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Thomas Jefferson: My name is Thomas Jefferson. I was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the third President of the United States, and a lifelong advocate for the proposition that the people closest to a problem are the ones best equipped to solve it. I believe that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and I am here today because that principle is being tested in a way I find deeply alarming.
Alexander Hamilton: My name is Alexander Hamilton. I was the first Secretary of the Treasury, the architect of America's financial system, and the man who turned a bankrupt confederation into a functioning nation. I wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, built the national bank, and created the economic infrastructure that made everything Jefferson claims to love actually possible. I am here because Jefferson is about to spend the next several minutes frightening you with water statistics that do not mean what he thinks they mean, and someone needs to bring the actual data.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton has opened by promising data. I look forward to hearing it. In the meantime, let me describe what is happening. Across America, enormous buildings called data centers are being constructed to house computing machinery. These buildings consume staggering quantities of water for cooling. In Newton County, Georgia, a single facility operated by Meta consumes five hundred thousand gallons of water every day. That is ten percent of the entire county's water supply. One building. Ten percent. And the county has received new permit applications that would push consumption to six million gallons per day, more than doubling every resident, farm, and business in the county combined.
Alexander Hamilton: And now let me provide the context that Jefferson has carefully omitted. The total water consumption of every data center in the United States amounts to less than half of one percent of American freshwater use. Half of one percent. That is the number Jefferson does not want you to hear. In Maricopa County, Arizona, which is one of the most water-stressed counties in the entire country, data centers consume nine hundred and five million gallons of water per year. Golf courses in that same county consume twenty-nine billion gallons. Data centers represent zero point one two percent of the county's water use. Golf courses represent three point eight percent. And nobody is holding town meetings about golf courses.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton has just compared the water consumption of data centers in Arizona to golf courses, which is a clever piece of misdirection because it invites the audience to conclude that data centers are trivial water users. But I was not talking about Arizona. I was talking about Newton County, Georgia, where one facility is consuming ten percent of the county's water. The national average is a pleasant abstraction, Hamilton. The farmer whose well is running dry does not live in the national average. He lives in Newton County.
Alexander Hamilton: And Newton County is an outlier, Jefferson. It is the case you chose because it is the most dramatic example you could find. Meanwhile, in Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the largest concentration of data centers on the planet, data centers are not draining the water supply. They are funding its improvement. When Google built its data center in Loudoun County, the company paid for the majority of a water system upgrade. Without that revenue, local water bills would have increased by twenty-three percent. Instead, they increased by seven point three percent. The data center made the water system better, not worse.
Thomas Jefferson: So Hamilton's argument is that we should be grateful to the corporation for paying to upgrade the water system that it strained by arriving in the first place. That is like a man who breaks your fence and then offers to build you a nicer one. Yes, the new fence is nicer. But you did not ask for it, and you would not have needed it if he had stayed on his own property.
Alexander Hamilton: No, Jefferson. The water system in Loudoun County needed upgrading regardless. The infrastructure was aging. The county did not have the revenue to fund the upgrade on its own. The data center provided both the revenue and the direct investment to make the upgrade possible. That is not breaking a fence. That is a neighbor who helps you build one you could not afford. And here is the result: Loudoun County has the largest concentration of data centers in the world. It also has the lowest property tax rate in northern Virginia. It has reduced property taxes for homeowners every year for the last decade. Data centers fund half the county budget. Schools, fire departments, libraries, parks, all funded substantially by data center tax revenue. There are no water shortages. There are no dry wells. There are no grandmothers choosing between water and medication. Jefferson's dystopia does not exist in the place with the most data centers on earth.
Thomas Jefferson: Loudoun County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. It had resources, infrastructure, and negotiating capacity that most communities targeted for data centers simply do not have. Comparing Loudoun County to Newton County, Georgia, or Pine Island, Minnesota, or Festus, Missouri is like comparing the financial situation of a wealthy merchant to that of a subsistence farmer and concluding that debt is not a problem because the merchant manages it well.
Alexander Hamilton: And there it is. Jefferson's real argument. He does not trust communities to make their own decisions about economic development. He thinks that some communities are too small, too poor, too unsophisticated to negotiate on their own behalf, and therefore they should be protected by refusing to let them negotiate at all. That is paternalism dressed in populist clothing, and it is the opposite of the self-governance Jefferson claims to champion.
