Data Centers And Industrial Farming Are Fueling A Groundwater Crisis, with Kaleb Lay

We talk with Kaleb Lay from Oregon Rural Action about how people living in a rural Oregon “sacrifice zone” end up with poisoned well water, and a widening wealth gap. We explore environmentalist claims that industrial farming, combined with a rapid build-out of Amazon data centers is compounding deadly nitrate contamination while communities fight for testing, transparency, and accountability. 

• what Oregon Rural Action does across immigration justice and pollution work in Northeast Oregon 
• why the Lower Umatilla Basin is described as a sacrifice zone 
• how industrial scale agriculture drives nitrate groundwater contamination 
• what nitrate does in the body, from blue baby syndrome to links with cancers and thyroid dysfunction 
• how door to door well testing exposed widespread unsafe drinking water after decades of state inaction 
• what retaliation can look like when organizers challenge powerful industries 
• what Amazon says about liability and what a $20.5M settlement does and does not change 
• why exascale projects raise alarms on water use, electricity demand, and rate impacts 
• how transparency gaps and inflated job numbers shape local decision making 
• why PFAS testing and disclosure matter for data center waste streams 

Kaleb Lay is a fifth-generation eastern Oregonian and former journalist who now serves as Director of Policy & Research with Oregon Rural Action, a nonprofit organization that works with frontline communities in rural northeast Oregon. He is a leading expert in pollution issues in Oregon’s Lower Umatilla Basin, which is both one of the most polluted places in the Pacific Northwest and one of the fastest-growing data center hubs in the United States. He’s also an avid outdoorsman, and gardener

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Transcript

The Hidden Cost Of Data

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Breaking Green, a podcast by Global Justice Ecology Project. Data centers use massive amounts of energy, diesel, and water. Increasingly, communities are faced with ecological and economic threats from this new technology. On this episode of Breaking Green, we will be talking with Caleb Lay, Director of Oregon Rural Action. Oregon Rural Action was central to the work in the lower Umatola Basin that exposed extensive nitrate contamination in the wells of Morro County, Oregon. The contamination has been historically connected to industrial farming by activists, but now Amazon's data center in the region has come under increasing scrutiny, with the company reported to have made a$20.5 million settlement in a lawsuit related to the nitrate contamination. Caleb Lay, welcome to Breaking Green.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

So, Caleb, you're with Oregon Rural Action, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about that organization and basically what kind of work uh it does in. I think it's Northeast Oregon or is it all of Oregon?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, we're we're focused here in Northeast Oregon. And uh I'd like to say that we're a small but mighty organization. Uh generally we have two big buckets of work. Um the the first is we work a lot on immigration justice. Uh some of the most uh immigration heavy or immigrant uh heavy communities in Oregon are actually here in the rural part of the state up in the northeast, where you know we have uh intensive industrial agricultural communities. And then our other uh bucket of work is working on pollution issues in what we call Oregon's worst sacrifice zone, the Lower Yumatilla Basin. As you can imagine, uh those two buckets of work tend to keep us pretty busy, especially these days.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

So it's interesting you use the term sacrifice zone. I've heard that several times on uh this program, uh, talking with Amanda Kiger uh in East Palestine, uh, and also Don Chapman in St. Louis describe their regions as sacrifice zones, uh environmental sacrifice zones. Uh what do you mean uh by that uh for the region where you work?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, when when we think about how the Lower Umatilla Basin is a sacrifice zone, it's it's really how multiple injustices and systemic injustices have compounded upon one another to exacerbate the situation. Specifically in this part of Oregon, we have uh a really disproportionate concentration of both industrial air pollution uh and groundwater contamination, primarily by nitrate, but also by PFAS, the forever chemicals. At the same time, the industries associated with all of that pollution are remarkably profitable. And they've set up shop and increasingly concentrated their activities in this small area. Very, very rural. It's uh around 500 square miles, uh, home to somewhere in the ballpark of 45,000 people. And despite the massive economic productivity of the area, something to the tune of several million dollars per day in economic output by large industry, uh, billions of dollars per year. There's a disproportionately high rate of low-income individuals, especially working class folks. So you've got a lot of economic productivity, but a huge wealth gap. And that comes along with uh health disparities in those uh exposed to pollution and those who actually work in the uh the industries that are creating that pollution in the first place.

