Teaching the North Carolina Case
Built for NC classrooms, civics courses, and community groups — and the page CPAI uses in its own North Carolina workshops. The core skill it teaches is argument construction: how to build a case that survives contact with the other side's evidence.
Why this is hard to teach.
This material is politically live in North Carolina, and your room will contain people with real stakes on more than one side — including, in some counties, people whose jobs or tax base are involved. A session that only prosecutes will not be used in the places where it matters most.
The specific difficulty is that the intuitive version of the argument is the weak one. Students who arrive believing data centers are harming NC communities will reach first for water and jobs, which is exactly where the state's evidence is weakest, and a county official could dismantle that case using their own press releases. Watching that happen is a better lesson than being told.
Third, several facts on this page have decision dates attached and some have already moved. Check the guide's “what's still moving” box before you teach, and tell the room you did. Modeling the habit of re-checking a live record is part of the content.
Target misconceptions.
“If it were a problem, someone would be tracking it.”
North Carolina Commerce issued 37 data center tax-exemption determinations between 2015 and 2025. None are published, and no company is required to report actual investment or exemption value. The state reads its own buildout off a commercial database because it never required anyone to tell it directly.
“The problem is that the data centers use too much water.”
Water use at NC's operating facilities is small — Meta's Forest City site used about 4.2 million gallons across all of 2024, below the state's registration threshold. The strong argument is cost-shift and accountability, and it does not require the water claim at all.
“The companies are getting something for nothing.”
They are getting a real benefit, and the counties are getting real revenue. The question the evidence actually supports is narrower and sharper: what was required in return, and can anyone check?
“Local governments have no options.”
Dozens of NC local governments passed moratoriums within six months. State law bars them from applying to projects already in the pipeline, which makes timing decisive — but the tool exists and is being used.
Two classroom-ready activities.
Facilitator note
Present the revenue argument fairly and let the room weigh it. A $10 billion investment in a county with a $3.2 billion property tax base does generate revenue with no corresponding local expense — no schools, no traffic, no solid waste. For a Tier 1 distressed county that is a serious argument, and treating it as a talking point is both dishonest and tactically foolish in front of an audience that lives there.
Concede first
45 min · group workHand the room the weak version of the argument — that AI is harming North Carolina communities through water use and job losses — and ask them to build the strongest case they can for it.
Then hand them the refutation: the Forest City figure, the withdrawn Apex and paused Edgecombe projects, and the fact that no NC data source can attribute a single layoff to AI. Let them feel the case collapse.
Now have them rebuild from primary NC documents: Session Law 2025-78, the Carbon Plan order, the Commerce memo, and the rate-case filings. The argument they end up with is narrower, entirely NC-sourced, and much harder to knock down.
The transferable lesson is the sequence, not the subject: find the strongest objection to your own case before your opponent does, and build the version that survives it. That is worth more to a student than any fact on this page.
Materials: the guide, printed or on screen. Works as a two-session unit with the rebuild as homework.
The missing number
35 min · public recordsAssign each group a named North Carolina facility and one question: how much water, or how much electricity, does it use? Give them the session to find out.
They will not find out. The task is to document exactly where the trail ends — municipal aggregation that folds a facility into city totals, a trade-secret clause in a county agreement, or a tax determination that was never published.
Each group reports the endpoint rather than the answer. Then ask the question that turns the activity into civics: what would have to change for this to be findable, and who has the authority to change it?
Materials: internet access. Municipal utility sites, county commission minutes, and NC Commerce. No account required. Warn groups in advance that not finding the number is the expected outcome.
Discussion prompts.
Ordered from easy to charged.
- 1.Which of the facts on this page surprised you most, and why that one?
- 2.Senator Berger's revenue argument: what's the strongest version of it, and what's the strongest response?
- 3.The state repealed its 2030 carbon target and kept its 2050 one. What does that combination accomplish?
- 4.Thirty-seven determinations, none published. Is that secrecy, or is it something else?
- 5.The Attorney General declined to sign the settlement everyone else signed. What does a refusal to sign accomplish?
- 6.If your county were offered a facility tomorrow, what would you want required as a condition — and what would you be willing to give up to get it?
Seeing whether it landed.
The steelman paragraph. Students write the strongest version of the argument they personally disagree with, in a paragraph its own advocates would endorse. Graded on whether an advocate would recognize it.
The trail map. A short write-up of where a specific number stops being findable, and which body would have to act to change that.
The comment draft. One paragraph a student could actually submit to a docket or a county commission. Specific, addressed to someone with authority to act, and free of any claim the evidence doesn't support.
When someone asks “is this proven?”
In teacher voice
"Most of this is North Carolina's own record — the session law, the Commission's Carbon Plan order, the Commerce memo. Those I'd stand behind in a hearing. The contents of the rate-case filings are different: we're citing journalism and advocacy releases, because the Commission's own filing PDFs wouldn't open for us. So the docket numbers and dates are confirmed and the quotes inside them are secondhand, and I'm telling you that rather than letting it blur. The Elon poll we haven't independently verified either. And several of these items have decision dates in September 2026 — if you're reading this later, check what actually happened before you repeat any of it."
Delivering a correction to a room that cares
Every guide in this series involves telling people that a claim they hold is imprecise. The flagship educator page carries the three-beat rule — the sequence that keeps a correction about scale from being heard as indifference. Read it before you teach any of these.
The three-beat rule →Where this leads
Teaching this is a different skill than knowing it.
Teaching AI Well is the facilitator library behind CPAI's Certified Applied AI Trainer Program — ten lessons on how to teach AI honestly, including the material on this page.