No you don't need to be pragmatic. You need to protect people from harm.

Spent the day earlier this week walking the State Capital as part of lobby day with Penn Future and Conservation Voters. A House Representative who will remain anonymous listened well to the group's feedback about:

1. Legislating to make entering non-disclosure agreements with local governments illegal when used to hide data center development plans from citizens
2. Requiring the Pennsylvania Utility Commission to define Public Interest in their hearings to allow accountability
3. Creating a regulatory frame work to protect consumers from large load data centers by accelerating clean energy deployment, protecting rate payers, and creating an energy independence fund (to be funded by data center developers who are not bringing their own generation and transmission infrastructure.)

These are all commonsense proposals. And reasonable people can disagree on the details.

Pennsylvania has a poor energy mix that needs to be addressed

Pennsylvania is a laggard in deploying sustainable energy and is overly dependent on aged nuclear facilities and fossil fuels, primarily natural gas. If nuclear is excluded the other low carbon sources account for less than 5% of the mix.

When compared to the national average, you can see Pennsylvania is a laggard in everything except extremely aged nuclear and is excessively dependent on fossil fuel. The average State, and Pennsylvania should not aspire to be average, has 5x the non-nuclear low carbon sources.

The representative implied, despite being in a long held majority, that this was Josh Shapiro's fault. Either because the Governor appoints the Public Utility Commission or because he approves new large generation facilities.

As an independent voter, this blame the other party game is nonsense. Pennsylvania needs to be a leader in sustainable generation and not excessively tied to aging nuclear and gas generation.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you sit, government needs to influence this strategic liability.

Regardless on which side of the aisle you sit, you have a fiduciary responsibility for protecting people's health and safety and for protecting the environment for future Pennsylvanians.

After a reasonable discussion the representative tossed out a throw away line paraphrased as:

AI is the future, you know, people love their chatGPT, and stuff. Right?

My reaction was smile and nod. Because a lobbying 'rule' is don't argue with the representative. But this is obliviousness to wide spread concerns that are important to a legislator. Seemed more like what I'd expect from an out of touch boomer than a millennial. Guess when you read the party line you can sound like a boomer.

Some things for all reps. to think about.

1. If, as is widely reported, AI is a pyramid scheme without a viable, profitable business model, Houston we have a problem. Maybe a systemic financial problem. Perhaps a financial collapse is the future of AI.
2. If a bunch of exuberant speculators build earth damaging quantities of new fossil fuel generation, Houston we have a problem. Maybe a earth scaled environmental problem. Perhaps global environmental degradation is the future of AI.
3. If the crazzzzzzy quantity of capacity being proposed and built is over kill because perhaps more efficient AI architectures emerge (as is normal in the information technology space,) Houston we have a problem. Maybe a country strewn with semi-built data centers owned by bankrupt 'carve out' corporate entities problem. Perhaps decades of work to clean up this litter is the future of AI.
4. The promise of AI has been well hyped since 2016, almost a decade. There are a variety of proven niches (that do not require GW-scale data centers) but the everyone wants ChatGPT is lame statement. Maybe there is no killer use case that requires systemic financial problem or environmental degradation or over built unusable capacity. Perhaps a number of small but efficient use cases are all that emerge from the AI hype bubble is the future.

But the bottom line is that a State Representative (even a Republican representative) is in no position to say the people want chatGPT so we just need to destroy the economy or the environment. It is tone deaf and politically foolish.

This disregard for concerns about AI would be kind of like saying, sure we side with the tobacco growers even though smoking kills people. Or like saying firemen love the way PFAS chemical extinguish fires so we side with the chemical companies.