AI is revitalizing the fossil fuels industry, and big tech has nothing to say for itself
Silicon Valley is helping to accelerate the climate crisis in at least 3 major ways
Greetings, and welcome to another edition of Blood in the Machine. This week, a grim subject; how the tech giants, once heralded as champions of clean energy and low-carbon solutions, are helping to automate, and exacerbate, the climate crisis. As always, thank you for reading, subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project. Paid subscribers are what make this all possible—if you are able, a paid subscription, at less than the cost of a beer a month, means I can keep doing this writing. I’m grateful for each of you. Onwards, and hammers up.
Last week, tech reporter Karen Hao dropped a big, thoroughly reported story about how Microsoft is trying to have it both ways when it comes to climate. The software giant has positioned itself as a leader in sustainability, championing its green initiatives and publicizing the ways its AI technology might be used to reduce carbon emissions—all while selling AI tools to oil and gas companies to help them accelerate fossil fuel extraction.
The AI climate innovations are largely speculative, but the value of those AI oil contracts is much less so: According to the internal documents Hao viewed, Microsoft estimates the fossil fuel deals to be worth up to $75 billion a year. When Hao pressed a Microsoft executive on the apparent contradiction, he could only seem to repeat “It’s complicated” ad nauseam.
This is of course *not* particularly complicated. Oil companies possess a lot of money, and Microsoft would like some of it. This market objective overrides the genuine desire of a number of individuals in the Microsoft organization to address climate change. So does running its AI program in the first place, as Hao points out: Worldwide, AI systems are on track to demand as much energy as all of India.
As if to emphasize just how uncomplicated this matter is, Bloomberg ran a story the very next business day headlined, “AI Boom Is Driving a Surprise Resurgence of US Gas-Fired Power.” From that story:
Energy companies in the US are planning new natural gas-fired power generation at the fastest pace in years, one of the clearest signals yet that fossil fuels are likely to have a longer runway than previously thought.
From Florida to Oregon, utilities are racing to meet a surge in demand from power-hungry AI data centers, manufacturing facilities and electric vehicles. The staying power of gas, which in 2016 overtook coal as the No. 1 US source of electricity, has surprised some experts who not so long ago had projected the era of frenzied domestic demand growth for the fuel might soon come to an end.
“A few years ago, there was the expectation that solar and wind would be able to solve our additional generation needs,” said Jed Dorsheimer, group head of the energy and sustainability sector at investment bank William Blair, who now sees gas accounting for as much as 60% of new generation. “There’s been a call for peak oil and peak gas, and eventually those calls will be right.” But not anytime soon.
Got that? We were, according to this report, on track for fossil fuel use to top out—until AI came along. AI is a notoriously large energy suck—an AI-generated answer needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search. Now analysts and agencies are quietly revising their decarbonization goals downward, gas and coal plants that were slated for retirement are being kept online, and now utilities are building more gas plants in the first half of 2024 than were built in all of 2020 combined.
It’s not great.
It’s also worth noting that data centers are at the moment a relatively small slice of total worldwide energy usage—currently something like 1%, dwarfed by cars, heavy industry, commercial buildings, and so on. That could change—a report from the Electric Power Research Institute projected that the electricity required by AI companies could rise to reach up to 9% of the United States’ energy mix, which would, quite frankly, be insane. (If you think the web is overrun with AI content now, imagine a world where one tenth of all the electricity we generate is going into pumping out more of the stuff.)
BUT. There’s another element at work here, and that, as energy analysts have pointed out, is that utilities have a self-interested reason to take AI companies’ energy projections at face value, or even to inflate them: It means they can raise rates and lobby to build more gas plants! And that means there might be two separate bubbles getting inflated here: A bubble in investment in generative AI in the tech sector, *and* a bubble in the investment in fossil fuel plants justified by generative AI. Both have disastrous ramifications for climate, for the reasons outlined above.
So the AI companies are exacerbating the climate crisis in at least three ways:
Selling tools to help oil companies AI tools to accelerate fossil fuel extraction.
Running data centers that require ~10x the amount of electricity as Google
Giving fossil fuel companies a reason—or an excuse—to build more power plants.
