Stop Bitching about AI (and do something about it)

The "Stop Bitching" Part

A lot of people are against AI. Blaming the tool instead of the people and companies who own and run it is the easy option, and it changes nothing. It points the anger at the thing you can see rather than at the people making the decisions.

Those who benefit at society's expense have no reason to correct you. They stay out of view, collect the returns, and let the public argue with a technology that cannot be held to account.

That anger does not trouble anyone with media reach, political access and money. It does cost you something, though. It crowds out the uses of AI that would help people, and it leaves the decisions that actually matter to whoever turns up to make them.

When people say AI is wrecking the environment, they usually mean something specific and local: the massive industrial shed going up a few fields away, the water it will draw in a dry summer, the hum at two in the morning, the lorries on a road built for tractors, and a power bill that goes up while the building next door takes a tax break.

None of that is a complaint about AI. It is a complaint about how one building got approved, and on what terms. That is a decision made by people. People you can vote for.

An Alternative Scenario

Opposition to the environmental and social effects of AI is justified when those effects are real. The answer is not blanket opposition to the technology. It is enforceable regulation aimed at the companies that build and run the infrastructure.

A data centre is a large industrial site. We already know how to host large industrial sites on terms that work for both sides. The terms simply have to be written down, made binding, and checked by someone the operator does not pay off. A data centre should leave the community around it better off. The relationship has to work both ways.

What follows is the kind of condition list a representative acting for you could insist on. If I have left something out, add it and send it to your candidate as your own.

Environmental and operational standards

Data centres must operate on a net-zero basis. Operators may offset only a limited proportion of their emissions, say no more than 25 per cent, through carbon credits. The rest must be dealt with through measures such as wind and solar generation, improved energy efficiency, and heat-recovery systems that turn waste heat into something usable.
Net-zero requirements must apply to each individual site, not to the combined operations of every data centre a company owns. An operator must not be allowed to let one community carry disproportionate harm because cleaner facilities elsewhere pull the company-wide average into an acceptable range.
Data centres must not compete with nearby communities for essential resources such as water and electricity. Residents and local businesses must be protected from shortages, restrictions and higher costs caused by data-centre demand.
Water use must be declared in detail before permission is granted: the source, the volume, the cooling method, and what happens in a drought. Closed-loop and reclaimed-water cooling should be the default, and drinking water should be the most expensive last resort, not the cheapest one.
Operators must disclose how many backup generators are planned for each site, their combined capacity, how often and how long they are expected to run, and the effect on air quality if they all run at once. Filtering must be fitted so that harmful pollutants are captured and disposed of properly, and routine testing must be confined to reasonable hours.
In sensitive areas, or where a horizontal design would do more damage to the community, data centres must build upwards rather than spread outwards.
Data centres that generate surplus electricity must be allowed to sell it to the grid at commercial rates, provided this does not threaten grid stability or eat into the power the site needs to meet its own commitments. Surplus can come from efficiency gains or from capacity installed ahead of future expansion.
Where there is a practical local use for waste heat, such as a district heating scheme, a school, a leisure centre or commercial greenhouses, the operator must be required to offer it.
Where several data centres are proposed in one region, their impact must be assessed together as well as individually. Approving sites one at a time is how a community ends up surrounded by something nobody ever agreed to.

Planning, transparency and enforcement

Planning permission must carry legally enforceable conditions. It must not be granted on the strength of voluntary statements, aspirations or non-binding promises.
Non-disclosure agreements must have no place in the siting of this kind of infrastructure. A community cannot consent to something it has been barred from discussing, and an official who has signed an NDA is no longer representing the people who elected them.
Operators must keep detailed records of energy and water use, emissions, pollution incidents, generator operation and other relevant data. Records must follow a standard format set by the responsible national regulator and be open to public scrutiny.
Monitoring must continue after the site opens. Noise and air-quality measurement should be ongoing and published.
Operators must fund the independent regulator through a levy fixed in law. The funding arrangement must give them no control or influence over the regulator's decisions, priorities, investigations or operations.
The regulator must employ properly trained inspectors to audit sites and verify compliance with planning conditions, environmental requirements and other rules.
Inspectors must be rotated between facilities and regions to reduce the risk of over-familiarity, complacency or unhealthy relationships with operators.
Fines must be significant. The size of each fine must reflect how serious the breach was, how long it lasted, the harm caused, and whether the operator has breached before.
Inspection reports, findings, enforcement actions and penalties must be published promptly and in full, with no redactions. Operators must not be able to suppress, delay or alter publication.
Affected communities must have a legal right to question inspection findings and get clear, complete, publicly available answers. The regulator must explain what was found, what it means, whether anything was breached, what has to be put right, and when compliance will be checked. Questions and answers must form part of the permanent public record.
Communities must be told about any tax incentives, grants, subsidised infrastructure or other public support an operator receives. This must be published before permission is granted, and updated if further support is given later.
Operators must disclose short and medium-term development plans. Applications and permits must identify foreseeable expansion and set enforceable limits on operational growth.
Permits must be reviewed on a fixed cycle, every five years or so, against the standards of the day. A permit issued in 2026 should not still be governing a site in 2046 on 2026 terms.

