AI companies eye fossil fuels to meet booming energy demand
It takes massive amounts of energy to power the data center brains of popular artificial intelligence models. That demand is only growing. In 2024, many of Silicon Valley’s largest tech giants and hordes of budding, well-funded startups have (very publically) aligned themselves with climate action–awash with PR about their sustainability goals, their carbon neutral pledges, and their promises to prioritize recycled materials. But as AI’s intensive energy demands become more apparent, it seems like many of those supposed green priorities could be jeopardized.
A March International Energy Agency forecast estimates input-hungry AI models and cryptocurrency mining combined could cause data centers worldwide to double their energy use in just two years. Recent reports suggest tech leaders interested in staying relevant in the booming AI race may consider turning to old-fashioned, carbon-emitting energy sources to help meet that demand.
AI models need more energy to power data centers
Though precise figures measuring AI’s energy consumption remain a matter of debate, it’s increasingly clear complex data centers required to train and power those systems are energy-intensive. A recently released peer reviewed data analysis, energy demands from AI servers in 2027 could be on par with those of Argentina, the Netherlands, or Sweden combined. Production of new data centers isn’t slowing down either. Just last week, Washington Square Journal reports, Amazon Web Service Vice President of Engineering Bill Vass told an audience at an energy industry event in Texas he believes a new data center is being built every three days. Other energy industry leaders speaking at the event, like Former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, argued renewable energy production may fall short of what is needed to power this projected data center growth.
“We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” Moniz said. The Obama-era energy secretary went on to say unmet energy demands brought on by AI, primarily via electricity, would require tapping into more natural gas and coal power plants. When it comes to meeting energy demands with renewables, he said, “you’re kind of stuck.”
Others, like Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue say the increased energy demand has led them to build out a new gas power plant while also trying to meet a 2050 net-zero goal. Other natural gas company executives speaking with the Journal, meanwhile claim tech firms building out data setters have expressed interest in using a natural gas energy source.
Tech companies already have a checkered record on sustainability promises
A sudden reinterest in non-renewable energy sources to fuel an AI boom could contradict net zero carbon timelines and sustainability pledges made by major tech companies in recent years. Microsoft and Google, who are locked in a battle over quickly evolving generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, have both outlined plans to have net negative emissions in coming years. Apple, which reportedly shuttered its long-running car unit in order to devote resources towards AI, aims to become carbon neutral across its global supply chains by 2030. The Biden administration meanwhile has ambitiously pledged the US to have a carbon pollution free electricity sector by 2035.
Critics argue some of these climate pledges, particularly those heralded by large tech firms, may seem impressive on paper but have already fallen short in key areas. Multiple independent monitors in recent years have criticized large tech companies for allegedly failing to properly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. Others have dinged tech firms for heavily basing their sustainability strategies around carbon offsets as opposed to potentially more effective solutions like reducing energy consumption. The alluring race for AI dominance risks stretching those already strained goals even further.
AI boom has led to new data centers popping up around the US
Appetites for electricity are rising around the country. In Georgia, according to a recent Washington Post report, expected energy production within the state in the next ten years is 17 times larger than what it was recently. Northern Virginia, according to the same report, could require the energy equivalent of several nuclear power plants to meet the increased demand from planned data centers currently under construction. New data centers have popped up in both of those states in recent years. Lobbyists representing traditional coal and gas energy providers, the Post claims, are simultaneously urging government offices to delay retiring some fossil fuel plants in order to meet increasing energy demands. Data centers in the US alone were responsible for 4% of the county’s overall energy use in 2022 according to the IEA. That figure will only grow as more and more AI-focused facilities come online.
At the same time, some of the AI industry’s-starkest proponents have argued these very same energy intensive models may prove instrumental in helping scale-up renewable energy sources and develop technologies to counteract the most destructive aspects of climate change. Previous reports argue powerful AI models could improve the efficiency of oils and gas facilities by improving underground mapping. AI simulation modes, similarly could help engineers develop optimal designs for wind or solar plants that could bring down their cost and increase their desirability as an energy source. Microsoft, who partners with OpenAI, is reportedly already using generative AI tools to try and streamline the regulatory approval process for nuclear reactors. Those future reactors, in theory, would then be used to generate the electricity needed to quench its AI models’ energy thirst.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-power
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The European Green Deal is limping to the legislative finish line as elections loom and farmers continue to stage fierce protests across the continent.
