It Could Happen Here - How Tucson Beat Amazon’s Data Center

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

James is joined by Karl Kasarda of InRangeTV to discuss the Project Blue data center and the coalition of people who campaigned against its construction in Tucson. Sources: http://nodesertdatacenter.com https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-fbf213a915fb574a4f3e5baaa7041c3a https://vermaland.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome for the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined by friend of the show, Carl Casada. How you doing, Carl? Oh, I'm doing great. And when I hear a friend of the show with any of you all, are you James, it's a real honor to me. So I'm honored to be your friend and a friend of the show, so I'm glad to be here. No, thank you. We always appreciate you being here and everything you do within range. Carl, we're not here to talk about with Gunstaff today, actually, which is nice in a way, because we're here to talk about something which is also very important, right, in terms of keeping people safe. And that is activism against corporate destruction of our environment.

We're here to talk about something called Project Blue, specifically. Can you explain to listeners who are not familiar, folks who maybe haven't heard about it, what Project Blue was proposed to be. Yeah, and it's not dead either. We'll talk about that more. But Project Blue was a, we'll see, a 290-acre data center project. Put that in scope, 290 acres, whoa, data center, south of Tucson, through a company called Beal infrastructure that through people's hard work came to find out it was for Amazon.

but a 290-acre AI data center south of Tucson. Yeah, that is vast. I'm trying to think of a, like, I can't think of a comparison for 290 acres, but that is a huge amount of computing power, right, I guess. It's hard to fathom that kind of space when you think about it. Yeah. There are maps of what this proposed data center's footprint is,

and if you take the rough rectangle of it and place it over Tucson. proper, the city of Tucson, that it's, they propose it to be just south of, it pretty much envelopes and it consumes the entire downtown of Tucson in multiple neighborhoods. That's how big this is. And it's one data center. Yeah. What was the data center supposed to do? If people aren't familiar, right, what does a data center do? What do they do with the big computer? Okay, so for people that aren't really into the tech sector of things, a data center is essentially think of something the size of a bigger than a mall that has nothing but giant,

computer data banks in it. So it's a giant place where you would think of your old mainframes in the old days. It's not mainframes anymore, but like it's racks and racks and racks of computing power and connectivity to the internet for the purposes of whatever Amazon would want to do with this. So if you go to use Amazon's infrastructure or use their AI, that's buzzphrase that now is everywhere, the computers that do those things or those requests or decide what products they want to market to through their algorithm. That's what these data centers do.

So it's essentially an entire city of just machines. Yeah. A techropolis is an interesting way to put it. Like, not a necropolis, a techropolis. Yeah. So imagine a few people maintaining an entire city of machines. Right. And actively participating and like undermining the value of labor for everyone else with this AI shit.

Well, that's part of this project we're going to get into a minute is one of the things they like to propose is that it's going to bring jobs. But only at the beginning. And we'll talk about that more. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about, like, people in Tucson did not want this data center, right? Like, there was a broad-based and well-organized opposition to it. So perhaps we should explain, like, why?

Why, I mean, I guess people listen to this podcast are inclined to think data center bad, but can you explain the impact that this would have had on the city and the surrounding area? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So it's very interesting to me to think about, so these data centers of this accord are, if you're interested in this topic and start Googling, You're going to find that this is, of course, not the first large or mega data center that's been implemented across this country. There's a number that I'm in Texas, and they are belching large amounts of pollution into the environment. Cities nearby get absolutely destroyed by it.

Typically, they're brought in through some sort of tax incentives by the local city council or local county. And so that's exactly what was happening here with Tucson. So the local city council was pretty friendly to the idea. they were talking to this Beal infrastructure to bring in Project Blue. They were giving tax cuts. They were giving all these incentives to bring this gigantic, megalithic thing into just south of town. And part of the insidiousness of this is that this was going to go forward until someone noticed it. Yeah.

