Thanks Hannah. Very helpful. Like so many environmental issues, the message is: Don't Panic! Which is NOT the same as "don't act to tackle this problem and reduce its impact". The AI case also highlights how innovation and efficiency gains are so often underestimated.
Yes, like most events in human history, the rise of AI is morally ambiguous. Its risks are largely socialized by the global market for better private decision making, yet it's obviously useful for the public interest as well. Its full cost when all externalities are internalized is unknown. OTOH, humans have shown themselves occasionally capable of acting collectively against shared danger without sacrificing liberal values of freedom and economic growth. IMHO the astounding (to my geriatric eyes) pace of computer hardware and software, among other cultural developments, supports a conditional measure of hope without veering into techno-optimism. Hell, I only plan to be around another 30 years anyway.
Can you specifically describe where AI is contributing to such innovations, or is this purely an expression of hope? The numerous claims of AI’s benefits seem to be more sales pitch than documented results.
Of course, openai is trying to sell a product, and those using the product are trying to make money. But the same can be said about a lot of pro-climate technologies (like solar panels or battery industries).
Most AI calculations are not real time, but are either 'near real time' or batch. There is a simple query, a large amount of processing, and a second later, a simple response.
That means the data processing can be done anywhere in the world. That should mean that energy intensive data centres migrate to places with cheap electricity. Iceland and northern Sweden are probably good locations in Europe. Once batteries can run data centres overnight, then anywhere sunny should be a good location, if it can use sea water for cooling.
Building a fibreoptic cable to Iceland is a lot cheaper than building a HVDC cable. You could even use Starlink and build wind powered data centres in the Falkland Islands.
Furthermore, a lot of AI processing is batch work - especially the LLM training, Depending on the relative costs of electricity and AI processors, this could be done at times of cheap electricity.
Speaking of Starlink, maybe in 20 years the data centres will migrate into orbit, powered by solar power.
"Ireland is a perfect example, where data centres make up around 17% of its electricity demand. "
I was hoping you would highlight an example like this, but honestly I'm disappointed that the implications of such high density of data centers in specific locations is not taken more seriously. Being Irish I am experiencing first hand the impact of high energy usage by data centers on our electricity bills and how data centers appear to be largely wiping out the gains we've made in wind energy over the last few years. Certainly on a global scale the energy usage is truly small, but data centers are not and will never be globally distributed. Ireland has a high concentration due to our climate, position on major data pipelines and relative geological stability etc which makes us a prime location. This is the same for many other locations around the world. So on a global scale the impact is smoothed out, but the global cost is being carried by specific, smaller populations which is having an outsized impact.
So I dont think "Don't panic" is a legitimate sentiment. If you build a global infrastructure on localised foundations the pressure will build and build until it collapses - so we should be very careful with that.
Great piece. I have been wondering “is this a big number?” when seeing some of the statements about AI energy and water usage. Nice to have at least the start of an answer to that.
The IEA is right to have revised down their energy consumption estimates for computing. For instance, the previous estimates took into account estimates of LLM training and inference energy use which were wildly inflated (yet reported widely) and which have now been picked apart. Why do published articles not compare a data centre to an aluminium smelter, or a fertiliser plant? Thank you for highlighting the more sensible turn in estimates and especially the local grid effect of data centre consumption.
The big issue is that developed markets haven't seen much electricity demand growth in two decades. We're now growing again, and it's caught the market by surprise. Moving from no-growth to 2% growth is meaningful, particularly when you're growing from such a large base.
Thanks for this info update Hannah. There has been much speculation as AI and LLM become more prevalent. Hopefully, innovation will continue to improve on power performance. Also possible to use the latent heat produced b y data centres for another useful purpose as well. Energy is 'circular'. It can add value at different segments of its cycle.
"I had no intentions". Heh. I'm guessing you've been trained as a disinformer, or at least read Schopenhauer (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right). You know all the rhetorical tricks! Thankfully, I'm pretty sure Ms. Ritchie knows them when she sees them too.
Hmm, although Trevor, if he's a volunteer denialist, could be unintentionally gaslighting Ms. Ritchie by denying his plainly evident intentions to himself (simplypsychology.org/unintentional-gaslighting.html).