The policy package, launched with fanfare by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, five years ago, is supposed to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050. But with elections in June, and polls suggesting some countries may take a swing to the right, the EU is gutting some of its key policies aimed at cutting pollution and protecting the environment.
On Monday, the European Council cancelled a vote on a law to restore nature after eight member states withdrew their support. The next day, it approved a proposal from the commission to cut some green strings on farming subsidies, which make up a third of the EU’s budget. At the same time, member states called on Brussels to weaken an existing law to tackle deforestation in countries from which Europe sources crops.
“It is hard,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU’s environment commissioner, who pointed to elections and farming protests as reasons for resistance to the final policy packages of the green deal. “But I do trust we will go through the finish line together with all member states.”
Not all of the environmental backsliding is about agriculture. An economy-wide law to tackle environmental abuses in supply chains barely passed this month after member states watered it down to cover a fraction of the companies for which it was proposed.
Farming has proved to be the most resistant sector to new rules. Agriculture pumps out at least 11% of all planet-heating gases emitted in the EU, many of which damage the heart and lungs when inhaled, and are a main driver of the destruction of wildlife.
While the continent’s emissions have stayed more or less steady for the last 15 years, efforts to rein in the damage to human health and the environment – or to make farmers and their customers pay for some of the pollution – have been met with fierce resistance. Honking lines of tractors, flaming bales of hay and stinking piles of manure have regularly blocked the streets of European capitals over the last few months as farmers have fought rules they say they can’t afford to follow. Green policies, as well as Ukrainian grain imports and a proposed free trade deal with South American countries, have borne the brunt of their anger.
Buoyed up by public support and appeased by politicians fearful of a rightward lurch amid rural voters, farmers have secured concession after concession from European leaders. They are, however, likely to pay a price for their success. Europe’s farms and fisheries are already suffering from a climate that has become more violent, and soils and waterways that have grown less supportive of life. In just one example of the unusual ways this is affecting daily life, people now steal more olive oil from Spanish supermarkets than any other food as droughts and recurring heatwaves ruin harvests and send prices of the “liquid gold” soaring.
Climate scientists say the picture for the planet is not all gloomy. Most of the policies that make up the European Green Deal, which has withstood the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have already passed – though often in a weakened form after lobbying from industries and member states. The continent has some of the highest environmental standards in the world and has been able to encourage businesses to transition, even without the vast subsidies for clean technology available in the US or China.
The biggest threat to its success now lies with the possible collapse of the nature restoration laws, the fate of which hangs in the air. The proposal is one of the pillars of the green deal and it is unclear if Belgium, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, will be able to find a majority among member states in the coming weeks to provide what should have been a rubber stamp for an already watered-down proposal.
Speaking at a meeting of ministers on Monday, the Irish climate and transport minister, Eamon Ryan, said retreating at this stage would be “disastrous” for nature and for public confidence in European institutions. “To allow this to go now means we’re going into a European election where we say the European system is not working, we do not protect nature, we do not take climate seriously.”
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A defeat for the PFAS warriors
"Highly toxic"? In their imagination
A federal appeals court in the US has killed a ban on plastic containers contaminated with highly toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” found to leach at alarming levels into food, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides and other products across the economy.
Houston-based Inhance manufactures an estimated 200m containers annually with a process that creates, among other chemicals, PFOA, a toxic PFAS compound. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December prohibited Inhance from using the manufacturing process.
But the conservative fifth circuit court of appeals court overturned the ban. The judges did not deny the containers’ health risks, but said the EPA could not regulate the buckets under the statute it used.
The rule requires companies to alert the EPA if a new industrial process creates hazardous chemicals. Inhance has produced the containers for decades and argued that its process is not new, so it is not subject to the regulations. The EPA argued that it only became aware that Inhance’s process created PFOA in 2020, so it could be regulated as a new use, but the court disagreed.