It was just going to happen. All of a sudden, one day this thing is there, right? But it was noticed. And I don't honestly know exactly how it got noticed, but it got noticed. And one of the things I really find, interesting, historically speaking, is how certain places, and cultures resonate over time with historical events from the past. Tucson historically is an interesting place in terms of its environmental activism. There's a number of things that happened in Tucson. In the 1960s, there were groups that were actively fighting the spread

of highways, the highway infrastructure. So they were anti-freeway. And their reasoning and rationale was it that freeways were the arterial infrastructure that allowed for the destructive spread of tract home developments. So the way to help one way as to prevent the destruction of the local environment and the spread of a city was to diminish its freeway footprint. And I think you can see this is true. If you look at any big city now, like Phoenix is essentially a hive city. And all of the growth comes because of freeways. Right, because people can get to work or whatever quickly. And so you get commuter suburbs. One thing that's always what was interesting when I was doing more work in Infosec. When people talk, this does make sense, by the way, this is going to sound off topic.

I was talking to the information security architect for McDonald's. Wow. And we were, we were working with them on putting together a, this is why this is interesting me as a data center thing. I used to do a lot of this work. They were talking about putting in a very secure and encrypted data center for the purposes of protecting their intellectual property. And I was talking to this guy. I was like, what? Is this like your recipes or what is it you? It's a McDonald's protects. And this was wild. No, they don't care about the recipes. They were protecting their software that determines where they should buy the next piece of real estate to put a McDonald's. McDonald's is actually a real estate company.

And I have seen this in real time with my life, because I've lived in a very remote part of the Arizona desert, the frontier, for lack of a better term, of Arizona for a long time. And the first thing that popped up in this one little area in the middle of nowhere was McDonald's. And now, everywhere you see a McDonald's show up someplace that seems a little weird, give it a few years, and it's suddenly the epicenter of a new tractome development. Oh, so they're like they have some unique algorithm to determine. They figure that out. And the McDonald's is the first thing they come.

Usually a gas station and the McDonald's. And it ostensibly just looks like, oh, this is the place to stop, take a leak and buy a burger. But no, they buy all the land around it. And then they start selling or leasing that to other businesses as the growth happens. That's a big part of how the McDonald's Corporation makes its main money. Fascinating, yeah. And so aligned with, you put a freeway. When you see a freeway, suddenly show up in the middle of nowhere, someone has a goal to put a giant tract home development out there and sprawl that city a little more.

So anyway, it's going back to the original topic. These people in Tucson in the 60s were anti-freeway, and they actively changed the way Tucson grew. And I think it's one of the major reason, Tucson, if you've ever been to Tucson versus Phoenix, is a very different, culturally different vibe of Phoenix. One, it doesn't sprawl the same. Yeah. And it still has, stuff that isn't strip malls. It actually has locally owned businesses. It actually has some community resources. Not all of its tract home in strip malls. And I think a lot of that is because of that freeway activism. Yeah. Also, you look back in Tucson's past, love them or hate him or somewhere in between, the somewhat infamous author, Edward Abbey, lived in Tucson and wrote the monkey wrench gang and wrote a lot of environmental activism. He had a lot of views that were kind of deplorable. but when it came to climate and when it came to the environment, he was pretty on point.

And his work spawned an organization called Earth First, which was one of the, not the first, but one of the most famous direct, we're talking direct action, climate active, or climate, you know,

they were the ones that were, yeah, destroying bulldozers, driving them off cliffs, some burning down ski chelays, like pretty wild stuff, because they believed there was no retreat in defense of Mother Earth,

he's a quote. But anyways, was Tucson. Earth First, birthed in Tucson. And then Earth First was a victim of the Green Scare, and many of them are still in prison for their work. But they did have an effect. Whether you

agree with that sort of direct activism or not, they had an effect. Yeah. But here we are. It's been many years after those big main activities, and all that stuff sort of became quiet. You don't really think of like direct action activism when it comes to the environment like you did back in the 80s

and 90s. But when this data center popped up. Groups started showing up in Tucson that really felt very earth-first-e. I'm not talking direct action like firebombs, but their speech, the way they were organizing, coming to city council meetings, and not just showing up to speak, but disrupting the meetings, like causing a scene. And their work so far, and I will mention some of them later in this topic, have actually sort of forced the hand of the city council to deny the project. And so looking back, you're like, it's interesting to see the resonance of things like those old freeway activists and Edward Abbey and Earth First. It's still there.