Thank you for putting potential global energy demand for A.I. processing in context. I wasn't panicking, but I wasn't well-informed about the issue either. I'm still not panicking about it, because as a US citizen I've got more parochial concerns! One factor I didn't see mentioned is government policy. I supported President Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" of 2022 (VP Harris broke the tie in the Senate), because without collective intervention in the energy market, decarbonization will happen much slower if at all. Our new President and Congress are hostile to decarbonization and friendly to AI. My fear is that the public money that's going to renewable energy development, electric vehicles, and heat pumps will be given instead to Mr. Musk and his competitors to pump up AI.
I'm still not panicking, but more like resigned. As documented by our hostess and her colleagues on OurWorldInData.org/renewable-energy, the rest of the world is decarbonizing with alacrity, in a "green vortex" of market responses to collective intervention by multiple nations. I'd prefer my country play at least a proportionate role in bringing global fossil carbon emissions to zero, but emissions reductions anywhere slow the warming trend for everyone. Full speed ahead, y'all, while the US rides for free. I apologize for the majority of my fellow voters, who just elected a kakistocracy.
Spending government money on AI is a better use than subsidizing electric vehicles, even if Musk’s companies benefit from both. If EVs are better and cheaper as most people say, they shouldn’t be subsidized. The world is not decarbonizing rapidly, although renewables are increasing, coal, oil and natural gas are also still increasing. And saying that the US is worst is backwards, the US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India. In the EU emissions decreased, but emissions from coal and oil actually increased per unit of energy consumed. I hope the new US administration increases natural gas exports, so other countries can see the same reduction in emissions that the US has achieved by replacing coal and oil burning with lower emission natural gas.
Buzen. YOU SAY : ".......saying that the US is worst is backwards, the US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India " IT'S WORSE: The US has dropped MORE emissions than anywhere else
in the world.....AND EVEN WORSE : China is the greatest polluter and CO2 emitter on the planet AND it wants to be treated as a THIRD WORLD , DEVELOPING ECONOMY which allows it to avoid any committments to improve that situation...........AND INEXCUSABLY WORSE is the rotten-to-the-core UNITED NATIONS ORGANISATION which condemns every Western Country but excuses China ! “Dual carbon” goals refer to China's two climate goals announced by president Xi Jinping at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020. President Xi announced that China would reach its carbon emissions peak before 2030 and become “carbon neutral” before 2060."
"Beijing's main motivation is to undermine Western capitalism, not support it, which is why he has no intention of supporting the West's ill-considered dash for net zero carbon emission" https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17912/china-climate-change
AND the rotten UN wants every Western Economy TO PAY FOR EVERY OTHER ECONOMY
to "decarbonise" , including China !!! That is just rude and ignorant !
The US , the largest financial supporter of the UN , should simply CEASE FUNDING this anti-western abomination before it does even more damage !
Oh, Trevor. It's just that I've been hearing it for years, and it's still wrong, no matter how loud it is! Collective climate action denialist memes are all undead zombies: No matter how many times they're shot down, they keep trying to eat your brain.
Buzen, are you really here to argue that a return to official climate-science (and vaccination, etc.) denial by the US government is the lesser evil? You're entitled to your opinion (even if you're paid to post it here), but have you ever heard of the "Tragedy of the Commons" (investopedia.com/terms/t/tragedy-of-the-commons.asp)? It's a term of Economics art for "diseconomies", i.e. social costs, that result from the free market's fundamental tendency to socialize ever transaction cost it can get away with. G. Hardin, who coined the term in 1968, pointed out that only "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" could limit what otherwise-free markets get away with. Anthropogenic global warming is simply the biggest common-pool resource tragedy in history.
In 2022, the President and the Democratic majority in Congress mutually agreed to accelerate the global green vortex domestically, by subsidizing the growth of alternative energy, EVs and other market trends toward decarbonizing the US economy. The "mutual coercion" is only in the use of tax money to reduce the price advantage fossil carbon enjoys on the energy market, by socializing the marginal cost of climate change: the IRA does not directly regulate emissions. The act is credited with achieving about half of what its backers had hoped (nytimes.com/2024/02/21/climate/inflation-reduction-act-progress-climate.html). IMHO, half is better than nothing. Now subsequent emissions declines resulting from the IRA are in jeopardy.
