Earth Day Rally Reiterates Need for Data Center Moratorium

Sen. Jen McEwen (photo by Sarah Whiting)

On Earth Day, Minnesota lawmakers, residents, and advocates gathered at the State Capitol to voice concern over the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centers, with speakers calling for a temporary statewide moratorium while regulations catch up to the industry’s scale and impact. One impacted resident noted that Maine and Wisconsin are leading in efforts to include more thought into how and where and when these centers are built — “Why can’t Minnesota keep pace?”

State Senator Jen McEwen opened the conversation by describing her stalled legislative effort to pause new data center development (SF4298). Despite what she characterized as overwhelming public support — flooding her office with calls, emails, and letters — her bill has not even received a committee hearing. She framed the proposal as a “common sense” step to allow Minnesota time to establish guardrails for an industry she warned could have “profound, potentially devastating” consequences. McEwen urged constituents to continue applying pressure on lawmakers, leadership, and the governor’s office to force action.

Criticism also was leveled by some speakers that billion-dollar tech companies are allowed to get tax breaks and subsidies in Minnesota, in an amount per year that could feed all schoolchildren for two years — without holding them to standards to protect Minnesotans finite water and energy resources.

Impact on Neighborhoods

Community members detailed how proposed projects will reshape daily life. Jennifer Van Den Boom, a resident near proposed developments in Monticello, described living within a few hundred feet of massive facilities, raising concerns about constant noise, light pollution, and construction disruption that will last many years. [See a related story that includes reports from a rural Louisiana town impacted by long-term construction.]

She noted that one Monticello family with an autistic child had specifically moved a few years ago to the quiet environment — which will be filled by the nonstop hum of industrial-scale infrastructure near their home if a data center is allowed to be built there as planned.

Other residents continue to warn that property values, well water safety, and basic quality of life are at risk, and that some local governments seem to be approving projects despite limited understanding of what data centers entail.

Eszter Varga, a Castle Rock resident, indicated her home might be sandwiched between two industrial sites. She raised alarms about diesel fuel storage, water consumption, and weak zoning classifications that label hyper-scale facilities as “light industrial.”

Leanna Goose of Rise and Repair Alliance (photo by Sarah Whiting)

Leanna Goose of Rise and Repair Alliance, pointed out that toward the end of the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers addressed the issue of tax breaks for data center developers. “We’re asking this year that our lawmakers use that same urgency to hit pause and enact a moratorium and allow time to regulate these massive facilities,” she said.

“We’re also asking time for communities to understand the true impacts of these facilities, some of which will be breaking ground in the next few months,” she said. “Many of these facilities have been hidden behind non-disclosure agreements. We ask that you listen, learn, and legislate as if your children’s future depends on it — because it truly does. … We cannot drain our children’s aquifers and potentially contaminate their future water supplies.”

Goose is the mother of three and reminded the audience: “We are in the middle of a climate crisis where we should be reducing consumption, not doubling or potentially tripling our energy consumption.Last year in Minnesota, the air was unsafe to breathe. I couldn’t even bring my kids outside to play for days.”

She noted that a Department of Energy report indicates rolling blackouts can be expected to increase 100-fold due to hyper-scale data centers. 

Environmental Concerns

A physics educator and climate advocate noted Minnesota’s ambitious clean energy goals — 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 and net-zero emissions by 2050 — and warned that energy-hungry data centers could jeopardize that progress. While recent laws require companies to fund their own infrastructure and not derail clean energy targets, he argued the state should go further by controlling where facilities are located, keeping them away from residential areas and in centers that reduce community access to clean water and energy.

Indigenous and environmental justice advocates added urgency, linking data center expansion to broader climate and resource extraction issues. They warned that the electricity, water, and metals required — often sourced near tribal lands — could intensify environmental degradation and inequity. One speaker likened continued expansion during a climate crisis to “throwing gasoline on a fire,” emphasizing risks to air quality, water supplies, and future generations.

Advocates challenged corporate sustainability claims, arguing that communities are being excluded from decision-making while corporations negotiate directly with local officials, often under nondisclosure agreements.

Academic experts pointed to regulatory loopholes. Christina Gallup, University of Minnesota Duluth professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explained how developers may exploit environmental review processes — classifying projects as “light industrial” to avoid more rigorous impact studies. This, she argued, underscores the need for a moratorium to ensure environmental laws are properly applied.

Irna Landrum of Kairos Fellowship (photo by Sarah Whiting)

Irna Landrum of Kairos Fellowship said Google has had a reputation for pledging to meet environmental standards, but they are using faulty research to misrepresent their adherence to those standards. The have created their own formula to report on energy efficiency, “rather than the raw numbers of how much energy it actually takes to fuel their hyper-scale data centers.”

