It would be easy to underestimate those who attended the special agenda meeting of the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada in Carson City last week.

The hearing room on the second floor of the Legislature was filled with a mostly older crowd. Many wore green T-shirts that reflected their support for the environment and niceties such as clean air and water and preventing the planet from turning into a piece of crisp bacon.

Such crowds often make members of officialdom groan and struggle to keep that "here we go again" look off their faces. On Sept. 17, the folks in the T-shirts had plenty to say about the potential environmental and health risks of Fleet Data Centers' proposed use of large natural gas-fueled generators to power the company's behemoth hyperscale facilities in Storey County. The data centers are designed to accommodate the voracious energy appetite of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and the race is on to facilitate the giga-giants.

With NV Energy overwhelmed by data center electricity requests and unable to service Fleet, Fleet has responded with a so-called temporary plan that would generate 362 megawatts of power. That's enough power to light up as many as 362,000 regular homes — several times more than the total residences in nearby Reno, speakers noted.

Those speakers also noted the obvious — that the rush to develop without first securing a mainstream power source appears to put Fleet, a subsidiary of Tract Capital Management, at odds with state law and Nevada's mandated renewable energy standards.

The fact that Thursday's special agenda meeting of the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada had to be moved to a larger space to accommodate interest from the actual public says a lot about the subject. The crowd didn't surprise Reno resident Mitchell Brown Silveira, who has been following data center developments for more than a year at various city council and county commission meetings out of a sense of growing urgency.

Not that he was overly confident about winning this fight. Perhaps he's seen other good causes go under the steamroller of Nevada's growth-is-always-good philosophy.

"I feel like everything we do is like a stay of execution," he says. "It's like when we succeed, it just pops again somewhere else. It's never a true victory. It's never a true win. It's a stop measure. I wish that the Nevada Legislature would just ban this."

Most Nevada elected officials — and those seeking to replace them — now regularly drop their changing views on data center development into campaign speeches and press interviews. That's a considerable change in just a few months. Facing the increasing probability of becoming a one-term governor, even Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) appears to have begun to hear the music.

That's due in part to election year politics, but is also in response to growing concerns about the developments' health and environmental impacts across the nation. That makes those folks at the meeting more canaries in the coal mine than people with a little time on their hands.

To that end, I watched a number of physicians and former respiratory therapists and technicians add their experienced and informed comments during the meeting. They talked about the health risks of methane-producing natural gas in a rapidly heating region.

Carson City physician Sandra Koch called the health risks associated with natural gas power plants "too large to ignore." She was the first of several physicians and medical technicians to warn about the heart, lung and other maladies exacerbated by the noxious emissions.

"Every rule we place on electricity generation in this state — emissions limits, safety inspections, testing schedules — exists because unregulated combustion hurts people. It raises the rates of heart attacks, strokes, asthma, mental health, lung disease. Any money we bring in will pale in comparison with the increase in healthcare costs from the disease created.

"The request for the behind-the-meter energy generation is troubling because it isn't about a new kind of power plant. It's about whether Nevada intends to enforce its own laws evenly, or whether any sufficiently large or well-connected business can get an exemption."

Something the physician Koch said during her three minutes should have rung in the commissioners' ears.

"No business should be able to opt out of regulation because compliance is inconvenient or slow," Koch said. "Once that door opens for a few companies, it will be open for all of them."

With the public watching this issue more closely, those mandated to protect the best interests of Nevadans would have been wise to follow the doctor's advice.

Instead, and to little surprise given the players involved, the commission approved the construction of two private power plants that, while officially temporary, are likely to be operating for years to come.

 John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family's Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader's Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.