How AI’s Energy Demands Fuel the Climate Crisis

Omar Ocampo – A.J. Schumann

 December 20, 2024
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Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Photo: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Texas’ electrical grid made national headlines in the winter of 2021 when the state experienced statewide power outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power grid operator, was caught completely off-guard when a winter storm exposed the organization’s lack of severe weather preparedness. Embarrassed, ERCOT developed a roadmap to increase the reliabilityof its energy delivery system.

But guaranteeing a reliable flow of energy from the state’s generating plants to the homes and businesses of Texan residents has proven more difficult than expected. ERCOT recently announced that if a comparable storm were to hit the Lone Star State this winter, there is an 80 percent chance that they would again experience blackouts during peak hours.

Failure to resolve Texas’ power grid bottlenecks is perhaps not entirely ERCOT’s fault. Demand for energy in the state has ballooned in recent years thanks, in part, to the explosion and hype around artificial intelligence.

A significant expansion in the supply of data centers is needed to meet artificial intelligence demand because the systems rely on vast computational power. AI systems are energy hungry — for example, a query using ChatGPT takes ten times the energy of a traditional Google search.

There are approximately 342 data centers currently operating in Texas. Running these systems non-stop, daily, for twenty-four hours, requires a gargantuan amount of electricity. As a result, ERCOT has identified data centers as presenting a potential energy emergency alert risk at night and during early morning hours this winter. Data centers are currently consuming close to 9 percent of the energy produced in Texas and it is putting a significant strain on its power grid.

Texas is a microcosm of the threat artificial intelligence poses to the world — lack of energy security for households, an accelerating climate crisis, and the consolidation of corporate power.

It is estimated that new AI servers that will be sold in 2027 will consume between 85 and 134 terawatt-hours annually. This is comparable to the electricity consumption of 18 million people living in the Netherlands.

Data centers can be the size of multiple football fields, and they are dependent on energy-intensive cooling systems that prevent computer servers from overheating and crashing. Water is an important component for cooling towers and lots of it is needed to bring down the temperature of server equipment.

An analysis conducted by the Washington Post and the University of California, Riverside found that generating a 100-word email with ChatGPT-4 requires the use of at least one water bottle. Multiply this by millions of queries that are inputted each day, and you can get an idea of the scale of the tech sector’s water consumption.

In regions where water is already scarce, the unquenchable thirst of Big Tech hits especially hard. In 2021, a Google-owned data center in The Dalles, Oregon, consumednearly one-third of the town’s water supply even as the community grappled with a prolonged drought. As one frustrated resident aptly put it, “Google has become a water vampire, basically.”

This surge in AI energy demand use has led utilities to build new gas plants and delay the retiring of current fossil-fuel infrastructure, thereby forestalling progress on our much needed green energy transition.

Both Google and Microsoft released reports this year effectively razing to the ground the climate goals they set for themselves by the end of the decade. Targets to reduce CO2 emissions are off track and both companies have blamed their investment in data centers for their increased carbon footprint.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently suggested at an AI summit in Washington DC that while the negative effects artificial intelligence will have on the environment are inevitable, we should continue to invest in AI development because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway.” The true AI doom scenario is not a sentient robot uprising but the oncoming environmental catastrophe caused by the expansion of AI infrastructure.

What’s worse is that tech companies are wrecking the planet to push a technology that most consumers do not even want. Aggressive investment in AI has resulted in their needless integration into existing consumer products, like an AI toothbrush or a Coca-Cola AI beverage, often without assessing the actual value added.

A recent study found that consumers were less likely to purchase a good if it contained the descriptor artificial intelligence. It demonstrates that the tech industry has created a frenzy that is less about solving real problems and more about staking a claim in an industry fueled by its own hype.

The demand for AI is largely manufactured by Big Tech itself, not the everyday consumers who bear the brunt of its consequences. Tech companies are not pouring billions of dollars into the industry with the hope of solving the climate crisis or initiating a post-work society, but with the aim of surveilling labor and, of course, increasing their rate of profit. They are plundering finite resources in their pursuit of endless growth.

Energy consumption for the sake of AI is pulling energy resources away from other very important endeavors like the green transition.

“There are ways to improve AI to use less power,” Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told The Daily Texan. But “decarbonizing the power grid is really the most important thing.”

But this will never occur if we continue to privilege the insatiable energy appetite of Big Tech over the collective need for environmental sustainability.

Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic. Communities are beginning to organize, and they are pushing back against the unchecked expansion of data centers and the drain they incur on local resources.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, officials rejected a data center application due to the strains it will put on the local electric grid. Atlanta’s city council shelved a similar proposal, citing an additional concern over local water supply depletion. In Peculiar, Missouri, public outcry led the city to reverse its decision to allow for the construction of data centers in their community, with one resident capturing the broader sentiment: “Big Tech is preying on small communities all over this country.”

This wave of resistance reflects a growing awareness that unchecked AI expansion comes at a cost to both consumers and the climate. By standing up to Big Tech, these communities are laying the groundwork to resist climate change and corporate greed. They are struggling for a future where people and the planet — not profits — take priority.

A.J. Schumann is a Henry Wallace Fellow working on the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. Omar Ocampo is a researcher at the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Dismantling the ‘Climate Alarm Industry’ 

Per Project 2025

Robert Hunziker

December 20, 2024
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Image by Mika Baumeister.

The definition of alarm: “A warning of danger” (Merriam-Webster) according to The State of the Climate Report 2024, 25 of 35 vital signs are at record extremes. By all accounts, this is an over-the-top alarm that’s setting off bells and whistles for knowledgeable scientists throughout the world. Two-thirds of vital signs at “record extremes” amounts to a strong mandate for trouble dead ahead. An alarm is warranted.

Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is on the Trump administration’s chopping block. According to Project 2025: “The preponderance of climate-change research should be disbanded.”

That’s a very strong statement to make about a 50-year-old institution that the world depends upon for accurate measurements. NOAA scientists were ranked in the World’s Best Scientists List of 2023.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict the changing environment, from the deep sea to outer space, and to manage and conserve America’s coastal and marine resources, a federal agency that provides science, information, and services to protect lives and property, and to support the economy. It was founded in 1970 by Richard Nixon.

More specifically, Project 2025 wants the weather forecasting division privatized and other functions downsized. One of Trump’s incoming appointees referred to NOAA as a voice for the climate change alarm industry. Well, frankly, yes, it is true, it is a sounding board for “alarm” and for very good reason. The public needs to be awakened to the alarming facts of disintegrating life-support ecosystems caused by too much CO2 from burning too much fossil fuel. Yes “alarm” is the proper noun.

Speaking of alarming situations: (1) A 2023 report (The Lancet) estimates that China lost 50,000 heatwave deaths in central regions, like Henan (2) northwestern Europe had 107,000 heat-related deaths in 2022-23 (3) the British Columbia heatwave of 2021 killed 619 people (4) a Nature article d/d 2024 claims roughly 50,000 heat-related deaths have occurred in Brazilian urban areas (5) the 2024 Haji pilgrimage in Mecca had 1301 heatwave deaths.

Heat-related deaths are challenging the numbers of wartime deaths with 489,000 heat-related deaths worldwide per year. This is a “new normal.” It is alarming. Heat-related deaths globally from 1990-2019 averaged 153,078 per warm season (WHO). The planet is obviously heating up.

The following scenarios depict “alarming situations” beyond the scope of nature acting on its own, perfect examples of why expressing ‘alarm’ is so important for a truthful public understanding of what’s really happening to the planet and hopefully incentivize people to demand a different socio/politico/economic system:

(1) ‘Intense’ Drought, Fires Pummel Amazon, Conservation.org, Sept. 11, 2024

(2) So-called Doomsday Glacier is ‘in Trouble; Scientists Say After Finding Surprising Formations Under Ice Shelf, CNN World, Feb. 15, 2023

(3) Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return, Inside Climate News, Aug. 15, 2020 94)

(4) Thawing Permafrost Poses Environmental Threat to Thousands of Sites with Legacy Industrial Contamination, Nature Communications, march 28, 2023.

(5) Europe’s Rivers Run Dry as Scientists Warn Drought Could be Worst in 500 Years, The Guardian, August 13, 2022.

(6) China’s Historic Heatwave Turns Deadly Amid Power Crunch Fears, Asia Financial, August 8, 2024

(7) Extreme Heat is Now Making Cities Unlivable. How Can We Survive It, New Scientist, Nov. 20, 2024.

(8) The AMOC Might Be Way More Unstable Than We Thought, PBS Terra, Dec.18, 2024. This alone is a horrific game-changer that hits every ‘alarm button’ with all arrows pointing at the human footprint.

“Alarm” describes each of the above-listed situations happening outside of the scope of nature acting on its own. The list of 8 could easily be expanded to 80. In all cases, the human footprint predominates.