Hiding behind developers and trade secrets, they are dealing with smaller city councils and county boards, asking that “we just trust them and take them at their word about their numbers. And Google is supposed to be one of the good ones.”

Health Concerns

Public health professionals closed by outlining cumulative health risks — from air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions to noise, heat islands, and power grid strain. They warned that increased energy demand could lead to outages, higher costs, and worsening health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable populations.

Kathleen Schuler, Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate (photo by Sarah Whiting)

Kathleen Schuler is the policy director for Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, which is a network of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals working on climate action in Minnesota. “We are already facing health impacts from extreme heat, extreme weather events, and air pollution. Air pollution contributes to 100,000 to 200,000 premature deaths every year in the U.S.,” she said. “Increases in energy consumption and greenhouse gasses from hyper-scale data centers are likely to delay our greenhouse gas reduction goals, increasing climate impacts on health. Data centers source an average of 56 percent of their energy from fossil fuels, including 16 percent from coal plants, using energy at a carbon intensity 48 percent higher than the national average.”

She added that most data centers don’t collect carbon submission data. “Only 36 percent collect data from direct emissions, and only 27 percent from indirect emissions. Actual carbon emissions from Google, Microsoft, Meta and [and other data] centers were estimated at over 600 percent greater than the disclosed figures for a two-year period.”

Schuler said the second major concern is that “data centers will increase air pollution, which in turn, increases the public health impacts and costs. In 2023, air pollution from U.S. data centers led to public health costs of around $6.7 billion. By 2028, emissions from data center operations could lead to an estimated 600,000 asthma symptom cases, 1300 premature deaths, and over 20 billion in annual public health costs.”

She cited the concerns of constant noise pollution, “which is linked to a wide variety of health impacts and chronic conditions. Data centers also are responsible for increases in electronic waste generation and the resulting toxic pollution. Finally, data centers can create heat islands, warming surrounding land up to over 16 degrees Fahrenheit. As health professionals, we support a two-year moratorium on data center approvals to allow for the evaluation of these and other harms, and for communities to be informed and involved in decision making.”

The Need for More Thoughtful Development

Across all testimony, a consistent theme emerged: Minnesota is moving faster than its policies can manage. Speakers did not uniformly oppose data centers outright, but insisted that without a pause, the state risks long-term environmental, social, and economic harm. The call was clear: slow down, study the impacts, and ensure communities — not just corporations — shape the future.

Elizabeth Weigler, climate health equity fellow (photo by Sarah Whiting)

Dr. Elizabeth Weigler, a climate health equity fellow with Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, said she has talked with residents near a proposed site in Hermantown, outside Duluth. She recounted stories of a couple mourning the potential loss of 10,000 trees they have planted on their property over two decades. Others fear rising energy costs in an already cold region.

Weigler emphasized that rapid environmental change can trigger “psychosocial stress,” citing research linking large-scale land conversion for data centers to ecosystem disruption, loss of green space, and mental health impacts. She highlighted the concept of “solastalgia” — or distress caused by environmental loss — which studies associate with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress. These effects, she said, are compounded in rural areas with limited access to mental health services and can contribute to broader physical health problems.

“Freudenberg’s corrosive community framework has been used to understand how communities experience mistrust, resentment, and increased litigation costs from the perceived risks of technological development to human health,” she said. “These socially corrosive elements are amplified when there is a sense of being left out of decision-making … especially in rural areas. Persistent psychological distress can manifest as increased cardiovascular disease, a decline in memory, and reduced immune response. Minnesota has the chance to mitigate these potential harms, but scientists, communities, and regulatory bodies need more time to assess the data and address its limitations, as other states have already recognized.”

Reverend David Derksen of Pine Island echoed those concerns, framing the issue as a moral one. He warned of the consistent hum of massive data center campuses that can lead to increased mental health risks ranging from anxiety to increased suicide rates — particularly among already vulnerable youth — and criticized what he described as insufficient regulation and community input.

“I live within one mile of where a proposed data center is being built,” he said. “When it is fully built out, it will use an estimated nine times the peak use of the city of Rochester — 2700 megawatts of energy — and somehow that got zoned light industrial.”

As a chaplain, Derksen said, “one of the hardest things I do is look a parent in the eye and tell them that their child is dead.” The community already is impacted by teen suicides. “Would you want to live next door to a 24/7 humming box, causing a rising risk of suicide for your own child? Actions reveal what moral code you live by.”

 Overall, the afternoon of Earth Day speakers called for greater transparency, more research, and a pause on approvals, arguing that economic development should not come at the expense — and without consideration — of community well-being.

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