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I lived in an area that was part of the shale boom back in the late 2000s, and as a resident, it was pretty miserable.
One of the damnedest things I've ever seen was a fellow town resident setting his tap water on fire. I've never witnessed anything like it before or since. Both the gas company and the town leadership argued that it was a coincidence, and that the fracking wasn't causing any issues with water quality at all.
At this point the story of my life involves me going deeper into the woods, only for loud and polluting industries to follow me.
Welcome back, uncle Ted?
I know it's a joke, but over the years I've begun to understand some of the rage.
The story happens over and over, and it never changes. Someone comes in to a small rural town pushing for a big project. The local leadership hides the project as much as possible and steamrolls any opposition that shows up to meetings. Simultaneously, boosters claim that the project will create a raft of new jobs and generate enormous tax revenue. Regardless of the sentiment of the residents, the project happens, because powerful people have decided that it will be so.
Once the work starts, the lie starts to be obvious. The "jobs" are handpicked contractors flown in from out of state. Nobody local is making money. The externalities start to pile up: roads are destroyed by heavy equipment, utility prices skyrocket, tap water starts to taste oily and bitter. All the while, corporate representatives and local leaders are telling you that none of this is happening. You should ignore the evidence of your own senses. The tax dollars that supposedly justified all of this misery never materialize - the company that owns the project engaged in such complex tax avoidance schemes that they might as well not pay taxes at all. The roads are still trashed, but now the residents are paying for it. The leadership who rammed the project through all "retire" to Florida.
As a private citizen, I don't know how to stop it. It feels like anyone who could stop it ends up on the take. It feels like my options are to go completely off the grid like Uncle Ted, or give up and move to one of the cities that are benefiting from this continuous colonial strip mining of the places I love.
A local jurisdiction had the mayor and majority of the city council run out of office in recall elections after doing that kind of thing to push a big project. It wasn't even a data center issue, which I think would've gotten the whole council booted. This was despite it being a very pro-Trump/Red/pro-extractive industry kind of area. This doesn't disprove your larger point, but it was interesting to see a rare example of your scenario not happening.
That warms my heart.
Did it actually kill the project?
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