This makes it all the more pressing to deflate each of those bubbles. It’s a lot harder, after all, to decommission infrastructure than it is to not build it in the first place. And it should go without saying that, amid an accelerating climate crisis, we do not need to increase our energy use tenfold so that every tech giant can compete to shoddily automate call center and illustration jobs, inundate search results with tips for how to eat rocks safely, and load up our social feeds with dubious deepfakes.
The question is, how? The recent past offers one possible route. This isn’t the first time that the tech giants have been made to face scrutiny over their hypocritical climate policies—back in 2018, I wrote about the many ways that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were selling AI and automation tools to fossil fuel companies. (The generative AI boom is like deja vu on steroids in this regard.) As the revelations of climate hypocrisy mounted, workers at those companies began public-facing pressure campaigns to get their employers to make good on their own climate promises. They made a climate-focused shareholder resolution, staged a public protest, and formed groups like the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The workers won concessions—Google said it would stop selling certain AI tools to oil companies, and Amazon made an elaborate if unenforceable Climate Pledge—even if they were far from what’s needed.
You can imagine some combination of worker power, public shaming, and legislation that mandates new data centers be powered by clean energy beginning to address the issue. A major hurdle is that the tech giants are less tolerant of employee dissent than ever, a number of those climate conscious employees have left the companies, and tech workers have faced years of layoffs—a difficult environment for climate organizing to be sure. But the companies are vulnerable, too. Each has publicly stated climate goals—Microsoft, for instance, pledged to be “carbon negative” by 2030—and the calls need to come from both inside and outside the house to point this out, loudly.
Because when pressed, the companies have remarkably little to say in their own defense. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging,” Google admitted in a report published this summer that found that its carbon emissions had risen 48% over the last five years. And when Hao pushed the Microsoft exec, all he could muster is “it’s complicated” 11 times in half an hour, per her account. At the *very, very least* we should see AI companies pledging to use clean power for their servers, and we’re not even seeing much of that.
“It’s complicated” and “It’s challenging” are not satisfying responses to “Why are you running so much automation software that you have tossed the entire domestic fossil fuels industry a lifeline? And actively selling AI tools to oil companies if you profess to care about the climate?”
The stakes couldn’t be much higher, after all—catastrophic climate change is on our doorstep. As long as the AI bubble continues to inflate, it seems it risks further revitalizing the fossil fuels industry right along with it. It’s darkly ironic that AI is being pitched as essential to the future, when it is breathing life into some of the most pollutive technologies of our past.
Peter Thiel thinks “maybe the Luddites are right this time around.”
Peter Thiel is skeptical of generative AI, too — comes around the 22 minute mark of an otherwise predictable discussion with the obsequious All-in lads of conservative politics and the blight of liberal universities and so on.
Potentially massive job loss headed for the Philippines, home to one of the world’s largest call center industries.
From a Bloomberg report:
Avasant, an outsourcing advisory firm that works extensively in the Philippines, estimates that up to 300,000 business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs could be lost in the country to AI in the next five years…
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the BPO sector to the Philippines. It’s the country’s biggest source of private sector jobs and the biggest sectoral contributor to gross domestic product. Socially, the centers are a source of decent money for non-university-educated Filipinos that doesn’t require them to work abroad. The government had been banking on the industry to help it move up the value chain, propel its 100-million-plus citizens into the middle class and kickstart the creation of other white-collar jobs. But AI arrived before that’s happened.
As always, already precarious jobs are the most vulnerable to AI, especially in industries where the ‘good enough’ principle is at play. AI will almost certainly do a much poorer job of answering customers’ questions than AI will—who wouldn’t rather talk with a person than an automated voice—but management can deem the systems ‘good enough’ regardless, and that’s likely to swing a wrecking ball at an entire industry that’s vital to a nation’s economy.
That’s it for now. Until next time, remember to do your part to put down the machinery hurtful to commonality.
…no one personally held accountable for the decisions they make that effect others…
"AI will almost certainly do a much poorer job of answering customers’ questions than AI will" that doesn't sound quite right to me Brian, was that intentional?