Zack Polanski has discovered the root cause of climate change: data centres. Not cars. Not agriculture. Not the fact that politicians fly to climate conferences instead of Zooming in like the rest of us plebs. Data centres.
The Green Party wants stricter rules to limit water and energy use by the facilities that power, among other things, the Zoom calls Polanski uses to attend parliament, the email servers holding his constituent complaints, and the cloud storage for whatever carbon-neutral policy documents his office generates at 3 a.m.
A temporary ban, he suggests. As if the problem is the newness. As if data centres built in 2019 somehow consume less electricity than ones built in 2024. The proposal has the energy of someone who noticed their electricity bill went up and decided the solution was to ban electricity, just for a bit, until everyone calms down.
Here’s what actually happens if you ban new data centres: the existing ones get older, less efficient, and consume more power per unit of computation. But sure, temporary bans are great for long-term infrastructure planning. Ask any grid operator how much they love regulatory whiplash.
The real comedy is that Polanski’s own parliamentary operations depend entirely on the infrastructure he wants to restrict. His emails travel through data centres. His voting records live in data centres. His political career, such as it is, exists in data centres. Demanding a temporary ban on them while remaining completely reliant on their existence is like a fish calling for a temporary ban on water.
The Greens want energy limits, not new construction. Which means the same amount of demand chasing the same amount of supply, except older. Physics doesn’t negotiate.