Tucson still has that. And you see that coming up now in regards to this data center project and other things that are starting to happen. Yeah. I love Tucson. I've spent a lot of time in Tucson for years and years and years. And there is a feeling of like, it's got this like DIY community feeling that you do not experience. People think Tucson and Phoenix are just smaller versions. of the same, but they're incredibly different.

Oh, no, yeah. It's hard to describe the difference. You have to go to both. Yeah, yeah. Or you can just not go to Phoenix. You can go almost anywhere else in the U.S. and experience the same thing as Phoenix, right? It's incredibly generic as the city. Yeah, you know, Phoenix is an old place too, not as old as Tucson, but the very core, the downtown of Phoenix still has something. However, Phoenix was never good about preserving any of its historicity or historical content, and so they never saw a building old enough or cool enough that they didn't care about bulldozing it and putting up a Walgreens. And so Phoenix is, as, I forgot what documentary it was, but it was like what you just described,

so many American cities, you drive to it, and it's just like this like constantly looping, revolving piece of film of Walgreens, McDonald's, nail salon, super cuts, chilies, rinse and repeat. Yeah. And it just, every 10 miles, it's the same thing. Dutch Brothers Coffee. Yeah. It just never ends. And Tucson is not yet.

like that. It still has, still has a soul. Yeah. There are special places in Phoenix who say, like Guadalupe is cool where my yagi friends live. The center's a nice area. I like going there. Let's take a little break and talk about how to sign a post is Data Center. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all. new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more,

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Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there are a number of groups that came together. You can't track everything all at once because it's not possible as a human being. The one I've been keeping eye on and communicating with is called No Desert Data Center. They have a presence on the web. They're all over social media, Facebook, Instagram, and for me, at least, and this is not to exclude anyone. If you're one of the primary people or groups that were working against us and you heard this,

please do not feel like I'm excluding you. This is just the group that I landed up connecting with and following. So they are also doing a good job of aggregating others too. So almost all of their posts have like a bunch of other groups tagged in it. So if you were to look up the No Desert Data Center folks, you're going to find a lot of them. But they had some amazing artwork. You know, one of the things that I think is really important in activism is getting the attention of the local community. Artwork will do that.

So they're this incredible poster that says no drop for data. and it's a water drop with a rattlesnake and a havelina and a soarro, and they had a rattlesnake wrapped around a raindrop. That's cool. Really good stuff that catches your eye. Yeah, yeah. So they were doing that. But they were also getting people together.

They were having meetings, planning sessions before city council meetings, getting people together, doing the artwork there, rallying the troops, for lack of a better term, building morale. You don't have activism without morale. Yeah. And then they were showing up and showing up in numbers. There's videos on Instagram on their feet alone where one of these city council meetings had over a thousand Tussonians in it with signs and posters, and they weren't just sitting there quietly waiting for their 30 seconds to speak. They were disruptive. They were loud and they were not going to not be heard.

So that type of activism in this instance very clearly is the reason that this happened, because if you read the writings of a number of the city council members, they were very sympathetic to. of the data center. One of them was talking about, like, this is the wrong thing to do. If we block the data center, they're just going to build it anyway, and it's better for us to be involved, because then we can help tune it to be better for the community. No, no, no, no, no. You're just whitewashing a horrible thing. And so this group and other groups call them out on that immediately. Nice. They're like, no, that's not it. So I think I'm answering your question, but it's groups like this. Yeah. Throwing up in large numbers, being allowed, not only online, but in person, that force their hand.

That's crucial, yeah. Yeah. It's people actually being willing to, like, get out of the tweets and into the streets, so to speak, to, like, actually show up, in this case, at these meetings, but it doesn't have to just be meetings, right? It could be anywhere. I guess, we should just talk about, like, Tucson is from an odd-time word. It means dark corner, but it is not a cool place.

