To Feed Data Centers, Pennsylvania Faces a New Fracking Surge

[Brenda]

Twenty years after fracking began to boost natural gas production in western Pennsylvania, residents are bracing for another surge in output as gas-fired power plants prepare to meet a big jump in electricity demand. At least five new energy-hungry data centers are planned in the region, most of which will power themselves by producing electricity by burning natural gas on site. The burst in activity is prompting predictions, by power companies as well as their critics, of drilling hundreds or even thousands of new gas wells to fuel the centers’ power demands.

Such concerns are not new in western Pennsylvania. For the last two decades, environmental advocates and researchers have accused the natural gas industry of polluting the air, polluting water through leaks and spills of chemicals used in fracking, and causing illnesses including cancer, asthma, and birth defects. The harms of fracking have been documented in a “compendium” of some 2,300 peer-reviewed studies from around the world published by the nonprofits Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group, maintains that fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania is safe, and that by replacing coal-fired generation it was responsible for a nearly 11 percent decline in the state’s carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.

“Unconventional oil and gas development has led to the loss of water resources not just at the front end, with removal, but also contaminating aquifers to the point where communities have lost their potable water,” said Stolz. As fracking expands to meet data center power needs, he added, “conditions will get worse for the people of western Pennsylvania.”

This shit has been happening in Mexico and other countries in poor areas for years. Now it's here. Josh Shapiro is not on the side of the people of PA.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/pennsylvania-data-centers-natural-gas

[slightlv]

1. Anyone else tired of actual, living humans always being placed on the lowest rung of priorities?! n/t

[jfz9580m]

2. It is probably not even good science

I looked at this about a year ago and felt very pessimistic about any of this stuff being worth it. It looks like another scam CS is pulling off.
It would be very on-brand for that field:

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/just-2-hours-is-all-it-takes-for-ai-agents-to-replicate-your-personality-with-85-percent-accuracy

Just 2 hours is all it takes for AI agents to replicate your personality with 85% accuracy

How can two hours be enough to truly simulate human personality? Humans are complex creatures who interact with their environment.

[hatrack]

3. It's not even a good scam . . ..

AI certainly has useful applications - notably in medical and scientific work (gene expression, vaccine development and so forth) but what we're seeing now is nothing but the largest pump and dump in the history of money.

It's a stock bubble kept alive by Silicon Morons with all the money in the world. That money has convinced them that they're galactic super-geniuses and they'll breathlessly sell that to Finance Morons, a tribe equally convinced of their own god-like powers.

Their collective IV drip of Randroid bullshit has convinced them that we must "Win The AI Race", though I have yet to hear a clear or reasonable explanation of what that means.

And isn't it an amazing coincidence that the "need" for more more more (apologies to the Andrea True Connection) generating capacity dovetails so neatly with the desire of the Asshole-In-Chief and his Political Morons to destroy any alternatives to gas and coal?

And why support climate science - or any other scientific endeavors - when you can trot out Shiny Tech Thing Dripping With Other Peoples' Money in lieu of anything tethered to reality? So let's fuck the planet and destroy the electrical grid, because I want more money right fucking now.

[jfz9580m]

4. It's not just that hatrack

Last edited Wed Dec 17, 2025, 06:32 PM - Edit history (1)

These industries are filled with these guys who break human social and professional contracts casually and in the ickiest ways, to monetize things and spaces no one thought an adult would find confusing wrt asking for permissions.

I am not American, but have been a member here for 19 years now. I was in grad school when I joined DU during the Bush years. I was an environmentalist from way back and that was my primary motivation for joining. I picked DU on reading that Elad was vegan. 1/3 of the admin being vegan made the board a good fit. I was very pleased on returning after a 10 year break, to see that you hatrack were still around in 2020, with the same V for Vendetta icon . Oh yeah you changed it to Ukraine.

We exchanged emails long back. You wouldn’t remember. I was nam78_two back then. I pmed you about how I wished there were as many environmental stories as celeb ones and you sent me a laconic and acerbic remark

I saw In Memoriam that Saphire Blue who used to post about poverty and homelessness etc back then is no longer with us.

But to get back on point, I cut my teeth in an EECS dept in the US in grad school. And that was a purely mercenary scam though a high end one. I was too young to get at the time that “Hey maybe if I am here at this high end school which seems to have accepted me only because of a high GRE score, average grades from a no name school and a reasonable command of English and its just a business transaction-I should expect better services.” Even by their own Randian standards the services sucked. I wasn’t such a hopeless student that with some guidance I couldn’t have performed better. There was none. My assigned advisor seemed nice, but mostly it was just ..no interest. The natural sciences were way better. have never been spoilt or entitled even though I am an only child - I just like a bit of space ;-/.

