Lawsuit Pushes California City to Reevaluate Data Center’s Environmental Harms

The project site is on grassland and wetlands habitat with nearby streams and other waterways. The area serves as an important wildlife corridor for the region and is home to red-tailed hawks, Cooper’s hawks, white-tailed kites, and other raptors.

“Data centers pretend to be unassuming, but in fact they pose huge risks to the air quality and water supply of our communities,” said Meredith Stevenson, a staff attorney at the Center. “We wouldn’t let a large industrial plant move into town without first analyzing how it’ll affect neighboring residents and wildlife. This is no different. Pittsburg leaders need to go back to the drawing board and give this project the thorough review the community deserves.”

Data centers, which accommodate artificial intelligence servers and other computer systems, are extremely energy intensive and require enormous amounts of land and water. As the industry grows, communities are rapidly realizing how environmentally destructive these centers can be.

All data centers currently operating across the country together require about the same amount of electricity as the state of New Jersey; they also use massive amounts of water for cooling. A mid-sized data center uses on average 300,000 gallons of water a day — about as much as is used by 1,000 households. And the greenhouse gas emissions are staggering: By 2030 the global data center industry will produce about 40% of what the entire United States emits in a year.

Monday’s lawsuit, filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, says the city violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved the project on Nov. 4. The lawsuit also asserts the city had failed to consider how the project would affect traffic and noise, as required by state law.


Photo: Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). Credit: Robin Silver.


The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.


https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/lawsuit-pushes-california-city-to-reevaluate-data-centers-environmental-harms-2024-12-02/