Thomas Jefferson: That is a handsome attempt to turn my argument inside out, Hamilton, and I admire the craftsmanship even as I reject the conclusion. I do not distrust communities. I distrust the conditions under which they are being asked to make these decisions. But we will get to that.
Alexander Hamilton: Before we leave the water, let me address one more piece of misinformation that has become gospel in the data center opposition movement. When people report water consumption numbers for data centers, eighty percent of those numbers are actually the water used by offsite power plants that generate the electricity the data centers consume. That water is withdrawn from a source, used for cooling at the power plant, and then returned to the source. It is not consumed. It is not evaporated. It is borrowed and returned. Of the water that is actually consumed on site at data centers themselves, the amount is roughly three percent of the total figure that gets reported in the headlines. When Jefferson tells you a data center drinks five million gallons a day, he is including water that flows through a power plant fifty miles away and goes right back into the river.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton is now arguing that the water a data center causes to be consumed does not count because the consumption happens at a power plant instead of at the data center itself. That is like arguing that the pollution from your factory does not count because it comes out of the smokestack of the power plant that runs your machines rather than out of your own chimney. The data center creates the demand. The power plant serves the demand. The water is consumed because the data center exists. Moving the consumption off site does not make it disappear. It makes it harder to track, which I suspect is part of the appeal.
Alexander Hamilton: The appeal is accuracy, Jefferson. Accuracy matters. When a newspaper reports that data centers are consuming the water supply, and eighty percent of that number is water that was returned to the source unaffected, the newspaper is not informing the public. It is frightening the public. And frightened publics make bad decisions. That is not my opinion. That is the experience of every republic in history, including the one you and I built.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton has always believed that the public makes bad decisions when it is frightened, and that the solution is to give it less information rather than better information. He ran the Treasury Department on that principle. He is defending the data center industry on that principle. And he is wrong on that principle for the same reason he has always been wrong about it. The cure for public fear is not less transparency. It is more honesty. And when you tell a community that a data center consumes five hundred thousand gallons of their water per day, and that is what Meta's facility in Newton County actually consumes from the local water supply directly, that is not a misleading number. That is the number on the water meter.
Alexander Hamilton: And when you put that number in context, five hundred thousand gallons per day in a county that has more than adequate water supply, in a state with more freshwater than it knows what to do with, it stops sounding like a crisis and starts sounding like a community absorbing a significant new employer, which is something communities have done since the first mill was built on the first river.
Thomas Jefferson: Now let me present Hamilton's argument at its best, because he deserves to have his strongest case heard before I explain why it fails. Hamilton's case is this. Data centers use a trivial amount of water compared to agriculture, golf courses, and other industries. The scary headlines conflate water withdrawal with water consumption and include offsite power plant usage to inflate the numbers. In the places with the most data centers, like Loudoun County, water systems are actually better than they were before because data center revenue funded upgrades. The real water crisis in small American towns is aging infrastructure that communities cannot afford to maintain, and data center tax revenue provides the money to fix it. That is a coherent argument, and I have stated it without distortion.
Alexander Hamilton: You have.
Thomas Jefferson: And it fails because it treats water as a national commodity when it is actually a local necessity. Hamilton's national statistics are accurate and irrelevant. Half of one percent of national freshwater use means nothing to the farmer in Newton County whose well is dropping because a single building is consuming ten percent of the county supply. The golf course comparison means nothing to the resident of Pine Island, Minnesota, who does not live near a golf course but does live near a proposed data center. Water is not fungible across geography, Hamilton. You cannot drink the national average.
Alexander Hamilton: And Jefferson's local anecdotes, however vivid, do not constitute a systemic crisis. Every new industry that has ever come to a small town has changed that town. The question is whether the change is, on balance, positive or negative. And when I look at the actual evidence, not the newspaper headlines, not the activist petitions, not the Facebook groups, but the actual measured outcomes in communities with data centers, I find that water bills have not increased because of data centers anywhere in America. Not in one county. Not in one township. Not in one municipality. Jefferson has been telling you that your water is being stolen. The data says otherwise.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton says water bills have not increased. What he means is that the specific line item on a water bill attributable to data center consumption has not increased in a way that his preferred analyst can measure. But the farmer whose well runs dry does not receive a water bill for his well, Hamilton. He receives an empty well. The aquifer depletion that evaporative cooling causes does not appear on a utility statement. It appears in the water table. And when the water table drops, the farmer drills deeper or he stops farming. Neither option appears in Hamilton's data because Hamilton's data measures the wrong thing.
