I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.
You can easily write a law that looks like this:
There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use.
We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my water rate at home is also different than if I were running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already discriminate for power and water based on end use. at least where I live. Most places I have lived have different commercial and residential rates.
In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
Yes, if you don't like datacenters, tax datacenters. If you want to do it via a tax on the water they use then I guess that works.
But the environment doesn't really care whether the water is being used by a datacenter or something else. My point is just that data centers are actually more efficient users of water compared to many less-controversial users.
>In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
And yet, if you believe the environmentalist argument in the first place, the price of beef should go up for the damages it causes. Hence why a lot of people think the people complaining about AI are wearing an environmentalist mask, rather than having an actual care about the environment.
Pigouvian taxes are fine, but should be applied across all sources of damage.
A lot of beef is produced in such a way that taxing municipal water won't make a material difference. Even buying market rate water rights in the high desert, which already happens in beef production, is a pretty small tariff on the beef.