And saying "US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India" is specious. US emissions declines were mostly due to replacement of coal by natural gas, which emits "only" about half the fossil carbon. Meanwhile, China is on track to reach peak emissions this year (carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2024-after-record-growth-in-clean-energy) as nuclear and renewables expansion catches up with explosive demand growth. And remember, the rate of global warming is caused by the aggregate of total global emissions. That means when one nation reduces its emissions, the rate of global warming is slowed from what it would otherwise be for every other nation!
Of course, there seems little hope of persuading you ("Free as in beer, and all other ways"), but there's always the hypothetical uncommitted lurker, who is at most a consequentialist libertarian like myself. As my favorite *former* Libertarian climate-change denialist, Jerry Taylor, said (niskanencenter.org/the-alternative-to-ideology/): "Ideology = Motivated cognition".
I never denied climate-change is happening, I only say the government shouldn’t be subsidizing energy or other technology which will not address the problem. The IRA did not reduce inflation or greenhouse gas emissions, but it did increase inflation and voters noticed. Emissions in the US transportation sector increased by 1.6% from 2022 to 2023, so I do not think that the EV subsidies are helping to decarbonize the economy, and if that is half the goal, then it isn’t very useful, but is very expensive.
China is now the largest emitter of CO₂ emissions worldwide, producing roughly twice the CO₂ emissions of the United States each year. Although China’s contributions to global CO₂ emissions only really started at the turn of the 21st century, it has now produced the second largest volume ever in terms of cumulative CO₂ emissions. They are building 70GW of coal electricity generating plants right now while planning only 23 GW of nuclear, and is in fact building 95% of all the world’s coal fired generating plants.
It seems like you are the one denying the fact that China is significantly imposing its coal pollution on the globe.
Buzen: "I never denied climate-change is happening, I only say the government shouldn’t be subsidizing energy or other technology which will not address the problem."
You're denying the urgency of collective decarbonization at the national level where sovereignty resides, the explosive commercial growth of carbon-neutral energy in response to collective action around the world to date, and America's disproportionate historical responsibility (sigh - ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country, again). And again, international energy analysts say China is on track to see its emissions peak this year. So why shouldn't we accept the need to decarbonize ourselves incrementally, under the rule of law, rather than waiting for everybody else to go first?
I, for one, favor a national revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend with border adjustment tariff, but politics is the art of the possible, and subsidies are much easier to enact, while clearly accelerating the learning curve of efficiency and cost reduction. And again: every decrement in even the growth rate of emissions from what it would otherwise be, counts, because they have to reach a peak before they can start to decline!
It sounds like yours is a "lukewarmist" position, however: you admit climate change is happening and it's anthropogenic, but you won't support targeted collective intervention in the "free" market, to bring a timely end to the transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually. Lukewarmists are happy to keep on socializing their private marginal energy costs. We've heard all the lukewarmist memes before: they appear on the climate-change denial bingo card (climateball.wordpress.com/the-bingo), including #butChina, #butRenewables, and #butFreedom. Sure enough, ideology = motivated cognition. Next!
I definitely deny the urgency, energy is needed and the solution to reducing emissions is better technology, which takes time to develop and money is better spent now in increasing energy supply for the rest of the world, and for the US to continue to export cheap, clean LNG to let other countries stop using coal reduces emissions faster than giving rich consumers discounts on electric vehicles.
China is not going to peak emissions anytime soon with so many coal plants under construction. Just today The NY Times reports that China has now passed Europe in cumulative emissions and will soon match the USA.
All the above said, I'll make a concession regarding China's historically unprecedented emissions growth, which may mean that in 75 years they may emit almost as much fossil carbon as we have in the last two centuries. They are indeed burning more coal now, to meet current demand while scaling up nuclear+renewables. But you've done some flagrant quote-mining. You're a resolute denier, but for the benefit of the uncommitted lurker, critical context is provided in that NYT article:
"When humans burn fossil fuels or cut down forests, the resulting carbon dioxide typically lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, heating the planet all the while. That’s why historical emissions are often used as a gauge of responsibility for global warming.
