To the editor:

The recent opinion piece, “What if we’d treated factories like data centers?” by Rich Lowry omitted several directly relevant facts.

There would be less public pushback if data centers were treated like factories. Zoning often allows data centers to be located in or next to residential areas where a noisy factory would not be allowed.

There was indeed much public opposition to the industrial revolution and its accompanying pollution and devaluing of labor. This lead to environmental laws and unions.

“We have imposed huge tariffs on the rest of the world …” is misleading. We have imposed huge import taxes (tariffs) on Americans. We, not other countries, pay the tariffs.

Taking these facts into account it is obvious that we will have many infrastructure, environmental, and workforce messes to clean up if we were to treat data centers as Mr. Lowry advocates.

The opinion page should not be home to essays that are poorly thought out or deliberately misleading.

Kim Roddis,

Lawrence