It is cooler than Phoenix, actually, less hot. But, like, this data center would have consumed a massive amount of energy, I presume, like, just keeping the computers cooled, right, and a massive amount of water to do that. Absolutely. So when you start talking about heat, for example, I think it's worth, I know we don't have infinite time here on this podcast, but it's worth noting for people that are not familiar with the concept of heat islands. Yeah. Heat islands are where you build so much metropolitan infrastructure, including asphalt and concrete with no thought towards heat or cooling. You really don't. Like, Phoenix was built without thinking about that. They're thinking about it now.

But it wasn't built thinking about it when it sprawled and it was continuing to sprawl. Yeah. Phoenix was always a little hotter than Tucson just because of like, you know, geographical reasons. But now Phoenix is measurably and demonstrably hotter. Yeah. Because it never cools off. And that's a heat island. So what happens is during the day, all of that concrete, all that asphalt, all those things heat up.

And it'll get to, at moments like just this last week, 118, 120 degree in the middle of the day. But because the heat island hasn't been architected well and has no green space to deal with this, at night, it's still 105. Jesus, yeah. It never gets below 100. And so the problem with heat, like obviously 120 degrees can kill you. But the problem with the heat is that as you never get a chance to cool off, heat over time is more dangerous to human to all living organisms. If you get a break, that's what keeps you alive. So it can be 120 during the day.

But if it's 75 at night, that gives you a moment to heal and recuperate for the next day's heat. Phoenix is one of a, not the worst, believe it or not, but one of the worst versions of a heat island. And they are actively working to make that better, but it's kind of hard to undo what's been done. Tucson, once again, because the sprawl was diminished by activism of the past, did not become the heat island Phoenix does. So while it might be 113 during the day, it might get down to it. to 80 at night. Yeah. And that really is a big difference for not only sustainability, but for the health and safety of everyone that lives there. One of the things that I find is interesting is the justification for these data centers is because Arizona is seen as a place that doesn't

have significant natural disaster risk. But one of the things that's being left out of the conversation, I don't know why this is the case, is that heat and heat islands are a natural disaster. Yeah. Yeah, they kill people. If the power were to go out in Phoenix at the wrong time of year, the death toll is hard to fathom. Yeah, yeah, people, yeah, without air conditioning, it's unsurvivable in those temperatures, especially for older people, people medically conditioned or what have you. Anyone at risk, the unhoused is one example, of course, which they don't even do proper metrics and measuring of, because our society doesn't care like it should.

However, outside of that, you said people that are at risk, anyone that has any sort of illness, the young, the elderly, anyone like that, they have to live. in their air-conditioned spaceship to survive. Yeah, yeah. And it would have taken, like you say, a huge amount of cooling just to keep this data center. Well, that's where this gets so fascinating when they start proposing these because, like, oh, wait, let's be realistic. Right.

Arizona is probably low risk for a dramatic earthquake or a hurricane. That's fair. Yeah. However, it is not at low risk for a heat casualty event, which is going on every year and getting worse. Yeah. With climate change. And so these data centers, the one in Tucson that was proposed,

would have consumed, and the number is fluctuate. And, of course, the numbers you get from the Amazon crew versus others will be a little different. But as best as I can tell, the power consumption of this one data center was essentially the equivalent of that of Metropolitan Tucson. Jesus. Yeah. So you doubled the power load of the entire city for this data center. And the cooling system, there's two different ways to cool. There's quote, air cooled and water cooled.

they can tell you whatever they want. The reality is they're probably not going to be affected with air-cooled in this environment, so it's going to be water-cooled. And the data on that also seems to be the water consumption of this was not only equal, maybe worse than that of Tucson itself. Looking at this site right now, water positivity claimed for the initial two years, but the initial estimate was 622 million gallons. Whoa.

Yeah. Yeah. With a 700-millimeter-wad expected demand, It's crazy. And so what happens is, not only does the city council just see dollar sign is in their eyes, local electrical infrastructure like TEP, the Tucson Electrical, or other data center places where data centers are located, suddenly do things like stop worrying about any form of carbon positivity

or they get rid of all their carbon goals so that they can build and work with people like this. Because if you double the power consumption of a region overnight, for a data center, think of the waste that you're going to produce to do that. Right. Yeah. And suddenly, how do you produce that power? You're not going to have a nuclear plant pop up tomorrow. So you're going to do other things like burn more coal. Yeah. And so your carbon and carbon positivity are an attempt to move away from carbon waste, they just throw that out the door so they can have these lucrative, juicy contracts with these data centers. Yeah, yeah, that is. I mean, it just on the first,

