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Feeding AI’s Energy Appetite — Cato Podcast

Host: Rikki Schlott, Cato Media Fellow Guests: Travis Fisher, Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies, Cato Institute; Jennifer Huddleston, Senior Fellow in Technology Policy, Cato Institute

Rikki Schlott: Since the Industrial Revolution unleashed human productivity, so-called experts have been saying that economic growth would not be sustainable. As far back as 1798, Malthus predicted that population growth would outrun food production. Then in the 1970s, the Limits to Growth Report similarly predicted resource depletion. Many others have since followed. Today, we hear the same outcry about data centers. We must stop them, critics say, before they use up all of our energy and water resources and hike prices for everyone else along the way. But history shows us that human beings don’t just consume stuff. We also invent stuff. I’m Rikki Schlott and welcome to the Cato Podcast. I’m joined today by Travis Fisher, Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies, and Jennifer Huddleston, Senior Fellow in Technology Policy, to talk about how we can embrace the energy abundance mindset and how we can respond to fearmongering about data centers.

Travis, let’s start with the basics here. What is energy abundance and why should we be optimistic about our energy prospects in the age of AI?

Travis Fisher: Well, as you said, we have a track record of being worried about things like this, being worried about energy consumption, being worried about resource depletion, running out of things in general. And the track record is very clear on this. We don’t run out of stuff. We run straight into more and more, especially energy, especially in the US. We are consistently running into more energy. So using energy depletion or running out of resources as the excuse to oppose data centers makes no sense to me.

Rikki Schlott: And I feel like you often hear people just assuming that more energy use automatically equals a bad thing. How would you refute that sort of mindset?

Travis Fisher: Well, we have a very close correlation between human productivity and human well-being and the use of energy. Over time, you know, going back to the era of Malthus when he was first worried about this, you know, population growth did take a lot of energy. Thankfully, we’ve been able to meet the moment every time. And that correlation is so tight that, you know, for me to hear people say we should use less energy, that’s the same thing as saying we should be less productive. We should have lower standards of living and things like that. So, you know, it’s inherently, I would say it’s the opposite. It’s inherently a good thing. It tracks so closely with human well-being that I say more energy is better.

Rikki Schlott: And can you just, for someone who might not be familiar with the history, explain maybe some moments that we did rise to the occasion in terms of meeting these sort of abundance challenges or any innovations that come to mind that kind of prove this pattern historically?

Travis Fisher: Yeah, the most pressing thing right now — I mean, we are awash in hydrocarbons in the US right now. And the talk for a long time was that we were going to run out. You hear theories about peak oil, that we had peaked our oil production and that we were on this slow slide downward. And that was true for a few decades. You know, we met a local peak in the 1970s. And then if you zoom out, we actually picked up again. We’re at historic levels now because of a technology change. We get better at producing energy. And the technology change in this case was hydraulic fracturing with directional drilling and the shale resources that we always knew about. You know, it really does get back to the question of what even is a resource. If hydrocarbons are trapped in rock that’s a mile deep and it’s really hard to get, that’s not really a resource. But once you figure out, you add that technology layer, you add the element of knowing how to use the resource, then it really becomes a useful resource. And that’s exactly what happens in energy — that happens across the board. So this idea that we’re running out of anything, it really just I think it shows a lack of creativity because we always find out new and better ways to do things and expand and grow.

Rikki Schlott: And Jennifer, can you explain how this idea of energy abundance applies to tech and AI and all the anxiety surrounding data centers, and maybe a good way to start here is just explaining what exactly data centers are and how they’ve been proliferating recently.

Jennifer Huddleston: So data centers are in many cases where the cloud exists. So you think about the number of times that we’re sending emails or we’re sending videos or we’re storing information, whether it’s information that’s deeply personal to us or if it’s financial records or medical records. These are the type of things that we’re having to see an additional amount of storage come online for, not just because of the rise of artificial intelligence and the exciting applications there, but also because we’re having more and more connected devices. We’re having more and more media that we want to access. We’re keeping those videos not on physical VHS tapes anymore, but we’re storing them in the data. And that data largely exists in places like data centers. Data centers are not new — when AI came about, this had been a critical part of infrastructure for a while and is critically important to a number of different elements that we’ve come to rely on in our day-to-day lives and that we expect to be able to rely on. We want faster speeds. We want less latency. We want that video or that email to be able to be sent faster. And so there’s this growing demand for data centers. Now, of course, some of our new technologies, things like artificial intelligence and eventually quantum computing, require more advanced data centers and perhaps even more data centers in general. But that’s not the only reason these exist. If you saw your average data center in a backyard, you probably wouldn’t know whether it was a warehouse, a distribution center, or a data center, unless you got really, really close to it and went inside the building even in many cases.

