The Plastic Straw Thing Is Happening Again

Plastic straws were never the problem, but banning them felt like doing something, and feeling like you’re doing something is a hard habit to break. Nowadays, the 2010s era of environmental panic feels like a weird dream. Paper straws were disintegrating in every restaurant cup, metal straws were in every Christmas stocking, and it was impossible to click through Instagram stories without seeing endless variations of sad cartoon turtles with bloody noses. The world had made up its mind based largely on a single sad photo : plastic straws were sea turtle genocide. Life in Plastic Except it wasn’t true. Beyond the photo, the single data point that had driven much of the panic, 500 million straws a day, was not exactly hard-hitting research. In fact, the number originated from a 9-year-old named Milo Cress, who called some straw manufacturers in 2011 for a school project. He didn’t do a whole lot of due diligence, and neither did the legacy media outlets parroting the number . Market researchers would later put the real figure at a fraction of that total, with straws ultimately accounting for only around 0.025% of the plastic entering the ocean annually . The impulse to ban plastic straws came from a good place, and the instinct to be biased toward action in the face of a sad reality was noble. Still, the theory of change fell flat on its face. The world hadn’t picked a strong way of actually tackling plastic pollution; it had just picked a target sitting around on the kitchen table and begun running victory laps. Now, we’re doing the exact same thing with data centers. Bad Neighbors Though the first data center was built over 80 years ago , opposition to them has only recently become mainstream. Thanks to the world’s appetite for cloud-based apps and AI-powered technology, their footprint has been expanding rapidly, and many people aren’t happy about it. Data center opposition groups grew from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March 2026 across 49 states, leading roughly $130 billion in projects to be delayed or canceled in Q1 of 2026 alone. Recent surveys show roughly 70% of Americans are now opposed to having them where they live. Though historically many people had no clue they lived near data centers, recent surveys show roughly 70% of Americans are now opposed to having them where they live, making it difficult to move projects forward in the face of heated opposition. On many levels the pushback comes from a valid place: multi-hundred acre campuses moving into towns with little notice or feedback, complicating everything from zoning to housing costs in the process. The frustrations with the siting and construction processes are valid, revealing less-than-perfect community engagement and PR on behalf of the data centers. Still, while data centers have a long way to go to become good neighbors, much of the resulting panic is more of a story of emotions than of facts. Let’s go through the biggest claims one by one: “They’re Drinking All the Water!” Swipe approximately four times on your social media of choice, and you’ll probably come across a video of someone saying data centers turn water brown or suck the entire water table dry. Oftentimes this information is being delivered by a heated activist, holding up a Mason jar of mud, saying something like “If you don’t want to drink this, we need to ban data centers!” Striking though the image may be, the truth is luckily far less dramatic. Data centers used about 228 billion gallons in 2023 , though only 17.4 billion gallons of that ran through cooling systems on site, while the remaining 211 billion was consumed generating the electricity they drew, which is the same water every other electricity customer in the country uses. For perspective, California agriculture alone irrigates nine million acres with roughly 34 million acre-feet a year, more than 600 times what every data center in America consumes on site, and closed-loop and dry cooling systems can cut that consumption by more than 90%. “They’re Raising Electrical Bills!” Similarly, there’s the electric bill. This one has more teeth than the water panic, mostly because you’ve probably watched your own utility statement creep upward and wondered who exactly is running a server farm on your dime. Data centers accounted for 4.7% of U.S. electricity in 2024, and could reach roughly 12% by 2030 . That’s significant, and anyone telling you it’s nothing is avoiding the truth. Still, American electricity demand is already climbing about 25% by 2030 no matter what happens with AI. That’s factories coming home, cars plugging in, and heat pumps replacing furnaces. Meanwhile, most of the sticker shock is inflation: residential rates have risen about a third since 2019 in nominal terms, but barely 5% once you account for the fact that everything else got more expensive too . The best test case is Virginia, which hosts the densest concentration of data centers on the planet and still pays less for electricity than the national average, though the gap has been narrowing fast enough that nobody should get too comfortable. The real bottleneck was never demand; it’s that 2,061 gigawatts of new generation are currently sitting in interconnection queues waiting to be attached to the grid, roughly one and a half times everything plugged into it today, and the median project finished in 2025 spent 61 months in line. “They’re Taking the Farmland!” This is the objection most people are getting emotional over, and unlike the others it is based in some truth. Roughly 67% of planned data centers are headed for rural areas, while 87% of existing ones sit in cities , and a campus running a gigawatt or more requires 500 to 800 acres that have to be converted from whatever they happened to be previously. The good news, though, is that this is among the most fixable problems in the entire debate, because the land doesn’t have to come from farmland at all. This is among the most fixable problems in the entire debate. Brownfields, meaning previously developed parcels such as decommissioned factories, retired power plants, abandoned warehouses, and old rail yards that sit vacant because of contamination, exist in nearly every county in America, and they come with the industrial zoning, the road access, and frequently the high-voltage grid connections that a data center needs anyway. A county that fast-tracks permitting and cleanup support for those parcels will attract developers to them, while a county that declines to do so will go on fielding rezoning requests for its cornfields. Good Fences The most useful fact about this entire debate is that nearly every legitimate complaint within it already has a solution somebody has written down. The American Conservation Coalition , a conservative environmental group, published a report in June 2026 proposing four voluntary standards that amount to a checklist any county board could adopt tomorrow. Developers would pay “a fair share of interconnection and transmission upgrade costs,” bring their own generation where possible, and commit to flexible load participation, which means throttling their power draw during the hours the grid is strained rather than competing with your air conditioner on the hottest afternoon of August. They would use “best-available efficiency technologies like closed-loop cooling” and offset what they consume through watershed restoration. They would prioritize “brownfields and existing industrial sites” over high-value farmland. And they would limit noise, design buildings “responsive to local character,” and commit to “early, ongoing, and transparent community engagement” that begins before the rezoning notice appears in the county paper. Each of these commitments is worth establishing in writing, because a commitment living in a press release is considerably easier to abandon than one written into a permit. It is also worth noticing who is doing the asking. These recommendations come from a group that wants this infrastructure built, which is the strongest available evidence that the standards are achievable rather than aspirational. Save the Turtles To be fair to the straw movement, it accomplished something genuine. Jackie Nuñez, who founded The Last Plastic Straw, describes it as “a gateway issue” that “triggered a lightbulb moment for a lot of people,” and she's right. The trouble is that it also allowed an enormous number of people to feel finished with a problem they had barely started, and the data center backlash is running the same play in reverse: loud enough to stall projects, while converting almost none of that leverage into an enforceable requirement about cooling systems, noise, or siting. Stopping a project and shaping one turn out to be entirely different skills. The only remaining question is whether the communities hosting it write the terms or inherit them. Meanwhile, this infrastructure will keep getting built, because the autocorrect on your phone, the fraud detection on your debit card, and the software helping radiologists read your mammogram all run on hardware sitting in a building like this one. The only remaining question is whether the communities hosting it write the terms or inherit them. The metal straw in your purse was always going to be a gesture, however sincerely intended, while a closed-loop cooling requirement written into your county’s zoning code goes on working for decades after everyone has stopped posting about it.