On this EcoJustice Radio show we share a panoply of voices speaking out about the dangers of AI – Artificial Intelligence – and this insane boom in water-and-power-hungry data centers throughout the U.S. Steven J. Kung from No Data Center Monterey Park joins us as well as journalists, activists, and academics weigh in. We end with a call to action by Chief Phil Lane Jr.
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Stop AI: The Fight for Water and Community
There’s an article on the wonders and concerns about Artificial Intelligence going around on the internet by Matt Shumer called “Something Big is Happening.” It sounds the alarm that AI is getting way better at scraping through the world’s data, yours, mine, everyones, and it will soon make superfluous the jobs of many writers, lawyers, even AI coders. And like Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey, they soon will be making all of us superfluous. At least this is what people chatter about.
We don’t have to accept our own superfluity. I don’t argue with Shumer’s premise, to use AI and get ahead of the game, to go on fancy machine friends, Chat GPT or Claude, and make it guess for you/entertain you/social post for you, often making ridiculous mistakes or hallucinations. The dangerous kind.
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Yet another perspective is to ask: AT WHAT COST. The recording-your-every-data-whim ethic has become an epidemic self-own. It accelerates power-burning-polluting-consuming, paying off the trusty oligarchs who ironically seem to need your money. At the expense of wild animals and winter snow, and embeds mass surveillance heating up your fingertips, your “smart” doorbell, biometric sensors, your EV “entertainment system” complete with facial recognition and constant report-backs to the mother ship. They can even predict, mostly unreliably and dangerously if you are a non-confomist, how you walk, talk, think, dream, emote.
In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta invested $465 billion in building out computing and networking infrastructure for AI, according to Goldman Sachs. Data is the new oil, and AI is the noxious refinery processor building our monetized personal profiles to cast us as characters in its own late-capitalist fascist charade.
“The race toward superintelligence is reshaping infrastructure requirements across every industry,” said Michael Wall, executive vice president at Prime Data Centers in the Los Angeles Times, which built the data center next to downtown LA in Vernon. “We’re working to give businesses the foundation they need to build and deploy the next generation of AI models — faster, more efficiently and at massive scale.”
One Harvard economist estimated that without data center investments, the U.S.’s gross domestic product growth could have come to a near standstill this year. Which is frankly more make believe. Thank you, Harvard, can we hear from someone from a community college who might actually understand what’s going on?
Los Angeles has more than 70 data centers. The hub for them has long been the One Wilshire building in downtown Los Angeles. It is the destination for massive undersea cables that connect the U.S. to Asia.
Prime and other developers, including Goodman Group, CoreSite, and Digital Realty, are planning hundreds of megawatts of new data center capacity in Vernon, said Darren Eades, managing director of JLL, who specializes in data centers.
Speaking of megawatts, consider the electricity necessary to power this worldwide-data-grab-operation. Data centers today consume 415 terawatt-hours of electricity, more than Japan’s entire grid. Artificial Intelligence accounts for nearly half of that surge, driven by hyperscalers whose cooling towers evaporate five million gallons per day per facility, enough to supply twenty thousand homes.
By 2040, under projected 15–20% annual growth cited by Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency, AI alone will demand 3,800 terawatt-hours, roughly the electricity used by the United States today.
Electricity grids already strain, so consider this upscaling. Rolling blackouts might turn Manhattan into Guatemala City, the latter who regularly face disruptions. The diesel backups for hospitals and nuclear power plants. Coal plants in West Virginia, China, and India are restarting to meet demand, adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, even as AI systems promise to “model” the climate, they intensify it. This is structural escalation, not innovation.
Water tells the darker story. Current hyperscaler demand is estimated at hundreds of billions of liters annually. By 2030, projections approach six trillion liters — equivalent to the annual flow of ten Colorado Rivers.
By 2040, estimates rise toward fifteen trillion liters, comparable to draining the Nile. Los Angeles consumes roughly one billion liters daily. AI will outdrink Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston combined.
STORY: Rising from the Ashes: Wildfire Resilience for Los Angeles and Beyond
We engage with Steven J. Kung, an advocate against the construction of a massive data center in Monterey Park, California. Steven, a writer and director, shares his insights on the environmental implications, air pollution, blight, industrializing the landscape, in addition to the excessive water consumption and energy demands.
We also hear from Stanford professor and renewable energy expert Mark Jacobson, who discusses sustainable alternatives for powering data centers. Tech journalist Paris Marx weighs in from the 2025 Bioneers Conference on the social and political implications of this data center bubble economy. For some positive news, legislators in New York introduced the strongest data center moratorium proposal thus far [https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/06/new-york-democrats-propose-sweeping-pause-on-data-center-construction-00768090]. The bill would pause data center construction for three years while appropriate regulations are drafted. Moreover, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders suggests a national moratorium on this data center building boom. Join us as we explore the grassroots movement to protect local communities and the fight for environmental justice.
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Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr., of the Ihanktonwan and Chickasaw Nations, the man who led our climate march back in 2013, has been speaking out about a better way forward. He spoke on the Binding Planetary Peace Treaty, initiated at the World Peace Gathering, July 2025, at Dripsey Castle, Cork, by Indigenous elders, spiritual leaders, and global peacebuilders, proposes structural redirection: end armed conflict, reallocate trillions from military expenditure toward ecological restoration, submit to the United Nations General Assembly, and open for global ratification, by all members of our Human Family.
If we lived under the Binding Planetary Peace Treaty to End War, initiated at the World Peace Gathering in Ireland, July 10–20, 2025, where nations chose cooperation over competition, the development of artificial intelligence would take on an entirely different character. Instead of fragmented national strategies, the United States, China, Russia, Europe, and others racing to outbuild one another, we could imagine a shared planetary framework rooted in unity rather than rivalry. In such a world, AI would not be an instrument of dominance, but a coordinated intelligence infrastructure serving the whole human family. Such a future begins with collective choice.
Consider a different way forward. Let’s not only consider it, but work to unite all of us for a better future. According to Chief Phil Lane, without coordinated governance, Artificial Intelligence becomes a force multiplier for surveillance, digital enclosure, and fortified compute enclaves. With coordinated restraint, we reclaim the Planetary Commons: water for life, equity, energy, and computation for restoration rather than extraction.
He concludes with the reminder that this is not a prophecy. This is arithmetic. We have fourteen years (really much less than that), not generations, to decide whether Artificial Intelligence accelerates collapse or supports planetary stabilization. The biosphere does not negotiate. The algorithm does not care who pays the cost.
Resources/Articles:
True Cost of AI with Paris Marx – Bioneers: https://bioneers.org/the-true-cost-of-ai-water-energy-and-a-warming-planet-ztvz2507/
Stopping a Data Center in Monterey Park
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/07/california-monterey-park-stop-datacenter-construction
Steven J. Kung is a proud Chinese American resident of Monterey Park who lives 1,300 feet from the proposed data center site. He is a writer-director who co-founded the grassroots activist group No Data Center Monterey Park [https://www.nodatacentermpk.org/].
Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He writes for a PBS SoCal Artbound project called High & Dry [https://www.pbssocal.org/people/high-dry]. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs.
Podcast Website: http://ecojusticeradio.org/
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Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt
Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats
Episode 278
Updated 21 February 2026
