Take a look at these two insects.
Pretty similar right? Both flying insects, both yellow and black. Both have stingers. But to a gardener they could not be more different.
The image on the left is a honey-bee. They are critical to the pollination of many plants, especially those that produce nuts and fruits.
In a world without the honey-bee we'd still have food because grains and other plant-based food is often wind/self pollinated. But we'd have less variety, growing food would be harder, and prices would be a lot more.
The image on the right is a yellow-legged hornet. They stress your gardens: they chew bark, damage fruit and - most importantly - hunt other pollinators. A garden without them is a healthier garden.
But the point is, if you don't know your insects, haven't researched how each impact the garden and have a "no flying insects" policy for your garden, your garden will grow more slowly, and garden by garden - you create a world where food is more expensive, less resilient and less bountiful.
Lumping bees and hornets under "flying insects" is like lumping bitcoin mining operations and AI data centres under "data centres": technically accurate, useless for policy, and dangerous for the grid.
Yet that is exactly what happened in Cedar Falls in Black Hawk County, Iowa yesterday.
The city council voted unanimously to block a Bitcoin mining facility from its 60% wind-powered industrial park - an operation that would have monetised surplus energy, and balanced the intermittency of that wind energy, without competing with a single resident for electricity.
The concerns? Power usage, losing control of the city and fear that these operations would consume more electricity than the city itself.
Every single one of those concerns applies to AI data centres. None of them apply to Bitcoin mining.
🤦♂️
Source:
kwwl.com/news/no-crypto-mini…
They sprayed the bee.
Here is the nuance most people miss: the gardener who sprays pesticide on all flying insects does not get a pest-free garden. They get an unpollinated one
The fruit costs more. The garden grows more slowly. The ecological balance is more fragile.
A grid with flexible load has a shock absorber. When demand spikes, the miner steps aside in less than a second, freeing capacity without anyone building a new power plant.
A grid without Bitcoin mining has no buffer, no surplus buyer and no way to balance supply and demand in real time without firing up gas-peaker plants that cost more and sit idle most of the year.
The gardener who knows the difference has a healthier garden. The grid operator who knows the difference has a healthier grid. The word "data centre" is doing the same work as "flying insect."
It collapses two fundamentally different things into one category so that people can avoid understanding the difference. The resilience of the grid suffers - and consumers get higher prices
And this is worth understanding: it is human nature to fear what we do not fully understand
If you cannot tell which insect pollinates and which one predates, the rational response is to keep both out. But rational is not the same as smart. Because playing it safe with a category you haven't bothered to research doesn't remove the risk.
It just makes sure the risk is invisible until the garden, and those who rely on it, suffer.