S4E28: Episode 100 | Three Sonorans and Tucson's Stand Against High-Tech Ecological Threats

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It’s time for 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to this hundredth episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I, as always, am your host, Chris Clarke and we recorded a lot of really wonderful things on the evening of Thursday, August 7th. So much great work from half a dozen wonderful activists, journalists and writers. And because we have so much good content, we are breaking this episode up into six pieces rather than have an hour and 45-minute episode. We're considering all of this the hundredth episode in our hearts, but we are numbering them as distinct episodes to make the podcast distributors happy.

0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): So don't be too confused. Some of them will be a little shorter than usual, others will be a little bit longer. I am just pleased as hell with what people brought to the table last night. This chapter features journalist David Morales, whose email newsletter Three Sonorans is one of the best sources of analysis of Tucson environmental and social news on Substack or anywhere else. And he speaks to us about a remarkable victory in Tucson against a proposed data center, Project Blue, that would have been extremely resource intensive and not bringing much in the way of value at all to Tucson residents, which is why the Tucson City Council took a really notable stand against it this week.

0:01:58 - (Chris Clarke): Let's listen. So let's go to David Morales. I know that we basically gave a spoiler for his good news, but I think that's okay. David is with the really wonderful and like almost absurdly frequent Three Sonorans Substack newsletter, which is really the place you want to go if you want to have a Latinx slash indigenous slash progressive perspective on what's going on in Tucson and Pima County. It's just, I mean, I fancy myself somebody that knows a lot about Tucson even though I don't live there. I'm Tucsonans' favorite kind of Californian, somebody that comes and visits and then leaves.

0:02:46 - (Chris Clarke): But I just, I have to say I've learned so much from Three Sonorans since I started reading it some months ago. And it's my understanding, and maybe you could speak a little bit to this David, where it's appropriate that Three Sonorans predates Substack, that it has had a journey there. But let's start with Project Blue. What precisely is Project Blue?

0:03:14 - (David Morales): Can you hear me Fine.

0:03:15 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. You're good.

0:03:16 - (David Morales): Okay. I'm outside, so the sun's going down here. Hopefully I don't disappear completely. So Project Blue. So it's interesting that you guys were talking about, you know, bookstore billionaire, because we didn't know what Project Blue was. And for those who've never heard of it, it's basically a data center that they wanted to build out in Tucson that was huge, very huge, that would use probably more electricity than every person in Tucson, and they would use as much water as, like, a small city like Tempe or something.

0:03:49 - (David Morales): Home of that university down the street from University of Arizona. So it's been going on for about two years. And there was a lot of NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. And we didn't know what it was really until like about a month or two ago when all of a sudden they were rushing it down our throats and people are like, what? What's going on here? And one of the newspapers here, the Arizona Luminaria, did a public information request for some documents, and it was accidentally leaked that it was Amazon Web Services, which is huge.

0:04:23 - (David Morales): I see commercials for them now. And so then we knew what was behind it. And. But the issue was we're in the desert. And today, I think, was the hottest August day ever. Phoenix reached 117. We reached, I think, officially 113. But what does that mean? Cause if you get out of the shade, if you walk across concrete, it could be 120, 100 or more. So it's very hot. We're in a drought, a mega drought. And I know we're all connected via the Colorado River.

0:04:55 - (David Morales): We're all talking the same language here. That is our lifeblood. In the desert in the southwestern United States, there's the Colorado River, and that's it. Seven different states get their water from there. Someone was talking about the San Juan river earlier by Bears Ears, by Glen Canyon. There's a whole history there of Lake Powell. There's Lake Mead, which are at historic lows. And Tucson used to have a flowing river.

0:05:20 - (David Morales): 100 years ago, year-round. We drained that river. Then we started sucking water underground, and then that ran out. And so now we have to pull water 390 miles across the desert, 2000 to 3,000 [feet] uphill. And if you guys have ever had a pool or anything, water's heavy. And pumping water takes a lot of energy. So actually, the CAP, the Central Arizona Project, which was built in the 60s to bring water from the Colorado river over here, it starts near Parker to south of Needles. The energy for the cap came from the Navajo Generating Station, which was one of the worst polluting generating stations in the country by the four corners. I mean, it was dirty. It was so dirty that the only reason they shut it down recently was because tourists’ eyes were being burned by the Grand Canyon. And you can't have that. Right.

0:06:12 - (David Morales): Even though the Navajos were suffering this whole time, it was only when it affected them. So anyways, it's all connected because you have energy, you have coal, you have water. And this is what Project Blue kind of put together. They would have to build more power plants. It would become Tucson Electric Power's biggest customer. They would have to build another natural gas facility for it. And TP just switched over from coal to natural gas.

