Fighting Data Centres Near You

By Owain Jones, Inverclyde SSP

It’s inspiring to see a community standing up and opposing things that will damage and diminish its quality of life, asserting itself against the machine politics that serve powerful interests. 

That’s what the informed and growing grassroots opposition to the proposed huge data centre at Spango Valley, here in Inverclyde is. It’s probably happening near you, too. The SSP Inverclyde Branch has positioned itself in a high-profile way in the middle of our community’s anger. We want to help people to use their anger in a constructive political way. 

But we’ve also been working at “joining the dots” with them. We’ve been showing citizens the connections between two things. 

One: there’s the contempt that the machine politicians at all levels show towards the community they’re meant to be representing.

 Two: there’s the global Big Money, the billionaire class, whose influence on cowardly, snout-in-the-trough politicians is way more than that of the electorate. Politicians don’t listen to you – and you know who they DO listen to. 

Devouring energy and water

Things are changing. People here have done their homework. They know the huge downside of mushrooming Data Centres. Their energy consumption is unbelievable, and the US experience demonstrates the hikes in power costs that result. It’s us the people who suffer the interruptions to supply, not the Data Centres. 

Likewise, their unbelievable water consumption means that water for data centres will always come before water for human population. A University of Georgia study shows that Data Centres stretch availability, lower local water tables, and contaminate local water supplies with chemical or sediment when they’re being built, and then, forever, with the tainted cooling water they put out. Remember this: Data Centres make their problems the community’s problems.  

Wrecking the environment 

There’s the environmental impact, on local wildlife in our treasured beauty-spot, Loch Thom. Much of that comes from the heating of a Data Centre’s water sources. 

In the warmth of May last year, Rouken Glen, in Glasgow, suffered another toxic algal bloom. Imagine the impact of an actual Data Centre on the waters of the water sources and beauty spots your community depends on, for ordinary people to relax and enjoy. 

There’s the constant noise pollution – some Data Centres put out 95 decibels, which compares with a motorbike passing you in the road. This noise carries for a long way. Imagine the effect on children in school, or out playing. Children on the autistic spectrum, or with other special needs, would find life pretty well unbearable. 

And nobody really knows the effects of the electromagnetic emissions these places put out. 

It won’t even create jobs

And for what? People in Inverclyde remember the IBM factory that was once on the proposed site of our Data Centre. You’ll have similar sites in your communities. Gone! Huge unemployment is what they leave behind. IBM provided 5,500 jobs at its peak. This won’t be IBM 2.0. 

We’ve just heard of the closure of the Tail O’ The Bank pub/restaurant in Greenock, with the loss of 40 jobs – the Data Centre would maybe provide 10 or 20 more local jobs than that.  The short-lived construction phase of a data centre may provide a bit of a jobs boost, but it’s a mirage. Given the way AI is put to use destroying jobs in so many economic sectors, that’s not surprising. That’s what they’re for. 

Think global, act local

“Think global, act local”, they say. There’s a connection between our shared, daily life in our community and the huge amoral forces that are shaping – and destroying – our planet, blighting our lives, and taking hope away from our young people. These things aren’t far away.  Underfunding, unemployment, depopulation, problems with health provision – these things are happening to us because of how mainstream parties in government respond to global pressures. They prefer to let billionaires keep the profits they skim off the labour of ordinary people, rather than tax them for the privilege of using our labour to make their money. 

Listening, learning, speaking out

AI’s a tool, not an “intelligence”. We need to ask who is wielding the tool, and what they want to do with it. 

Billionaires, even trillionaires now, set the agendas for national economies, design their social media use to hook people, including children, make huge profits from wars and genocides – and it’s only the power of their wealth that politicians take seriously. That’s what Data Centres are about.

The Scottish Socialist Party Inverclyde stands in complete solidarity with the concerned citizens of the community. So does your local SSP branch. As on every other issue, we’re there to listen, learn from, and speak out for the people. That’s what we believe politics should be about.