"China, for its part, has promised that its emissions will peak this decade and then start falling. The country is installing more wind turbines and solar panels than all other nations combined and leads the world in electric vehicle sales. But even with China’s shift to low-carbon energy, the Carbon Brief analysis found, the nation’s historical emissions are projected to approach those of the United States in the coming years."
Nowhere in the article is the case made that the US should wait for authoritarian China to go first, before we democratically decarbonize our own economy.
Thank you for answering my original question. I presume you voted for the Denialist-in-Chief, who has repeatedly declared anthropogenic climate change a hoax, and is backing it up with his appointments. If he's not worried, why should you be? "Ideology = Motivated cognition". You guys won this battle in your culture war, so you can stand down for the next four years. You don't have to Gish-gallop multiple undead denialist memes in public fora anymore.
So much the worse, though, for the 53% of Americans who were "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change last year, up from 39% ten years ago (climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas). Not enough of them voted their concerns this time around, but I expect that percentage to grow as extreme weather records are repeatedly broken around the globe, not sparing our country. There will always be a hard core of motivated deniers, but if our democracy survives the Kakistocrat-elect for another term, we're bound to face reality sooner or later.
It seems funny to call huge demand for energy the “doom scenario”. That’s a scenario where AI is succeeding and creating many new and valuable things in the world.
Yes, that's the irony of the Anthropocene. Markets have existed at least as long as our species has, and have always socialized every transaction cost they could get away with. Capitalism, a more recent cultural adaptation, has driven the vast acceleration of per-capita resource consumption and cost socialization on the global market, as our population grew. Now, the benefits of rising per-capita income and technological capability for everyone, though distributed unequally, are outstripping population growth as drivers of the sixth Great Extinction event in the history of life. Anthropogenic climate change is only the costliest and most global of our "environmental" impacts. It's got to be halted sooner rather than later, if only to give us time to address all our other impacts!
How much do you get paid by Tech to write this stuff ??!!
Of COURSE electric vehicles and heating are going to be dominant in taking electricity - they are supposed to be REPLACING fossil fuels.... such as diesel cars or gas heating......
So, you are not comparing apples to apples. Can you tell me WHAT source of fossil fuel AI is actually replacing ?????!!! To me it seems you're trying to defend a dangerous beast trying to make it look cute and cuddly.
Hi Hannah, I found your article very thoughtfully written and challenged my incoming belief about the growing DC energy use. However, a recent US Department of Energy report predicts an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028 in the US alone. How do you reconcile this with the 223 TWh global increase predicted by 2030 by IEA?
Ireland is an interesting case study. DCs are now at 21% of national electricity consumption and there are bans on data centres. Some research on this before the AI boom.
Interesting! But let's be careful here: Ireland is not using all that capacity, it's powering a lot of the world. And it's a tiny country. data centres could be 90% of Ireland's energy use and it still would not necessarily imply that DC energy use is big on a global scale
Thank you on the podcast episode on free heat. It really seems like a no brainer in a lot of Europe and US to reuse the heat produced by data centers to heat homes. I wonder however how this would work in hot climate, where there is little demand for heating homes and hot water can be generated easily by solar.
Thanks Hannah. Very helpful. Like so many environmental issues, the message is: Don't Panic! Which is NOT the same as "don't act to tackle this problem and reduce its impact". The AI case also highlights how innovation and efficiency gains are so often underestimated.
Yes, like most events in human history, the rise of AI is morally ambiguous. Its risks are largely socialized by the global market for better private decision making, yet it's obviously useful for the public interest as well. Its full cost when all externalities are internalized is unknown. OTOH, humans have shown themselves occasionally capable of acting collectively against shared danger without sacrificing liberal values of freedom and economic growth. IMHO the astounding (to my geriatric eyes) pace of computer hardware and software, among other cultural developments, supports a conditional measure of hope without veering into techno-optimism. Hell, I only plan to be around another 30 years anyway.
Seems the benefit of potential innovative solutions to climate change outweighs the cost of increased energy consumption
Can you specifically describe where AI is contributing to such innovations, or is this purely an expression of hope? The numerous claims of AI’s benefits seem to be more sales pitch than documented results.
