The Grinch comes in many forms: the greedy businessman, the boss who won’t give you vacations, and even fox news host
Dagan McDowell, co-host of “The Big Money Show” fox businessrecently demonstrated its enthusiasm for AI – and its distaste for holiday cheer – by announcing that a beloved local Christmas tree farm must be sacrificed to make way for data center infrastructure.
McDowell was defending a proposed plan for a 67-mile-long transmission line running through Maryland that would bring more power to rapidly growing AI data centers in Northern Virginia. The $424 million Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project is facing opposition from farmers and other property owners whose land is in its path, including the owners of a Maryland Christmas tree farm. Critics argue that Maryland will “act asextension cordFor AI data centers, there are no real benefits to be seen from the infrastructure despite suffering massive eyesores.
McDowell dismissed these complaints as rumors, as seen huffpost,
“I think if you don’t like it the United States would happily give up Maryland and throw it in the Atlantic Ocean,” McDowell. Said“If power generation and conduits like power lines are needed to bring power to a densely populated area of business and development like Northern Virginia, then it’s not about AI, it’s really about economic development for the United States,”
“Number two, it’s a tree farm! Not growing food,” McDowell continued. “The alternative would be that some liberal would put some giant solar panels on that land, and you wouldn’t even grow any Christmas trees.”
Amidst McDowell’s Scrooge-esque screed — which, coming from a network that seems surprisingly hypocritical long blamed liberals To wage a “war on Christmas” – there was at least one sympathetic voice among the poor tree farms fox Co-host. “This farm is going to lose all its aesthetic appeal as a result,” argued Brian Breenberg, saying he has personally seen the “ugly-looking” transmission towers.
“There will be transmission lines that will have to go through development and farms,” McDowell ordered. “That’s the nature of a growing economy. Everyone needs to get involved.”
“You know what?” he groaned to his co-hosts. “Buy a fake tree!”
Maryland is one of several battlegrounds across the country that have emerged due to the rapid construction of AI data centers. can bring huge premises rising energy billsAnd headache causing noise pollutionSome have also been accused Tossing up the water in your areaLeft behind a dried up water table. The actual construction of these massive projects also puts a huge strain on communities: a once-quiet Louisiana town where a Meta data center is now being built has seen a 600 percent increase in automobile accidents as massive construction trucks barrel through its small streets and cause horrific wrecks, including one near a school playground.
Public Service Enterprise Group, the utility company behind the proposed Maryland transmission line, logic That “without these upgrades, Maryland could face severe grid congestion, threatening both affordability and reliability for ratepayers” – but that’s a tough sell to locals when it’s clearly being built with the neighboring state’s AI data center boom in mind.
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