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Three panelists sit side by side in red chairs during a discussion, each holding a handheld microphone. On the left, a woman with long dark hair smiles while looking down at a tablet. In the middle, an older man with glasses and a gray beard smiles as he holds a microphone over a notepad. On the right, a blonde woman speaks into her microphone and gestures with her free hand; name tags are visible on the panelists, and a large screen is mounted behind them.

Journalists Forum Explores State and Local Initiatives in the Face of Federal Retrenchment

As state and local governments struggle to make progress on challenges including affordable housing and climate change amid dramatic policy shifts at the federal level, reporters and editors learned more about those efforts—and the solutions to be found in land policy—at the 2025 Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum.

The two-day workshop, the latest installment in a series held for more than twenty years, was put on in December in partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Cities and Arnold Ventures. More than 30 working press attended, representing outlets including Bloomberg, Politico, Slate, Fast Company, Pro Publica, and Governing magazine, as well as the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Texas Tribune, Baltimore Banner, and Substack. The Journalists Forum is designed to allow reporters and editors to take two days away from their pressing deadlines to gain perspective on the issues they are covering; the last two workshops had a focus on housing, in 2023, and climate, in 2022.

In welcoming remarks, Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy said that the organization has been committed to supporting local government through technical assistance and other means since David C. Lincoln, son of founder John C. Lincoln, established it in Cambridge in 1974. “From our first days, our interest has been in … making it possible for local governments to do their job, because for us, we think that the quality of life is delivered by your local government.”

Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, delivered the opening keynote online from Dakar, Senegal, highlighting the importance of local initiatives around the world to build safe and affordable housing and environmentally resilient metropolitan regions. “Localization has been a key principle for us,” she said, noting how cities and nations worldwide are putting together action plans on what she views as an intertwined crisis of housing and climate change.

Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. "Mac" McCarthy speaks into a microphone he is holding. He is dressed in a dark suit and standing at a wooden podium. To his right are two wall-mounted video screens displaying the face of Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN Habitat. Below the video screen is a row of five empty red chairs set up for panel discussions. Three of the chairs have black microphones placed on their seats. — Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy introduces keynote speaker Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN Habitat, at the 2025 Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum. Credit: Anthony Flint.

In the US, however, as the first panel revealed, state and local governments trying to pursue their own policies have encountered vigorous opposition by the federal government, in the form of halting offshore windfarms, freezing or clawing back funding for clean energy and mitigation initiatives, and initiating lawsuits against setting vehicle emissions standards or holding polluters liable for compensation. That has state and local governments playing a lot of defense and in some cases punching back, said Nestor Davidson, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

But states are also engaging in pre-emption of their own, inherent in the zoning reform mandates that override local control of land use. Those kinds of initiatives aren’t ideological as much as a practical attempt to streamline bureaucracy and prompt more housing to be built amid the constraints of a not-in-my-backyard stance in established neighborhoods, Davidson said. “A lot of what states are trying to do is overcome fragmentation and overcome local parochialism,” he said. Tracy Loh, fellow at the Brookings Institution, observed that the tumultuous array of pre-emptions, legal challenges, and regulatory reversals are making it harder for metropolitan regions to manage rapidly changing economies. The panel was moderated by Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute.

Having heard those perspectives on the current political environment, the journalists then explored challenges and opportunities for state and local governments in three categories—housing, climate, and local public finance—and discovered several interconnected policy elements among those topics.

Housing. As the Trump administration calls for reducing rental assistance and other programs under US Housing and Urban Development, state and local governments have been tackling the urgent issue of housing affordability on their own. In a panel moderated by Solomon Greene, director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute, Charles Gardner, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, reported that 33 states enacted legislation aimed at expanding the supply of housing through zoning and code reform, a big increase since 2023. The measures—such as allowing accessory dwelling units, reducing minimum parking requirements, banning single-family only zoning, increasing density at transit stations, and streamlining permitting so housing projects don’t get bogged down—constitute a “great land use realignment,” he said, and are getting popular support in red and blue states alike.

New housing still faces pushback in established neighborhoods, and some local leaders have decried any diminishing of local control over land use and development. But as more communities understand the outdated land use rules they have in place, zoning reform becomes more legible as a way to create a range of housing types that are more affordable, said Sara Bronin, law professor at George Washington University and founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a database of zoning conditions in 9,000 jurisdictions. Even as they push to increase housing supply, local leaders need to understand flooding and sea level rise to halt “nonsensical” development in vulnerable areas, she said.

Colin Higgins, executive director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, a bipartisan coalition promoting innovations in the production and preservation of housing, said that in pursuit of the goal of producing up to 8 million new homes, communities need to include subsidized and mixed-income projects alongside the luxury market-rate housing that upzoning enables. That would help address growing skepticism about filtering—the theory that wealthier homebuyers who move into high-end housing open up apartments, condos, and smaller single-family homes that are lower in price.

In a second panel on housing moderated by George W. “Mac” McCarthy, practitioners talked about alternative pathways to affordability, including pre-assembled and manufactured homes, community land trusts (CLTs), and homes built on government-owned land.

Reina Chano Murray, associate director at the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), demonstrated recent efforts to help municipalities identify land they own that is suitable for housing. CGS identified 276,000 acres of buildable, government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas with existing infrastructure, across the US. These public lands present many opportunities for the potential development of affordable housing options, including establishing a community land trust, which allows buyers to purchase homes on leased land and agree to restrictions on resale profit.

According to a 2024 analysis by the Center for Geospatial Solutions, more than 276,000 acres of publicly owned land in transit-accessible, urban areas could be redeveloped for housing or other purposes. Credit: CGS.

Charles Dillard, director of planning for the City of Burlington, said that Vermont city is testing what’s possible in developing city-owned land, and has one of the longest-running community land trusts, the Champlain Housing Trust, as a model. John Smith, executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Association in the Roxbury section of Boston, said the bulwark against gentrification is community control of land.

While new construction is an obvious path to expanding affordable housing options, cities and towns must also strive to preserve existing housing stock, some of which gets snapped up by institutional investors, said McCarthy. A recent report published by the Lincoln Institute revealed that nearly 9 percent of residential parcels across 500 urban counties have corporate owners, who often jack up rents and outmaneuver first-time homebuyers. The Trump administration recently moved to restrict purchases of housing stock by institutional investors.