Rikki Schlott: And so, Travis, can you walk me through what some of the resource-based concerns are surrounding data centers? And I’m curious whether you think that these are entirely new concerns and also whether any of them are justified.

Travis Fisher: I’ll focus on the electricity side. I know there are also a lot of water concerns, and that we now have the infamous brown jar of water from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that’s pointing to resource depletion and souring of drinking water and things like that. I don’t think there’s any specific merit to that, especially tied to data centers. It might be tied to construction in general, but the electricity question is probably the most interesting piece for me because you can’t just categorically wave it away. I think there is a legitimate problem there, but it’s not the fact that data centers are causing a new problem. They’re essentially exposing it. They’re shining a light on an issue that’s been brewing for a very, very long time. We didn’t really have that much growth in electricity demand over the past 20-something years, so we as an industry were somewhat flat-footed coming into this. I think we probably could have anticipated it better, but especially in local pockets — you think about Northern Virginia, the state of Texas is growing like gangbusters and supporting a lot of new data centers. That does put some stress on what’s otherwise a very heavily regulated and socialized system, which is the power grid. There are concerns there that there might be cost shifting — that if you expanded the transmission system as we have it, a lot of those costs, even if they’re driven by a growing industry, a lot of those costs would spill over to everyday ratepayers. We’re seeing a lot of responses to that, like the ratepayer protection pledge at the White House. Some laws in Congress that are being floated to do the same thing at the state level. I will say that it’s an open question where utility rates are going to go with this influx of AI data centers. I think there’s a strong argument that if we do it well, if we implement the new growth well and get out of the way and are sort of supply conscious and trying to bring as much new supply to bear as possible — and I think we’re there at the federal executive branch, states, I think, are a little bit more dug in and trying to hit the pause button — but I think if we do it well, we could actually see rates go down. It’s not a foregone conclusion that more demand means higher prices. This is supposed to be an industry that has natural monopoly features. I don’t completely buy that argument, but if it’s supposed to be one of those network industries that has huge economies of scale, more demand is not a bad thing. More demand could actually reduce average costs. So with that in mind, it’s not a problem necessarily. It’s just how we implement it. I do have a few policy ideas that would help relieve the stress on the incumbent system as we know it. If people want to go and build new networks, I think they should be allowed to do that. We’re seeing more of that and sort of creativity that comes from it. But in general, that crunch — how much electricity is available, where is it going, can we build enough — I think the answer in the long term is, yes, we can absolutely build enough. And if anybody is going to do it, it’s going to be in the US. We’re very good at expanding. We’re very dynamic. There’s a lot of reform that needs to happen on the electricity side to get to that sort of dynamism that you would ideally like to see in this sort of growth area. But right now, it’s a collision between a very fast-moving AI tech industry and a very slow-moving, heavily regulated electricity industry. From my point of view, the thing to do is not to stop the fast-moving growth industry. The thing to do is to reform the slow one and tell it to catch up. I mean, that’s the moment we have right now. I think we can meet the moment, but it’s going to take some reforms.

Jennifer Huddleston: I know Travis is going to want to talk a little bit about those energy reforms. But I do think we need to take a moment and talk about this more generally, because I think this is one of the bigger misunderstandings around data centers that are out there. As Travis pointed out, our demands for energy have been growing outside of data centers — again, particularly in some of these areas where we’ve seen populations move. Texas has had a lot of people move there. Northern Virginia is a very population-dense area, and it’s been a very booming area for a while. You are having an increased demand on electrical grids separate from the data center kind of boom that has been going on. And then you have places like Mississippi, where you have more land, perhaps less demand in certain areas, where you may be able to better withstand some of the increased buildout compared to somewhere that may already have a potentially heavy strain on their system, in which case there may be a different set of policy solutions to play at.