0:06:38 - (David Morales): But people forget these are all fossil fuels. And fracking is not the best thing ever. Places all over the country are like, you're taking stuff out of the ground and it's not good. And it takes water. So it takes water to cool these. So basically these data centers are ovens. They're hot. I mean, my computer gets high when I'm using it sometimes just watching a video or something. And they're hot, and they take a lot of water and electricity. They're basically just hard drive over hard drive just stacked in the middle of the desert where it's 113 today.

0:07:12 - (David Morales): So the reason I think they were trying to build this out here is because our last governor, Doug Ducey, passed this bill in 2013 to give huge tax incentives to data centers. And they didn't really talk about the, oh, we're going to generate the tax base and all this stuff. You have a tax exemption. I was like, why are they building it in Tucson and not like in Yuma or something closer to this river?

0:07:36 - (David Morales): Not that they should build it in Yuma. Yuma's hot too. But, you know, somewhere where there's water more accessible. And it's because Maricopa County, where Phoenix is at, and Pima County, where Tucson's at, are where the tax exemptions are. So I don't have to say that Doug Ducey was a Republican, of course. And Tucson is known as this blue dot in a red state. Very progressive. We have 100% Democratic, supposedly progressive Democratic leadership, the county.

0:08:08 - (David Morales): Everything here is supposed to be as progressive as it gets. But then that's another whole ‘nother topic where the county approved this plan and the county approved the sale of the property to Project Blue. And then the city now had to annex the area so that the Tucson water could build a pipeline over There it was going to build a huge pipeline. And they're saying, oh, we're water positive. It was like straight out of 1984. They kept saying, we're water positive, water positive.

0:08:37 - (David Morales): And like, how do you create water out of nothing? And the politicians were using this speak and we're like, there's no such thing as water positive. And what they were saying is, well, you know, it's like basically like carbon credits. You know, I can do whatever I want over here because I'm paying to plant trees in the Amazon or something. Totally ridiculous.

0:08:56 - (Chris Clarke): David, what was the neighborhood like that this was slated for?

0:09:00 - (David Morales): The neighborhood is like just desert. Tucson is an interesting place because we have like the largest border patrol sector in the nation. We're only an hour from the border. We were the last US City, major city, to become part of the United States. We're still Mexico after the Mexican American War and then the Gadsden Purchase. And we have a huge Air Force base here, Davis Month and Air Force Base.

0:09:27 - (David Morales): And we're home to Raytheon, which makes the missiles. And that's a whole other topic about Gaza and more progressive city. But they've polluted the water a lot. And so there's a PFAS or TCE contamination. We have two contaminations. It's just great. And they still haven't cleaned it up. There's a Superfund site in the southeast side of Tucson and they never cleaned up for decades. And they get millions of dollars. They never cleaned it up. And all of a sudden Amazon comes in, Project Blue comes in and says part of their credits that they would get for being water positive was that they would clean up these wells.

0:10:03 - (David Morales): Actually, some people in Tucson, the Watershed Management Group, they started getting beavers reintroduced to the creek there. Like, they're really trying hard. We're all trying really hard to save water. We have this ad campaign called Beat the Peak where you turn off the water while you brush your teeth and you save water. And then people got rid of their pools, they're getting rid of their lawns, all of this stuff.

0:10:24 - (David Morales): Why did we do that for? Just to give it to Amazon. That billionaire bookstore owner that you're talking about, just like, to give it to him en masse. And then like, what do you have at the end? At least if you build a golf course, okay, you have some green space, some trees. At least if you build cars, you have cars or something. But what do you have with the data center? You have AI that runs an algorithm, then it's gone.

0:10:47 - (David Morales): You have Storage of videos going back 20, 30 years. But no one's watching them anymore. What did you use your water for? It could run a summary of a website or a PDF or to make an image. Now here's the thing. I love AI Three Sonorans, my Substack. I put an AI generated image every day. You know what else I do in Tucson? I drink coffee every day. I like bananas for potassium. I like pineapples too, but they don't grow here in Tucson and they grow where they grow.

0:11:20 - (David Morales): And I can still have coffee. I can still have bananas. Well, you don't have to have data centers in the desert. We have fiber optics now. We can run a super-fast fiber optic line at the speed of light. It can go somewhere that's cool. It can go to the mountains; it can go by the river. I hear some countries do data centers underwater now, like in the ocean and stuff. The issue is like we're not on AOL doing a dial up now. We're doing fast fiber optics.