Nature-Based Solutions. Two panels of experts examined the question of whether local and state climate action can have any impact on what’s happening to the whole planet. The retrenchment at the federal level is breathtaking, said Jody Freeman, professor at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, including withdrawal from international emission reduction treaties, the deregulation of fossil fuels and their impacts by the Environmental Protection Agency, the termination of collection of climate data, and the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act and its promotion of clean energy.

The panelists and moderator Peter Colohan, director of partnerships and program innovation at the Lincoln Institute, described a federal rollback defined by unprecedented maneuvers. Freeman offered, as an example, “the executive orders from the president directing the attorney general to identify state climate policies that the administration disagrees with … as somehow unlawful or unconstitutional, and sue the states in order to block them.”

Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, said advocates are spending a lot of time in court defending “a legacy of victories” once thought secure, on fronts including offshore drilling, the Endangered Species Act, or Vermont’s use of the Superfund law to collect money from fossil fuel companies to pay for climate action.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources to just maintain [previous wins],” he said. “Fortunately the advocacy community is very well organized … I think we have a pretty solid front for defending against a lot of those rollbacks.”

The dramatic redirection from Biden administration climate policies has prompted state and local government to fill the gap with dedicated funding for emissions reductions, clean energy like solar and wind power, and what Melissa Hoffer, chief of the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience, described as a “nature-forward but engineered” approach to building coastline resilience. By establishing statewide codes that promote geothermal heating and a switch from fossil fuels to renewable-powered electricity, she said, states can prove that “clean energy and energy efficiency is really the pathway to affordability.”

“Cities have been leading the charge on climate long before state and federal governments were ever involved,” said Brian Swett, Boston’s chief climate officer. “Gina McCarthy, one of our great EPA administrators and the first and only domestic climate czar, used to say … that’s where innovation happens.” He cited the city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, which sets requirements for large existing buildings to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions over time. “You pilot at the city level, and we’ve been proud of what we’ve been able to do in Boston. So we’re back in that moment again. We are used to leading the charge.”

State, local, and regional initiatives promoting land conservation, biodiversity, and ecosystem protection preservation are similarly continuing apace despite policy reversals at the federal level, as a second climate panel revealed. Peter Stein, principal at Lyme Timber Company, acknowledged the termination of the Biden administration’s 30×30 initiative and moves to expand resource extraction on public lands, but said land conservation has widespread support among voters.

“A little more than a year ago … Donald Trump got elected, but $18 billion worth of local public finance was passed by voters in the U.S. in red, purple, and blue counties and states to support land conservation,” he said. “There’s a long history of voters voting to tax themselves … to pay for land conservation. Eighty percent of all the public money that’s invested in conservation comes from local and state governments.”

Chandni Navalkha of the Lincoln Institute, left, moderated a panel on nature-based solutions with Peter Stein of Lyme Timber, Deb Davidson of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, and Vincent Gauthier of the Environmental Defense Fund. Credit: Catherine Benedict.

Regional collaboration on land conservation is partly filling the vacuum at the federal level, including a pact between New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers, as well as targeted efforts to protect ecosystems and wildlife corridors, said Deb Davidson, chief strategy officer at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey launched a package of initiatives promoting biodiversity and wildlife protection. Efforts are also underway to make agriculture more climate-friendly, said Vincent Gauthier, senior manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. Agricultural communities are working with environmental advocates to “develop solutions that find the right trade-offs for everyone, for the climate, and for farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods are on the line every day.”

The land conservation panel was moderated by Chandni Navalkha, director of conservation and stewardship at the Lincoln Institute.

Public Finance and the Property Tax. In two sessions, panels of experts examined the extraordinary fiscal squeeze being felt by cities and towns nationwide, with pandemic aid winding down and future federal funding in doubt, the cost of providing services soaring, and the bedrock source of local revenue—the property tax—under threat. Moderator Bethany Paquin noted that “lawmakers all over the country are exploring how they can provide meaningful property tax relief without undermining … essential local services,” but proposals making headlines in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania among other places would scale back the property tax dramatically or eliminate it altogether.

The new wave of property tax revolts is driven in part by booming housing markets and significant increases in assessed home values that have prompted nearly a doubling of property tax bills in some cases, said Jared Walczak, vice president of the Tax Foundation. “It’s not surprising that people have some really strong, robust responses to this. I don’t blame them,” Walczak said, though he added: “I do think that the solutions they’re talking about are irresponsible and will not work.”

Because the property tax is the primary source of revenue for local governments and school systems, it is hard to imagine what would take its place, said Billy Hamilton, deputy chancellor emeritus at Texas A&M University. Big increases in a sales tax, or the income tax, seem politically infeasible. Targeted property tax relief in the form of circuit breakers can help those who struggle to pay rising bills, the panelists agreed.

Meanwhile, cities and towns struggle each year to keep a balanced budget, said Katie McCue, deputy executive director at the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Property tax revenues in Massachusetts are capped each year by Proposition 2 1/2, but the cost of providing services, including employee health care and retirement funding, continues to rise. Municipalities have had to rely on voter-approved overrides to bolster funding for services or to build a new school, she said.

Experts in the second public finance panel, moderated by Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, suggested there are precious few other ways for local governments to raise revenue. Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the practice of charging user fees, partly making up for the post-pandemic drop in commercial property tax revenue in struggling downtowns. Daphne Kenyon, principal at D.A. Kenyon & Associates, said payments-in-lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreements with nonprofit institutions can bolster municipal coffers, but only to a point.

Other tactics include establishing a vacancy tax or a land value tax, said Nathan Seegert, professor of finance at Northeastern University. Municipalities that are responsible for an increasing array of obligations, from filling potholes to educating kids, need to diversify their revenue portfolio to have any hope of functioning in that role, he said. “If we’re going to have this trend of pushing the services further down the chain, we’re going to have to be creative in what kind of revenue sources we look for, that can provide that stability.”