But when we actually look at kind of the water and power demands of data centers, I think we have to ask the compared-to-what question. So as I mentioned, we can think about these in terms of general infrastructure projects. That’s not to say data centers don’t have an increased demand, but we would also see an increased demand in those same areas, those same densely populated areas, from other projects as well. Similar when we think about the water usage. Think about how much water golf courses use. Golf courses use significantly more water than data centers do. And yet it’s very rare that we see the same sort of animosity in a local region to the idea of someone wanting to build a golf course and a concern about resources that we do as when we see a data center potentially being built there.

Rikki Schlott: On that note, what do you think is driving such an emotional outcry about data centers in particular? I recently wrote a column in the New York Post about putting some of the numbers into context, and also mentioned golf courses and refrigerators and a lot of other utility-consuming products that we enjoy every day. And I was shocked by the response. Is this sort of a misdirected anxiety about AI’s potential impact on our future? Or do you think that there is some legitimacy to at least the energy use, in context of just a couple years ago, coming from data centers?

Jennifer Huddleston: So I think there are four different places that these concerns seem to come through. The first is kind of this uncertainty around AI and this uncertainty around change. The data centers are something that people can kind of point to that’s a physical manifestation of the change that they are experiencing. The second is a more traditional not-in-my-backyard approach. The idea that people very much care about what the view they bought from their house looks like because they take it very personally. They see that as personally impacting their experience and their lived experience, and they think, oh, do I want this thing in my backyard even if I like this other thing in general? The third are some of these ongoing environmental debates that we’re having, the kind of manifestation of these resource debates, and that people have seen what seem like very big numbers. That’s why I brought up this compared-to-what element. Until you see that kind of comparison side by side, I think it’s easy to look at something that’s just a sheer number of kilowatt hours or a sheer number of gallons of water and not be able to put that into context, because these numbers just sound really large. The final one is what is a bit of a growing concern — and that is that some of this animosity isn’t coming from everyday Americans who are seeing these facts on the ground, but is in some ways being amplified or even seeded by folks who don’t want to see America succeed in the global AI competition. If the U.S. doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to compete with China in AI, for example, that means that China could have an AI advantage. And there’s been a lot of discourse and a lot of debate and some questions of whether there is evidence to see that foreign adversaries may be trying to encourage Americans to be more skeptical of data centers as kind of a tactic to potentially make the U.S. less successful in AI, knowing that this is a global competition race and knowing that this is a critical technology for the future of information and for the future of the technologies that will come after.

Travis Fisher: Well, to jump on your point about whether the concerns are legitimate, I think a lot of this is reverse engineered. You start with the sort of gut-level impulse that you need to ban data centers, and then you come up with justifications for it, including electricity and water and local pollution, noise, and things like that. I think the parallel with foreign influence, the parallel to hydraulic fracturing — that debate was raging. If you recall, the movie Gasland by Josh Fox, they were lighting tap water on fire and blaming hydraulic fracturing for that, despite the fact that that was a well-documented phenomenon that had been happening for decades in that area of Pennsylvania. We’re seeing a lot of that same pushback, where it’s this new foreign concept. At the time, it was hydraulic fracturing. Now it’s data centers. And you take the combination of the gut-level instinct to ban something new plus a lot of interest from the outside — in the case of the campaign against hydraulic fracturing, we found out after the fact, a lot of that was foreign influence. A lot of that was foreign money coming in and saying, well, okay, who doesn’t want the US natural gas and oil industries to thrive? Our friend Russia is the one that we found out was actually behind a lot of that work, funding a lot of it and funding nonprofits. I would not be surprised to find out that that’s what’s happening here, probably from China. But the parallels are all the same. It’s something new. It’s a growth area. It’s got sort of uncertain impacts. And so we’re going to play on people’s concerns about that and hype them up and then jump right into the ban.

The ban-first-and-ask-questions-later approach — that is my nightmare, because that’s what I’m hearing now: well, let’s pause, this is new, we don’t understand it, we have to study it. And you hear that on the electricity side too. I really don’t think that’s the right way to approach it. If there are legitimate concerns, we address them as we go. But banning first, even pausing for a matter of weeks or months at this stage, would have terrible impacts. So that whole ban-first-and-ask-questions-later, I’m seeing that across the board, whether it’s from the energy side, the water side, et cetera, and it really is concerning. The one thing that I think folks are not talking about, which is equally concerning, is I think a lot of this stuff — if you wanted the federal government to ban new data centers, you don’t necessarily have to ban the construction. You just have to make sure that they can’t get electricity. You can do that. I think there’s existing federal law — we’re fortunate to have an executive branch right now that is supportive of data center growth in general, and if that changes, if that were to change in say January 2029, we have a new set of issues on our hands, which is what laws are already on the books that the federal government could use to crush the industry. And I don’t want to give anybody ideas, so I’m not going to publish on this. I might write a private memo on it, but I’m not going to give the blueprint. But I assure you that it exists, and that’s some work that we have to do between now and 2029, in case we do have a president who has been holding jars of brown water and saying to ban the industry. I think there’s a lot that the federal government could do — we’re fortunate they’re not doing it now, but those laws already exist.