“The court did not dispute EPA’s underlying decision that this is a danger to human health, what they did was say it’s not a new use, which I think is wrong … but this case isn’t over by any stretch,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit, which has intervened in legal proceedings.
PFAS are a class of about 15,000 compounds used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they have been linked to cancer, high cholesterol, liver disease, kidney disease, fetal complications and other serious health problems.
The EPA said in a statement to the Guardian that it was reviewing the decision.
Instance said in a statement its “technologies … keep thousands of tons of harmful chemicals and fuels out of the environment, preserve product quality, and ensure compliance with many global regulations”.
However, the company in 2021 admitted the creation of PFAS is “an unavoidable aspect” of its process.
The decision is the latest salvo in a four-year legal fight over the company’s manufacturing process. Inhance treats containers with fluorinated gas to create a barrier that helps keep products from degrading.
A peer-reviewed study in 2011 found Inhance’s containers leached the toxic compounds into their contents. Bennett and the EPA found in 2020 that PFAS were leaching into pesticides held by containers Inhance produced, and several follow-up studies reconfirmed the problem. Since 2020, Inhance appears to have repeatedly lied to regulators and customers about whether PFAS leached from its containers, and for several years resisted EPA’s demands to submit its process for review.
The company is facing a separate lawsuit from a pesticide maker who claims Inhance concealed its products’ dangers.
The fifth circuit judges wrote that the EPA would have to regulate the containers under Section 6 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which the judges and Inhance claim would require the EPA to take into account the economic impact on Inhance. The company has said a ban on its fluorination process would put it out of business.
However, Peer noted Section 6 states health risks should be weighed “without consideration of costs or other non-risk factors”.
Bennett also noted that the EPA and other companies have found alternatives to treating containers with PFAS, including those that are strong enough for storing highly corrosive substances, like pesticides.
Another lawsuit over the containers is playing out in federal court in Pennsylvania, and a contradictory decision from it could send the issue to the US supreme court. The EPA has other options, Bennett stressed, including Section 6.
“Given how strong the EPA’s orders [to ban the containers] were, I can’t imagine they will throw their hands up and walk away,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/30/pfas-ban-plastic-containers-court#:~:text=A%20federal%20appeals%20court%20in,other%20products%20across%20the%20economy .
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Wrong, Daily Mail, Climate Change Isn’t Causing a Chocolate Easter Egg Crisis
The Daily Mail posted an alarming Easter themed story saying climate change has caused the price of chocolate Easter eggs to increase. This is false. Chocolate Easter eggs and other chocolate candies have seen prices increase; however, data prove it isn’t due to a shortage of cocoa beans since cocoa production has risen as the Earth has warmed. If climate change isn’t harming cocoa production, it can’t be behind the rising prices.
“With Easter fast approaching, you might have already begun to notice that Easter eggs are more expensive this year,” opens the Daily Mail’s article, titled Chocolate Easter eggs have risen in price by 50% or more in the UK – and scientists say climate change is to blame. “But this isn’t just due to inflation, as scientists say climate change is a key reason your chocolate is costing more.”
“According to researchers from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a combination of wet heatwaves and drought have battered this year’s cocoa harvest,” writes the Daily Mail.
The ECIU’s claim is false on a number of counts. First, across the region making up West Africa, it is common, not rare, for it to have heatwaves and heavy rains, interspersed with periods of drought. Those conditions are known as typical weather there. Hot weather is the norm across West Africa. While the northern part of West Africa is semi-arid Sahel, a transition from the Sahara to the savannah grasslands, much of the region is tropical forests where rainfall is common and commonly heavy. So, a “wet heatwave” is not uncommon and cocoa production, in fact, requires and thrives in hot wet conditions, which is why most global cocoa production comes jungles and forests near the equator, where much of West Africa lies.
