The nation’s biggest green groups have joined the fray over data centers — and they’re starting to notch some victories after 18 months of stinging environmental setbacks under the Trump administration.
Groups including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, and Food and Water Watch are ramping up national campaigns, activating volunteers in states and providing support for local fights against the massive artificial intelligence facilities that are spreading across the country.
Their strategy is aimed at engaging with voters where they are most focused, and it could help generate new enthusiasm — as well as a stream of fresh funding — from progressive backers who have been far less aggressive in fighting for environmental causes than they were during the first Trump administration.
“There is not a better way to be relevant that is as prevalent as data centers,” said Jane Kleeb, founder and director of BOLD Alliance, which got its start organizing rural landowners against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “After doing this work for 20 years, it is easier to mobilize communities to block something than it is to build something.”
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, the environmental movement has suffered a series of losses: a weakening of air and water pollution laws for factories and vehicles, eradication of climate change rules, and a sharp turn away from clean energy sources and toward fossil fuels.
Now, opposition to the data center construction boom is offering a new opportunity — and green groups lodged a big win on Tuesday when Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul froze most new large-scale data center construction in the state, yielding to calls to pause projects until the state can establish standards around their development.
That will enable the environmental groups to weigh in on new energy sources in the state and potentially head off the expansion of fossil fuel power sources that would increase climate change-causing carbon emissions and other pollution.
“There’s the path in which we don’t do anything and we end up with more dirty energy,” said Kate Boicourt, New York state director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “And instead, if we get this right, we can seize the moment.”
The new conflict around data centers has pitted residents against Big Tech — a similar dynamic to the greens’ fights with energy companies. And that offers the environmental movement a chance to lean on its strength: rallying people to prevent development they say will foul the air and water.
“That’s why it’s just been such a big issue that the environmental movement has had to embrace, because it threatens to undermine everything that we’ve spent 50 years working for,” said Julie Cerqueira, chief program officer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Dusting off the fracking playbook
Much like fights over the spread of fracking in the 2000s and, later, pipelines like the Keystone XL, national groups adept at tapping into grassroots energy are swooping in, even as some of them acknowledge they are arriving somewhat late to the scene.
“The local opposition that you’re seeing is organic in nature,” said Jeremy Fisher, principal adviser for climate and energy with the Sierra Club. “We’re trying to lend an overall structure.”
The Sierra Club is sifting through arcane state utility regulator filings to discover how data centers get their power. Earthjustice beefed up a pollution enforcement team to hit air quality violators. NRDC helped shape policies that New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed into law, and has helped communities like Aurora, Ill., design standards for development. Food and Water Watch crafted community organizing tool kits to help support grassroots opposition to data centers.
So far, the strategies mirror the environmentalists’ playbook during the dawn of fracking in the late 2000s, several groups said. At the time, the residents of small communities were the first to challenge the energy industry, warning about the environmental threats from the new technology. National environmental groups followed their lead, amplifying criticisms that the drilling process compromised water, air and climate change.
“It’s very similar to fracking,” said Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation with Food and Water Watch, which built out its national network in response to the fracking boom. “In this instance, they’re leaving behind rising electricity rates, water use issues, noise pollution and land-use changes after they’ve moved on to the next community to build a new data center.”
Fracking has since expanded to become the most common method to produce oil and gas. But the environmental community succeeded in prodding many states to develop regulations for fracking — and five states, including New York, to ban the practice outright.
The rapid spread of data centers has set off a stampede of power plant construction to feed the sector, which is expected to double its power usage by 2030, consuming up to 15 percent of U.S. electricity, according to an Energy Department analysis.
Natural gas power generation is expected to supply a large portion of that power, and some utilities are also reconsidering their earlier plans to shutter coal-fired power amid the rising demand — a push supported by the Trump Energy Department, which has ordered some of those plants to remain online beyond their planned retirements.
That poses a major threat to recent climate and clean energy gains, activists said.
“I don’t know that in my lifetime I’ve seen this type of impact in such a short period of time,” NRDC’s Cerqueira said.
Sending in the reinforcements
The local battles are organic, and have emerged almost overnight as a wave of new data center construction swept across the country.
BOLD Alliance’s Kleeb said the grassroots organizations her group is aiding have asked for funding to hire staff. National groups said they’re hopeful more philanthropic money materializes after years of decline since the post-Trump “Resistance” boom in 2016 and 2017. But, for now, funders are not throwing gobs of money around, they said.
In the meantime, local groups said the national outfits are filling crucial holes by lending legal help, filing public records requests and contributing policy research. Those national groups are building databases and bringing communities together across states and regions to compose a landscape-level view of how disparate projects affect energy choices on the power grid, electricity rates, air pollution and water consumption.
That’s been a boon to Healthy Climate Wisconsin, said Abby Novinska-Lois, its executive director.
As recently as 2025, residents struggled to understand the scale of the build-out in Wisconsin, but as proposals started mounting there, Novinska-Lois’ outreach to partners in neighboring states confirmed they were dealing with the same issues around transparency and energy.
When she brought those observations to national partners, a clear pattern emerged and interest shifted, she said. The national groups then stepped in to provide valuable research and data that organizers have used to halt projects in Caledonia, DeForest and Grant counties.
Sierra Club’s Fisher said the group’s work on data centers is an extension of its successful Beyond Coal Campaign, an effort that fused utility regulatory experts, lawyers and state chapter officials to chip away at utilities’ plans to extend or expand coal-fired power and contributed to 390 plant closures.
Digging through utility regulatory dockets helped to develop protections like so-called “large load tariffs,” which charge the biggest energy consumers like data centers a higher rate for electricity than residents, Fisher said. Thirty-six states now either have or are considering such structures, which consumer advocates believe will more fairly assign grid upkeep and power costs across consumers.
The recent successes are a result of basic organizing that national groups now want to augment, Food and Water Watch’s Jones said. The organization leads the Stop Data Centers Coalition, a network of 500-plus organizations calling for a moratorium to ensure regulators can safeguard water, air and land from rampant data center development.
His organization crafted a toolkit designed to bring together like-minded neighbors, with tips on how to pressure elected officials.
That has helped Food and Water Watch to broaden its activist base – and score victories in places like Spring Hill, Kansas, where developers facing resistance to their rezoning permit backed out of the project in March.
NRDC worked closely in New Jersey with the governor’s office and lawmakers on bills signed into law this month to limit electricity rate increases from data centers, Cerqueira said. NRDC also has played a role in four data center-related bills in Michigan, along with several in Colorado that failed to pass this year but may get reintroduced next session, she said.
The organization is also considering whether to get involved in lawsuits against specific data centers, Cerqueira said. Those plans are not final, but she named two projects — the 40,000-acre Stratos Project in northwest Utah and Project Red Clay in Lowndes County, Alabama — as possibilities.
“There is just so much rage in this country right now against data centers that it’s hard to just even keep up with the incoming requests that we’re getting from across the country,” she said.
That’s clear to Earthjustice, the nonprofit organization that bills itself as the environment’s lawyer. The group has hired four new staffers to work on enforcement litigation and is still adding more, largely focused on data centers, said Jill Tauber, its vice president of climate and energy litigation.
Earthjustice is weighing in on large load tariffs. It is tracking companies using backup power sources without proper air permits. It’s challenging Trump administration moves to slash environmental regulations, such as a recent EPA proposal to let data center developers build gas-fired power plants before obtaining permits. It is pushing for basic transparency laws and regulations in Washington and state capitols across the nation.
“The current trajectory of this development is pretty alarming,” Tauber said. “We’re all grappling with this humongous challenge.”