How Industrial Farming Spreads Nitrates

SPEAKER_02 3:45

So how you popped up on our radar screen was the a Rolling Stone article uh about uh nitrate pollution uh in the region and also data center. Uh I think it's an Amazon data center. But before we get into that, what are the traditional industries that pollute in the region?

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, so primarily our and looking specifically at nitrate in this area, um, our our main sources of pollution are industrial scale agriculture and the industries associated with that. Um, this is a high desert region, meaning that our soil is very, very sandy. Uh, and we have a lot of industrialized agricultural operations growing commodity crops, potatoes, corn, onions, things like that. They then ship those crops to nearby food processors that create a bunch of wastewater. So at every stage of this cycle, and it's sort of like a feedback loop, right? Out in the fields, you have the over-application of fertilizers and pesticides, things like that. Because of the sandy soil, they get flushed down through the soil column as you irrigate and into the groundwater that serves as drinking water for most of the residents. Those crops then go to factories where they're processed into ultra-processed foods, and the wastewater from those operations goes back out onto those same fields, uh, further exacerbating our groundwater contamination problems.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

I read that 30% of the population live in mobile homes, so they're more dependent upon well water. Your organization helped the state test and they found a high rate of nitrate poisoning, which is associated with all types of cancers, uh kidney cancers, uh, I think even throat cancers, and there's a lot of anecdotal stories uh of people suffering from these things. So tell us a little bit about uh nitrate poisoning of groundwater.

The Rural Flint Well Testing Push

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yeah, nitrate is a very nasty chemical. And uh increasingly, not just in Oregon, but across the United States, across the globe, uh nitrate contamination in groundwater as the result of industrial-scale agriculture is a bigger and bigger problem. Um basically, what nitrate does is when you when you get it in your body uh with drinking water, nitrate molecules like to grab onto your red blood cells where oxygen is supposed to go. Um, causes a lot of problems because obviously your body needs oxygen for many, many things, right? Uh, it's especially dangerous for pregnant women, uh, infants. Um, in infants, it actually can cause this condition called methymoglobinemia, which is better known as blue baby syndrome. And that's as horrible as it sounds. Basically, you know, nitrates grabbing those red blood cells. And in infants and babies, there's not a lot of blood to go around. They can actually start to turn blue as they asphyxiate, even though they're breathing just fine, and it can be fatal. Um, if as if that weren't bad enough, uh, nitrate is also linked to uh increased rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, uh birth defects like neural tube defects, and then with longer-term exposure is increasingly linked to a laundry list of cancers, especially of the uh gastrointestinal tract, you know, stomach, bladder, colorectal, uh, as well as thyroid dysfunction. And there are some emerging studies now that show later in life neurological uh issues as well. So it's a it's a really nasty chemical. And for folks who live on the front lines of this pollution, in many cases they've been living with it for years or decades because nitrate has no color, no smell, and no taste. The only way to know if it's there is to test for it.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

You uh are or uh Oregon Rural uh action uh was part of a comprehensive testing. So how bad was it and how did that testing uh come about and why wasn't it done before? Tell us a little bit about that because it it sounds like Flint, Michigan.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Yeah, we we've referred to this as the rural Flint, Michigan. You know, uh back in 1990, the state of Oregon declared what's called the groundwater management area uh in this region. And for the next 32 years, they did essentially nothing. Basically, in nine in 1989, they passed a bill, they identified uh groundwater contamination that rose to the level of a public health threat. And then the response by the state for the next 32 years was to convene a volunteer group of sources of pollution and local elected officials to recommend voluntary plans to reduce pollution. Surprise, surprise, over the next 32 years, nothing really happened other than the pollution continued to get worse. Fast forward to 2022 and Oregon Rural Action, we'd been doing a lot of uh COVID testing in the farm work community, uh, trying to get information and access to vaccines out to people and had had a lot of success. So a local county commissioner named Jim Doherty uh contacted us and said, Hey, I have concerns about uh this contaminated groundwater issue. Can you help me come knock on some doors? And in 2022, we we tested almost 700 wells with a very small team of volunteers, and what we found was was horrifying. Uh extraordinarily high levels of contamination, you know, up to five, six times the limit that's considered safe under federal law right now. Uh, and very, very widespread. Entire communities were affected in a neighborhood of 100 wells, well users, uh, maybe two or three were were below the unsafe limit. Uh we we then had to pivot uh to try to get the state to support because this was uh a energy intensive and funding intensive effort. Uh so the next year, I would say, of our work was essentially trying to pressure the state of Oregon into responding in a meaningful way by testing wells and uh getting people who tested at unsafe levels access to bottled drinking water deliveries or filters. Since then, we've managed to get over 2,000 wells tested, 2,000 households. And uh of those, I think six or seven hundred have been above the safe limit. I think the highest nitrate level we've seen is 94.8 parts per million. The safe limit is 10. And that safe limit is probably set quite a bit too high.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

