On the Twelve-Month Warning

The principle operating here, stated plainly, is: when the people whose water and electricity my enterprise will consume begin to object, I shall ask their government to bring them round before their objection can hinder me, and I shall set the deadline. Let us ask whether this principle, universalised, produces coherence or contradiction.

First, the facts on which the maxim rests. Firms in the artificial intelligence trade, among them Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco, have told ministers of the United Kingdom that they have twelve months to head off public opposition to datacentres, or risk protests of the American kind that could threaten construction. The objection they anticipate is not invented. It grows from successive dry summers and rising energy bills, which is to say from the two things a datacentre most conspicuously draws upon. I do not know the inner motive of any firm, and the facts do not tell me. One may infer an interest in securing sites before resistance hardens. One may equally suppose a sincere belief that the public misunderstands what these buildings cost and return. My method does not need to decide between these, because it judges the maxim and not the heart.

Now universalise it. Suppose every party facing popular objection adopted the rule of asking the state to dissolve that objection on a timetable the party itself had fixed. The water company, the motorway builder and the incinerator operator would each arrive at the ministry with a stopwatch. The state would become a persuader on commission, and its assurances would carry a known interest behind them. Here the contradiction appears, and it is the same one I find in the lying promise. A false promise works only because promises are generally believed, and a world of false promises abolishes belief in promises. The firms’ request works only if ministers’ reassurances are received as disinterested judgments about the public good. A world in which ministers routinely reassure the public at industry’s request is a world in which no such reassurance is believed. The maxim consumes the credibility it needs. Willed universally, it produces exactly the suspicion it was meant to prevent.

The strongest reply deserves its full weight. Infrastructure requires consent. A firm that foresees conflict and tells the government early is behaving more responsibly than one that builds first and absorbs the protests later. To warn is not to command, and twelve months of public explanation might be precisely what a democracy owes itself before it decides.

I accept all of this, and it changes nothing about the maxim, because it describes a different one. There is a principle that would survive universalisation: I shall lay before the public every term of my project, including what it takes from their reservoirs in a drought and who pays for the grid it requires, and abide by their judgment. Any industry could act on that, and the more of them did, the more trustworthy the whole practice of public consent would become. The test which separates the two maxims is simple. Could the firms’ request be announced in full to the people it concerns? “We have asked your government to change your minds within a year, before you can stop us” is not a sentence that persuades when spoken aloud. A maxim that must be whispered to succeed has already confessed its character.

Consider, then, how the maxim regards the persons it concerns. The phrase “US-style protests” files citizens beside flood risk and supply-chain delay, as a hazard to be mitigated before the cranes arrive. Picture a woman in a market town during a hosepipe ban, carrying her washing-up water out to the tomatoes in a plastic bowl, with the electricity bill propped against the kettle. She has formed a judgment about where her water and her money go. The maxim does not ask that judgment for its reasons. It asks how long it will take to remove. That is to treat a rational being as an obstacle rather than as a co-legislator of the conditions she must live under, and no quantity of training runs makes it otherwise.

The duties follow from the foundations. The firms owe the public reasons that would hold if every figure were disclosed. Ministers owe the public a refusal: they may hear the warning, but they may not accept the commission. Their task is to set the terms on which datacentres may be built, in public, and let the industry meet them.

The clock the firms have handed to Whitehall runs for twelve months. The woman with the washing-up bowl keeps no such clock. She has only next summer, and she will remember who tried to hurry her.