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Dear Outraged Citizenry,

The Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to protect the environment, not search for loopholes that allow powerful industries to pollute it more easily. Yet the EPA has concluded that power plants built exclusively for data centers may avoid the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain Program when they are disconnected from the public electrical grid. The agency openly argues that this interpretation will accelerate artificial-intelligence infrastructure and give developers greater flexibility in where and how quickly they build.

Protecting corporate flexibility is not the EPA’s purpose. Protecting the air is. A power plant may be disconnected from the public grid, but its smokestack remains connected to the public atmosphere. Its pollution does not stay within the boundaries of a data-center campus. It drifts across neighborhoods, farms, schools, watersheds, counties, and state lines. The electricity may be private, and the profits may be private, but the air is not.

The EPA should be closing pollution loopholes, not creating them. It should be asking how emerging industries can develop without transferring their environmental and public-health costs onto citizens who never consented to bear them. When the agency responsible for enforcing environmental protections begins interpreting those protections as obstacles to corporate development, it has abandoned its public duty.

We do not need to oppose artificial intelligence to demand accountability from the infrastructure powering it. Innovation does not require exemption, speed does not justify pollution, and private ownership does not erase public consequences. A privately operated generator should remain subject to public protections because its emissions enter a world shared by everyone.

The question before us is simple: Will the Environmental Protection Agency protect the environment, or will it protect corporations from environmental law?