At an evening reception at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, introduced Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who shared reflections on the current state of American democracy, including the bare-knuckle tactics being deployed as different levels of government fight with each other. Sandel, who wrote The Tyranny of Merit and was recently awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, said the public discourse might be less polarized if educated elites would “listen more” and avoid technocratic slogans like “follow the science.” He also said that while more than a century old, the ideas of Henry George, the 19th century political philosopher who inspired Lincoln Institute founder John C. Lincoln, are critical to understanding the high home prices and real estate speculation of today.

Author and Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, right, speaks with Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute as part of the 2025 Journalists Forum.

The journalists also heard from Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who referred to Sandel’s description of state and local governments as historically laboratories of democracy, but now seen more as “outposts or sanctuaries of democracy. I found that pretty meaningful and certainly motivating for the work that we’re doing in the environment that we’re in right now.” As a classic second city in the orbit of Boston, Providence is daylighting rivers, taking down freeways, and promoting arts and culture to attract those seeking an alternative to larger cities, Smiley said. More affordable housing is a key part of the city’s economic development strategy.

Brett Smiley, mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, describes the city’s efforts to address affordability and sustainability. Credit: Anthony Flint.

Finally, a panel of journalists and publishers in the closing “Practicing the Craft” roundtable addressed a troubling dilemma: that while the actions of state and local governments are more important than ever, many communities lack the capacity to cover those activities.

Over the last 20 years, about 3,500 newspapers have shut down, most of them weeklies that provided the kind of granular, hyper-local neighborhood coverage that community democracy depends on, said Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University. Some 50 million Americans are left with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Kennedy cited several successful examples of independent digital startups based on a nonprofit model, though he added “they tend to be located in affluent suburban communities, and urban communities of color and rural areas are struggling.” Success stories included Brookline.News, which co-founder Ellen Clegg reported was gaining in circulation covering local stories in that Boston suburb of 65,000 people. Dale Anglin, representing Press Forward, a national local news network funded by the MacArthur Foundation, reported “strengthening information networks that keep communities engaged and informed” through chapters in 32 states, and suggested that not only formal news outlets but video influencers and others deserve support.

Local reporters and editors can do their jobs better if they have access to training for covering complicated issues like housing, said Jon Greenberg of the Poynter Institute. Charles Sennott, co-founder of Report for America and publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, suggested that local outlets—just like cash-strapped local governments—need to work smarter and more efficiently, and could make judicious use of artificial intelligence.

Participants in the 2025 Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum connect during a break in the action. Panel members Tracy Loh of the Brookings Institution and Nestor Davidson of the Harvard Graduate School of Design stand at left (facing away from the camera). Credit: Anthony Flint.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Catherine Benedict is the digital communications manager at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: 2025 Journalists Forum panelists shared their work with reporters from media outlets across the country. Credit: Catherine Benedict

2026 Lincoln Institute Scholars Program

Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026 at 11:59 PM

Application Guidelines

The 2026 Lincoln Institute Scholars Program provides an opportunity for recent PhDs (one to two years post-graduate) specializing in public finance or urban economics to work with senior academics.

Lincoln Institute Scholars will be invited to the institute for a program on April 29–May 1, 2026, that will include:

presentations by a panel of journal editors on the academic publication process;
a workshop in which senior scholars comment on draft papers written by the Lincoln Institute Scholars;
an opportunity for the Lincoln Institute Scholars to make presentations on their research; and
a seminar in which leading scholars in public finance and urban economics present their latest research.

For information on previous Lincoln Scholars, please visit Lincoln Scholars Program Alumni.

Details

Submission Deadline

March 15, 2026 at 11:59 PM

Keywords

Economics, Property Taxation, Public Finance

Fellows in Focus

Guiding Greenways in New Ways

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

Managing major municipal accounts for BellSouth telecommunications for two decades, Darryl Washington learned a lot about the inner workings of local government. So in 2012, he started his own consulting firm, and has since led economic and community development efforts for a number of Alabama cities, including Birmingham and Montgomery.

Now Washington is back in Birmingham as the chief executive of Jefferson County Greenways, a new public-private organization formed in 2024 by the merger of three public green spaces. These outdoor spaces, Washington says, “are really infrastructure for our city … they’re also connective tissue for our communities.”

In 2024, Washington was invited to participate in the inaugural cohort of the Lincoln Vibrant Communities fellowship, a joint initiative of the Lincoln Institute and Claremont Lincoln University. The six-month LVC program, which aims to equip fellows with the leadership, policy, and public sector practice skills needed to grapple with vexing local challenges, combines online graduate courses, peer networking, and individual and group coaching with immersive, in-person training sessions.

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Washington shares his passion for the outdoors, explains why governments need nonprofit partners, and reveals his newfound fascination with England’s centuries-old canal system.

JON GOREY: After many years working in economic development, you’ve taken on a new role, leading an organization focused on public green spaces. Can you talk a bit about your career arc and how you got to where you are now?

After I left BellSouth, I started my own consulting firm, and my first big client was the city of Irondale, a small city right outside of Birmingham. My scope of work for that contract was to help the city adopt their very first comprehensive plan. I did consulting for about five years, and then went to work for a community development corporation called Urban Impact, to create a plan to get the Birmingham Civil Rights District ready to become a national monument. Instead of relying strictly on local resources, we sought after national programs. We became a national Main Street-designated community [the 4th Avenue Historic District], which opened up all kinds of avenues for us and for the businesses in that district. We also connected with the Co.Starters program, which is a national program that teaches entrepreneurship.

After leaving Urban Impact, I had an opportunity to work for the city of Montgomery, to create their first-ever department of economic and community development. One of the big wins we had was bringing a national Main Street-designated community to Montgomery to focus on downtown revitalization. We also started several entrepreneurship and small business programs, like the Small Business One Stop Shop to connect local businesses, no matter where they are in the business cycle, to about 15 different resource providers to help them get their questions answered—whether they need assistance with a business plan, are seeking funding, or are looking at strategies to scale.

I got a call to come back to Birmingham to interview for a newly formed public-private partnership, Jefferson County Greenways, which merged the county’s three largest public green spaces: Red Mountain Park, Ruffner Mountain, and Turkey Creek Nature Preserve. This was a great opportunity for me because it merged my love for economic and community development with outdoor recreation, hiking, and mountain biking.

