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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of reasons you can oppose fracking BUT oil wells are generally built on pretty low value land eg West Texas and the Dakotas. Also, fracking creates a lot of jobs. Plus the landowner (often farmers or ranchers) will typically get royalties on the amount of oil pumped.

There have been a lot of sins committed by the oil industry, like in Texas there are lot of leaking, "orphan" wells where nobody ended up being responsible for capping the well and doing the clean up. This goes back to the 1950s and earlier. I think things are somewhat better now.

There's literally zero upside to a community to building a data center. Electricity costs go up, there's noise pollution, there are no jobs, water rates go up and there is water pollution.

Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

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A functioning property tax brings in a lot of revenue for the local government. Areas of the US with lots of data centers, like Loudon County, can have 35% of their budgets covered by data centers, and the worst of it is so ugly big box buildings you drive by sometimes.

Put in place sensible rules around noise, locating in pre-planned areas, and covering the cost for electrical upgrades then let the market decide how many to build. Most people appear to be getting their information from TikTok and have developed a very ignorant NIMBY attitude.

To be blunt progress does get made by listening solely to those who get short end of the stick. Japan and China have good rail in large part because the central government can simply make the globally better choice over the objections of those nearby who lose out due to noise and other factors. We don’t need to do that, we simply need to not let ignorance win and instead regulate the externalities properly, and capture value for the public through property taxes.

"let the market decide" means "let the billionaires decide" and they have. They've decided they don't care about public opinion and are more than happy to push all the infrastructure costs, pollutions and externalities onto everybody else.

Take Kevin O'Leary's DC. Massive energy tariff credits and propetty tax deductions and it uses more power than the rest of the state. So there'll need to be electrical infrastructure upgrades to get in gigawatts of electricity. You think Kevin O'Leary is paying for that? Of course not. Utah residents will be paying for that.

The blatant lies around tax breaks and subsidies are funny too. "we have to hand them out or they'll go elsewhere". No, no they won't. And if they do, who cares? Most things in life are a collection of positives and negatives. Like someone else mentioned fracking. It definitely has a lot of negatives but (IMHO) it's way more positive than data centers. I actually think AI data centers are strictly negative, meaning they have zero positives for the state and the communities affected. I honestly cannot think of a single positive that the residents of Utah will get out of Kevin O'Leary's DC.

> Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.

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