But this was not an easy fight, and there were some real consequences, not only for the people who've been exposed to these poisons and toxins, but also for those who were trying to bring awareness.

Retaliation Fears And Community Trauma

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, in our canvassing over the last few years, we have talked to more people than I can count, and uh trying to explain the health implications. And, you know, our organizing team, there's a honestly a bit of trauma involved in all this. Knocking on a door and walking someone through what nitrate can do as you do a rapid test in their house and showing them, hey, your nitrate level looks like it's above 30. Here are the health consequences of that, and watching the blood drain from their face as they make the connections to the cancer that their loved ones have had or that they have, or the miscarriages that they couldn't explain over the years that prevented them from starting a family. Uh it's it's incredibly difficult work. And and the only solace I can take from that is it's motivating. And we have seen a real upswell of uh industry or uh community members who want to stand up to polluting industry and and make meaningful change. Now, as we've been doing that, uh one of the things that we like to do is, you know, Oregon Rural Action works with community to help them achieve their interests, right? And one of the ways we do that, we try to bring strategy to the table where they bring uh you know, they define the outcomes that we're working for. One of the things we did was we organized a visit by several state legislators in the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color caucus uh in uh November 2023. And during that visit, one of our organizers, Rafael, um, he had parked uh his pickup uh and he had a big magnet on the side for the state testing program because he'd been out uh doing some canvassing that day, trying to get uh to get information out to people. Um we visited the house where he'd parked his pickup, and then we went to another venue for a community meeting. And about 15 minutes after we left, he got a call uh saying that his truck was in flames. Uh first responders said that it was arson, um, but the investigation was quickly closed with no cause determined. Uh we we were able to pressure the state into sending or the state police to investigate, but by then it had rained on the site for several days, and there was there was no way for them to determine a cause. So um, you know, in our mind, it's hard to prove anything definitively, but it felt like retaliation for the work that we've been doing. And we are standing up to incredibly powerful industries.

How Data Centers Concentrate Pollution

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Talking about incredibly powerful industries, uh how does Amazon fit into the nitrate problem?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah. So you it's a little bit uh uh uh what's the word I'm looking for? It's not the most intuitive thing, right? Uh Amazon is not a farm. They they don't grow crops, god forbid, anyway. Uh so you know how do they figure into a situation where fertilizer and and you know food processing wastewater is the major source of our problem. Well, in this same area, you know how sacrifice zones tend to you know compound on themselves, right? First you get the the industrial scale ag, then you get four of the five dirtiest power plants. The latest iteration of the sacrifice in the lower Umatilla Basin is a massive build-out in data center campuses. To date, uh, if my count is correct, we have 19 hyperscale data center campuses, uh either already built, under construction, or in the permitting process in this very small region. Each of those uses massive amounts of water, energy, uh, and diesel as backup power. Now, the water is the key piece of this. If those data centers pull in contaminated water and cycle it through their data center as a way of cooling those servers, as all of these data centers do, uh, then they lose a lot of that water to evaporation. Now imagine if you like if you ever made jello or simple syrup on your stovetop. You start with water and sugar, you boil off some of the water, and it increases the concentration of the sugar. The same thing happens with the nitrate. If you start with nitrate contaminated water, boil off some of that water. The water coming out on the other side is a much higher concentration. And we've seen that. There's data I can point to showing that some of these campuses pull in water, and when it leaves, it's eight times more contaminated than when it came in. A lot of that water then goes into wastewater systems that get dumped on farmland as a means of reuse and disposal. So it's taking nitrate and putting it back into the same system where it's already being overloaded. So they're not adding nitrate, but they're exacerbating the existing issue.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

So where this is happening, and I think it's uh Morrow County, uh that there's a um a long uh standing um system of taking wastewater, which has nitrate contamination, and then using it to fertilize land. And uh a lot of people are concerned, and and I think they would say have have proven that that contaminates the aquifer, which is brings us back to the original problem of nitrates in in people's drinking water when they draw it from the well. Um am I correct in that?