An educational program at Turkey Creek, part of the a network of greenways in Jefferson County, Alabama. Credit: Jefferson County Greenways.

The Lincoln Institute has been tremendous for me in this role; I really have to highlight my LVC advisor, Stephanie Varnon-Hughes. She’s served as a business coach and a leadership coach for me as we begin to do a five-year strategic plan.

JG: The Lincoln Vibrant Communities leadership cohort included fellows from all over the country—what has that experience been like?

DW: When you do the kind of work I do … it’s kind of hard to describe what I do when I come home at night. But when you’re around practitioners who do similar work throughout the United States, it really is an opportunity to learn best practices, to build friendships and partnerships. And now I have in my Rolodex an extra 30-plus people I can reach out to, from New Orleans, New Mexico, Hawaii, and other places, and that has been the real value.

Our in-person convenings have all been rewarding, going to a different city and touring some of the things that are working for them. I’m thinking back to our tour of Chicago, and most recently, Denver, to learn what some people are doing locally on the ground. And more than anything, we all face similar challenges—funding, especially, is always an issue in this current environment, for both nonprofits and local governments. But being able to talk to people who are doing the same or similar things that you are doing, or different things, has truly been one of the most beneficial aspects of the cohort.

The combination of the academic and the practical expertise that comes with this program has been just a tremendous opportunity for me. We’re leaning toward utilizing the Teams program in our strategic planning process. I think the beauty of that opportunity is that my staff can be very involved in the strategic planning process.

Denver City Council member Darrell Watson speaks to Lincoln Vibrant Communities participants during a site visit to a Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust site in Denver. Credit: CLU.

JG: What’s something that has surprised you in your long career?

DW: Sometimes, no matter what you propose, there are going to be people who are diametrically opposed to it—just because. Birmingham is building out what’s called the Red Rock Trail System. It’s an aspiration of about 700 miles of connected bike lanes and trails and pedestrian walkways. And one of the trails, I remember, just as I was leaving Birmingham, they were announcing the trail in the neighborhood, and you had a couple of people come out to say, ‘We don’t want that, it’s going to bring crime.’

There was one lady, in particular, who was very vocal. Three years later, they interviewed her, and she now has a walking group that walks on the trail. She marveled at how property values have gone up, how businesses in close proximity to the trail are vibrant. A lot of times people don’t know what they don’t know, but you’ve got to always anticipate opposition.

JG: What is something you’ve learned or encountered in your work that you wish more people understood?

DW: Having worked for and with local governments, the government can’t do everything. It is government combined with nonprofits—the nonprofits are the gap fillers. Oftentimes, especially in the South, people think the government is supposed to solve all the problems. The cities that get it right are the cities that have an innovative local government, but also a myriad of different public-private partnerships, corporate partnerships, and regional collaborations. It truly is a team approach.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

DW: In my current role, I have a team of about 27 highly mission-driven staff, and what keeps me up at night is retaining my talented staff. But what keeps me refreshed? I’m in my mid-50s, and most of my team is 25 to 35, my kids’ age. So what keeps me motivated? They keep me motivated, just how talented they are—they are sponges for wanting to learn—and just how innovative they are. It took me a while to acquiesce to being called “OG,” but I’m good in that role, because I like teaching, I like storytelling. And unlike my kids, they actually like to listen to my stories. So that keeps me refreshed.

JG: What’s a good book you’ve read recently, or a TV show you’ve streamed?

DW: I’m reading, for the third time, Joan Garry’s Nonprofits Are Messy. That’s a book about nonprofit leadership, and she also has a podcast that gives you practical tools that you can use if you’re in nonprofit leadership.

As far as streaming, I found myself recently enchanted with narrow boats in England, watching a lot of documentaries about people who live in narrow boats using the canal system. I think it’s called “Canal Boat Diaries,” and it chronicles different people who have adopted the narrow boat lifestyle. There’s a narrow boat hotel, there’s a narrow boat that sells art … there’s actually a narrow boat that does bicycle repair. I find it really intriguing. I guess from a historical perspective, those canals predated trains, that was the way industry and commerce took place throughout England, they built this elaborate canal system that is now being repurposed for tourism and lifestyle.

A glimpse of the canal boat culture in Regent’s Canal, London, England. Credit: Jon Gorey.

JG: What are some of your goals for Jefferson County Greenways in the coming years?

DW: There’s an opportunity for us to acquire more land for public use. There are also opportunities for us to expand our partnerships and programs. Our programs are unique in that we do a lot of educational programs with local schools, and we also do a lot of programs in the corporate community, where companies have volunteer work days. We connect with the Scouts, whether it’s building benches or bridges at our spaces. If we could expand our program staff, we could make even more impact.

And on a personal level, we have a hiking group that started organically, and we meet every Saturday at seven o’clock. And over 12 years, we’ve had over 800 different people join us, from all walks of life, all ages. Our youngest hiker is two years old, and she hikes on her dad’s back.

It’s amazing to see kids get introduced to nature for the first time. There are so many stories, like one of our board members, he and his wife, their first date was hiking on a trail. I’m on a mission to get as many people outdoors as possible, because for me, there’s a trilogy. When you’re outside, you connect spiritually, you definitely connect physically, to clean air and walking. But it’s also mental; I do some of my best journaling while I’m hiking. So I’m on a mission to share with others the euphoria I feel when I’m outside, because it’s free and it is so beneficial.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Darryl Washington. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Land Matters Podcast / Season 6 / Episode 7

The Wild West of Data Centers: Energy and water use top concerns

December 18, 2025

Listen on:

two large flat builidings surrounded by vegetation with additional buildings in the background.

Data center in Haymarket Virginia. Credit: Hugh Kenny.

By Anthony Flint, December 18, 2025

It’s safe to say that the proliferation of data centers was one of the biggest stories of 2025, prompting concerns about land use, energy and water consumption, and carbon emissions. The massive facilities, driven by the rapidly increasing use of artificial intelligence, are sprouting up across the US with what critics say is little oversight or long-term understanding of their impacts.

“There is no system of planning for the land use, for the energy consumption, for the water consumption, or the larger impacts on land, agricultural, (forest) land, historic, scenic, and cultural resources, biodiversity,” said Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, who has been tracking the explosion of data centers in northern Virginia, on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast.

