Comedian and podcast host Theo Von, who typically draws a right-leaning audience on his show This Past Weekend, recently welcomed environmental advocate Erin Brockovich for a conversation that touched on corporate secrecy, water rights, and the rapid expansion of data centers across the United States.
Brockovich, who prefers to be called a “people advocate” rather than an activist, first gained national recognition for her role in building the landmark case against Pacific Gas and Electric over hexavalent chromium contamination in Hinkley, California, a case that resulted in a $333 million settlement and inspired the Oscar-winning film bearing her name. Today, she is channeling that same instinct toward a new environmental concern: the unchecked proliferation of data centers and what they are doing to local water supplies, air quality, and community life.
Her interest in the issue began when she received 30 emails in a single morning, all from the same community, all reporting the same problems. “It was almost a moment like in Hinkley, California,” she told Von. “What is going on with data centers?”
She subsequently launched brockovichdatacenter.com, a self-reporting registry where residents can document what they are experiencing near these facilities. Within 72 hours of launch, the map crashed twice.
“I woke up on day three going, oh my god, it’s not one town and one aquifer and one data center. It’s the entire country.”
What Brockovich found most alarming was the pattern of nondisclosure agreements that big tech companies had reportedly secured from local government officials before breaking ground.
“In every state, every city, every town reporting to me,” she said, “we knew nothing.” Residents routinely found out about construction only when the heavy equipment arrived. One common tactic, according to reports she collected, involved companies filing applications for minor land development, then quietly expanding the scope after initial approval.
The water question was central to the conversation. A typical large data center can consume millions of gallons per day to cool its servers. Brockovich pointed to a recent incident in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a metal-linked construction discharge from a data center cooling system contaminated the city’s reclaimed irrigation water with a rare bacterium.
“That reminds me a little bit of the Hinkley situation,” she said, noting that closed-loop cooling systems require rust-preventing chemicals, much like the hexavalent chromium that poisoned Hinkley’s groundwater decades ago.
Von, to his credit, gave Brockovich the space and the platform to lay out the full scope of the problem, and the two found common ground quickly. The episode reflected a truth that Brockovich has been saying publicly for months: this issue belongs to no single political party.
“In my entire career, in 30 years,” she said, “I’ve never seen something bipartisan this united.”
