Cute AI climate projects hide AI increasing fossil fuel use

I finished the book Only Son by Kevin Moffett. A sticker on the cover says it was on the longlist for the National Book Award. A description is straightforward: In the first third of the book the narrator describes the effect of losing his father at about age nine. In the middle third he talks about life as an adult with a son of his own. In the final third he and his son take a road trip, the basic outline taken from a brief description in his father’s diary. The trip happens the summer before the son goes off to college. While the book is praised and Goodreads gives it a decent reader rating of 3.9 out of 5, I was less pleased. Each scene in the book is short – rarely up to two pages, usually just a couple paragraphs, many times just s sentence or two. A lot of those scenes, especially in the middle of the book, seem to have topics all jumbled together, most of them seeming to have little to do with the general flow of the story. I bought the book because it was about the relationship between a father and son, including how the narrator losing his father affected how he raises his son. I don’t think I got much of that. With a book that gets this much praise I did enjoy reading it. I don’t think the story adds up to much. Last weekend Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos discussed the chatter about AI at Climate Week NYC. One part of that chatter was about how AI could help reduce emissions in transportation, manufacturing, and buildings. Those benefits would outweigh AI’s big climate footprint. But AI also produces climate denial and perhaps misplaced optimism that technology can get us out of the mess. There was also chatter in how AI could optimize fossil fuel extraction and production – coming up with ways to increase the use of fossil fuels. So the benefits of AI are still hazy and off in the future and the problems of AI, such as high electricity demands for data centers, are happening right now. Holly and Will Alpine wrote about all that in the journal Nature. Holly said in an email to Gearino:

What we’re seeing at Climate Week is a familiar pattern: companies spotlighting a handful of clean energy pilot projects while the overwhelming majority of AI’s actual applications are aimed at increasing fossil fuel extraction and production. Nvidia’s post is a good example—highlighting a renewable energy partnership is easy and photogenic, while conveniently omitting how much AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more oil and gas.

Gearino turned to data centers. The AI companies don’t know how many of what size they will need. Electricity companies don’t know how many power plants to build. If they build too many, if the AI boom slacks off, the electricity companies may have to cover their costs by billing the rest of us. But if they don’t build enough and fast enough AI centers will use the “least efficient and most expensive power technologies, such as natural gas combustion turbines.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote:

Bloomberg is reporting that the Trump administration has hit yet another milestone, and it is not a good one: For the first time, federal contract spending is more than $1 trillion. That’s “trillion,” with a T. Part of why you’re paying more is that because President Donald Trump’s gutting of the administrative state means outsourcing tasks to private companies, and that costs more.

These contracts to private companies are to pay for services the government used to do before DOGE fired 400,000 government employees. The services still need to get done and if the government doesn’t have enough employees to do it they must pay a private company to do it. And private companies want profit. So DOGE “savings” cost us more than leaving employees in place. Two weeks ago Needham told another side of the story.

Right now, every week, you’re paying $1.6 million to Voice of America employees, which probably sounds totally good and fine, because we should pay federal employees and pay them well, right? The problem is that you’re paying them to not work, and you’ve been paying that for months now.

The nasty guy wanted to close VOA and appointed Kari Lake to dismiss the staff. But a judge ruled her appointment to be illegal and those hundreds of employees were ordered back to work. But with VOA closed these employees have nothing to do. They’re not the only workers in this predicament.

Last month, an entirely different government agency, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report saying that in the aftermath of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampage through the federal government, $9.5 billion of your tax dollars have gone to paying federal employees not to work. That’s because DOGE’s antics resulted in a 435% spike in paid administrative leave.

DOGE claimed they would save us $2 trillion, a number that kept dropping. But in its first few months DOGE cuts cost us $135 billion. Some of that was because of cycles of firing and rehiring.

Overall, after all of these cuts, the administration shrank the workforce by over 350,000 employees. Yet somehow the federal deficit is higher and total spending is higher. Terrific job, everyone. It costs a lot to be this stupid, apparently.

Kos of Kos discussed a New York Times article that talked to disaffected conservatives. They are voters who want to punish Republicans by voting against them or tuning out the election. Kos says not voting is better than the alternative of voting for Republicans. But it must be nice to simply tune out the suffering their vote for the nasty guy caused. Even nicer would be to take responsibility for that mess and help clean it up. Yes, that means voting for Democrats. People who care for others.