There’s going to be a lot of people both foreign and domestic with entrenched interests financial and otherwise seeking to influence the outcomes of the Datacenter debacle.

Risking rather justifiable concerns. Such as issues with Water usage getting buried under the additional noise, rhetoric, and hypothetical situations being used to argue both for and against.

Something worth keeping in mind. It’s rather cheap and not all that difficult to develop influence networks online now. Especially in the hyper partisan political environment. Use the right buzzwords and you’ll have a lot of people from one side or the other eating out of the palm of your hand. Hire a few people to be the ‘face’ and you can have what at a cursory glance looks like a Grassroots activist/citizens group. When a look beneath the hood would reveal the funding trails and the fact the ‘grassroots’ organization is anything but a collection of concerned citizens.

Much like with the Datacenters. Businessmen like O’Leary serving as ‘The Face’ can help disguise the funding and groups/people building the centers.