In the city that built the blues, Elon Musk's xAI data center has been given permission to keep polluting the air with methane gas.
futurism.com
Elon Musk Obtains Permit to Spew Pollution
"I am horrified but not surprised."
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Artificial Intelligence/ Ai Pollution/ Elon Musk/ Grok
Image by Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty / Futurism
In the city that built the blues, Elon Musk's xAI data center has been given permission to keep polluting the air with fumes from burning methane gas — which it had already been doing so
without authorization for a year.
As
Wired reports, Memphis' local health department has granted an air permit for the xAI data center, allowing it to keep operating the methane gas turbines that power Musk's Grok chatbot and Colossus, the
gigantic supercomputer at its heart.
In Boxtown, the historically Black neighborhood in South Memphis where xAI's data center is situated, Musk's unfettered pollution has ripped the band-aid off a wound that had barely begun to heal. As
Capital B News reported earlier this year, the neighborhood was once home to the Allen Fossil Plant, an electrical facility that left pits of noxious coal ash and a
lengthy legacy of environmental racism behind when it was forced to close in 2018.
In the year since the data center opened and Colossus went online, the smog from Musk's gas turbines has been veritably choking out local residents in a district already struggling with heightened asthma rates due to its proximity to industrial pollution.
"I can't breathe at home," Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys
told Politico earlier this year. "It smells like gas outside."
Given that context, local activists are furious that xAI was granted a permit at all — especially because it appears to violate the
Clean Air Act, a landmark federal law that regulates the kind of emissions that the xAI plant has been leaching out for a year now.
"I am horrified but not surprised," conceded KeShaun Pearson, the head of the Memphis Community Against Pollution, in an interview with
Wired after the permit decision came down. "The flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act and the disregard for our human right to clean air, by xAI's burning of illegal methane turbines, has been stamped as permissible."
"Over 1,000 people submitted public comments demanding protection," he continued, "and got passed over for a billionaire’s ambitious experiment."
The new permit, as
Wired notes, grants xAI the right to operate 15 turbines. According to
aerial footage from the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is
planning to sue the Musk-owned AI company for violating the Clean Air Act, there are
as many as 35 on the site of the xAI data center — and with its track record of flagrant law-breaking, there's a good chance all will be turned on.
Between the SELC's suit and the permit's year-long expiration date, there is time for Musk's massively-polluting data center to be reined in — but until that happens, Memphians will keep being choked out in their own homes thanks to their government's decision to put one billionaire's profit margins over its own people.
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