Oil Companies Are Using AI Bulls**t To Suppress Renewable Energy
They aren’t even being subtle about it.
You may have heard of Sultan al-Jaber, as he was the oil billionaire who led last year’s COP28 climate summit. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest, right? Well, he recently told the Financial Times that the immense rise of AI is giving the world’s largest oil companies a major incentive to increase their investments in renewable energy. On the surface, this sounds like a good thing. But if you even take a second to peer beneath the surface, you will find stinks of oil industry greed and manipulation and the cost of our planet’s health.
So, what reason did al-Jaber give for this view? Well, he cited how Shell and BP have massively pulled back from their renewable push over the past two years. But, are now interested in supplying renewable energy to AI companies (specifically generative AI).
You see, AI companies require vast amounts of energy to train and run their giant Large Language Model (LLM) AIs, such as Chat-GPT. These same companies have also pledged to become net-zero in just a few years, as the tech industry is seen as the easiest to decarbonise, and these companies don’t want to be restricted by climate legislation. But AI is ruining these plans. Google’s emissions have increased by 48% over the past…
