Climate change is real. The Earth is warming. Human activity has caused the warming. Seas are rising. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. We need to do several things to halt the increases in emissions of all kinds. In practical terms, this means engaging with, and sometimes overruling, the sectoral interests of those doing the emitting. These are the new fault lines emerging between Irish environmental policy and Irish industrial policy. Data centres are the power plants of our digital, ideas-based, 21st-century economy. Data needs and data traffic are expanding exponentially, resulting in a very large increase in data…