BloombergNEF now projects that by 2035, natural gas consumption at U.S. data centers will exceed that of Germany and Japan put together. The forecast is nearly twice what the same analysts published only nine months earlier.
Where you live determines how a figure like that hits you. For residents of Grays Ferry in Southwest Philadelphia, it arrives in a neighborhood that has already lived for decades in the shadow of the biggest oil refinery on the East Coast.
Shawmar Pitts was raised beside it. An explosion in 2019 finally closed the plant, and for most of his years there he never tied the illnesses around him to the facility at the end of his block.
The shift came in 2018, when Philly Thrive, an environmental justice group, set up a table in his neighborhood to discuss a proposed expansion of the refinery.
The list on the table
“I read the information they had on the table about how living near the refinery affects you, and I’m looking at all the sicknesses on this paper, and I’m like, ‘My mother has this, my sister has that, my next-door neighbor suffers from this’ — every house, someone has something on that list,” Pitts told us. “From that point, I was all the way in.”
Today he serves as managing co-director of that organization, and he is one of the voices calling for a moratorium on data centers in Philadelphia.
What makes the situation unusual is the timing. Not a single formal construction proposal has been filed. Two possible locations have been flagged by city officials — one in Northeast Philadelphia, the other in Grays Ferry, where Pitts lives.
The resistance arrived ahead of the buildings.
The pitch isn’t landing
Jobs and economic growth are what the data center firms and their clients are offering. Most Americans aren’t buying it: a majority oppose having these facilities built near them, typically citing energy and environmental worries.
Resistance has cropped up nationwide, particularly in towns and cities operating with limited resources. It builds quickest, though, in communities where heavy industry left damage residents can still point at.
“We don’t want data centers,” Philly Thrive board president Sonya Sanders said at a rally Monday at Philadelphia’s City Hall. “We don’t want the pollution, we don’t want the noise, and we know they’re not going to bring us more jobs.”
In 2020, Sanders’ husband, another Grays Ferry resident, died from a rare bone cancer. He neither smoked nor drank, she said, and she holds refinery emissions responsible for what killed him.
“In my eyes, they killed him,” Sanders said at the rally. “The pollution killed him. I believe he would be here today if he wasn’t silently murdered, because it was the pursuit of profit that killed him.”
A data center isn’t a refinery. That’s not the whole argument
The comparison deserves honesty, since the activists’ opponents will insist on it. A data center in Philadelphia is unlikely to damage the neighborhood to the degree the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery did. That plant ran as much as 335,000 barrels of crude through it daily.
Still, the scramble for AI supremacy has dragged the energy arithmetic somewhere nobody was modeling twelve months ago.
Gas burns cleaner than oil, which is not the same as burning clean. A single cubic foot of it puts out the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide, and the added demand from data centers is projected to produce another 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution daily — about 12% of everything the U.S. emits today.
Back in 2021, researchers at Harvard University concluded that air pollution from fossil fuels accounts for one death in every five worldwide. None of the current buildout had begun when that number was calculated.
The diesel engines nobody talks about
Backup power is the piece that turns the local argument specific, and it’s the detail most reporting leaves out.
“A typical data center planned in Pennsylvania has hundreds of diesel engines that spew air pollution, and even if they’re supposedly reserved for emergencies, the government has already said that the data center should use those rather than drawing from an overstressed electrical grid during some heat waves,” Clean Air Council attorney Annie Fox said at the rally. “We can expect that to get more frequent… Fossil fuel-hungry data centers will worsen climate change, making those heatwaves more frequent and severe.”
Go over that again. The generators labeled for emergencies won’t be limited to them, and whatever switches them on is a condition these sites help bring about.
Officials are starting to move
Governor Kathy Hochul in New York has signed an executive order putting a temporary halt on state approval of new permits for large projects.
“Progress shouldn’t arrive with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution,” Hochul said at a press conference. “These data centers can only be built, should only be built in places that want them.”
Moratoriums have already passed in Denver, Indianapolis, Asheville, Charlotte and Reno. Few of them amount to permanent prohibitions. They function as pauses, giving officials room to work out what one of these facilities actually does to a city before signing off.
What residents say they’re worried about
Emissions were only the start of what people raised at the Philadelphia rally.
“I’m worried about pollution,” Philadelphia resident Donna Greenberg told us. “I’m worried about surveillance and the fact that they’re going to have access to information they have no business knowing, and I’m concerned that they’re going to be using water and electricity that takes away from the people and the neighborhoods who need it.”
Monday’s kickoff rally for the No Data Centers in Philly campaign drew more than 100 people. Their chants, they hoped, carried far enough for council members to hear them inside City Hall.
“I just think that our community standing up and fighting back is tremendous,” Pitts said. “It takes a lot of effort and a lot of people.”
To see where the next battle over AI infrastructure breaks out, skip the permit filings. Look instead at the neighborhoods that already understand the price of a smokestack — and note that in Philadelphia, the campaign began against two sites that so far exist only on a map.