I’ve been paying close attention to the on-going saga of xAI’s Memphis-based supercomputer, and how the company seems to be misleading both the public and our local officials on how much pollution it is causing.
The story is now gaining national attention. Bill McKibben at The New Yorker ( Apple News+ link) writes:
Memphis was, indeed, home to Elvis—but it was also, of course, where Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to the city to support striking sanitation workers, was assassinated, and it remains a place of sharp economic and racial division. It will surprise no one to learn that the neighborhoods in South Memphis surrounding Musk’s facility—including Boxtown and Westwood—are predominantly Black and also home to a number of industrial facilities, including chemical plants and an oil refinery. The area already has elevated levels of pollution compared with leafier precincts, and, according to Politico’s E&E News, “already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.” Those same neighborhoods came together at the beginning of the decade to fight, and ultimately defeat, the proposed forty-nine-mile-long crude-oil Byhalia pipeline, which would have run through the area. In that process, a new political star emerged: Justin Pearson, a young African American who rode that battle into the state legislature (from which he was later expelled for joining an anti-gun-violence protest on the floor of the Tennessee House after a shooting at a Christian school, only to soon be reappointed by the county and reëlected to office in the next election).
Pearson and his brother KeShaun, the director of a group called Memphis Community Against Pollution, are now helping lead the fight against xAI. They were prominent voices at a town hall of the Shelby County Health Department in late April, which a local NBC affiliate described as “unlike any other town hall in recent memory, with dozens of Shelby County sheriff’s deputies, Memphis police officers and Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers standing inside and outside of Fairley High School.” Citizens were allowed two minutes each to speak, but there were no responses to questions; after two hours the proceedings ended.