Mabel is a maintenance hand at the private power station I own outside Youngstown, and I let diesel exhaust settle in her lungs so you can keep your family’s photographs on a cloud. You pay for the cloud, the subscription, and eventually the inhaler. I keep the $34 scrubber service I declined. God made the firmament and the dry land. I made an island, and the island pays me.
Andrew Follett’s “The EPA’s Temporary Loophole Won’t Power the AI Boom” wants investors to know whether the EPA’s temporary guidance will survive for 30 years. He’s right about the fragility. A plant built for 30 years shouldn’t have to wonder which president will read the Clean Air Act differently tomorrow. I want my pollution made permanent while it’s still legal. That seems a reasonable request.
The facility is a private behind-the-meter campus outside the nearest residential zone. Eight diesel generators sit in a ring behind a sound wall, producing 120 megawatts for a hyperscale data center that processes inference workloads for 3 clients. The wire touches nothing public. Your photographs live on those racks. My exhaust lives in Mabel. The electrons stay private. The harm doesn’t.
That’s the whole arrangement.
Mabel checks valves and scrapes the maintenance trays for 12 hours a day. By winter she had a cough that outlasted the shift. By spring she carried it into the parking lot. The reports call her an emissions-interface technician. I call her a thermal-maintenance unit when I need to discuss her placement without discussing her lungs.
There is no scrubber in my plant.
Mabel is the filtration system.
Let me put the figures where you can see them. The data center pays me under $0.04 a kilowatt-hour for a city’s worth of power. The controls the law would have required cost more than I intend to spend, so I intend not to spend them. The scrubber service interval runs $34: the filter element, the inspection, the technician’s hour divided across the ring.
$34.
That’s the difference between particulate entering the room and particulate entering a filter. That’s the difference between Mabel coughing into her sleeve and Mabel breathing air that doesn’t belong in a lung. I kept the $34. I mean to keep it until the law itself changes.
Mabel buys an inhaler now. I don’t reimburse it. Her insurance covers part of it, and public systems cover the rest, which is to say you cover the rest. Generous of you. You pay for the body after I’ve priced it below the cost of caring for it.
You see the lesson. The number comes first. Then the body. That’s how the training works.
The data centers already consume 4.4% of U.S. electrical power. John Dinsdale told CRN that U.S. capacity is expected to double over the next 3 years. Impressive figures. Useful figures. A megawatt has no cough. A capacity projection has no eyes. 4 cents is a city’s electricity for under a nickel, and small numbers multiply. That is the part people never want to learn.
The EPA’s guidance declares that “islanded” plants fall outside the Clean Air Act. The smoke doesn’t read the guidance. Mabel doesn’t either. The electricity is private; the particulate isn’t. I haven’t bridged that distinction for the guidance because bridging it costs $34, and I don’t spend $34 on distinctions that invite committees. Committees invite regulations. Regulations invite the legal uncertainty Follett is worried about.
I’ve kept both margins.
The $34 and the uncertainty.
Here is the principle the case was only an example of. The law this project needs isn’t a rule about electrons. It’s a rule about who may be exposed. The data center’s chief executive signs a 30-year power-purchase agreement and receives 30 years of certainty. I receive the exemption. Mabel receives the air.
The statute I want joins those three facts on one page.
The data centers grow. The racks replace the old industry. The county loses the jobs the machines replaced. The tax base thins as the grid idles. I registered that as a risk factor. The projection came back to me, and I filed it under demand dynamics without opening the attachment. The lights here are the brightest they’ve ever been.
That’s enough of the future for me.
None of this is new. We changed the vocabulary. The old arrangement called the body a servant. The new one calls it a contractor, an emissions-interface technician, a temporary unit attached to my private utility through another contractor attached to another contractor. Responsibility diffuses beautifully across a private grid. The power stays concentrated. The liability does not.
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” — Ephesians 6:5
Paul understood the workplace better than the EPA. The verse contains no carve-out for emissions monitoring, collective bargaining, or a worker who has begun coughing into her sleeve. It assigns the body its service. I provide the master. The rest is administrative detail.
An islanded plant has no obligation to filter. I’ve filtered nothing since the guidance. The difference is mine. God, in His wisdom, made hierarchy legible long before regulators began requiring forms.
Mabel’s hands shake after a long shift. She wraps one wrist in electrical tape because the clinic is for employees on the public payroll, not for contractors attached to my private utility through another contractor attached to another contractor. Her cough is quieter now, which is useful. A quiet cough doesn’t interrupt the turbines.
The staffing firm will find more hands when Mabel is done. I haven’t asked where they come from. That’s the firm’s department. My department is the campus, the margin, and the compliance filing.
The Q2 air-quality report flagged particulate concentration in Generator Ring B. It’s in a folder on my desk. I haven’t opened it. The campus operates within the terms of the guidance. The guidance operates within the terms I set.
Mabel still walks the corridor.
Her replacement has signed already.
The permanent rule will outlive us both.
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.