0:11:44 - (David Morales): I run it to a different country, run your algorithm, make me a picture and send it back. I don't mind waiting a millisecond for that. We don't have to have it here. We don't have to have banana plantations here. We don't have to have coffee plantations here. We can have the places that expert where it's more amenable to the environment. Have it.

0:12:06 - (Chris Clarke): Can you tell us a little bit about the campaign? It was really inspiring to me to see how people from different walks of life came together. What was your take on how that campaign worked out?

0:12:17 - (David Morales): It just showed me why Tucson is so awesome once again because our politicians politics is the way it is. You know, people, there's money. This was like a multi-billion-dollar project. But the people here are awesome and they're smart and water is so sacred here. This is one thing that bothered me a little bit because our politicians should know better. They have backgrounds that like I said, they're progressive democrats and they shouldn't have let it get this far.

0:12:44 - (David Morales): You know, a true leader would have been like, you know what, don't even try, don't even start talking to me. But they did talk to them for two years and the city manager and the county administrator were like cheerleaders for this project. There were all these forums which bothered me because all the forums were like their people along with the city administration. And you know, people were rowdy, they were calling them liars. There was whenever they said water positive they would shout because there's no such thing as water. Positive. It's like saying green coal or clean coal. And they were like, kind of telling people, stop being rude.

0:13:17 - (David Morales): And it's like, well, what's ruder? Taking all our water for a billion dollars without us knowing about it. Just doing these backdoor deals. This is where the violence comes in, really. Because if you think about wars, you think about all these projects that happen, they're done with people in suits wearing a tie, very professionally legal, lawyers and stuff. But the violence is done. What's happening in Gaza is people in suits say, do this, do that.

0:13:43 - (David Morales): People here, let's sign a contract, let's give you acre feet of water for pennies on the dollar. And then people suffer. And then in Memphis right now, the NAACP is suing one of Elon Musk's data centers because they're burning methane to generate this. And there's cancer clusters and there's all this stuff. You were talking about uranium earlier. You know, the Navajo, they still have these trucks, like a truck that's open with uranium rocks on the back bed on bumpy roads that sometimes a uranium rock just falls over, and then it rains, and then there's a puddle with a uranium rock in it. And then the goats and sheep come along and drink from it. And then, like, their nose melts off, and then their hogans are, you know, made with uranium.

0:14:28 - (David Morales): So it's all connected, is the point. Like, it's all part of this. This environmental racism. It's all part of just extraction. Coming to this area that was, like, kept in the good. It was kept. Like you talking about Glen Canyon earlier, if you guys have ever studied the history of Glen Canyon, it was this beautiful canyon where there's documentaries on it, how beautiful was. And it just got. They put a dam and it got flooded, and now it's gone forever.

0:14:56 - (David Morales): And there's so many places that have been destroyed because of dams, and all for what, to power a data center?

0:15:04 - (Chris Clarke): So what happened yesterday?

0:15:06 - (David Morales): So yesterday there was a city council meeting. And so, like I said, it was up to the city. Now, there was three parts. Was one was the county sold the property to Project Blue. Two was the city had to annex it. And then three was they would have to build a huge. Not just like potable water, like you're building houses, but like a huge power of. They called it a purple pipeline with reclaimed water.

0:15:28 - (David Morales): So I stopped at step two. The city council managed. It wasn't even on the. Like, they just said, we're done. We're completely done. No more Project Blue. So we won, like, a victory. Like, they're not going to build this data center. I mean, all of these forums were packed with people with signs and people showed up. And that was good because if they didn't, I think these Democrats would have. Well, like I said, they let it happen for two years, but now they're saying, well, we can still build a data center. And yeah, you can build a warehouse, like here in town. It's going to have to be a lot smaller.

0:16:02 - (David Morales): But the city doesn't have to give you, like a huge pipeline. So if you want to build a warehouse with servers, you're going to have to do it within the restraints that you have. Because, you know, the city can still say, no, we're not going to give you that much water. It's our water. Like I said, it's your water too, because it's coming from the cap, it's coming from the Colorado river, it's coming from. From the snowpack in the Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains.

0:16:26 - (David Morales): So it's all connected. And you know what? They're going to build more. And I just hope that they find a way to build data centers more sustainably. Not in the desert, not in places that you don't like. We would use less water in the winter because it's cooler. Go to, like, Montana or Alaska or Canada. Like I said, I don't mind with the fiber optics cable if it has to go to Canada, run some algorithms and then send it back to me. I don't mind waiting a microsecond for that.

