It's dumb and feels astroturfed. My pet speculation: existing data center owners want to prevent more data center construction to boost the value of their asset

It's dumb and feels astroturfed. My pet speculation: existing data center owners want to prevent more data center construction to boost the value of their assets. I ran some numbers on energy use a while back. In general: if you skip one 20 mile drive, you make up for heavy use of e.g. Claude Code for a week. So telework one day and you're making up for your AI use. If AI is using too much water, it means the data centers are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll magically discover ways to reduce water consumption. The Texas natural gas mega-data-center story: that's a political problem. Tax carbon emissions and they'll suddenly realize they can power it better with solar, wind, or nuclear power. I'd also speculate that Texas made gas power a contingency to build it, since fossil fuels own Texas.