Jennifer Huddleston: I think also when we talk about AI being something new, there’s another element there too — one that I oftentimes struggle with because I don’t see it this way, but I think a lot of people see AI as something superfluous. It’s that fun thing that you’re making that silly cat video on, or that has the AI slop, or is doing XYZ and gave you the wrong answer of what year the US was founded or something along those lines. And they’re not actually seeing the critical role AI is playing in so many different areas. They’re not thinking about how AI is playing incredible roles in advancing medical research and finding cures for disease — things that could lead us down a path to a cure for cancer and many other things. They’re not seeing the role that AI is playing in improving our responses to natural disasters, having better prediction models, any number of elements in that regard. They’re not seeing the way that AI is working in various other industries, everything from transportation and logistics to education, to identifying health risks, to any number of things. And they just see it as, well, this came about in 2023, why are you all so upset if it gets paused or doesn’t go away? And the problem is that it’s not just about using ChatGPT to change your grocery list into a different font or help you rewrite that email. To be clear, those can be really good purposes of using AI, and there are people for whom this can be incredible in terms of translating things or really empowering them and giving them information that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise. But because it’s kind of still seen as this extra, as opposed to this transformative technology, I think sometimes people forget what would actually be lost in that potential pause.

Rikki Schlott: So let’s talk a little bit about how that skepticism has manifested in our government. Can you take me through what sort of legislation has been proposed to prevent the construction of new data centers?

Jennifer Huddleston: So we’ve seen this — everything from very local level city council meetings, where many more people than would normally be expected show up and there’s a lot of vitriol and animosity, and policymakers who support data centers have found themselves voted out of office or, in some very horrifying cases, even having their homes shot at while someone was inside. Luckily, no one was injured in that case, but it shows just the intensity with which this kind of debate has reached. You may see local zoning regulations or things used with regards to data centers. On a state level, we’ve seen states consider data center construction moratoriums that would say that no new data centers could be built for a certain amount of time, or no new data centers could be built that require more than a certain energy demand — oftentimes of which there doesn’t necessarily seem to be a particular reason for the different calculations. Maybe Travis is aware of something that I’m not from the energy policy side, but oftentimes these numbers feel like they’re just the number that was decided upon versus something that was really researched in terms of, well, it will take us this long to modernize our grid, or this is what our grid can currently withstand, or something of that nature. The problem with that is these projects take time. They take planning. You don’t just build this overnight. You’re going to have to have the infrastructure somewhere — where else are you going to look if you can’t build it in the state that you originally wanted? And then perhaps most concerningly, we’ve now seen movement towards the idea of a data center construction moratorium or ban on a federal level. And that not only brings with it this kind of question of that moratorium putting the U.S. even further behind than just the length of the moratorium itself — because you’re going to have not only the lag in construction where things can’t currently be built, but then you’re going to have this kind of question of, do I even know that I’ll be able to build it in the year when it potentially expires? But on a federal level, it’s really concerning to see this debate because it goes back to those core principles of federalism. A lot of these really boil down to basic land use debates, basic zoning debates that are long present in city councils. And as libertarians, we have feelings about those things, but it really is a very local issue of governance. And what we’re seeing is that it’s becoming the type of thing where folks that aren’t a part of those local communities, folks that don’t necessarily have the direct impact, are looking at things — whether it’s at a state level or a federal level — that would take away the ability of a local community that may want this to have it, or that local communities who may kind of negotiate with each other — if one community doesn’t want it, another community may see an advantage to having it, they may see the economic opportunity there — that they’re taking away that local control. And particularly when we’re looking at this on a federal versus state level, that seems to go against some of the core principles of federalism in the Constitution. And it really raises the question of, if that were to happen, how far could the government power extend? What else could the government say that a state or city isn’t allowed to make decisions around?