I think it's hope, but it's also not entirely unrealistic. We're seeing some evidence now that even today's models can start researching hard problems: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/
Of course, openai is trying to sell a product, and those using the product are trying to make money. But the same can be said about a lot of pro-climate technologies (like solar panels or battery industries).
Most AI calculations are not real time, but are either 'near real time' or batch. There is a simple query, a large amount of processing, and a second later, a simple response.
That means the data processing can be done anywhere in the world. That should mean that energy intensive data centres migrate to places with cheap electricity. Iceland and northern Sweden are probably good locations in Europe. Once batteries can run data centres overnight, then anywhere sunny should be a good location, if it can use sea water for cooling.
Building a fibreoptic cable to Iceland is a lot cheaper than building a HVDC cable. You could even use Starlink and build wind powered data centres in the Falkland Islands.
Furthermore, a lot of AI processing is batch work - especially the LLM training, Depending on the relative costs of electricity and AI processors, this could be done at times of cheap electricity.
Speaking of Starlink, maybe in 20 years the data centres will migrate into orbit, powered by solar power.
"Ireland is a perfect example, where data centres make up around 17% of its electricity demand. "
I was hoping you would highlight an example like this, but honestly I'm disappointed that the implications of such high density of data centers in specific locations is not taken more seriously. Being Irish I am experiencing first hand the impact of high energy usage by data centers on our electricity bills and how data centers appear to be largely wiping out the gains we've made in wind energy over the last few years. Certainly on a global scale the energy usage is truly small, but data centers are not and will never be globally distributed. Ireland has a high concentration due to our climate, position on major data pipelines and relative geological stability etc which makes us a prime location. This is the same for many other locations around the world. So on a global scale the impact is smoothed out, but the global cost is being carried by specific, smaller populations which is having an outsized impact.
So I dont think "Don't panic" is a legitimate sentiment. If you build a global infrastructure on localised foundations the pressure will build and build until it collapses - so we should be very careful with that.
Great piece. I have been wondering “is this a big number?” when seeing some of the statements about AI energy and water usage. Nice to have at least the start of an answer to that.
The IEA is right to have revised down their energy consumption estimates for computing. For instance, the previous estimates took into account estimates of LLM training and inference energy use which were wildly inflated (yet reported widely) and which have now been picked apart. Why do published articles not compare a data centre to an aluminium smelter, or a fertiliser plant? Thank you for highlighting the more sensible turn in estimates and especially the local grid effect of data centre consumption.
The big issue is that developed markets haven't seen much electricity demand growth in two decades. We're now growing again, and it's caught the market by surprise. Moving from no-growth to 2% growth is meaningful, particularly when you're growing from such a large base.
Thanks for this info update Hannah. There has been much speculation as AI and LLM become more prevalent. Hopefully, innovation will continue to improve on power performance. Also possible to use the latent heat produced b y data centres for another useful purpose as well. Energy is 'circular'. It can add value at different segments of its cycle.
Dear Hannah and others contributors : Please accept my sincere apologies !
I had no intentions of provoking and unleashing this Mal Adapted " I.D. Ten T " on you all.
Thanks for the article Hannah ! Much appreciated !
Regards , Trevor.
"I had no intentions". Heh. I'm guessing you've been trained as a disinformer, or at least read Schopenhauer (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right). You know all the rhetorical tricks! Thankfully, I'm pretty sure Ms. Ritchie knows them when she sees them too.
Hmm, although Trevor, if he's a volunteer denialist, could be unintentionally gaslighting Ms. Ritchie by denying his plainly evident intentions to himself (simplypsychology.org/unintentional-gaslighting.html).
Thank you for putting potential global energy demand for A.I. processing in context. I wasn't panicking, but I wasn't well-informed about the issue either. I'm still not panicking about it, because as a US citizen I've got more parochial concerns! One factor I didn't see mentioned is government policy. I supported President Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" of 2022 (VP Harris broke the tie in the Senate), because without collective intervention in the energy market, decarbonization will happen much slower if at all. Our new President and Congress are hostile to decarbonization and friendly to AI. My fear is that the public money that's going to renewable energy development, electric vehicles, and heat pumps will be given instead to Mr. Musk and his competitors to pump up AI.
