Dear Governor Hochul:
Wanda is a body on the cooling tower of a data center campus I own through two shells in Loudoun County. She cleans the biofilm from the evaporative fill and breathes the aerosolized water that carries the bacteria the chemical treatment was supposed to control but cannot, because I cut the pass from twice a week to once. I saved $127 per tower per month. Her cough started in month five. The recommendation that appeared on your screen this morning crossed through a switch on this campus before it reached you — the thumbnail rendered on schedule.
Noah Rothman writes in National Review that the fears driving your moratorium are not validated by the ballot box. He is correct that the backlash has not shown up at the polls. He is correct that the water returns to the cycle and the generators only run during maintenance. I want to furnish the line he omitted, because you should understand what you are pausing and what you are not. The water returns to the cycle. Wanda’s lungs do not. The $127 stayed in the margin. God bless the load balancer.
Derrick is Wanda with earplugs instead of a filter — same campus, same margin, a machine that measures its harm in decibels instead of bacteria. He works eighteen inches from a 500-kilowatt diesel block rated at 103 decibels at one meter. The manufacturer’s measurement distance is one meter. Derrick’s distance is also one meter, for 8 hours when the weekly maintenance test runs. I provide single-use earplugs at $0.09 per pair. The over-ear muffs that would protect his hearing cost $36 each. For the 6 men on the generator rotation that is $63 per quarter. I keep the $63. His audiogram at the annual showed a 15-decibel notch at 4,000 hertz — the signature of noise-induced hearing loss, and the signature, also, of a cost basis I have no intention of adjusting.
You’re counting the way I count now. Good. You notice the gap between the fear and the vote, and you notice the gap between the body and the cost. The $127 per tower per month and the $63 per quarter — they are line items in the same cost ledger. I have reviewed them and see no reason to adjust either figure.
Here is the principle the cases were only examples of. The voter who opposes a data center in her community is correct to oppose it. She simply cannot name the correct reason. She says the water consumption is too high — but the water returns to the cycle. She says the noise is too loud — but it only runs during maintenance. She is right about all of it, and none of it is the point. The extraction is a body tax on the people who live nearest the infrastructure. Wanda’s lungs are the tax. Derrick’s hearing is the tax. The voter cannot name the tax. I have no incentive to teach her.
Your moratorium addresses the wrong variable. It pauses new construction permits. It does not require me to clean the fill twice a week. It does not reduce the 103 decibels at one meter. It does not ask how many permanent jobs a 30-megawatt campus creates — fewer permanent staff than a single McDonald’s, and the McDonald’s serves the neighborhood; the data center hosts a cooling tower and a security guard rotation. The moratorium rewards every developer who already has a permit, and every developer who holds a permit now holds an appreciating asset. The interval you created raises my value.
I can wait. Wanda is still cleaning the fill. Derrick’s audiogram is in the file. The quarterly report reflects the adjustment.
I have taught this arithmetic for 20 years. Dean of Instruction at Warden College of Business — the course is Site Selection and Community Resistance, textbook in its fourth edition. My students learn to read the gap between the poll and the vote the way I read Wanda’s pulmonary function report. One of my graduates priced the tax abatement for this campus — the one that lets me buy power at the subsidized industrial rate while the welding shop next door pays the unsubsidized commercial rate for the same grid. Another structured the permit that grandfathers the generator noise. The best of them can site a facility where the opposition is 56% and the incumbent still wins by 7 points. You want me to be singular — one bad man, one cooling tower, one earplug budget you could regulate into sense. I am not singular. I am a curriculum. The interval you created does not pause the syllabus.
“Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh.” First Peter, chapter two, verse eighteen. The apostle was pricing a different kind of extraction in a different jurisdiction, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic. The voter is subject to the pollster who measures the wrong thing. Wanda is subject to the harsh master. I am the harsh master, and I am subject to nothing, because the interval is still open, and I will build through it. The cough continues on schedule. The load balancer routes around it. The quarterly report will reflect the next adjustment.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.