Rikki Schlott: And Travis, I’m just curious to hear what, in your view, is the role of legislation when it comes to energy regulation, especially at a time when it seems like these technologies are growing so quickly.

Travis Fisher: Well, I think we have to appreciate where we are to start with, and we have a very sclerotic grid. So whatever rule changes, legislative changes, are going to douse that with WD-40 and get it moving again — that I think is what we need. We need to basically unstick the grid, and there’s a few different ideas. You could go outside the grid, or you can improve the way we optimize and build the grid that we know. I think the role of policy in general should be get out of the way, remove barriers. We have so many barriers to new energy. I mean, the fact that we are awash in hydrocarbons is amazing, but it’s not easy to transport them. It’s not automatic that you can build a pipeline. There’s still a lot of opposition to energy, to any new energy project at all. And that’s the same for even transmission lines. So it’s not even a partisan thing of, oh, you just don’t like fossil fuels — it’s that some people just don’t like infrastructure. And I think to compound the issue, if people think you’re only building a transmission line because of a data center, and people think data centers are useless — oh man, then you’re cutting through someone’s yard for no reason at all. So I think you kind of need both. You need the pro-energy case, meaning you’re not a bad person for using more energy. In the case of an AI model curing cancer, how much energy would you be willing to spend to cure cancer? I’m all in on let’s just use this stuff as much as we possibly can — the possibilities are endless. But once you start putting an energy budget on things like that — I wouldn’t want to put an energy budget on the cure for cancer. We really need to unleash all this stuff. So that’s the posture, that’s the word I constantly use, is unleashing the market on the energy side so that we’re not the constraint. I think that’s a well-known fact at this point, that the grid is the binding constraint on AI growth. I guess it’s an open question now whether politicians will be the new binding constraint and want to ban this either at the state or the federal level. But right now, it is an energy infrastructure that was not really built to be dynamic. And so the role of policy changes at this point should be whatever gets it moving, make it dynamic. And there are a lot of ideas on the table — for the most part it is as simple as getting out of the way. So we’ve got permitting reform, we’ve got that debate that’s already been going on for years in Congress. I think it actually has more momentum now than I’ve ever seen it. So I’m relatively optimistic — if you go to the Cato site, it says it’s about a 50–50 chance. I’ll take that. There’s a lot of really good reforms that I think a lot of people have collectively seen and said, yeah, this is not the way to do business, it’s just too hard to build things in the U.S. And that goes for every type of energy project, transmission lines, even the data centers themselves. There’s just too much that you can do to throw a stick in the spokes of these projects, and if anybody can kill a project, then these projects are going to get killed because there’s always somebody that doesn’t like it. But I think those tools — removing the barriers — that’s where things are headed. I’m optimistic about that.

Rikki Schlott: And Jennifer, what, in your view, are some good non-legislative approaches to dealing with the proliferation of data centers right now?

Jennifer Huddleston: I think working with local communities to understand what a particular community’s concern is, and if there’s actually an underlying policy issue there that needs to be fixed. So in some communities, it may be a concern about the pull on the electric grid. And in that case, Travis, for example, has done some great work on an idea called consumer-regulated electricity, which in some communities may be a solution where a large player could bring their own grid with them, so there’s not that concern about a new infrastructure project — whether it’s a data center or something else — pulling on that demand. The elevator pitch is: if you go to the utility and say, I would love electricity service, and you’re a large customer — either a data center or a new factory, this is the same for aluminum and titanium smelters as it is for a data center or anybody else trying to do something big — you go to the incumbent utility and they say, ooh, we’re fresh out of power, you’re going to have to wait five, ten years, maybe fifteen, we’re not sure. That answer for a fast-moving industry is just — it’s the same as them saying no. So what a lot of people are doing is coming up with new options, either bring your own generation and connect to the grid, or just build a new network altogether. Both of those options are now on the table in a way that really haven’t been, because there is so much preference for speed to power — they need to get in service, they need that electricity in short order, and the system that we have right now, a lot of it is because it is over-regulated and has been for decades. The system can’t really keep up with these fast movers, so policy should enable those fast movers to go and do what they need to do. And I think, to what Travis said, this gets to the point that a lot of times these policy issues are bigger policy issues, and the policy changes are important now because of this data center moment, but they’re also important for whatever demand is going to come onto our energy system, on the debates we’re going to have over land use or anything. And so this may be the symptom rather than the disease, so to speak — it’s the thing that’s getting everyone’s attention. I think the second thing is to also recognize the real economic impact that this can have — how are we working on job training, how are we making sure that these can have a significant impact in a particular community? I also think really examining, are there ways that we can make things more efficient? We see this time and time again from industry and from innovation. The data centers we have right now, the chips we have right now, the servers we have right now, are going to be the least efficient ones that we have for AI. What we’re going to see is that if this really is the concern that everyone thinks it is, there’s going to be innovative solutions — solutions that take less energy, take less demand. Companies are going to have incentives because they know that that demand is going to increase as more and more devices and more and more use cases come online. And back to the point Travis made, I don’t think anyone wants that scenario where it comes down to the question of, do we have enough power to potentially power a quantum computer or to potentially power an AI system that could cure cancer, if that is ultimately the decision that we’re having to decide between.