Community protections

Data centres must sit a legally established minimum distance from residential areas, far enough to protect residents from noise, light, air pollution and industrial traffic.
Noise assessments must cover average levels, low-frequency noise, tonal character, intermittent noise and night-time conditions, and must account for everything running at once, including cooling systems and backup generators.
Operators must pay for road construction, upgrades, maintenance and repairs made necessary by building and running their facilities. Those costs must not land on the community.
Operators must reach fair agreements with property owners inside the legally defined impact area. That area must be drawn from environmental modelling, noise contours, generator emissions, construction activity, traffic routes and visual effects, not from distance alone.
Communities must be told, before permission is granted, about any restrictions, disruption or other consequences they may face. If unforeseen impacts emerge after approval, they must be dealt with the meaningful involvement of the people affected.
No significant amendment to a permit, operational limit or expansion plan may be approved without consulting the affected community and publishing the reasons for the change.
Community-appointed environmental and oversight representatives must have formal inspection and information rights: access to environmental and operational records, the right to observe specified inspections, the right to request an investigation, and the right to commission independent testing.
Requests from those representatives must get a formal response from the regulator within a period set in law. The request, the response and any action taken must be published as part of the permanent record. If the regulator misses the deadline or does nothing, the community must have somewhere else to go.

Money, jobs and what happens at the end

Large electricity users must sit on their own tariff, so the cost of grid connections and network upgrades falls on the operator rather than on household bills. If a data centre needs a new substation, the people living nearby should not be paying it off through their standing charge.
A fixed share of revenue, or a levy per megawatt of capacity, must go into a community fund that the community itself controls. This is the simplest way to make the relationship work both ways, and the easiest to audit.
Employment commitments must be written into the permit with real numbers: local hiring, apprenticeships, training, and annual public reporting against the targets. Where public money or tax relief is involved, the agreement must allow it to be clawed back if the jobs do not appear.
Operators must post a bond up front to cover demolition, equipment removal and land restoration at end of life. Hardware ages fast and companies fail. Neither should leave a community holding an empty shed and a bill.

What it looks like when this works

Picture a representative who actually speaks for you signing off a data centre on those terms.

Construction work turns up locally. When the site opens, some of your neighbours work there. Others take jobs created because it exists: inspectors, analysts, technicians, maintenance, the regulator's own staff. Waste heat goes into the local pool or a greenhouse instead of the sky. A community fund pays for something the council has been putting off for a decade. Your bill does not quietly subsidise the substation. And when the site reaches the end of its life, the money to clean it up was set aside on day one.

Now picture the same project approved on a handshake and a press release.

The gap between those two outcomes is not about AI. It is about who signed.

You will be told that conditions like these are too harsh, that investors will walk, and that the only workable option is to give operators a free hand. The people making that argument have billions to spend making it sound like common sense. It is not. Large industrial projects get built under strict conditions all the time, in plenty of countries. What conditions actually do is move the profit from cutting corners back towards the community that hosts the site.

The "Do Something about It" Part

This is where it stops being an opinion and starts being a decision.

Permits like these are rarely signed by a head of state. In most places they are decided by planning and zoning bodies, county or municipal councils, and utility regulators, with the tax breaks handed out at state or national level. Some of those people are on your ballot. The rest are appointed by people who are. The ballot line you skip decides what gets built down the road from you.

Three things you can do before the next election, none of which take long.

Find out what is proposed near you. Planning applications are public. Search your local planning register for data centre applications and read the conditions attached to them. You will know within ten minutes whether anyone is asking for the things on this list.

Find out where your candidates stand. My piece Where Do They Actually Stand? sets out what you can do to push your own needs and your community's to the front of the queue. It includes two AI prompts, one for US voters and one for everyone else, that you can edit and paste into your AI chatbot. Switch web search on, pick the deeper reasoning setting if your chatbot offers one, and ask about a named candidate and a single topic. The prompt is built to come back with evidence and sources, and to say plainly when the evidence is not there rather than inventing a position. Then make up your own mind.

Ask one question in public and publish the answer. Pick the sharpest item on the list, the water, the tariff, the decommissioning bond, and put it to a candidate at a public meeting, by email, or on social media. Then post what they said, or post that they said nothing. Both are useful. When a candidate does the right thing, a like or a repost tells them it was noticed, and tells the people who missed it.

Anyone who tries to talk you out of voting knows exactly what your vote is worth. A good representative can carry this from a local council into a state or national agenda. A bad one will take the donation and sign whatever is put in front of them. Both of those are on the same ballot paper, and you are the one who picks.

If this is useful, pass it on. Send it to someone in a community with a project on the way, to a neighbours' group, to anyone who has been told the only choice is take it or leave it. Send it to a candidate and ask which of these conditions they would support.

Arguing about AI online costs you nothing and achieves about the same. Sharing something a neighbour can take to a planning meeting, and voting for someone who will act on it, is the part that counts.

Follow This, That and (Maybe), the Other:

Search This Blog

TT(O)M