The rains are interspersed with periods of intense drought, especially in the arid northern part of West Africa. As the U.S. National Science Foundation wrote recently, “West African droughts are the norm, not an anomaly … some droughts lasted centuries in the past ….” So a single year’s drought after heavy rain is not proof or even an indication of climate change. Indeed, history indicates that West Africa cycles periodically from wet periods to dry periods lasting multiple decades each. Multiple studies, here, here, and here, for example, confirm the region’s climate history. Since 1991, the Sahel region in West Africa has been in a rainy period recovering from an extended dry period from the early 1970s to the 1990s. As has been pointed out repeatedly at Climate Realism, here and here, for example, scientific bodies recognize climate change as indicated by a shift in average weather recorded over a 30-year period, not the weather happening in a single year or couple of years. There is no trend for either drought or extreme rainfall which would indicate climate change is impacting normal rainfall patterns in West Africa, rather recent weather has been well within the historic cyclical norms for the region.
While weather hasn’t changed much in West Africa’s cocoa production region, cocoa production has, increasing dramatically even has the weather has varied from year to year. Like most other crops, cocoa production has grown substantially during the recent period of climate change in response, in part, to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. During the period when climate alarmists claim warming has been most severe, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1992 to 2022 (the latter being the most recent year for which data is available): Cocoa bean production in West Africa increased by more than 158 percent. West Africa set records for production 17 times during that period, most recently in 2022.
Globally the story is much the same. Global cocoa bean production from 1992 to 2022 grew by nearly 120 percent, setting records for production 19 times, with each of the last six years setting new records for production.
Because the climate in West Africa isn’t changing and cocoa production is setting records, one can hardly blame climate change for the higher costs of chocolate Easter eggs in the United Kingdom or anywhere else.
Interestingly, in its story the Daily Mail pointed to two other more likely candidates for the price increase: El Niño and inflation. Sadly, the Daily Mail promptly downplayed these two tangible factors to play up the false climate change angle.
The past two years wide weather swings across the globe have been dominated by the shift from a La Niña to a “strong El Niño year,” as the Daily Mail admits.
Then there is the dramatic increase in inflation affecting most of the world, complicated by supply chain issues. It should be noted that inflation is being driven, in part, by developed countries’ climate policies that have raised the costs of fossil fuel production and use which has contributed to higher costs for the energy used to process and the fuels used to transport cocoa and finished chocolate products.
To conclude, there is no evidence climate change has played any role in the U.K.’s chocolate Easter egg crisis. Rather than publishing one more “climate change is causing everything bad” fairy tale, the Daily Mail, would better serve their readers by checking the facts and publishing them. Doing so would reduce its readers’ climate anxiety and in the process direct their attention to a more likely cause of higher chocolate prices: government climate policies which increase energy costs.
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Fact is, Australian entrepreneur has revealed the lies about renewables
The RMIT ABC Fact Check own goal against Dick Smith exposed not only the green-left bias and deceit of the national broadcaster and the so-called “fact-checking” outfit, but also the central lie at the heart of the national climate and energy debate. The renewables-plus-storage experiment that Australia has embarked upon is not only unprecedented but impossible with current technology.
This is an inconvenient fact that is denied daily by the Australian Labor Party, the Greens, the ABC, the climate lobby, and the so-called elites of our national debate. We are undermining our national economic security by chasing a mirage, and our taxpayer-funded media deliberately misleads us down this dead-end path.
In an age when most of us were analogue, Smith made an electronic fortune then turned his attention back to the organic and irreplaceable, focusing on conservation and adventure.
The Australian Geographic founder epitomises the admirable qualities of initiative, innovation, and environmental stewardship.
Which makes it confounding that the RMIT ABC nexus targeted him. It seems he committed the mortal sin in their eyes of supporting the only reliable, weather-independent, emissions-free electricity generation available – nuclear.
It is an energy source increasingly embraced by green activists and leftists in Europe and the US. But not here. Whether it is due to intellectual rigidity or partisan positioning, the left in Australia are stuck in an old-fashioned, Cold War mindset of nuclear fearmongering and denial.
The ideological blinkers are so strong at RMIT ABC Fact Check that when the renewables enthusiast and environmentalist Smith made perfectly sensible and apolitical comments about the inability of renewables alone to power a country, he made himself their public enemy. The fact checkers decided to take him down, even though he was right.
This is an example of all that is wrong in our public square. Facts do not matter so much as perceived motives or ideological side.
Anyone who has spoken with Smith, listened to him being interviewed or read his comments would be in no doubt that he would favour an all-renewable energy system if it could work. (For that matter, who would not?)
