Climate Snark from the NYT

2024 10 22

It would be hard to create a more perfect example of what is wrong with reporting on net CO2 emissions reduction policy than this New York Times piece, “AI Power Grab” (with no comments section!) by David Gellis. 

It discusses the growth in electricity demand for electricity arising from AI training and roll out as synonymous with additional CO2 emissions.  The identification was so complete in fact that net CO2 emissions were not even mentioned explicitly.  That some of the new data centers (why not all?) would be powered by nuclear fission was mentioned only in passing.  And the mention was only as an example of (gasp!) increased output of electricity and completely parallel with “helping to keep a coal plant in Nebraska running.”

The central theme is the apparent irony that, “Cleaning up the technology industry was supposed to be easy.” [Of course, cleaning up any technology is easy with a tax on net emissions, but that was not what Gellis had in mind.]  The new demands are presented as some kind of betrayal of greenwashing statement that Technology CEOs have made in the past.  Even leaving aside the oversight of taxing net CO2 emissions, Gellis seem pretty innocent of what happens in any market when demand increases: prices rise, some users cut back on use, and more gets produced.

Of course, the main driver of demand for AI is that is reduces costs, including reducing use of CO2 emitting inputs, but Gelli snarks, “So far, however, there is scant evidence that A.I. will deliver a miracle fix.”

Hands were wrung as well that, “The surge in power demand from the technology sector is just one part of a broader spike in power use” from the substitution of EV for ICE vehicles and heat pumps for gas and fuel oil heat.  You just can’t please some folks!

“The A.I. boom is leaving the tech industry in an awkward spot. After years of claiming to be environmentally friendly, some of the biggest companies in the world are making hard trade-offs between increasing profits and lowering emissions.”  In other words, politicians have not adjusted incentives to make the cost-effective degree of “environmental friendliness” the profit maximizing choice.  That is, Gellis is implicitly expecting private business executives to do the politicians’ job for them.

Why can’t we have better environmental reporting from the MSM?

Image prompt: Journalist, pen in hand, staring up, puzzled, at a supply and demand diagram on a blackboard.

[Standard bleg:  Although my style is know-it-all-ism, I do sometime entertain the thought that, here and there, I might be mistaken on some minor detail.  I would welcome comments on these views.]