ESSAY · NOVEMBER 2026

“The cloud” sounds weightless. “Artificial intelligence” sounds like software. “Innovation” directs our attention toward what comes next.

None of those words tells a neighbor what will be built across the road.

Some proposed data centers would generate their everyday electricity on site by burning natural gas. These are not simply buildings filled with computers and equipped with emergency generators. They are computing campuses paired with power-generating operations.

Just north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, one proposed campus would run on 864 natural-gas engines, each nearly as powerful as a freight-train locomotive, running day and night. For the families nearby, that is not an abstraction. It is the sound outside the bedroom window.

This essay is addressed to the people who approve, finance, and build these projects.

You may believe in the technology. You may see jobs, investment, and useful services ahead. But before you ask a community to accept the consequences, there is something you owe yourself as well as the people affected: an honest examination of what you are choosing to place in their lives.

Not simply whether the project is permitted. Not simply whether it will succeed. Whether you can defend what you are asking other people to live with.

What we owe our neighbors

Most of us recognize a basic obligation to the people around us. We should not treat their homes, health, or peace of mind as expendable. We should not mistake our power to make a decision for their agreement to live with it.

If someone proposed a substantial industrial operation near our home, we would want to understand its emissions, its noise, and its possible effects on water and land. We would want answers before construction began. We would want our concerns to matter.

Those expectations do not become unreasonable when someone else’s investment depends on setting them aside.

If you would hesitate to place your own family beside the operation you are proposing, that hesitation deserves your attention. If you would want stronger protections for your own home, you owe others the same consideration.

And if you would consider those conditions acceptable for yourself, remember that your willingness does not substitute for someone else’s agreement.

The machinery behind the promise

A data center that burns gas for its everyday electricity is also a power-generating operation. That equipment is not incidental to the project. It is part of what the community is being asked to accept.

The concerns include greenhouse-gas emissions, air pollution, noise, fuel handling, maintenance waste, and the demands of keeping industrial machinery operating. Water use and land disturbance can add to those burdens.

Not every project will have the same effects. Location, equipment, operating practices, and safeguards matter. Potential harm is not the same as demonstrated harm.

But uncertainty does not remove responsibility. It creates an obligation to investigate openly, reduce avoidable harm, and explain what remains unknown.

These are not simply categories in an environmental review. They are questions about the conditions in which people will live. Will they be able to rest? Will they trust the protections around their water and air? If something goes wrong, will anyone with the power to correct it still be listening?

Residents should not have to prove that disaster is certain before asking how they will be protected.

What the language leaves out

The ethical obligation is not merely to avoid a false statement. It is to avoid leaving people with a misleading impression.

A gas engine does not care what a company’s sustainability report says. It burns what it burns.

If everyday power will come from burning fuel, that belongs in the public description—not only in technical documents residents must find and decipher for themselves.

Disclosure should help people understand a decision before it is made. It should not become a defense offered afterward: the information was available, if only someone had known where to look.

When the benefits do not justify the burdens

The stated benefits deserve scrutiny, not automatic acceptance. Promises of jobs, tax revenue, investment, and useful technology must be weighed against what a community may be asked to live with—and for how long.

When the design is hundreds of engines burning gas every day for decades, I believe the promised benefits are far outweighed by the long-term harms: sustained fossil-fuel dependence, pollution, disruption of people’s homes and daily lives, and obligations that may outlast the companies and officials making the decisions. Jobs and tax revenue can come from many kinds of development. Clean air, quiet nights, and safe water, once lost, are far harder to restore.

That judgment does not require pretending there are no benefits. It requires refusing to treat those benefits as sufficient justification.

Even where a project brings local revenue or employment, we should ask whether those gains warrant the burdens, whether less harmful alternatives exist, and who will be responsible if the consequences prove worse than promised.

A home is not just a property value. It is where someone sleeps, raises children, grows food, cares for family, or expects to spend the rest of their life.

Their lives cannot become an acceptable sacrifice simply because someone else has decided the benefits are worth it.

An opportunity to speak is not enough

Public participation should mean more than an opportunity to express concern.

Can residents obtain independent advice? Do they have time to understand the proposal? Can they challenge its assumptions? Can their participation change its location, scale, conditions—or whether it proceeds at all?

Independent scrutiny should be part of responsible decision-making, not something a community must struggle to purchase for itself.

Not every objection can determine an outcome. Communities disagree, and public decisions require judgment. But meaningful participation requires genuine possibilities. If the only acceptable answer is yes, the process is not asking for agreement. It is asking for acceptance.

A decision can be lawful, profitable, and professionally rewarded—and still leave a moral question unanswered.

A permit cannot, by itself, establish that the arrangement is fair.

Responsibility does not end on opening day

A commercial deadline is not a moral exemption. The fact that a company wants electricity quickly does not settle where its power plant should go or what others should be expected to endure.

Nor does the obligation end when construction is approved or the facility opens.

If promises about noise or pollution prove wrong, who must act? Who pays for independent monitoring? What happens if ownership changes, the business fails, or equipment is abandoned? Who funds closure and cleanup?

Long-lived infrastructure can shape the choices available to future residents, who had no part in approving it. Responsibility therefore extends beyond today’s transaction and today’s officials.

The people receiving the benefits should not be free to leave the consequences behind.

The decision you must live with

I am not against AI. I wrote a book with one. I can recognize a technology’s usefulness and still question the conditions under which its infrastructure is built.

The choice is not between accepting every proposal and rejecting technology altogether. We can insist that some proposals change—and that some should not proceed.

You may never live beside what you approve. You may never hear it at night, worry about it during a storm, or wonder whether a promise made years earlier will still be honored.

That distance does not diminish your responsibility. It makes it easier to forget—and more important to remember.

The people affected are not obstacles to your plans. They are people with lives as important to them as yours is to you. Their homes are not less deserving of care because they stand where you want to build.

Before you proceed, ask whether you have given them the honesty, consideration, and protection you would expect for yourself. Ask whether their participation can genuinely change your plans. And ask whether you are prepared to reconsider—not merely explain—what you propose.

When the meetings are over and the contracts are signed, there is still a question no permit can answer for you: can you live with what you have asked other people to live with?

Not as a company. Not as an officeholder. As a person.

That is the moral cost of decisions made for other people.