Like There’s No Tomorrow
Days ago, an article in the Washington Post made it clear that the big tech companies — especially Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — have no intention of meeting their climate pledges.
Though companies like Amazon continue to trumpet their clean power purchases, those purchases are a sleight of hand that masks what their wildly increased use of energy (especially for AI) actually looks like in any given market. In short, if a company’s energy use skyrockets and it’s not building renewables and storage at the same rate of increase, then it’s causing more emissions either directly (it’s using the gas/coal power) or indirectly (because it’s purchasing all the clean power in a region, leaving residential and other customers with the dirty energy mix). The power doesn’t magically come into being because they think up a new use for it.
Apple wasn’t mentioned in that particular article, but it’s implicated too. A couple of months ago, I watched with astonishment as the company ran an advertisement with the sole purpose of persuading customers never to delete bad photos — presumably, because they don’t want customers to worry their pretty heads about their cloud storage. The more storage a customer uses, after all, the more money the company eventually makes from that storage; it’s much like electric utilities that don’t want to encourage efficient appliances, because that means they’ll sell less power. (It might be even worse, though, because they’re not telling you to keep running the devices you don’t want, along with all the ones you do — and Apple, in essence, is.)
How bad is the buildup of data centers? Bad enough that they’re threatening to torpedo states’ climate goals, almost single-handedly: “Washington in recent years has gotten a smaller share of its electricity from renewable sources than it did two decades ago,” indicates ProPublica, in partnership with the Seattle Times (emphasis mine) — and because of data centers, tech industry energy use is expected to double by 2026.
Yet despite the rabid energy use of AI, none of these supposedly modern, energy-transition-friendly companies are doing anything to reconsider or slow their rollout of AI everywhere — quite the opposite. There’s not even a setting on Google search to turn off the AI results at the top of the page; despite its utter lack of profitability, they’re all tripping all over each other to be the first past the post with the killer AI apps that they’re sure are just around the corner.
Day to day, it can be easy to forget (or suppress): when we talk about failed climate goals, we’re talking about the end of the most stable era in the planet’s history—the era that has allowed human civilization to flourish—and the coming of millennia of radically increased floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, landslides, sea-level rise, extinctions, even earthquakes. If this weren’t true, the behavior of these companies might not be a shock; they’re in it for the money, after all — that’s how the system works (or, as now, fails to). But these companies, like the oil majors before them, know what kind of catastrophes are in store for us. (Or at least, they know some of them; others likely lie in wait.) And yet, just like oil companies in the 60’s and 70’s, they seem to have decided that pursuing profit like there’s no tomorrow is an acceptable business decision, no matter the cost to the world, and to their own children.
This is particularly notable because in the past, appearing forward-thinking and idealistic mattered to these folks; it was part of the Silicon Valley mystique. And two things are really striking in this moment: first, that one of these companies could look like a hero (and arguably be a hero) simply by slowing its AI roll while implementing a rapid buildout of wind and solar and storage[1]. And second, that even just the founders of these companies could personally, with their own wealth, go a long way towards buying the most precious thing on Earth: a more stable world for their children. Instead, like lemmings, they head straight for the cliff, because they’re afraid someone else will get there first. (In truth, lemmings have gotten a bad rap; they do not do that. But some humans do!)
Or, a company or individual could choose not to stick their neck out, but could rather agitate for a shared agreement. If Gates or Bezos (or Microsoft or Amazon) decided to be completely transparent about the stakes and to begin to actually solve the problem by building or spurring the development of renewables at the rate at which they need them (rather than simply working within the Data Center Coalition to lobby for more nuclear), there would be pressure for the others to come to the table and do the same. Instead, afraid of losing market share, they’re risking the loss of everything that matters.
The most effective way for any of this to happen, of course, would be at the national level, politically, with direct investment, incentives, and regulation that would balance the desire for innovation with concerns about our survival, our national interest, and our values. We can do big things: Silicon Valley itself would not exist were it not for the federally funded water mega-projects that utterly transformed the American west, or for the federal research that undergirds the internet; these companies weren’t born from the brains of a few individuals, but from the support and resources of the nation and the world.
We could and should have a national conversation about the need to safeguard our children’s future — about what it would mean to really do that, with their basic needs at heart.
That’s…not going to happen in the next four years. Which means that it’s vitally important that we pressure companies to live up to the inadequate promises they’ve made, even if (especially if) they’re suddenly distracted by new possibilities for profit — and also to pressure governors and legislatures in blue states like Washington to ensure that massive amounts of renewable power are not taken from existing residential and commercial customers in order to greenwash tech companies’ brand new uses. This would be easy to do with sharply tiered rates, and those are something we can fight for — and that can be politically popular — in our own regions.
Many folks in tech seem to truly believe that their innovations will make all these messy real-world problems disappear (in a blaze of optimization, perhaps); they are, as the saying goes, high on their own supply. There’s room for that kind of grandiosity; it can help us forge ahead as a nation or a species when the rest of us are uncertain. Without our grandiose and wildly expensive water projects, there would be no Los Angeles or Las Vegas, and the Central Valley wouldn’t be the most productive farmland in the world. But we need to be mindful of the realities of the living world, or what we’ll have isn’t big dreams, but only smoke and mirrors.
It’s time for Big Tech to grow up.
[1] Not nuclear — why jump out of the frying pan only to head straight for the fire? Kicking the nuclear waste can down the road is an example of the same what got us here
