Matthew Kordon

As a reminder, data centers do not take up a dangerous amount of water. Even in a drought, I do not support punishing data centers more than anyone else. Nevertheless, their presence is growing rather fast, and they take up a meaningful amount of electricity. Data centers, when deciding a place to be built, ought to have lots that are considered for environmental significance and for health in scale with the amount of quality time people spend there, whether construction workers or long-term jobs. My understanding is that newer centers tend to be, already, more efficient typically, but that data centers are better suited in cooler climates in contrast with places like Florida. I believe North Carolina should neither resist nor attract data centers but should instead go out of its way to produce abundant, varied, cutting-edge energy. That might sound like a thoughtless answer, but keep in mind I am deeply aware of efforts in my state to at-once attack and promote data centers and I oppose both groups on principle. The science community is making great strides with nuclear power lately but has major challenges to overcome with solar and wind power, which I suspect will be achieved eventually but in the short-term limit viability. I speak as someone with a computer science bachelor’s degree.

To address that, I have two options. I can demand our state Constitution be amended to stop requiring “uniform” education, or I would need to ensure every school in the state prepares kids for the career relevant to Wake/ Durham Counties and only those two. The latter is preposterous, and hopefully I made clear the reason why! It is funny how easy it is to point people to the draconian way we do not allow nuanced, localized differences in our education system. I lament that my preferred solution of decentralizing education and allowing alternatives to public school is a very uphill battle to implement. It is a common-sense solution: give locals the tools to prepare students for the industries nearby to them. Non-locals do not need those same tools and that is for the locals to decide for themselves. If we had 100 school systems instead of one central system, and if higher-ed was not funded through equity bonds that typically reduce their specialization trajectory, we would absolutely have plenty of institutions from Kindergarten to graduate school preparing students for science, biology, and whatever else. It took me no time at all to type up this answer because “freedom” is shockingly often the simplest and most ignored solution to our problems in a circumstance of ever-consolidating power. Hence, our need for freedom (the pendulum swinging back where it came from) is, in this case, the direct and most effective solution.

I must disclose before answering that, as of this Summer, I work as a paralegal in asbestos lawsuits. In the Environmental Stewardship plank I added to my Party’s state platform (prior to getting or even knowing about my new job), I spoke about how harm to health and life are grounds for tort lawsuits. Keeping these laws and our courts is sufficient to ensure corporations and the government alike are held accountable for not taking health seriously. Parents need greater discretion to decide what vaccines to introduce into their children, but on the other hand, institutions, even some public ones, within reason, should likewise have the discretion to set rules about health requires for customers and visitors. I tend to believe firmly in rights of association in which a group has the right to exclude more than an individual has a right to interfere in the sense that property can be collectively owned and operated by a group. This allows for peer pressure to get a vaccine and wash your hands, et cetera. I sometimes joke that I am a 1990s politician out of time; I think Bill Clinton had the right idea when he became sincerely concerned about having a reserve of vaccines as a social program in case of natural disaster, as well as for the country to take measures again bio-terrorism. But since the 1990s, we have largely gone too far with getting the government involved with our health; we may be more advanced in the field of science than we were in the 1990s, but our ability to govern has gotten no better, and in fact has gotten worse since then, and I therefore believe we cannot trust the government with controlling our health; the details of the COVID-19 Pandemic response demonstrate what I mean. Ultimately, well-being is the responsibility of the citizens in their communities with their local and (sometimes) state governments except in the narrow cases within true, major emergencies.

The hard-to-swallow truth of how we got into this mess is that scientists competed with each other to win the favoritism of corrupt politicians who then gave said scientists nice, powerful jobs on the payroll of taxpayers as technocrats. We learned the hard way that we were placing too much trust in said people to have our best interests at heart and a willingness to pursue truth above all else. More often than not, they meant well, but even so, the public came around to realizing that the road to hell can be paved with good intentions and started resenting scientists and others bossing them around for their safety’s sake as though that was more important than the trade-offs. Nothing short of humility is going to fix this: fewer powerful technocrats in government, less elite hierarchy within the scientific community, oaths to fight misinformation/ our own assumptions, less politically correct speech on matters of fact, and a willingness to cautiously engage fringe views and questionable science. Meanwhile, elected officials can do the same, fighting misinformation as role models, which would be more reliable to expect out of my peers if getting elected was not so tantalizing that a person would lie and cheat their way to victory. For that, we would need to limit the government and treat the Constitution as the ultimate law of the land, not like a living, unimportant, flimsy document that has no restraints on elected officials.