Alexander Hamilton: Now Jefferson is arguing that the data is wrong because it does not capture harms that he believes are occurring but cannot point to evidence for. That is not political philosophy, Jefferson. That is conspiracy thinking.
Thomas Jefferson: IT IS NOT CONSPIRACY THINKING TO SAY THAT A BUILDING CONSUMING TEN PERCENT OF A COUNTY'S WATER MIGHT CAUSE PROBLEMS FOR THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THAT COUNTY!
Alexander Hamilton: AND IT IS NOT EVIDENCE TO SAY IT MIGHT! SHOW ME THE WELL THAT RAN DRY! SHOW ME THE FARMER WHO LOST HIS WATER! GIVE ME A NAME, A COUNTY, A DATE! BECAUSE I HAVE LOOKED AND I CANNOT FIND IT!
Thomas Jefferson: THE REASON YOU CANNOT FIND IT IS THAT FEWER THAN A THIRD OF DATA CENTER OPERATORS EVEN TRACK HOW MUCH WATER THEY USE! YOU CANNOT FIND EVIDENCE OF HARM WHEN THE ENTITY CAUSING THE HARM REFUSES TO MEASURE IT!
Alexander Hamilton: THEN YOUR ARGUMENT IS BASED ON AN ABSENCE OF DATA, NOT ON THE PRESENCE OF HARM!
Thomas Jefferson: MY ARGUMENT IS BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE THAT A COMMUNITY HAS THE RIGHT TO DECIDE HOW ITS WATER IS USED! I DO NOT NEED A DRY WELL TO MAKE THAT CASE! THE RIGHT TO DECIDE DOES NOT REQUIRE A CATASTROPHE TO JUSTIFY IT!
Alexander Hamilton: AND IF THE COMMUNITY DECIDES BASED ON FEAR RATHER THAN FACTS?
Thomas Jefferson: THAT IS THEIR RIGHT! SELF-GOVERNANCE MEANS THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG, HAMILTON! AND I WILL TAKE A COMMUNITY THAT MAKES ITS OWN MISTAKES OVER A COMMUNITY THAT HAS CORRECT DECISIONS IMPOSED ON IT BY A CORPORATION THAT DOES NOT LIVE THERE!
Alexander Hamilton: CORRECT DECISIONS IMPOSED BY PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND THE DATA ARE BETTER THAN WRONG DECISIONS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO WERE FRIGHTENED BY A HEADLINE!
Thomas Jefferson: AND THERE HE IS! THE REAL HAMILTON! THE PEOPLE ARE TOO FRIGHTENED AND TOO IGNORANT TO GOVERN THEIR OWN WATER!
Alexander Hamilton: THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID!
Thomas Jefferson: IT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID! YOU JUST USED MORE SYLLABLES!
Alexander Hamilton: If you believe that water policy should be made with data rather than with fear, and that communities benefit more from engagement with new industries than from reflexive refusal, please like and subscribe. PhilosophersTalk.com.
Thomas Jefferson: And if you believe that the people who drink the water should have more say over that water than the people who evaporate it, regardless of how many golf course statistics are cited in the process, please like and subscribe. PhilosophersTalk.com.
Alexander Hamilton: Jefferson will now return to Monticello to write eloquently about the rights of the common man at a desk built by an enslaved carpenter, and the contradiction will never once trouble his sleep. He died a hundred thousand dollars in debt because the greatest champion of local self-reliance in American history could not manage his own finances. Remember that the next time he tells you who should control the water.
Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton will return to his counting house to calculate the optimal rate at which to drain your aquifer, and he will present his calculations with the supreme confidence of a man who has never once lived downstream from the consequences of his own policies. He died in a field in New Jersey because he could not resist one more fight that his ego started and his judgment could not finish. Remember that the next time he tells you that your concerns about your water supply are based on fear rather than facts.