Amazon’s Response And Settlement

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, that's a big piece of this puzzle. You know, the the wastewater system regionally, you know, uh 20, 30 years ago, it was around a billion gallons of of water being reused in this way. Today, it's more like four to five billion gallons. So this massive growth in industrialization of the region is is very much a contributor to our groundwater pollution and all of our other pollution problems as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

This is your host, Steve Taylor, and we will be back right after this.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

If you're enjoying this episode of Breaking Green, please subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. The interviews heard here are often ignored by mainstream media, and without your support, these stories would not be covered. Consider leaving a review and sharing it with friends and colleagues. You can find the full catalog of previous episodes and sign up to have future episodes delivered straight to your inbox at breakinggreen.org.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

What does Amazon say about these claims that they're making the problem worse? Have they said yes and we want to help mitigate that? What's what's Amazon's uh response?

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Amazon, you know, of course, they deny uh any liability or any responsibility with the groundwater contamination here. Uh they say that their their water is a very small part of the regional system. And that's not untrue compared to you know the larger wastewater systems from the power plants and from uh general irrigation, it is a small part. But it's not like they're starting from a blank slate. You know, there's already a pollution issue here. And just because you're, you know, it's like if if I am driving down the road through a school zone, right, and I'm driving 90 miles an hour. I don't then get out of a speeding ticket because somebody else was going 200 miles an hour, right? I still have responsibility for my actions. So Amazon, of course, denies responsibility, as do all of the other uh sources of pollution in the region. Uh there's a pending uh class action lawsuit, and Amazon settled its part in that lawsuit for$20.5 million. Now that's sort of a rounding error on what they do in a day, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Aaron Ross Powell, so their settlement. I saw that a$20 million settlement was uh regarding uh nitrate pollution.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yeah, essentially there's this class action lawsuit, and Amazon had been uh named as a defendant in that lawsuit, uh, and they settled those allegations for$20.5 million. They maintained that they are not liable for the damage and wanted to just settle out to uh avoid getting bogged down in litigation. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Why are there concerns of environmental impact from a bunch of computers? It a lot of people would say computers are clean, you know. Uh I don't I don't perceive any any uh pollution when I'm using chat GPT or are or creating great images of uh of me as Jesus or whatever.