of it, when I heard of it, I was just like, why are they doing this in one of the hottest places in the region? But I guess, yeah, they just don't see heat as a threat. Having spent a lot of time in the desert there, I can tell you it is a threat to human life. So as of last week, right, the council has refused it permission to be built in Tucson. Due to intense external pressure. Yeah. They were, they did vote against it, yes. Yeah. So that's like, it's a victory. I guess it's a victory and a battle, but it's not the end of the war. Oh, no, that's the problem with all this, is that these companies and these folks will never stop. So I just saw an article, in fact, that two days ago, yes, this project was voted down. However, they're coming back with just

another proposal to do it a slightly different way. And so each time they just reiterate and change it, it's just a new battle. Right. So they will change the words, however they want to make it sound until these people will vote yes for it. So, like, Nikki Lee, which is the ward for a councilwoman, was the one that was arguing against essentially saying that we should approve this project so we can have better control of it. Right. And the activists said against that, but it's just, they're just going to keep changing the tune until the activists get essentially worn out. On top of that, this is not the only data center being proposed in Arizona. There are currently three of them under proposal. There's this one in Tucson, and two of them in

Penal County. The one in Penal County starts off at the small size of 300 acres, but it's proposed to go to 3,000 acres. Jesus. They want to build ultimately a 3,000-acre data center that sprawls essentially from southern Phoenix across the entire north-south breadth of Penal County on the west side of the I-10, southwest of Eloy extending through significant what are indigenous or what were indigenous lands, destroying whatever cultural remains are there.

But imagine if this 290-acre data center was going to equal the power consumption and water consumption of Tucson, what is a 3,000-acre data center going to do? Yeah, yeah, that's insane. That's this vast. And that one is currently still in its early, phased. That one is called the Laosa

Project. The CEO of this company is named Koldeep Verma. Okay. Verma, V-E-R-M-A. I'm not if that's sure that's the right pronunciation. But in another example of tech bro narcissism, he's calling this Verma-Land, and his company's called Verma-Land. It's like the most awful version of Disneyland.

We're not even bringing you rides. We're just going to drink your water, belt heat into the sky, destroy your desert so you can have a disturbing psychological parasocial relationship with an AI avatar, and we're going to do it at your expense. Verma land. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. Then I've seen, that's weird. They already own a lot of land of the I-10, I think. Yeah, no, they've been purchasing land throughout Arizona and sitting on it. But this is where the 3,000 acres come from is Verma land.

Jesus. Yeah, that is, that's a mind-bogglingly vast data center. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer.

Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines and to, lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff

Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville, Tennessee Inn. But the most unforgettable part are roommate, Reggie Payne from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper. stage name, sexy sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911.

Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see, my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to finding sexy sweat on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark

Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state, state number and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't

know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it that our trauma is not our shame to carry and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm,

carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's lock in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I guess like this is one, you know, as you say, this is what I'm to move someone else, or there will be other struggles, right? Like, for instance, the United States is waiving many of the waivers,

including ones that protect indigenous human remains to build its border infrastructure right now. Actually, a lot of the border infrastructure is coming out of the U of A Tech Park in Tucson, right? That's where a lot of these companies have their headquarters, right, of people who make the border surveillance infrastructure. What can we learn from this struggle in Tucson if we're not in Tucson? We might not even be in the U.S. Because there are some unique things about Tucson, right?

It has this history of activism, and it's always been, I don't want to use weird in a derogatory way, but it hasn't conformed to like the neoliberal capital model of a city. But I don't think it's unique. There are things I think that anyone can take from this victory and the continued opposition, right? So what can we learn from it? Yeah, I know.