But with his technical nous, environmental bent, and practical mindset, Smith asks the obvious question: if renewables alone cannot give us an emissions-free world, what is the most efficient and effective way to deliver that goal?
And his answer is nuclear.
Despite Smith aiming for the right goal and advocating the right outcome through the only indisputably effective means, his answer apparently is not what the woke want to hear.
Because in making his case, Smith dared to speak the truth about renewables.
“Look, I can tell you, this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie,” Smith told 2GB.
“It is not true. They are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables — that’s impossible.”
It is worth picking over this dispute because it is illuminating. Smith’s initial complaints to RMIT ABC Fact Check were ignored, until he appeared on my Sky News program threatening legal action and got his lawyers involved.
The eventual apology specifically retracted their claim that Smith opposes renewable energy. Little wonder, this is a bloke who charges his EV with renewable energy – Smith loves the technology, he is just realistic about its limitations.
Reworking their “fact check” after Smith’s threats, RMIT ABC included tortured and implausible arguments. They reported that the CSIRO denied ever having said you could run a whole country on renewables.
It is not difficult to find contradictory evidence. For instance, a 2017 article on the German “Energy Transition” website was headed “CSIRO says Australia can get to 100 per cent renewable energy”.
The article talked about a “toxic political debate about the level of renewable energy” that can be accommodated in the system.
“CSIRO energy division’s principal research scientist Paul Graham said there were no barriers to 100 per cent renewable energy, and lower levels could be easily absorbed.”
Years later, Graham doubled down on this, declaring; “The whole system is getting ready for renewables supported by storage.”
In 2020, on Australia’s “Renew Economy” site, we saw the headline “CSIRO embraces transition to net zero emissions ‘without derailing our economy’ ”.
And just last December, the CSIRO published an article titled “Rapid decarbonisation can steer Australia to net zero by 2050”,
There is no renewables scepticism or realism in those statements. It seems that Smith was right about the thrust of CSIRO analysis.
Yet now, via RMIT ABC Fact Check’s revised article, we learn the CSIRO has a more nuanced, and realistic stance: “Its position is that ‘renewables are a critical part, but not the only part, of the energy mix as Australia moves towards the government-legislated target of net-zero emissions by 2050’.”
Smith has flushed out an important concession to reality from the CSIRO. The “renewables are a critical part, but not the only part” formulation is exactly the point Smith was making when RMIT ABC tried to take him down.
Talk of a 100 per cent renewables-plus-storage model is fantasy for now. I wonder how long it will take the politicians to become similarly frank, and most of the media.
Perhaps even more deceitful was the RMIT ABC pretence that some countries are already powered entirely by renewables.
“There are four countries running 100 per cent on wind-water-solar (WWS) alone for their grid electricity,” reported RMIT ABC, quoting an academic report that cited Albania, Paraguay, Bhutan, and Nepal.
Right off the bat, these were ridiculous comparisons. These are not large, modern, or developed economies (why not compare our emissions challenge to the performance to subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa?). Australia’s GDP per capita is about eight times higher than Albania’s (which had to import electricity from neighbouring countries just two years ago anyway, thanks to a drought undercutting its hydro generation), 10 times higher than Paraguay’s, 20 times Bhutan’s and about 50 times higher than Nepal’s.
The comparisons are laughable on those grounds alone, but it gets worse. The so-called fact checkers were only accounting for the electricity grids in these nations, even though huge parts of their populations and economies are not connected to the grid, and there is heavy use of other fuels for heating, cooking, and transport.
The most pertinent figures, now included in the RMIT ABC updated article show that renewables account for only a third of Albanian energy, closer to 40 per cent in Paraguay and just 6 per cent in Nepal. A long way from their previously claimed 100 per cent.
Perhaps self-conscious about the absurdity of their claims about those small, poor nations, the fact checkers had also made reference to a comparable developed economy, choosing the US state of California.
Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson noted California had “been running on more than 100 per cent WWS for 10 out of the last 11 days for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day”.
Really? As little as 15 minutes on renewable energy and that proves a modern economy can thrive on renewables plus storage?!
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