Exascale Water And Power Demands

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Yeah, it it is counterintuitive, right? Especially because there's so much uh out there from the the big tech industry about how amazing this technology is and how responsible they are. But when you actually look at what's happening in communities where these campuses are being built, yeah, there's a very different story to tell. The ground truthing is important. Now, I mentioned earlier, we have 19 hyperscale campuses in the lower Umatilla Basin. Oregon is very quickly becoming one of the largest data center hubs in the world. And the largest part of that is here in the lower Umatilla Basin, a desert where we already have pollution issues. Now, if you look at the operation of these data centers, they pull in massive amounts of water, they lose a lot of that water to evaporation. That's a consumptive process. It's not closed loop. There's no such thing as a closed loop system, but you'll hear that a lot from big tech in that process, concentrating contaminants, dispersing wastewater back into the environment. And one of these campuses, uh, based on the permitting records that we've seen, can use up to 300,000 gallons of diesel in a year just for backup power. The cumulative impact of burning all of that diesel is massive. And now we've got 19 hyperscale campuses either built or in the works on top of that. Now we're looking at the possibility of an Amazon exascale data center project. So where a hyperscale campus is causing all of that environmental uh impact at you know, a hundred acres a pop for a hyperscale, this exascale project will be thirteen hundred acres, more than an order of magnitude larger. In the hottest part of the summer, it'll use up to thirteen hundred gallons per minute of water. Imagine four or five gallon buckets every second. It's more than that.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Right now, I mean you were you were saying that uh it it was, you know, uh a relatively small uh fraction of the usage, but it sounds like as they scale this up, it's going to become a larger and larger part of the water and energy equation.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Absolutely. And again, this is in a desert. It's in the west, right? We already have water, water quantity issues. This area has water quality issues. People in this community are watching pipelines for fresh water be built and bypass their homes for data centers that haven't even been built yet, haven't even broken ground. Meanwhile, the water in their house is poisoned and they can't drink it. And there's no end in sight for most of them. It is an economic and environmental justice issue through and through.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Is there any other way to kind of understand the scale of these projects? Not just for you know including the size but also uh energy consumption. I mean it's just a massive scale.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Oh it is the the exascale project that uh is in the pipeline for us now, the big one I like to call it, it's gonna use a gigawatt of electricity. That would be, you know, one of our largest uh utilities in this region is Portland General Electric. A gigawatt is like a quarter of their entire electrical usage in a year. It's a huge chunk of what Oregon uses in a year as an entire state, industrial, residential, you name it. And what really worries me about the electricity usage is on one hand, how it's gonna drive up uh utility rates for average working people who are already strapped, but also how this is gonna make it much, much harder for us to meet our climate goals. Oregon has great policies on the books for mitigating climate change, uh developing clean electricity and decarbonizing. But we're starting to fall behind in some ways that are very scary because data centers are running away with our load growth. There's so much demand for new electricity from all of these campuses, and there's just more and more of them every day that we're falling behind.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

These centers, were they cloud storage centers? Who's who's involved here? Is it is it all Amazon uh right now, or are are you looking at uh some other tech giants coming in and doing AI? What's what's the what's the ecosystem uh tech ecosystem looking like there?

SPEAKER_01 23:31

You know, statewide, it's a mix. Um, just to the west in the Dallas, there's a Google uh data center, there's some meta data centers down in Primeville. But in our region here in the lower Yumatil basin, it's all Amazon, every single one of them. Amazon are an Amazon subsidiary, right? Uh and some of them are for cloud computing, but more and more we're seeing a lot of this growth being driven by uh artificial intelligence and generative AI, you know, chat GPT type programs, things like that. Uh and I I can't help, but you know, there's some uh some reporting I read a few days back uh that said the amount of debt that big tech has taken on to facilitate this AI data center growth globally is more than the revenue for all global advertising in a year. That's a bit of a sunk cost issue, right? If you take on debt, you want to be darn sure that you're gonna be able to pay it back. So maybe they've uh sort of pushed themselves into a corner. I'm not sure. Regardless, on the ground in these communities, the impacts are very real and they're being felt in the immediate term.

Transparency Gaps And The Jobs Claim

SPEAKER_02 24:43

We're in a new phase. I think we're just starting to see uh the implications. I did an interview with someone about generative uh biology and uh artificial intelligence. They suggested that the fight uh to regulate AI will come uh when it comes to the data centers, that maybe that's the soft underbell in a way uh uh for for the industry. I'm not so sure if that's the case. Talking to you, it sounds like they have a lot of support uh politically um uh for their growth. Uh what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 25:19

You know, that gets to a weird element of this fight uh that we've had with these communities. Um people think of Oregon as a blue environmental state. Uh, you know, we've got a democratic trifecta and some very good environmental laws on the books. At the same time, uh, we have had a heck of a time getting the state to step in and do basic nitrate well testing, step in and do polluter accountability, uh, pass legislation that would actually help people in this part of the state. Uh it's hard to not see that as a bit of a cynical problem, right? You know, this is a small area. The votes out here don't elect the governor, uh, they don't sway the political powers that be in Salem. Uh, and so it's part of why I think this has become a sacrifice zone. It's a place that's out of out of sight and out of mind for the political power centers in the state. You know, it imagine if someone proposed to put 19 hyperscale data center campuses or one of the biggest dairy complexes, or four of the five dirtiest power plants in a wealthy suburb in Portland. It would never happen. But because it's happening east of the Cascades in a rural agricultural community where people are low-income, not politically engaged, not politically represented, and generally disproportionately don't even speak English. It's easy to just trample on them. That's what we're fighting here. And it's not an easy fight, but it has to happen.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

