Comment by cmiles8 4 hours ago
AI is partly to blame here.
All that power has to come from somewhere. The idea that all this AI is powered by “green” energy and unicorn farts is just a bunch of PR puffery from tech companies trying to divert attention from the environmental damage they’re causing.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the biggest setback on our path to energy sustainability we’ve seen in a generation.
It is, but degrowth is an election losing proposition. Any talk like this needs to be transparently non-hostile to demand for political purposes. The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy, or tax them and put the money into a subsidy fund for clean energy.
> The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy,
That's happening without regulations, though, isn't it? It's been making headlines for the last few months.
For instance:
- Meta https://carboncredits.com/meta-signs-three-nuclear-deals-of-...
- Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos_Power?utm_source=chatgp...
- Microsoft https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2025/10/14/tech-giants-tur...
- Amazon https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-data-center?utm_so...
If anything, it seems to me that AI is revitalizing nuclear energy investments, which I think is a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?
It takes approximately 5 to 10 years to bring a nuclear plant online. Clean energy is growing at an average of 40GW a year for the next 10 years. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
By the time a nuclear plant comes online, Renewables have incrementally added 400 gigawatts. Granted, nukes generate 4 to 8 times more energy, but solar can significantly improve crop yields and soil health. They also make it easy to raise sheep and cattle. It's a good thing I like lamb (yum).
There is a real need for education of the masses. Not destroying the planet should win elections, not lose them.
> there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Sustainability politics is mainstream in Europe in a way it isn't in the US. Aside from ethical concerns, a lot of people over here see climate change as a very real economic threat (likely to cause them material economic harm within their lifetimes).
You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
Intentionally reducing quality of life in the short term will never win elections, no matter how educated a populace is. The best strategy to reduce consumption that seems to be working is allowing below replacement total fertility rates.
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
It's not the power demand that is the problem.
It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.
Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...
This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.
The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.
What your are describing is purchasing certificates from renewable energy vendors, which while technically a small investment (more money to the renewable energy vendor → renewable business growth → more renewable energy projects) has very little to do with renewable energy projects like those I was talking about.
It is technically possible for the AI companies to decide to become self-sufficient or enter into the energy production market if things tilt far enough in favor of that, but it is somewhat unlikely and unexpected.
Big renewable projects are run by electricity producers, not consumers, and they are the ones being actively sabotaged in all sorts of ways.
Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.
You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.
If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.
Not if your government refuses to let you build any renewable capacity.
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.
AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.
Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?
I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
We've had my more movement on the nuclear front than any time since 3mile island
I don't like the social harms related to AI but I think the energy is a silly emphasis. No one has ever thought twice about any heavy industry or absurdist garbage for consumers, home heating, etc.
If we were on track for everything else a serious uptake of AI might have put us barely off track.. But this is like blaming the wafer thin mint for the fat guy exploding.
The big engineering challenges right now are electrifying everything (which means convincing people that it's the right thing to do and that gas powered vehicles belong to the trashbin of history, amongst others) and banning production of "virgin" plastic items, especially single use items (which also required a whole lot of convincing).
Most of that is convincing is done in the exact opposite direction with... you guessed it... AI.
Yep, someone was bragging recently they used 13B tokens last year. At 8mg CO2/token that's ~100t of CO2. Consumption of 5 households (or 200 NYC-London flights) just for vibe coding!