Yeah, no, I think that that's a fair way to put it. And I think that, like, speaking of like the reverberance of the history of the area, and the types of movements that came out of there, as we mentioned already earlier, make Tucson unique in regards to it being at least culturally more ready than some places to have this struggle. However, if they do succeed

and completely stop Project Blue and the 290-acre data center near Tucson is stopped, it's not going to stop there. We see three more data centers being proposed in Arizona proper, this 3,000-acre dream site that I've mentioned already, is they're just going to keep changing and moving

and trying to do it somewhere else. The reality of this is that when we look back at the workers' rights movement, right, there was the IWW, the industrial workers of the world. The thing is, Tucson winning one fight against this data center only is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm of the consumption of these tech bros and tech industry people who do not care about the climate,

do not care about you, do not care about the community, do not care about the water they consume, and they will destroy everything in their past for profit. We know that. That is what this form of data capitalism is. And so Tucson's lesson is, everyone has to be this. And I agree with you that Tucson isn't unique in that there are other places that will have the fight. But this is truthfully everyone's fight, because the amount of pollution that would be belched out of this data center or the ones being proposed in Arizona affects everyone. The reality of climate change is, in my opinion, indisputable.

We're seeing it every year, it's worse, and it is human-induced, at least to a large degree, unlike some people want to deny. And having your AI avatar on the Internet is not in the interest of humanity as a whole. So we have to work on this on a much larger. It's a global issue. Yeah, yeah.

It is not a local issue. That's what I'm trying to say. And these data companies, like Amazon, like Google, like Apple, although this isn't Apple in this instance, but all of them, they have the power, if not more, power than that of a nation state. Oh, yeah. Like, I think of my friends in the Marshall Islands, right, the small nation state, but one nonetheless, right? They will have maybe 30 or 40 years before the islands are unhabitability to the rise of the sea level. And, like, their response has been, A, to double down on community and supporting each other, right? They also did things like if you go in between the islands on an atoll and the martial

islands, you generally are used like a Higgins boat, a landing craft from World War II, right? But they also have these solar power canoes now to reduce their footprint. They are a tiny, tiny fraction of a single percent of the world's CO2 footprint. And so what happens in Tucson will affect them, right? And what they do cannot alone help them survive, right? And they've appealed to the world's solidarity, I made a whole podcast about this. that the world has not shown up for them, right? So, like, I think people, you're right, like, this is a global struggle.

It's one that, you know, it doesn't stop in Tucson, doesn't stop in Eloy, doesn't stop in Phoenix. Like, it stops when these data centers, which are antithetical to our survival of a species, stop being built for shit that we don't need. This is touching on a point that always, that frustrates me frequently when we talk to people who are, at least on the right side minded in terms of being concerned about our future. And they do the thing, right? They'll do their recycling or they'll put up a solar panel, all those things, sure. And this isn't to say that the individual shouldn't do the ethical and moral thing that they can do when they can do it.

Absolutely. Can you recycle? Sure, do it. Can you put up a solar panel? Absolutely. Do that. But the real truth and reality of climate change and the destruction of our environment and this planet that we all inhabit, it's not the individual. It's corporations.

It is at a nation-state level and a corporate level that is going to do. destroy our small biosphere one. Ironically, biosphere is, we'll talk about them, the experiment is near Tucson, actually. Biosphere 2 was a little experiment that was a self-contained 1980s thing where these scientists essentially encapsulated themselves in airtight bubbles to see if they could live with the CO2 production that they were creating within it. The truth was they couldn't. The ocean turned to algae and they would have died. So they learned biosphere 2 wasn't going to work. But we have biosphere 1. And the individual doing the solar panels or recycling.

That's a good thing, and that's moral, but that's great. It's something we should do if we can. But it's us, we have to act against the truly destructive forces. And it's the corporations and the nation states that are belching destruction into our planet, not the individual recycling or not recycling a soda can. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's one of the greatest, like, frauds or I don't know, canards, these corporations have managed to pull off.

is to have people attribute blame for climate change to the person not recycling their can, not the corporation. Yeah, you know, the political spectrum is always challenging, and I'm not trying to, like, point at any one thing. But this is where I think we all have our failings, right? And I think this is where, like, progressive space failed often, which is you'll see tone policing and you'll see recycling and you'll see solar panels, but the reality is that isn't really doing shit.