I'm still not panicking, but more like resigned. As documented by our hostess and her colleagues on OurWorldInData.org/renewable-energy, the rest of the world is decarbonizing with alacrity, in a "green vortex" of market responses to collective intervention by multiple nations. I'd prefer my country play at least a proportionate role in bringing global fossil carbon emissions to zero, but emissions reductions anywhere slow the warming trend for everyone. Full speed ahead, y'all, while the US rides for free. I apologize for the majority of my fellow voters, who just elected a kakistocracy.
Oh ! Dear ! Maladjusted.........How true ! ..........you say : " I apologize for the majority of my fellow voters, who just elected a kakistocracy."
How unfortunate for you then it must be !
To think so little of the people living in , arguably , the best country on Earth ! Shame on you !
Did nobody ever tell you that it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought of as a fool
than to open it , and prove it !!??? No ??? Then take heed !
Fools live in fool's paradises, Trevor.
Spending government money on AI is a better use than subsidizing electric vehicles, even if Musk’s companies benefit from both. If EVs are better and cheaper as most people say, they shouldn’t be subsidized. The world is not decarbonizing rapidly, although renewables are increasing, coal, oil and natural gas are also still increasing. And saying that the US is worst is backwards, the US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India. In the EU emissions decreased, but emissions from coal and oil actually increased per unit of energy consumed. I hope the new US administration increases natural gas exports, so other countries can see the same reduction in emissions that the US has achieved by replacing coal and oil burning with lower emission natural gas.
Buzen. YOU SAY : ".......saying that the US is worst is backwards, the US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India " IT'S WORSE: The US has dropped MORE emissions than anywhere else
in the world.....AND EVEN WORSE : China is the greatest polluter and CO2 emitter on the planet AND it wants to be treated as a THIRD WORLD , DEVELOPING ECONOMY which allows it to avoid any committments to improve that situation...........AND INEXCUSABLY WORSE is the rotten-to-the-core UNITED NATIONS ORGANISATION which condemns every Western Country but excuses China ! “Dual carbon” goals refer to China's two climate goals announced by president Xi Jinping at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020. President Xi announced that China would reach its carbon emissions peak before 2030 and become “carbon neutral” before 2060."
"Beijing's main motivation is to undermine Western capitalism, not support it, which is why he has no intention of supporting the West's ill-considered dash for net zero carbon emission" https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17912/china-climate-change
AND the rotten UN wants every Western Economy TO PAY FOR EVERY OTHER ECONOMY
to "decarbonise" , including China !!! That is just rude and ignorant !
The US , the largest financial supporter of the UN , should simply CEASE FUNDING this anti-western abomination before it does even more damage !
Trevor, Trevor, Trevor. Shouty, shouty.
Yes....................AND I hope you are listening !!!!
Oh, Trevor. It's just that I've been hearing it for years, and it's still wrong, no matter how loud it is! Collective climate action denialist memes are all undead zombies: No matter how many times they're shot down, they keep trying to eat your brain.
Buzen, are you really here to argue that a return to official climate-science (and vaccination, etc.) denial by the US government is the lesser evil? You're entitled to your opinion (even if you're paid to post it here), but have you ever heard of the "Tragedy of the Commons" (investopedia.com/terms/t/tragedy-of-the-commons.asp)? It's a term of Economics art for "diseconomies", i.e. social costs, that result from the free market's fundamental tendency to socialize ever transaction cost it can get away with. G. Hardin, who coined the term in 1968, pointed out that only "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" could limit what otherwise-free markets get away with. Anthropogenic global warming is simply the biggest common-pool resource tragedy in history.
In 2022, the President and the Democratic majority in Congress mutually agreed to accelerate the global green vortex domestically, by subsidizing the growth of alternative energy, EVs and other market trends toward decarbonizing the US economy. The "mutual coercion" is only in the use of tax money to reduce the price advantage fossil carbon enjoys on the energy market, by socializing the marginal cost of climate change: the IRA does not directly regulate emissions. The act is credited with achieving about half of what its backers had hoped (nytimes.com/2024/02/21/climate/inflation-reduction-act-progress-climate.html). IMHO, half is better than nothing. Now subsequent emissions declines resulting from the IRA are in jeopardy.