Rikki Schlott: So what is the libertarian takeaway, and how, on a libertarian principles basis, can we approach this challenge?

Travis Fisher: Well, I would love to ride the coattails of the data center question, and really what we’re trying to solve for now is how do we address dynamic growth, unexpected dynamic growth, and it happened to come from data centers and AI this time. But I think whatever policy reforms we make, especially on the energy side — and I’m optimistic that we’ll get a lot of healthy reforms on the electricity side that wouldn’t have been possible without this growth — but essentially, to use this moment to make the reforms that we need to make and become more dynamic, become a more dynamic economy. And the next thing that comes along that demands a lot of electricity, we’ll be able to say, yeah, we figured this out, we have policies in place that are going to enable that. I think that’s the optimistic takeaway I’m hoping for from all of this. And it really is the free market answer. We really need to free up all the resources on all sides to be able to address these things. We don’t know what the next thing is, so I’m hopeful that we make the right reforms now and we’ll be able to tackle the next problem even faster.

Jennifer Huddleston: I think this is actually where it’s really important to distinguish what the libertarian perspective on data centers is and what it’s not — because if you get it wrong, it can actually be something that’s not libertarian at all. The reason that I consider myself to be in favor of data center buildouts right now, and why I’m so concerned about these government moratoriums on potential construction, is because of basics of supply and demand. We know there’s a huge demand for the type of infrastructure that data centers give us. We have people who want to provide that supply. And right now there are a lot of barriers to providing that supply, which means we either end up in a world where there’s potential scarcity of a resource that we need — meaning that we either see prices drive up, or we see potential regulatory barriers that mean individuals can’t get that resource that they actually need — and that we don’t have opportunities to have some of these abundant solutions, whether it’s AI or energy. But this is where I have to be really careful and really specific about why, even though we know there’s this need for increased supply in data centers, we know that there’s more demand for data storage, that can also go a bit of a concerning route for some people. This isn’t about a situation where the government should be engaged in eminent domain or takings because data centers are so important a type of situation — we want to make sure that this is done in a free market way. Similarly, there can be concerns about too many incentives being given to build data centers, which could mean that we end up with more supply than is really necessary — the type of government incentives that can actually lead to cronyism or favoritism. So really, the libertarian perspective on data centers is about how do we get this system back to as much of a supply-and-demand basis, so that we end up with that appropriate, measured build-out that allows innovation to succeed, that allows us all to have that abundance, that can respond to our changing demand and benefits both consumers and entrepreneurs.

Rikki Schlott: Well, we have to leave it there, but I think it’s safe to say that human progress and innovation has always been a story of overcoming limits. The narrative that we’re running out of resources is a resilient one, but history shows us that when people are free to innovate, they find new solutions. The rise of AI and data centers presents real challenges, but the answer is not to slow down progress or to restrict the technologies that are reshaping our future. The goal is to create an environment where innovation can thrive, where energy is affordable, abundant, and available to meet growing demand. Instead of asking how we can stop the future from arriving, we should be asking how we can build the infrastructure that allows everyone to benefit from it.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Cato Podcast. Once again, I’m Rikki Schlott, Cato Media Fellow, joined by Travis Fisher, Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies, and Jennifer Huddleston, Senior Fellow in Technology Policy, here at the Cato Institute. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, and for more on the ideas and research discussed in this episode, visit Cato​.org. The Cato Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute, dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.