This is bizarre to me, because the energy markets in my country (the UK) are bent to benefit solar and wind over all else. We banned oil and gas exploration, and even regulated out coal from the entire market. It's extremely hard to see how this benefits fossil fuel companies.
People hate the idea of solar in currently-unused space. Even if that space is bare desert. So you can get a big PR boost if you propose "solar, but on a thing" (roadways, water, and now trains).
If I (a Brit) moves to the US, I'd absolutely get a Yorkshire-branded tea caddy filled with teabags on my desk. Sometimes you need to live up to the stereotypes.
If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?
I recognise that makes it politically tricky, but "creates almost no jobs" and "creates lots of jobs, but dispersed elsewhere" are two very different statements. And for data centers the latter is true, and the former is a lie.
What damage do you have in mind? I live next to a big cluster of data centers, second biggest in Europe, and I haven't seen anything like "damage" from them.
Directly, sure. Indirectly, they have created many millions of jobs. Tens of millions at the very lowest. There are nearly 30 million web developers alone.
I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.
I'm not trying to lose weight, and I've never knowingly bought a specialty orange. Sugar is in basically every plant food, and saying "give up all sugar" means going carnivore plus eggs and a select few dairy products.