And saying "US emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen over the last few decades, whereas it is still increasing in China and India" is specious. US emissions declines were mostly due to replacement of coal by natural gas, which emits "only" about half the fossil carbon. Meanwhile, China is on track to reach peak emissions this year (carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2024-after-record-growth-in-clean-energy) as nuclear and renewables expansion catches up with explosive demand growth. And remember, the rate of global warming is caused by the aggregate of total global emissions. That means when one nation reduces its emissions, the rate of global warming is slowed from what it would otherwise be for every other nation!
Of course, there seems little hope of persuading you ("Free as in beer, and all other ways"), but there's always the hypothetical uncommitted lurker, who is at most a consequentialist libertarian like myself. As my favorite *former* Libertarian climate-change denialist, Jerry Taylor, said (niskanencenter.org/the-alternative-to-ideology/): "Ideology = Motivated cognition".
I never denied climate-change is happening, I only say the government shouldn’t be subsidizing energy or other technology which will not address the problem. The IRA did not reduce inflation or greenhouse gas emissions, but it did increase inflation and voters noticed. Emissions in the US transportation sector increased by 1.6% from 2022 to 2023, so I do not think that the EV subsidies are helping to decarbonize the economy, and if that is half the goal, then it isn’t very useful, but is very expensive.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118464/transportation-co2-emissions-in-the-us-energy-consumption/
China is now the largest emitter of CO₂ emissions worldwide, producing roughly twice the CO₂ emissions of the United States each year. Although China’s contributions to global CO₂ emissions only really started at the turn of the 21st century, it has now produced the second largest volume ever in terms of cumulative CO₂ emissions. They are building 70GW of coal electricity generating plants right now while planning only 23 GW of nuclear, and is in fact building 95% of all the world’s coal fired generating plants.
It seems like you are the one denying the fact that China is significantly imposing its coal pollution on the globe.
Buzen: "I never denied climate-change is happening, I only say the government shouldn’t be subsidizing energy or other technology which will not address the problem."
You're denying the urgency of collective decarbonization at the national level where sovereignty resides, the explosive commercial growth of carbon-neutral energy in response to collective action around the world to date, and America's disproportionate historical responsibility (sigh - ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country, again). And again, international energy analysts say China is on track to see its emissions peak this year. So why shouldn't we accept the need to decarbonize ourselves incrementally, under the rule of law, rather than waiting for everybody else to go first?
I, for one, favor a national revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend with border adjustment tariff, but politics is the art of the possible, and subsidies are much easier to enact, while clearly accelerating the learning curve of efficiency and cost reduction. And again: every decrement in even the growth rate of emissions from what it would otherwise be, counts, because they have to reach a peak before they can start to decline!
It sounds like yours is a "lukewarmist" position, however: you admit climate change is happening and it's anthropogenic, but you won't support targeted collective intervention in the "free" market, to bring a timely end to the transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually. Lukewarmists are happy to keep on socializing their private marginal energy costs. We've heard all the lukewarmist memes before: they appear on the climate-change denial bingo card (climateball.wordpress.com/the-bingo), including #butChina, #butRenewables, and #butFreedom. Sure enough, ideology = motivated cognition. Next!
I definitely deny the urgency, energy is needed and the solution to reducing emissions is better technology, which takes time to develop and money is better spent now in increasing energy supply for the rest of the world, and for the US to continue to export cheap, clean LNG to let other countries stop using coal reduces emissions faster than giving rich consumers discounts on electric vehicles.
China is not going to peak emissions anytime soon with so many coal plants under construction. Just today The NY Times reports that China has now passed Europe in cumulative emissions and will soon match the USA.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/climate/china-emissions-fossil-fuels-climate.html
All the above said, I'll make a concession regarding China's historically unprecedented emissions growth, which may mean that in 75 years they may emit almost as much fossil carbon as we have in the last two centuries. They are indeed burning more coal now, to meet current demand while scaling up nuclear+renewables. But you've done some flagrant quote-mining. You're a resolute denier, but for the benefit of the uncommitted lurker, critical context is provided in that NYT article:
"When humans burn fossil fuels or cut down forests, the resulting carbon dioxide typically lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, heating the planet all the while. That’s why historical emissions are often used as a gauge of responsibility for global warming.
