Data-center drama queens risk Americas future by denying truths of the past

When American manufacturing was truly coming into its own in the early 20th century, workers sometimes labored 12-hour days for seven days a week and risked life and limb working near dangerous machinery.Factories blackened the skies of American cities and poisoned waterways. Yet some of the same people who insist that the American economy needs to re-industrialize to return to a version of those halcyon days can’t bear the thought of the construction of industrial-scale computing facilities.They complain that data centers are unsightly and use lots of energy and water.But what do they think major factories are like? If today’s standards applied, we almost certainly never would have built manufacturing facilities at scale. Industrial buildings may look pretty in Edward Hopper cityscapes, and facilities like the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex had a certain majesty as captured by photographers and painters.Otherwise, factories — especially when clustered together — generally looked more like William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” than anything the average local zoning commission would want in the neighborhood. No one ever said, “God, that smokestack looks gorgeous — I wish I lived closer to it!”Data centers have caused outrage because they look like big warehouses — but imagine the vapors everyone would have if they spewed soot over streets and houses, created slag heaps, divided neighborhoods with rail lines and other supporting infrastructure, and packed workers into subpar housing nearby. Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought she had a trump card in the anti-data center case when she brandished two jars of dirty water from a house near a data center (the house’s well was perhaps disturbed during construction).But that’s nothing compared to the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, which repeatedly caught fire from 1868 to 1969 as a by-product of the sort of industry that populists on the left and right look back to fondly. The early...