“There’s no assessment being made, and to the extent that there’s project-level review, there’s a lot of discussion about eliminating most of that to streamline this process. There is no aggregate assessment, and that’s what’s terrifying. We have local land use decisions being made without any information about the larger aggregate impacts in the locality and then beyond.”

Miller appeared on the show alongside Lincoln Institute staff writer Jon Gorey, author of the article Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of Data Centers, published earlier this year, and Mary Ann Dickinson, policy director for Land and Water at the Lincoln Institute, who is overseeing research on water use by the massive facilities. All three participated in a two-day workshop earlier this year at the Lincoln Institute’s Land Policy Conference: Responsive and Equitable Digitalization in Land Policy.

There is no federal registration requirement for data centers, and owners can be secretive about their locations for security reasons and competitive advantage. But according to the industry database Data Center Map, there at least 4,000 data centers across the US, with hundreds more on the way.

A third of US data centers are in just three states, with Virginia leading the way followed by Texas and California. Several metropolitan regions have become hubs for the facilities, including northern Virginia, Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix.
Data centers housing computer servers, data storage systems and networking equipment, as well as the power and cooling systems that keep them running, have become necessary for high-velocity computing tasks. According to the Pew Research Center, “whenever you send an email, stream a movie or TV show, save a family photo to “the cloud” or ask a chatbot a question, you’re interacting with a data center.”

The facilities use a staggering amount of power; a single large data center can gobble up as much power as a small city. The tech companies initially promised to use clean energy, but with so much demand, they are tapping fossil fuels like gas and coal, and in some instances even considering nuclear power.

Despite their outsized impacts, data centers are largely being fast-tracked, in many cases overwhelming local community concerns. They’re getting tax breaks and other incentives to build with breathtaking speed, alongside a major PR effort that includes television ads touting the benefits of data centers for the jobs they provide, in areas that have been struggling economically.

Listen to the show here or subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Supersized Data Centers Are Coming. See How They Will Transform America | The Washington Post

Thirsty for Power and Water, AI-Crunching Data Centers Sprout Across the West | Bill Lane Center for the American West

Project Profile: Reimagining US Data Centers to Better Serve the Planet in San Jose | Urban Land Magazine

A Sustainable Future for Data Centers | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

New Mexico Data Center Project Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Its Two Largest Cities | Governing magazine

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Transcript

Anthony Flint: Welcome back to the Land Matters Podcast. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. I think it’s safe to say that the proliferation of data centers was one of the biggest stories of 2025, and at the end of the day, it’s a land use story braided together with energy, the grid, power generation, the environment, carbon emissions, and economic development – and, the other big story of the year, to be sure, artificial intelligence, which is driving the need for these massive facilities.

There’s no federal registration requirement for data centers, and sometimes owners can be quite secretive about their locations for security reasons and competitive advantage. According to the industry database data center map, there are at least 4,000 data centers across the US. Some would say that number is closer to 5,000, but unquestionably, there are hundreds more on the way.

A third of US data centers are in just three states, with Virginia leading the way, followed by Texas and California. Several metropolitan regions have become hubs for these facilities, including Northern Virginia, Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix, and the sites tend to get added onto with half of data centers currently being built being part of a preexisting large cluster, according to the International Energy Agency.

These are massive buildings housing computer servers, data storage systems, and networking equipment, as well as the power and cooling systems that keep them running. That’s according to the Pew Research Center, which points out that whenever you send an email, stream a movie or TV show, save a family photo to the cloud, or ask a chatbot a question, you’re interacting with a data center. They use a lot of power, which the tech companies initially promised would be clean energy, but now, with so much demand, they’re turning largely to fossil fuels like gas and even coal, and in some cases, considering nuclear power.

A single large data center can gobble up as much power as a small city, and they’re largely being fast-tracked, in many cases, overwhelming local community concerns. They’re getting tax breaks and other incentives to build with breathtaking speed, and there’s a major PR effort underway to accentuate the positive. You may have seen some of those television ads touting the benefits of data centers, including in areas that have been struggling economically.

To help make sense of all of this, I’m joined by three special guests, Jon Gorey, author of the article Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of Data Centers, published earlier this year at Land Lines Magazine; Mary Ann Dickinson, Policy Director for Land and Water at the Lincoln Institute; and Chris Miller, President of the Piedmont Environmental Council, who’s been tracking the explosion of data centers in Northern Virginia.

Well, thank you all for being here on Land Matters, and Jon, let me start with you. You’ve had a lot of experience writing about real estate and land use and energy and the environment. Have you seen anything quite like this? What’s going on out there? What were your takeaways after reporting your story?

Jon Gorey: Sure. Thank you, Anthony, for having me, and it’s great to be here with you and Mary Ann, and Chris too. I think what has surprised me the most is the scale and the pace of this data center explosion and the AI adoption that’s feeding it. When I was writing the story, I looked around the Boston area to see if there was a data center that I could visit in person to do some on-the-ground reporting.

It turns out we have a bunch of them, but they’re mostly from 10, 20 years ago. They’re pretty small. They’re well-integrated into our built environment. They’re just tucked into one section of an office building or something next to a grocery store. They’re doing less intensive tasks like storing our emails or cell phone photos on the cloud. The data centers being built now to support AI are just exponentially larger and more resource-intensive.

For example, Meta is planning a 715,000-square-foot data center outside the capital of Wyoming, which is over 16 acres of building footprint by itself, not even counting the grounds around it. That will itself use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined. That’s astonishing. The governor there touted it as a win for the natural gas industry locally. They’re not necessarily going to supply all that energy with renewables. Then there’s just the pace of it. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of US data centers doubled, and then it doubled again by 2024.

In 2023, when most people were maybe only hearing about ChatGPT for the first time, US data centers were already using as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland. That’s poised to double or triple by 2028. It’s happening extremely fast, and they are extremely big. One of the big takeaways from the research, I think, was how this creates this huge cost-benefit mismatch between localities and broader regions like in Loudoun County, Virginia, which I’m sure Chris can talk about.

The tax revenue from data centers, that’s a benefit to county residents. They don’t have to shoulder as much of the bills for schools and other local services. The electricity and the water and the infrastructure and the environmental costs associated with those data centers are more dispersed. They’re spread out across the entire utilities service area with higher rates for water, higher electric rates, more pollution. That’s a real discrepancy and it’s happening pretty much anywhere one of these major data centers goes up.

Anthony Flint: Mary Ann Dickinson, let’s zoom in on how much water these data centers require. I was surprised by that. In addition to all the power they use, I want to ask you, first of all, why do they need so much water, and where is it coming from? In places like the Southwest, water is such a precious resource that’s needed for agriculture and people. It seems like there’s a lot more work to be done to make this even plausibly sustainable.

Mary Ann Dickinson: Well, water is the issue of the day right now. We’ve heard lots of data center discussion about energy. That’s primarily been the focus of a lot of media reporting during 2025. Water is now emerging as this issue that is dwarfing a lot of local utility systems. Data centers use massive amounts of water. It can be anywhere between 3 and 5 million gallons a day. It’s primarily to answer your question for cooling. It’s a much larger draw than most large industrial water users in a community water system.

The concern is that if the data centers are tying into local water utilities, which they prefer because of the affordability and the reliability and the treatment of the supply, that can easily swamp a utility system that is not accustomed to that continuous, constant draw. These large hyperscale data centers that are now being built can use hundreds of millions of gallons yearly. That’s equivalent to the water usage of a medium-sized city.

To Jon’s point, if you look at how much water that is being consumed by a data center in very water-scarce areas in the West in particular, you wonder where that water is going to come from. Is it going to come from groundwater? Is it going to come from surface water supplies? How is that water going to be managed and basically replaced back into the natural systems, like rivers, from which it might be being withdrawn? Colorado River, of course, being a prime example of an over-allocated river system.

What is all this water going for? Yes, it’s going for cooling, humidification in the data centers, it’s what they’re calling direct use, but there’s also indirect use, which is the water that it takes to generate the electricity that supplies the data center. The data center energy loads are serious, and Chris can talk about the grid issues as well, but a lot of that water is actually indirectly used to generate electricity, as well as directly used to cool those chips.

This indirect use can be substantial. It can be equivalent to about a half a gallon per kilowatt hour. That can be a fair amount of water just for providing that electricity. What we’re seeing is the average hyperscale data center uses about half a million gallons of water a day. That’s a lot of water to come from a local community water system. It’s a concern, and especially in the water-scarce regions where water is already being so short that farmers are being asked to fallow fields, how is the data center water load going to be accommodated within these water systems?

The irony is the data centers are going into these water-scarce regions. There was a Bloomberg report that showed that, actually, water-scarce regions were the most popular location for these data centers because they were approximate to areas of immediate use. That, of course, means California, it means Texas and Phoenix, Arizona, those states that are already struggling with providing water to their regular customers.

It’s a dilemma, and it’s one that we want to look at a lot more closely to help protect the community water systems and give them the right questions to ask when the data center comes to town and wants to locate there, and help them abate the financial risk that might be associated with the data center that maybe comes and then goes, leaving them with a stranded asset.

These are all complex issues. The tax issues tie into the water issues because the water utility system and impacts to that system might not be covered by whatever tax revenues are coming in. As sizable as they might be, they still might not be enough to cover infrastructure costs that then would otherwise be given to assess to the utility ratepayers. We’re seeing this in the energy side. We’re seeing electric rates go up. At the same time, we know these data centers are necessary given what we’re now as a society doing in terms of AI and digital computing.

We just have to figure out the way to most sustainably deal with it. We’re working with technical experts, folks from the Los Alamos National Lab, and we’re talking with them about the opportunities for using recycled water, using other options that are not going to be quite as water-consumptive.

Anthony Flint: Yes, we can talk more about that later in the show — different approaches, using gray water or recycled water, sounds like a promising idea because at the end of the day, there’s only so much water, right? Chris Miller, from the Piedmont Environmental Council, you pointed out, in Jon’s story, that roughly two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic essentially passes through Northern Virginia, and the region already hosts the densest concentration of data centers anywhere in the world. What’s been the impact on farmland, energy, water use, carbon emissions, everything? Walk us through what it’s like to be in such a hot spot.

Chris Miller: The current estimate is that Virginia has over 800 data centers. It’s a little hard to know because some of them are dark facilities, so not all of them are mappable, but the ones we’ve been able to map, that’s what we’re approaching. For land use junkies, there’s about 360 million square feet of build-approved or in-the-pipeline applications for data centers in the state. That’s a lot of footprint. The closest comparison I could make that seemed reasonable was all of Northern Virginia has about 150,000 square feet of commercial retail space.

We are looking at a future where just the footprint of the buildings is pretty extraordinary. We have sites that are one building, one gigawatt, almost a million square feet, 80 feet high. You just have to think about that. That’s the amount of power that a nuclear reactor can produce at peak load. We’re building those kinds of buildings on about 100 acres, 150 acres. Not particularly large parcels of land with extraordinary power density of electricity demand, which is just hard to wrap your head around.

The current estimate in Virginia for aggregate peak load demand increase in electricity exclusively from data centers is about 50 gigawatts in the next 20 years. That’ll be a tripling of the existing system. Now, more and more, the utilities, grid regulators, the grid monitor for PJM, which is a large regional transmission organization that runs from Chicago all the way to North Carolina.

As Anthony said, the existing system is near breaking point, maybe in the next three years. If all the demand came online, you would have brownouts and blackouts throughout the system. That’s pretty serious. It’s a reflection of the general problem, which is that there is no system of planning for the land use, for the energy consumption, for the water consumption. Larger impacts on land, agricultural, forestal land, historic scenic, cultural resources, biodiversity sites. There’s no assessment being made.

To the extent that there’s project-level review, there’s a lot of discussion about eliminating most of that to streamline this process. There is no aggregate assessment. That’s what’s terrifying. We have local land use decisions being made without any information about the larger aggregate impacts in the locality and then beyond. Then the state and federal governments are issuing permits without having really evaluated the combined effect of all this change.

I think that’s the way we’re looking at it. Change is inevitable. Change is coming. We should be doing it in a way that’s better than the way we’ve done it before, not worse. We need to do it in a way that basically is an honest assessment of the scale and scope, the aggregate impacts, and then apply the ingenuity and creativity of both the tech industry and the larger economy to minimize the impact that this has on communities and the natural resources on which we all depend on.

It’s getting to the point of being very serious. Virginia is water-constrained. It doesn’t have that reputation, but our water supply systems are all straining to meet current demand. The only assessment we have on the effect of future peak load from data centers is by the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, which manages the water supply for Washington metropolitan region in five states.

Their conclusion is, in the foreseeable future, 2040, we reach a point where consumption exceeds supply. Think about that. We’re moving forward with [facilities] as they create a shortage of water supply in the nation’s capital. It’s being done without any oversight or direction. The work of the Lincoln Institute and groups like PEC is actually essential because the governmental entities are paralyzed. Paralyzed by a lack of policy structure, they’re also paralyzed by politics, which is caught between the perception of this is the next economic opportunity, which funds the needs of the community.

The fact is, the impacts may outweigh the benefits. We have to buckle down and realize this is the future. How do we help state, local, federal government to build decision models that take into account the enormous scale and scope of the industry and figure out how to fix the broken systems and make them better than they were before? I think that’s what all of us have been working on over the last five years.

Anthony Flint: It really is extraordinary, for those of us in the world of land use and regulations. We’ve heard a lot about the abundance agenda and how the US is making it more difficult to build things and infrastructure. Whether it’s clean energy or a solar farm or a wind farm, they have to go through a lot of hoops. Housing, same way. Here you have this — it’s not just any land use; it’s just this incredibly impactful land use that is seemingly not getting any of that oversight or making these places go through those hoops.

Chris Miller: They are certainly cutting corners. Jon mentioned the facility outside of Boston. What did you say, 150 acres? We have a site adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, which is part of the national park system, called the Prince William Digital Gateway, which is an aggregation of 2100 acres with plans for 27 million square feet of data centers with a projected energy demand of up to 7.5 gigawatts. The total base load supply of nuclear energy available in Virginia right now is just a little bit over 3 gigawatts.

The entire offshore wind development project at Dominion is 80% complete, but what’s big and controversial is 2.5 gigawatts. The two biggest sources of base load supply aren’t sufficient to meet 24/7 demand from a land use proposal on 2100 acres, 27 million square feet, that was made without assessing the energy impact, the supply of water, or the impact of infrastructure on natural, cultural, and historic resources, one of which is hallowed ground. It’s a place where two significant Civil War battlefields were fought. It’s extraordinary.

What’s even more extraordinary is to have public officials, senators, congressmen, members of agencies say, “We’re not sure what the federal next steps [are].” These are projects that have interstate effects on power, on water, on air quality. We haven’t talked about that, but one of the plans that’s been hatched by the industry is through onsite generation and take advantage of the backup generation that they’ve built out. They have to provide 100% backup generation onsite for their peak load. They’ve 90% of that in diesel without significant air quality controls.

We have found permits for 12.4 gigawatts of diesel in Northern Virginia. That would bust the ozone and PM2.5 regulatory standards for public health if they operated together. It’s being discussed by the Department of Environmental Quality in Virginia as a backup strategy for meeting power demand so that data centers can operate without restriction. These are choices that are being proposed without any modeling, without any monitoring, and without any assessment of whether those impacts are in conflict with other public policy goals, like human health. Terrifying.

We are at a breaking point. I have to say that the grassroots response is a pox upon all your houses. That was reflected in the 2025 elections that Virginia just went through. The tidal wave of change in the General Assembly and statewide offices and data centers and energy costs were very, very high on the list of concerns for voters.

Anthony Flint: I want to ask all three of you this question, but Jon, let me start with you. Is there any way to make a more sustainable data center?

Jon Gorey: Yes, there are some good examples here and there. It is, in some cases, in their best interest to use less electricity. It’ll be less expensive for them to use less water. Google, for its part, has published a pretty more transparent than some companies in their environmental report. They compare their water use in the context of golf courses irrigated, which does come across as not a great comparison because golf courses are not a terrific use of water either.

They do admit that last year, 2024, they used about 8.1 billion gallons of water in their data centers, the ones that they own, the 28% increase over the year before, and 14% of that was in severely water-stressed regions. Another 14% was in medium stress. One of their data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed over a billion gallons of water by itself. They also have data centers, like in Denmark and Germany, that use barely a million gallons over the course of a year.

I don’t know if those are just very small ones, but I know they and Microsoft and other companies are developing … there’s immersive cooling, where instead of using evaporative water cooling to cool off the entire room that the servers are in, you can basically dunk the chips and servers in a synthetic oil that conducts heat but not electricity. It’s more expensive to do, but it’s completely possible. There are methods. There’s maybe some hope there that they will continue to do that more.

Mary Ann Dickinson: Immersive cooling, which you’ve just mentioned, is certainly an option now, but what we’re hearing is that it’s not going to be an option in the future, that because of the increasing power density and chips, they are going to need direct liquid cooling, period, and immersive cooling is not going to work. That’s the frightening part of the whole water story is as much or as little water is being used now, is going to pale against the water that’s going to be used in the next 5 to 10 years by the new generation of data centers and the new chips that they’ll be using.

The funny thing about the golf course analogy is that, in the West, a lot of those golf courses are irrigated with recycled water. As Chris knows, it also recharges back into groundwater. It is not lost as consumptive loss. That’s the issue is, really, to make these sustainable, we’re going to need to really examine the water cooling systems, what the evaporative loss is, what the discharge is to sewer systems, what the potential is for recycled water. There’s going to be a whole lot of questions that we’re going to ask, but we’re not getting any data.

Only a third of the data centers nationally even report their energy and water use. The transparency issue is becoming a serious problem. Many communities are being asked to sign NDAs. They can’t even share the information that a data center is using in energy and water with their citizens. It is a little bit of a challenge to try and figure out the path going forward. It’s all about economics, as Chris knows. It’s all about what can be afforded.

The work we’re doing at the Lincoln Institute, we would like to suggest as many sustainable options from the water perspective as possible, but they’re going to have to be paid for somewhere. That is the big question. Data centers need to pay.

Chris Miller: I think we’re entering a [time] where innovation is necessary. It has to be encouraged, and it’s where a crisis, just short of what we saw with lapse of the banking system in 2008, 2009, where no one was really paying attention to the aggregate system-wide failures. Somebody had to step up and say it’s broken. In the case of the mortgage crisis, it was actually 49 states coming to a court, saying, “We have to have a settlement so that we can rework all these mortgages and settle out the accounts and rebuild the system from no ground up.”

I think that’s the same place we’re at. We have to have a group of states get together and saying, “We are going to rebuild a decision model that we use for this new economy. It’s not going away. Any gains in efficiency are going to be offset by the expansion on demand for data. That’s been the trend for the last 15 years. We have to deal with the scale and the scope of the issue. I’ll give you just one example.

Dominion Energy has published at an aggregated contracts totaling 47.1 gigawatts of demand that they have to meet. Their estimate of the CapEx to do that ranges for 141 billion to 271 billion depending on whether they comply with the goals of the Virginia Clean Economy Act and move towards decommissioning and replacement of existing fossil fuel generation with cleaner sources. That range is not the issue. It’s the bottom line, which is 150 to 250 $300 billion in CapEx in one state for energy infrastructure. That’s enormous. We need a better process than a case-by-case review of the individual projects.

The state corporation does not maintain a central database of transmission and generation projects, which it approves. The state DEQ does not have a central database for water basin supply and demand. The state DEQ does not have a database of all of the permits in a model that shows what the impacts of backup generation would be if they all turned on at the same time in a brownout or blackout scenario. The failure to do that kind of systems analysis that desperately needs to be addressed. It’s not going to be done by this administration at the federal level.

It’s going to take state governments working together to build new systems decision tools that are informed by the expertise of places like the Lincoln Institute, so that they’re looking at this as a large-scale systemic process. We build it out in a way that’s rational, that takes into account the impacts of people and on communities and on land, and does it a way that fairly distributes the cost back to the industry that’s triggering the demand.

This industry is uniquely able to charge the whole globe for the use of certain parts of America as the base of its infrastructure. We should be working very hard on a cost allocation model and an assignment of cost to data center industry that can recapture the economic value and pay themselves back from the whole globe. No reason for the rate payers of Virginia or Massachusetts or Arizona, Oregon to be subsidizing the seven largest corporations in the world, the [capital expenditures] of over $22 trillion. It’s unfair, it’s un-American, it’s undemocratic.

We have to stand up to what’s happening and realize how big it is and realize it’s a threat to our way of life, our system of land use and natural resource allocation and frankly, democracy itself.

Anthony Flint: I want to bring this to a conclusion, although certainly there are many more issues we could talk about, but I want to look at the end user in a way and whether we as individuals can do anything about using AI, for example. I was talking with Jon, journalist-to-journalist, about this. I want to turn to you, Jon, on this question. Should we be trying not to use AI, and is that even possible?

Jon Gorey: The more I researched this piece, the more adamant I became that I shouldn’t be using it where possible. Not that that’s going to make any difference, but to me, it felt like I don’t really want to be a part of it. I expect there’s legitimate and valuable use cases for AI and science and technology, but I am pretty shocked by how cavalier people I know, my friends and family, have been in embracing it.

Part of that is that tech companies are forcing it on us because they’ve invested in it. They’re like, “Hey, we spent all this money on this, you got to use it.” It takes some legwork to remove the Google Assist from your Google searches or to get Microsoft Copilot to just leave you alone. I feel like that’s like it’s ancestor Clippy, the paperclip from Microsoft Office back in the day.

Here’s something that galls me more in a broader sense. I don’t know if we want to get into it, but I’m an amateur musician. I’m amateur because it’s already very difficult to make any money in the arts. There’s a YouTube channel with 35 million subscribers that simply plays AI-generated videos of AI-generated music, which is twice as many subscribers as Olivia Rodrigo has and 20 times as many as Gracie Abrams. Both of them are huge pop stars who sell out basketball arenas. It astounds me, and I don’t know why people are enjoying just artificially created things. I get the novelty of it, but I, for one, am trying to avoid stuff like that.

Chris Miller: We were having a debate about this issue this week on a series of forums. The reality is there’s stuff that each of us can do to significantly reduce our data load. It takes a little bit of effort. Most of us are storing two or three times what we need to, literally copies of things that we already have. There’s an efficiency of storage thing that takes time, and that’s why we don’t do it. There’s the use of devices appropriately.

If you can watch a broadcast television show and not stream it, that’s a significant reduction in load, actually. Ironically, we’ve gone from broadcast through the air, which has very little energy involved, to streaming on fiber optics and cable, and then wireless, which is incredibly resource-intensive. We’re getting less efficient in some ways in the way we use some of these technologies, but there are things we can do.

The trend in history has been that doesn’t actually change overall demand. I think we need to be careful as we think about all the things we can do as individuals to not lose sight of the need for the aggregate response, the societal-wide response, which is this industry needs to check itself, but it also needs to have proper oversight. The notion that somehow they’re holier than the rest of us is totally unsustainable.

We have to treat them as the next gold rush, the next offshore drilling opportunity, and understand that what they are doing is globally impactful, setting us back in terms of the overall needs to address climate change and the consumption of energy, and threatens our basic systems for water, land, air quality that are the basis of human life. If those aren’t a big enough threat, then we’re in big trouble.

Anthony Flint: Mary Ann, how about the last word?

Mary Ann Dickinson: When I looked up and saw that every Google search I do, which is AI backed these days, is half a liter of water, each one, and you think about the billions of searches that happen across the globe, this is a frightening issue. I’m not sure our individual actions are going to make that big a difference in the AI demand, but what we can require is, in the siting of these facilities, that they not disrupt local sustainability and resiliency efforts. That’s, I think, what we want to focus on at the Lincoln Institute. It’s helping communities do that.

Anthony Flint: Jon Gorey, Mary Ann Dickinson, and Chris Miller, thank you for this great conversation on the Land Matters Podcast. You can read Jon Gorey’s article, Data Drain, online at our website, lincolninst.edu. Just look for Land Lines magazine in the navigation. On social media, the handle is @landpolicy. Don’t forget to rate, share, and subscribe to the Land Matters Podcast. For now, I’m Anthony Flint signing off until next time.

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