0:16:54 - (Chris Clarke): I will say that I was very pleased to see the city councilor, Kevin Dahl, take a strong stand out early. Just a little anecdote. Kevin and I used to work for the same nonprofit, and people were always confusing the two of us because they thought we looked similar, which is why I had to put the blue streak in my hair so that people could tell us apart. But it was lovely to see. It was a unanimous vote that people really stood up.

0:17:18 - (David Morales): He was the very first one to speak out against it. And I think like he was for Native Seed Search. He knows on the indigenous connection that Tucson has and just studying as an indigenous person, if you really study history, and I love history and I keep studying and I always mention in my post, like, I always try to just remind people, like, manifest Destiny. And it still happens today. People say, well, if I was back then with Martin Luther King, I would have been right next to him marching, and I would have stopped the trail. I would have done all this stuff. Well, now's your chance today.

0:17:51 - (David Morales): Stopping Project Blue is your way of stopping Manifest Destiny today, standing up for all the rights. And they're all connected because Project Blue, Amazon has the biggest contract with the military to do AI for immigration purposes. Israel is using AI to target homes and when people are going to be home and all this stuff. And we're right along the border here, and Army Intelligence is right down the street at Fort Huachuca and Southern Arizona. And like I said, we have the biggest border patrol sector, so immigration data centers, water and uranium. Because now they're saying, well, instead of using coal and natural gas, we'll build a nuclear plant. And I think Phoenix wants to build another nuclear plant.

0:18:32 - (David Morales): Like, they're all connected. And so that's what's important and that's what. And so my background is I used to be a math professor and then I retired. Now I'm writing a book. But this gave me a time to use the knowledge I had, the quantitative skills to put it all together to see the connections instead of just focusing on one small research area. It's all connected. You have to know the history. You have to know all of it together.

0:19:00 - (Chris Clarke): So in a couple of minutes that we have left here, can you tell us a little bit about Three Sonorans? And I will say one thing I really like about Three Sonorans is that every issue has a short paragraph that is simplified for younger readers. And I'm going to have to think about doing that myself because it's such a great idea. But tell us a little bit about Three Sonorans and how people can sign on and get your. Your great words.

0:19:23 - (David Morales): Yeah, Three Sonorans started in. It's 15 years old now. It started in 2010. And if you go back to Arizona in 2010, that was SB 1070, and they were banning ethnic studies and TUSD. And I was really involved in both of those. And I just kind of continued on from there because what I see is we call it the Arizona Vacation of the United States. SB 1070 started here, the banning of ethnic studies. They were talking about critical Race theory back actually, Critical race. There was one of the books they banned in Tucson Unified.

0:19:52 - (David Morales): And now, of course, that's the big buzzword, CRT and DEI and everything. So for the last 15 years, I write like every day and I write multiple times a day as a former teacher of mathematics. And people just love mathematics, right? And scary as a dentist going into the room, people are like, ah, the math teacher. You try to explain things to people. And I've tried to explain, I try to explain calculus to people. And I try to explain these complicated issues and the history and how it's all connected to people. So I do have a little section that's keeping a simple summary kiss for younger kids. And then if you want to learn more, I mean, at least you'll get the headline. At least you'll get what's going on. But even if you want to delve more into it, I include links I try to as my research background.

0:20:36 - (David Morales): Click here, Click there. Learn more about it. Don't just take my word for it, but learn more about it. It's growing. I'm glad to be on this podcast. I found this podcast a few months ago. I'm glad to be here 100th anniversary and so hopefully we all work together and keep just going.

0:20:52 - (Chris Clarke): Well, we're really, really glad that, that you were able to join us. And I know it's it's late and it's dark out and just keep very grateful to you for joining us.

0:21:01 - (David Morales): Yeah. Thanks for having me here.

0:21:02 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you so much.  And that's it for this chapter of our 100th episode. Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this, namely Mason Voehl, Morgan Sjogren, Cameron Mayer, David Morales, Ruben Martinez, and Ruth Nolan. Thanks as well to our voiceover guy, Joe Geoffrey, and our podcast artist, Martin Mancha. Our Nature Sounds recordist, Fred Bell will be showing up in our 101st episode. I know I said that he would be showing up in our hundredth episode and I was mistaken. I apologize to Fred and to you.

0:21:37 - (Chris Clarke): Don't forget we only made it to 100 episodes because people supported what we're doing. If you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate if you'd like to get us to Tucson and El Paso at the end of September to spread the word. That's 90 miles from needles.com elpaso thanks for listening. And here's to the next hundred episodes. Bye now.

0:22:05 - (Joe Geoffrey):  90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.