Yeah, I don't understand your electrical grid and the like. Will will the uh gigawatt of power that's drawn down for the centers, let's say that's about what it's going to be, will that affect prices around the entire state, or will that be uh disproportionately uh borne by people uh near the centers?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

You know, it's really hard to say. And that goes back to a lack of transparency. Big tech does not like to share information about how much energy they're going to use, how much water they use, how much water they lose when they use it, uh, how much diesel they use, or or what the environmental impacts are. Uh I will say Oregon did pass some legislation recently, uh, the Power Act, um, which creates a new rate class for large energy users like data centers. Hopefully that will help uh spread the load back where it belongs. Like, you know, you make a mess, you clean it up. Data centers should be paying their fair share for their own power. It's a start. It's by no means the entire fight. And we're already seeing uh big utilities and data centers push back on it. Now, the transparency issue is a problem, not just on power use, environmental impact, but on communities understanding whether or not these are a good idea and local decision makers. You know, if all they're saying is we're gonna bring in tax revenue, we're a closed loop system, why would you ever say no? We'll bring in jobs. But you scratch the paint on any of that thing and the whole car falls apart. Uh, take the jobs, uh, for example, this exascale project uh that Amazon's proposing outside Bourgman. They're saying that they're gonna create 6,400 construction jobs just to build the thing, and then a whole bunch more permanent full-time jobs afterward. But the way they get to that 6,400 jobs figure is they say it's gonna be 800 construction workers for eight years and they count them once every year. So it's not 6,400 jobs, it's 800. It's inflated, right? We need transparency and we need credibility. We need to be able to verify these claims so that we can make good decisions about whether or not we want these things, and community can understand whether or not it's in their interest to have them.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

I read in the Rolling Stone article that uh Oregon Rural Action lobbies the state legislature. Um is that the case? Aaron Powell Yeah, we're getting into that scene a little bit. Uh well let me ask you this then. If you go into a state legislator's office uh and you say, hey, data centers, we have a problem here, or we have some very serious concerns, what's the typical response?

Building Resistance Against Big Tech

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Aaron Powell You know, it really depends on which legislator's office you're walking into. Uh they're people, they're all individuals, and there are other people chirfing in their ears all the time, including a whole bunch of highly paid lobbyists for big tech and for polluters. Uh, you know, I've had very good interactions with uh members of the environmental caucus, for example. Uh, our local delegation, I would say they have been more uh adversaries than allies, which has been a bit frustrating. But uh I think more and more as communities across the state, across the country, across the world learn more about what it's actually like to live with data centers, there is a very palpable and powerful grassroots movement building that is anti-data center, anti-big tech. Not necessarily saying no data centers, but saying this is not going well. We need transparency, we need accountability. We're sick of subsidizing these things just so they can suck up all of our water and pollute our air. They need to pay their fair share and they need to be accountable to our laws and to our communities. I think the political landscape in Oregon has been a little slow to react to that. Um, but I think it's something that could be seized to do some really big, bold things that'll change our communities forever and for the better. Um, but it'll take that grassroots organizing to make it happen.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

It seems like data centers is on the horizon that uh it's it's going to become more and more a community issue, an environmental issue, social justice issue. And so uh you have been a little bit in the forefront of that, uh especially you know, with Amazon uh, you know, making a settlement, you know,$20.5 million, which is great, but you know, as as you noted,$20.5 million doesn't uh get you as much as it used to.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

And it's not going to change behavior, right? You know, uh our Department of Environmental Quality a while back uh fined some of the data centers for you know using their backup power generators in non-emergency situations, which they're not supposed to do. They find them ten thousand four hundred dollars. That's like finding me the hair on my chinny chin chin, right? I mean, if you're going to uh to change the behavior, and if if the behavior is a problem, you want to change it, you have to actually tailor the solution to the scale of the problem. Amazon is one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in human history, and they're not getting any smaller. We have to have a serious movement from the grassroots to the state legislative level to the national level to actually get our arms around this thing. Otherwise, we're playing catch up. And take it from us. We're living on the forefront of a massive data center uh expansion, and it causes problems. It is much better to get ahead of those problems now than to be trying to catch up later.

