Comment by roywiggins
6 months ago
I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller.
We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness.
Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.
I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.
Taxes can have nuance.
You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use.
We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates.
In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
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A lot of beef is produced in such a way that taxing municipal water won't make a material difference. Even buying market rate water rights in the high desert, which already happens in beef production, is a pretty small tariff on the beef.
If it only applies to beef, fine. If it's ALL agriculture...
I can live without another datacenter - I get very little utility from "one more" - but I have to eat, generally every day..
> We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness.
Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football fields while we’re at it.
That's a debate worth having too! And it doesn't block this AI debate from continuing nonetheless.
Water taxes should probably be regional. The price of water in the arid Southwest is much higher than toward the East coast. You might see both datacenters and beef production moving toward states like Tennessee or Kentucky.
Of course golf courses are useful as shown by the fact that people pay to use them. Perhaps you mean that you personally haven't (yet) found them useful, but you know that different people want different things. I think eating shrimp is disgusting and never eat them but I don't want to ban global shrimp production because the people it would harm are not me!