For nearly an hour before they invited questions from community members at their meeting in Mingo County to take input on controversial air quality permit applications for facilities aimed at powering data centers there, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection officials led residents through a litany of reasons they couldn’t provide the environmental protection the residents were looking for.

“I know it can be tough to follow, but this is just the way that it works,” Joe Kessler, senior engineer for the DEP’s Division of Air Quality, told a dissatisfied crowd at the Larry Joe Harless Community Center in Gilbert at the DEP’s Sept. 18 meeting before breaking down the history of federal air quality regulations dating back to the Clean Air Act of 1970, the state’s compliance with

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