That was one reason my first postdoc mentor was so different -he really cared about mentoring. He is a Bernie supporter..he is self-consistent. He was pretty awesome. He wasn’t touchy feely or sappy. I was in awe of him.
Which I never have been of these Google creeps and I have forgotten what it used to be like to have automatic respect for scientists.
These guys are a menace and should never be near human brains.

He was generally laconic and rigorous etc. But you knew that whatever ..I could guess how he thinks outside science.
I don’t know..He was very much the old school publicly funded scientist without much flavor of the military or industries. I liked that.

When I wrote a recommendation letter for him, I was deliberately more measured to not sound like a fawning damn LLM or some sort of ghastly sycophantic person. As opposed to those tech creeps where the stuff I say here is the better stuff..kidding.

They don’t value anything. They are either too stupid or too malicious to get that Soap operas and clicks and tears. That’s not the tangible value a good teach or mentor confers. Daft..those guys.

Like your insides getting scooped out with a rusty pitchfork..Google personality AI agent..terrible..That would be beyond obscene.)

If like James Buchanan you think anyone motivated by anything but the crassest form of greed or desire for importance is a zealot, how would your goods and services not deteriorate..their worldviews are less self consistent I notice with right wingers.

That means that job satisfaction, respect from the community as a teacher (which can’t be commodified which these guys don’t seem to get)-those things just don’t matter and some horrible person’s (Buchanan’s) horrible worldview is the “prediction machine for progress”.

That’s really clunky and stupid. How would an AI trained using methods and procedures from that crowd not be an abomination in every way? And they would totally blame not the privatization of education and greed, but the student. The Randian view is so shallow and these guys hate being confronted with realities which mediocre scientists like me who still get how science and reality are don’t mind as much.
But I don’t like stupid crap being gussied up and sold as something amazing.

I am pretty certain my last employer-one of those ghastly schools: Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc. Doesn’t really matter -they are all the same.
I focus on Stanford and MIT due to their extensive ties with Google and Alex Pentland and such people and they had the MIT Media Lab, that Aaron Schwartz suicide. Those two schools are jerks.

But I totally bet they were trying to shill a version of the ORI - like a creepy AI agent that is on your devices, plus healthcare. The whole idea is that the ORI is stressful so a creepy little bit of tech solutionism that normalizes a Panopticon is just awesome.

Even I would find Internet sleuths stressful though not the Ori. That’s kinda the same tablodization and phony populism of the net being represented democratization.

I hate spectacles. I am glad the era of being silent and pretending that one thinks RetractionWatch is awesome! Ioannidis is awesome! To show how contrarian and boldy honest and open they are. While those guys whale on publicly funded science like petty Nazis, but don’t really attack what is making science so shitty.
They are always eager to platform loudmouthed venture capitalists like that ass Roger MacNamee, but hypocritical.

I am not saying that RetractionWatch doesn’t ding some pretty awful people. But in retrospect rather than being this awesome self correcting of science, it’s this rather petty venture on a spook and corporation built web with a pretty libertarian bent. It’s part of the same worldview that made lfie so hard after Covid.

Many people in science are from overseas and are not paid much. The NIH postdoc is not meant to be the gig economy, but that is how Google, Facebook etc would view it and find ways to exploit it.

I am myself self correcting some old work on my own dime and it’s fine. That’s my job. But I self police but I can’t pretend that I think this other policing type is awesome. I don’t like policing other people and think that sort of performative honesty is kinda..dishonest. It is crossing some ts and dotting some is. But most of the science I saw was honest and honestly collaborative.

The sleaziness I have seen was all from this Trumper humper or humpers of capitalism of the Californian Ideology strain. And I don’t think it is actually good for publicly funded science or medicine.

The gist is that these guys are libertarians destroying the public sector or making it completely useless and that started a long time back and is mercenary.
I am an honest scientist, but I don’t have patience with heartlessness nor histrionics and soaps.
It’s why I liked your email response.;-/
I swing between gruff and friendly myself. Not bipolar ..

[jfz9580m]

5. Right fucking now

I have however not called anyone, merely left various serial killer adjacent attempts to sound like a member of the community ;-/.

I vaguely feel asparagus were cast at me? Eeek

I was never in on any of the jokes..I have to go offline to get a brain..lol..