SPEAKER_02 32:30

Aaron Powell Are you like me hearing some things being said on the national level uh by the current administration and maybe some um federal legislators about wanting to deregulate or or to loosen regulations around AI, which to me kind of uh would include data centers.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Yeah. I mean, we we see a lot about not just around AI, but around you know, water pollution, air pollution. These rollbacks are really scary. Uh and you know, no law is any better than the enforcement of that law. And the enforcement both at the state and the federal level in the lower UMatilla basin has left a lot to be desired. But it's better to have those laws and rules in place so that you have something to fall back on, so that the communities affected have a leg to stand on when they stand up for themselves, stand up for each other. Uh, these rollbacks are really scary. And and one of the really frustrating things is that the people out here in the lower Umatola Basin, they are salt of the earth, working class, generally conservative people. They they deserve better from an administration and from a government that's that said they were going to stand up for them. I don't think they're getting it. And it's it's heartbreaking to see. You know, we've we have people show up in red hats to our meetings, and they've stopped coming in.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

Or they stopped coming in the red hats, but they're still going to your meetings. Exactly. You are a veteran of many fights, uh, I'm sure. Uh you know, you can't work long for an organization uh like yours without being so. How do you see the resistance forming? Do you have an opinion about that?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

I see it as a huge dent. And I see it as as primarily a class-based issue. Working class people, you know, low-income people, but they're the ones on the front lines. And the thing about data centers is it touches on so many things that are so important to people. How much are they paying uh for water and electricity every month? Can they drink their water? Is there air poisoned? You know, is there enough land to go around for housing and land use issues? Uh, are they swallowing up huge slots of agricultural land? Once you build an exascale data center campus on grazing land, it's never going to be grazing land again. You know, there are so many ways that we can bring different communities together on this who have different interests and might not never be caught in the same room twice. But on this, it's big. And the tent is the richest of the rich, the most powerful of the powerful against all the rest of us. I think it's a huge opportunity for uh a generational movement. But we need the infrastructure, we need the hands, and we need the passion of people all over the state, all over the country, all over the world. I think we're gonna get it.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

That's a very interesting uh observation and analysis. Also, you know, these sacrifice zones, when you talked about being a class issue, uh these sacrifice zones don't usually occur in in the wealthier regions, right? Uh it it tends uh the toxins and and the and the like tend to accumulate in uh in in in areas uh where people are well, I don't know, they're not the 10 or 1%, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:53

Exactly. You know, and and so often the people working for polluting industry are the ones living with the effects of that pollution. It's it's such a working class issue, right? You go to work at a dairy, you come home, and your drinking water is polluted by nitrate. And dairies are a huge source of nitrate, right? And and especially in these areas, sources of pollution, they are economic powerhouses. You know, in some ways, you could even argue that they sort of have the local economy hostage, which makes them very, very hard to stand up against. There are fears of retaliation, there are feels fears of people losing their jobs if they speak up or speak out, if they even go to the wrong meeting. You know, it's it's a hard thing for people to stand up against their employer when there's not a lot of other options for employment. It's food on the table and a roof over your head, right? That's why it's so important that we build movements. It's not just an individual standing up, it's all of us standing together. You know, that's fine, the school of little fish forming a big fish to eat the shuck, right? That's a movement. That is organizing, and that's what we're trying to do here.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

Is there anything I didn't ask you that you would like to address?

SPEAKER_01 37:03

You know, the other thing that I think is worth mentioning, um, because I've heard this from some folks in other states as well. There's a lot of concern about PFAS in data centers. And from what I can tell, there are very, very few examples of data centers actually testing their wastes for PFAS before they discharge them back into the environment. That's another place where we really need some transparency. You know, we have three cities in Northeast Oregon that already have contaminated drinking water from PFAS. And this is a really scary chemical. Synthetic, man-made, they last forever in the environment, and they're linked to a lot of health problems. The if we're talking about transparency and helping communities understand the bare minimum of what they should be, what they should have a right to, it's information about how data centers are going to affect their environment, the environment they rely on. I think a good place to start would be to disclose all of the toxins that uh that are associated with your operation.

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Caleb Lay, thank you for joining us on Breaking Green.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Thank you very much. It was a privilege.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

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