacity rather than actual usage - They already have backup generators at most datacenters that they can run during outages. It wouldn't be much work to allow those to feed power back into the grid in extraordinary circumstances - They generally use local contractors to build them for practicality purposes anyway.

This is just some fancy PR and nothing else.

Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.

If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.

the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.

Building pipelines is a long and arduous process and one that will not be done in time to reasonably accommodate the increase in natural gas demand presented by these data centers.

The pledge is meaningless political theater meant to placate voters in the mid-terms.

One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.

We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.

This absolutely cannot backfire. /s

Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now that's innovation.

See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?

Tesla’s Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...

So no.

But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.

Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).

And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.

I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.

Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.

And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.

> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

If it is not legally required, it will not be done.

There's a lot of data centers that are not being built because they're not fixing it. The trend is going to continue. The hate for AI is going to grow. You basically have a lot of people that will vote a lot of people into office to take down all AI progress inside the United States if they don't fix their problems.

It'll be cool to shit on big tech as a politician.

Blinded by greed, I have never done it before, but I have seen the light, the bright future that we are all building toward.

From this day forth, I shall be righteous.

In your name, all good things come.

Hallelujah.

Soon I’ll get a used EV and cover the garage in panels too so I don’t have to care about wars causing surges in gas prices either.

But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].

AI has a great potential like this too..

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease