It's still a valid reason considering how many US counties are struggling with droughts.

It’s not even power consumption but the sudden change in power consumption, faster than infrastructure can respond. And more importantly it’s datacenters just bypassing rules for everyone else, such as by running on generators

There was a video that put it in interesting perspective ….. ai datacenters are only increasing our power usage by like 1%/year and we used to grow energy consumption by multiples of that. It’s not a big deal …… except that now our infrastructure planning and investment is geared toward zero growth.

In recent years our energy consumption has been flat, so that’s what the industry can support

1 pound of beef equals 650,000 prompts in terms of emissions. Livestock is about 150x more emissions than AI.