Remember 2018, when every city council, major airline, and coffee giant suddenly decided that plastic sip-lids were the frontline of planetary salvation? It was the great Plastic Straw Panic. Celebrities made somber videos, corporate PR teams scrambled, and public policy shifted on a dime. The entire crusade was built on an eye-popping stat repeated with absolute, religious Americans use 500 million plastic straws every single day. With 330 million Americans, that is roughly 1.5 straws per person per day. It sounded scientific and was repeated by reporters and even the National Park Service. With institutions and people we trust every day without verifying, you might be shocked to learn that this estimate wasn’t the outcome of a peer-reviewed publication. It wasn’t even something derived from a trade association representing the largess of American straw manufacturing. Instead, the statistic was actually an environmental science project of a well-meaning nine-year-old kid in Vermont named Milo Cress. Milo’s project was totally defensible for a fourth-grader. But major media outlets, international corporations and politicians took that number, ran it through the viral echo chamber, and regurgitated it without a single second of basic scrutiny. Overnight, a kid’s napkin-math guess became unquestioned gospel. In this form, it spurred legislation that put the weight of jail time and $1,000 fines behind it — as with a California bill. We didn't need bot farms in China or foreign influence operations to fall for it. We did it all by ourselves, the way humans always do — in the glorious, chaotic excess of the crowd. Which brings us to today’s issue sweeping the the great data center panic.如果你最近读了新闻，你会以为那些为现代世界提供动力的闪亮灰色盒子，是活脱脱的科幻巨石碑，正要来抽干我们的河流、把电网榨到只剩铜线，还让我们坐在黑暗中。又一次，令人眩晕的数字被抛来抛去，被大肆渲染，瞬间化作道德恐慌。听着，这些并非别有用心的论调，提出它们的人也并非恶人。被脱缰的数字牵着走，只是人类典型的错误——一种我们会一起陷入、等冷静下来后又会一起发笑的古怪集体幻觉。因为当你剥去刷末日新闻带来的焦虑，能源与水的现实其实悄然堪称Every time you flip a light switch or pour a glass of tap water, you are benefiting from the quiet, cumulative genius of generations of engineers, hydrologists and grid operators far smarter than any of us. As writer Charles Mann quips, we live like royalty and don’t know it. Our modern infrastructure wasn't built by panicking; it was built by solving tricky engineering problems with cool-headed design. Data centers are big. They use a lot of juice, and they need cooling. Water and power are challenges in particular — they require real engineering, localized planning, and honest numbers. This is the norm for any major industrial effort — steelmaking or computer chip fabrication. Both of which, it should be noted, far outstrip data center water use. So, what’s the revolutionary, radical solution to integrating data centers into American life?

令人意外的是，这其实相当乏味，而令人欣喜的是，应当像对待其他任何行业一样对待它们，让它们公开交易，并期望它们自食其力。禁令和暂停令忽视了处理数据中心更为有效的工具组合。首先，现有的妨害法已经保护了社区的安宁。无论你是凌晨两点吹大号，还是数据中心在运营，制造噪音都是被禁止的。这些强硬手段更可能适得其反，而非保护美国人。从根本上说，公共政策既不应惩罚也不应偏袒数据中心。正如体育场馆的经济发展激励和再工业化激励一次又一次失败一样，那些试图用未公开、无上限的补贴把数据中心吸引到自家后院的社区，很可能发现自己变得更穷。这些政策是被错误宣传为制胜达阵的失误。

政策制定者最好一视同仁，而非偏袒任何一方。在推高电力成本的问题上，我们应确保数据中心支付基于市场的费率，并允许它们自带发电设施，而不是被过时的垄断束缚。数据中心是复杂的大型能源用户。我们应让它们探索离网数据中心、表后发电等选项，并继续拓展数据中心成为良好电网公民的途径。所有这些都为过于僵化的能源行业注入了灵活性。美国从未因每次新技术需要更大插头就惊恐逃窜而向前发展。我们最擅长的，是相互挑战以看清事实、坚持透明，并让既定的法律原则承担重任。放下干草叉，把恐慌留在过去。

我们可以保护我们的社区，要求大型科技公司为其账单买单，并建设未来。我们可以同时做到这一切，只要我们信任那些久经考验的美国机构。乔什·T·史密斯是太平洋法律基金会繁荣与环境及自然资源领域的高级研究员。梅根·詹金斯是PLF的战略研究主任。