Brace yourself for a winter of discontent, of strikes and protests, rising prices and dwindling living standards, and all of it pretty much traceable back to one cause: energy costs.
asserted
all → brace → cause
Between the current public sector ‘work to rule’, politics dominating sports coverage and Orange Order marches making headlines once again, rampant inflation fuelled by an energy crisis is just about all we need to plunge us right back to the hungry 1980s.
asserted
we → rule → 1980s
The price that farmers, manufacturers, hauliers, hospitality, retailers, importers, producers pay for their energy impacts directly on the consumer, meaning more and more pressure on household finances, wages stretched more and more thinly, and more and more people, who would once have counted themselves as comfortable, now feeling a chilling pinch.
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who → pay → pinch
And whatever efforts Simon Harris and Jack Chambers make in next week’s budget, everybody is going to suffer the effects of rising fuel costs.
asserted
everybody → make → costs
Because it seems that the multi-billion-euro tech industry, on which our Exchequer depends so alarmingly, is to be buffeted from the worst of the pain with energy subsidies for data centres.
asserted
Exchequer → seem → centres
With a net profit of just $132 bn last year, the poor souls in Google are truly pulling the divil by the tail, and so they, and their equally impoverished bros across the tech sector, are in line for Irish taxpayer-funded assistance to pay their massive electricity bills.
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they → pull → bills
Google owns the largest single data centre in the country, at Grange Castle 2 in Dublin, which extends to almost 327,000 square feet.
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which → own → feet
To put that in context, the average Irish family home is less than 2,000 square feet, but such centres consume far more electricity and water, output far more carbon emissions, and make an awful lot more noise on a 24/7 basis, than a couple of hundred households.
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centres → put → households
And they don’t exactly contribute to a sense of community, as a housing cluster might, since the only things they accommodate are your social media videos, messages and photos, your Spotify and Netflix streaming files, the mobile apps, web pages and online shopping catalogues you casually access every day.
uncertain
you → contribute → community
But because of our reliance on the big tech overlords, who have convinced us that these services are vital to our everyday existence, we have no option but to put up, shut up, and cough up.
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we → convince → option
At least, that’s what we’re led to believe, and so we’ve allowed this country to become one of Europe’s biggest data centre hubs with scarcely a murmur of protest.
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country → ’ → protest
Last year, data centres consumed almost a quarter of our entire electricity output, and as much treated drinking water as 340,000 homes.
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centres → consume → homes
Yet while households and ordinary businesses faced strict mandatory regulations on water usage over the hot, dry summer, there was no limit placed on the data centres’ consumption – in fact, their demand for water spiked.
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demand → face → water
No hosepipe bans for them, otherwise they’d dangerously overheat and whither, then, your Instagram holiday
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they → overheat → them
But other countries haven’t been quite so docile, and a growing backlash against data centres – not just because of their environmental issue, but also sparked by concern over their role in the growth of artificial intelligence – is set to be the most decisive issue in the upcoming US midterm elections.
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countries → grow → elections
Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders has called for a halt to all new data centre development, noting that ‘People are looking around worried about how quickly the technology is moving, how little control they have over it, how will data centres impact their community in terms of electric rates and water utilisation.’
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centres → call → rates
The need for more and more data centres, it seems, is primarily driven by the surging demand for artificial intelligence, even though experts in the area have warned of a ten percent possibility that AI could wipe out humanity within the decade.
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AI → seem → decade
The leading companies are racing each other to develop ‘self-improving superintelligence’ of a kind that will make human input unnecessary, according to top boffin Jacob Coxon, ‘and gambling with our lives.’
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input → lead → lives
A recent US poll found that people are more opposed to living near a data centre than a nuclear power plant.
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people → find → plant
But imagine the panic if informed experts warned that there was a one-in-ten chance of a nuclear accident or war wiping out humanity by 2036?
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accident → imagine → 2036
Yet we’ll continue to build data centres to power this proliferation of a technology that could extinguish us like the dinosaurs in the next few years.
uncertain
that → continue → years
And what’s more, we’ll give them tax breaks and energy subsidies to help it along.
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we → ’ → it
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we → accept → article
The Aporia