"China, for its part, has promised that its emissions will peak this decade and then start falling. The country is installing more wind turbines and solar panels than all other nations combined and leads the world in electric vehicle sales. But even with China’s shift to low-carbon energy, the Carbon Brief analysis found, the nation’s historical emissions are projected to approach those of the United States in the coming years."
Nowhere in the article is the case made that the US should wait for authoritarian China to go first, before we democratically decarbonize our own economy.
Again, for any uncommitted lurkers: The misleading argument for "cheap, clean LNG" is relentlessly flogged by US gas producers (insideclimatenews.org/news/25062024/low-emission-gas-certification-is-greenwashing-climate-advocates-conclude-in-a-contested-new-report), but even without counting what escapes during production, "natural gas" (mostly methane) still emits 60% of the fossil carbon coal does (eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-the-environment.php). Exporting doesn't make LNG cleaner, because the atmosphere is global. Meanwhile, its producers and investors gain their profit by charging all the traffic will bear while socializing the marginal emissions cost out of the price. Buzen might even be working for them! Y'all can judge for yourselves.
"I definitely deny the urgency".
Thank you for answering my original question. I presume you voted for the Denialist-in-Chief, who has repeatedly declared anthropogenic climate change a hoax, and is backing it up with his appointments. If he's not worried, why should you be? "Ideology = Motivated cognition". You guys won this battle in your culture war, so you can stand down for the next four years. You don't have to Gish-gallop multiple undead denialist memes in public fora anymore.
So much the worse, though, for the 53% of Americans who were "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change last year, up from 39% ten years ago (climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas). Not enough of them voted their concerns this time around, but I expect that percentage to grow as extreme weather records are repeatedly broken around the globe, not sparing our country. There will always be a hard core of motivated deniers, but if our democracy survives the Kakistocrat-elect for another term, we're bound to face reality sooner or later.
It seems funny to call huge demand for energy the “doom scenario”. That’s a scenario where AI is succeeding and creating many new and valuable things in the world.
Yes, that's the irony of the Anthropocene. Markets have existed at least as long as our species has, and have always socialized every transaction cost they could get away with. Capitalism, a more recent cultural adaptation, has driven the vast acceleration of per-capita resource consumption and cost socialization on the global market, as our population grew. Now, the benefits of rising per-capita income and technological capability for everyone, though distributed unequally, are outstripping population growth as drivers of the sixth Great Extinction event in the history of life. Anthropogenic climate change is only the costliest and most global of our "environmental" impacts. It's got to be halted sooner rather than later, if only to give us time to address all our other impacts!
This was a really interesting article that changed my perspective on the matter. Thank you for sharing!
How much do you get paid by Tech to write this stuff ??!!
Of COURSE electric vehicles and heating are going to be dominant in taking electricity - they are supposed to be REPLACING fossil fuels.... such as diesel cars or gas heating......
So, you are not comparing apples to apples. Can you tell me WHAT source of fossil fuel AI is actually replacing ?????!!! To me it seems you're trying to defend a dangerous beast trying to make it look cute and cuddly.
Hi Hannah, I found your article very thoughtfully written and challenged my incoming belief about the growing DC energy use. However, a recent US Department of Energy report predicts an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028 in the US alone. How do you reconcile this with the 223 TWh global increase predicted by 2030 by IEA?
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers
Ireland is an interesting case study. DCs are now at 21% of national electricity consumption and there are bans on data centres. Some research on this before the AI boom.
https://rkd.ie/insights/data-centres-and-their-role-in-irelands-zero-carbon-transition/
Interesting! But let's be careful here: Ireland is not using all that capacity, it's powering a lot of the world. And it's a tiny country. data centres could be 90% of Ireland's energy use and it still would not necessarily imply that DC energy use is big on a global scale
Thank you on the podcast episode on free heat. It really seems like a no brainer in a lot of Europe and US to reuse the heat produced by data centers to heat homes. I wonder however how this would work in hot climate, where there is little demand for heating homes and hot water can be generated easily by solar.