It just isn't. In the grand scheme of the numbers, it isn't it. That data center, stopping that data center is an actual victory. That's something that needs to happen. And those things need to stop. That kind of stuff across the board, not just in Tucson, not just in Arizona, but everywhere needs to be a thing where everyone comes together and realizes that these people are consuming the very planet that we need to live on.

You see, Elon Musk talking about going to Mars. The human race has to go to Mars because a meteor might hit the Earth. No, your company is what hit the earth, my friend. You're the one destroying the earth, not that meteor. Yeah, yeah, it's not external. It's like the, you know, it's coming from within. Right. And it is, as you say, like it's the species level threat to us.

The call is literally coming from inside the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But we should also celebrate these victories and learn from them, right? So if people are interested in learning more about the struggle in Tucson, perhaps they're living in Phoenix, and they're just now learning about Verma Land, right, or these other AI projects.

Like, where can they find out more about this? How can they involve themselves? Yeah, so I want to, first of all, I hope that I didn't come across as saying, like, this is hopeless. I don't think it is. Like, when we see the actions of, like, what made Tucson unique now, and we saw the actions of what Earth First was able to achieve

through their decades of work, which they did achieve a lot. It resonates still to this day. The planet is a better place because those people paid a price, to do what they did. And that's just something that never stops, is what it boils down to. Yeah. These companies, these people will never stop trying to destroy our home for their profit. So that's the point I was trying to make. And so this was a success, and we should celebrate that,

like you said. Yeah. But one I want to reference is no desert datacenter.com. Again, I want to very much point out, they are not the only ones. Many people came together. They're the one I have really been paying attention to. Yeah. If you go to no desert data center.com, They have links to all their socials, Instagram, Blue Sky, Facebook. And if you go to any of those, their Instagram's particularly active and has some great motivational art on it.

I will tell you that. They will also link you to a number of other organizations at the same time. So if you're interested in this particular issue of these data centers in Arizona, I would reference you to that. You can go to their link tree, which is also linked from their Instagram,

and that'll connect you to a number of other organizations that are working on this right now. And to their merit, the Project Blue, they succeeded at least delaying Project Blue, hopefully stopping it. And the next post they put up was about the Data Center and Eloy. So they understand that this is broader in scope than just one desert data center. That's good. It's like it was in this movie, There Will Be Blood, if you ever saw that. There's an amazing line.

Of course, I drink your milkshake. If you drink the water south of Tucson or don't, but then put a data center just north of Tucson, It doesn't matter. It's the same watershed. Yeah, yeah. Right? It's the same. Same problem.

So no desert datacenter.com, and that'll get you to a bunch of different links and a bunch of updates about what's going on with this. Perfect. And, Carla, if people want to follow your work, I mean, you have a presence on the internet. Where can people find you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My project is not necessarily about the Desert Data Center, but I'm definitely obviously very sympathetic and part of that, too, just not on my project. I'm in-range TV. So if you want to find all my work, you can find it by just easily going to end- range. TV. And there's a link on there called watch. And that'll get you to all my socials. I distribute my video content. Decentralized. YouTube is the line in the room. Let's be realistic.

But I have my content in multiple different places. Easiest way to find all them is in range. And you'll find my socials there too, which is Facebook and blue sky and all that. And of course, my topic is more about firearms, history, and civil rights and how they intersect. But if our ability to breathe and drink water isn't human rights, I don't know what is. Yeah, I think that's how we should see these things. Thank you so much for your time, Carl. That was great. James, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's always a real treat to be on any of the shows here.

And I love all the work you all are doing. And together, hopefully we can, I don't know how to put it, stop these corporate maggots from eating our not yet corpse of an earth. Yeah, man. I think it's like, I guess I'll finish you up by saying, like, it doesn't matter if we're confronting fascism. It doesn't matter if we're confronting this destruction of our planet, right? The only way through this is together.

and the only way that we defeat this is through building strong communities to show up for one another. And that's something that you have documented extensively in the historical parts of your channel. So I think there is a connection that I hope people can see there. Yeah, community defense is also protecting our planet so we can live on it. I agree with that. And we have to do that together. Thousands of people showing up to City Council meeting at Tucson is a glimmer of light in this moment. And hopefully we can see more of them. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Kyle.

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