According to Project 2025 as described in the LA Times: “Break up NOAA,’ the document says, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its six main offices, including the 154-year-old National Weather Service. Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,’ the document says.” (Source: Project 2025 Calls for Demolition of NOAA and National Weather Service, LA Times, July 28, 2024)

Really??? Warning society of deteriorating ecosystems that are key to life support is harmful to future U.S. prosperity?? Really? Frankly, the opposite has much more cachet, meaning failure to expose the dangers of climate change is 100% guaranteed to be harmful to future U.S. prosperity.

Meanwhile, if the National Weather Service is privatized, somebody pays for the service. Public taxes will no longer support the weather network infrastructure, including satellites, currently-in-orbit 322 earth observation satellites, 23 are geostationary and 223 polar-orbiting. Privatization means everyone pays (per person) for weather services, maybe on a subscription basis, for example, $19.95/month for the basic service or $295.95/month for premier service, including detailed reports of ski conditions in Aspen.

Specifically, according to Project 2025, the National Weather Service (NWS) should become a “performance-based organization.” This is ‘market talk’ or how the free-market values stocks and bonds and all sorts of investments. Maybe NWS will go public via an IPO. Just imagine shareholders cheering for more massive wildfires burning structures, super-charged hurricanes leveling entire communities, destructive lightning storms, and golf ball-sized hail to juice up the listed shares of NWS stock with all eyes focused on storm map configurations online and on TV with the NWS stock symbol proudly displayed in big red letters for super-hot intense heat days. And, maybe add the impact of AI to crank the stock up to the moon.

Looking ahead, it appears there won’t be regular free weather forecasts. Under the new administration, a profit is essential for essential services. While they’re at it, how about an IPO for Planet Earth?

According to Project 2025: “Investing in commercial partners will increase competition for weather service.”

Seriously? “Competitive weather service” Yes, evidently only a dog-eat-dog commercial enterprise competition can improve weather service, as competition nips at the heels of the staid ole dog-eared NWS that’s faithfully providing 154 years of excellent service.

In all, caution should be the watchword for privatization of public assets. For example, according to Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest? (Harvard Business Review) “Private sector managers may have no compunction about adopting profit-making strategies or corporate practices that make essential services unaffordable or unavailable to large segments of the population.”

And larger issues are at play when privatizing public assets: “Many reject privatization for the distributional consequences. The deeper problem is that it threatens the very foundation of political legitimacy.” (Source: Why Privatization Is Wrong, Boston Review, Nov. 24, 2020) If private actors are morphing into government, can they act with the legitimacy that government claims? And can a government morphed into a network of private actors still govern those subjected to its rules legitimately?

“The private sector’s central goal is to maximize profit, not deliver necessary services. It has proven impossible to ensure that private providers’ incentives match public interest in these arrangements. Too often, contracted companies generate more income by exploiting workers, cutting corners on quality, charging high prices to users, and/or excluding certain groups from service—not by increasing efficiency.” (Source: The Harms of Infrastructure Privatization: A Step Backward in Progressive Policymaking, Roosevelt Institute, July 28, 2021)

Nevertheless, Pay-for-Weather is likely coming. If privatized, the money must come from somewhere. Does it appear truly legitimate? Will it cut corners to achieve a big profit; will it anticipate the arrival of 2C above pre-industrial in time to forewarn coastal cities to build seawalls? A thousand questions come to mind. Will NOAA’s high standards continue? What if consumers refuse to pay for weather reports? Will local TV stations be able to afford weather reports? Or will NWS go bankrupt?

And, finally, will ‘private NWS’ level with the public, forewarn alarming weather conditions that kill people, for example: The ‘wet-bulb’ set to kill hundreds of thousands of people if temperatures and humidity levels continue to rise, Intellinews, April 22, 2024: “The hottest city on earth’, Jacobabad in Pakistan, has passed the wet-bulb threshold four times and La Paz, Mexico, Port Hedland, Australia, and Abu Dhabi, UAE have also breached the limit, according to the 2020 study,” Ibid.

In that regard, NOAA is responsible for keeping the public informed about life-threatening global warming issues that are spreading around the world, and certain portions of the U.S. are getting very close to wet-bulb conditions, especially the Gulf Coast. See – ‘Extreme Threat’: Large Swathe of Southern US at Dangerous ‘Wet Bulb Temperature’, The Hill, June 29, 2023.

NOAA’s responsibilities are about to get very, very heavy.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com