Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Data Centers Are a Climate Enemy w/ Ketan Joshi | Tech Won't Save Us

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Data Centers Are a Climate Enemy w/ Ketan Joshi | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

0:00
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not how a moon shot works now, like that's you have to build a rocket and you go to the moon, but they are flying very specifically away from the moon, it's not like they've kind of made a few bad decisions along the way and they're roughly on track, but a little bit off course, they built a rocket and flew an exact for the wrong direction.
0:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Tech on Save Us, made in partnership with the nation magazine.
0:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Katan Joshi.
0:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Katan is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo, working with climate and environmental groups.
0:45
[SPEAKER_00]: As I record this, Comp30, the big international climate conference is wrapping up.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: We will see what comes out of it.
0:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I personally don't have a lot of faith in these kinds of conferences, but maybe it'll help set us on the right path.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see.
0:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway,
0:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I figured, given what is going on, it's probably a good time to talk about a climate issue that is very directly related to the types of things that we regularly talk about on this show, and that is, of course, data centers.
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And Katan has been following very closely the recent data coming out on the high energy demand of data centers, Heather contributing to growing energy demand around the world.
1:21
[SPEAKER_00]: and how that contributes to the amount of fossil fuels that we're collectively using, the fossil fuel infrastructure that is being built out as a result.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, how that causes increased emissions, which contribute to the climate crisis that, you know, is making the world warmer, that is making natural disasters worse, and causing a whole number of effects in every different corner of the planet.
1:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in this conversation, we discuss many different aspects of what is going on with the climate impact of data centers, whether that is the increased emissions and energy use, whether that is the greenwashing campaigns that we're seeing out of the major tech companies, and how that is related to things that we have seen from the fossil fuel industry in the past, not to mention the growing relationships between these major tech companies and the fossil fuel industry itself,
2:12
[SPEAKER_00]: given the political dynamic and given the business models that they are pursuing with generative AI and data center expansion.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, this is quite a concerning, quite a scary picture, given that these are companies that at least used to pretend to care about climate change about their environmental impacts and now see much more invested in distorting the reality of what they're doing as their contributions to climate change get worse
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and emissions are not falling nearly fast enough.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So obviously this is something that we need to be paying attention to, that climate groups need to be much more engaged on, and that these companies deserve to feel more pushback about.
2:54
[SPEAKER_00]: As they continue turning out generative AI tools, that not only have very little material use, but actually are harmful in many different ways, in ways that we've discussed.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: on the show in the past, whether it's, you know, the effects on people's mental health, critical thinking skills, but also how it contributes to this problem of false information and of misleading people of scams of everything else, like the list goes on and on and on and it's something that we really need to be paying attention to and trying to stop and rain in, not just for at social consequences, but as Katan makes clear, it's environmental consequences as well.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Katan.
3:33
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3:36
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3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations, discussing really important topics like the climate impacts of these data centers and the major tech companies behind them.
3:51
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4:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
4:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Katan, welcome to Tech won't save us.
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, how's it going?
4:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nice to be here.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a long time coming to finally get you on the show.
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, we've been in touch for ages.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been following your work for even longer.
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it's great to have you on the show because I feel like you have been doing really fantastic analysis of
4:26
[SPEAKER_00]: all of this growing like data center demand where it's coming from what it means for energy and climate issues and so I'm happy to just dig into all that with you today because I think it's a subject a lot of listeners are going to be really interested in.
4:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's start big picture.
4:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're now a few years into this basically generative AI hype wave started November of 2022.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're pretty much like right on three years.
4:50
[SPEAKER_00]: If my math is right.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But over that time, we have seen this massive increase in the number of data centers, hyperscale data centers being built by these major companies, which, you know, as many listeners will know, are very resource intensive or very energy intensive, which has led to this whole discussion around climate change and energy.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what have you made of just this rapid increase over the past three years, the way that it has been framed and talked about by these tech companies and the issues that creates.
5:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is a really interesting one because you mentioned generative AI specifically when you were speaking there and we don't know, you can't walk past a data center and know what's going on inside it, nor can you look at a sustainability report from a company and go, okay, well, you increased your energy consumption by two terror waters from one year to the next.
5:36
[SPEAKER_02]: why.
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: What was that increase made up of?
5:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Were you generating more images and videos?
5:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Was it more people doing video calls?
5:46
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a total mystery.
5:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so to answer the question that you've mentioned there, we kind of have to turn to proxies, which is a bit strange.
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But we can look at the sustainability reports of the companies themselves and I've got a page on my website where anyone can download
6:02
[SPEAKER_02]: the energy consumption and emissions associated with tech companies and most of the most of the energy for most of the companies will be related to data centers.
6:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Not only is that increasing year on year, the rate by which it increases is also increasing and so this is something new.
6:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a second part where it's accelerating.
6:26
[SPEAKER_02]: That is something that wasn't happening before, right?
6:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you kind of go back to like 2016, 2017, and you look to the sustainability reports of companies like Google or Meta, the increase was linear and it was proportionate to the size of their customer base and roughly proportionate to how much money they need.
6:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So the more money they're made, the more customers they had, or the more users they had, and more energy they're consumed, and what you can see in the data, it's quite amazing, it's about three to four years ago, it decoupled from what the companies do as businesses, right?
6:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So for every one user or for every dollar of revenue that they bring in, they're burning more energy each year.
7:06
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a really important dynamic because it kind of shows you, they're not getting returns for the pallet at purchasing, right?
7:14
[SPEAKER_02]: They offer an pallet grid.
7:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all they run pallet stations and we can come to that later on.
7:19
[SPEAKER_02]: and they pay money for fuel or for access to the grid and to purchase energy.
7:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is really something that's worth noting, right?
7:28
[SPEAKER_02]: They're using more and more energy, but they're not making more money, the more energy they use.
7:32
[SPEAKER_02]: The second thing we can look at is just aggregated energy data at particularly the way power generation works across different grids.
7:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, in regions where data centers are concentrated in the US, but also other parts of the world we see faster demand growth than we do in other parts, right?
7:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, of course, it's not always going to be data centers in regions where you have growing power demand.
7:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And the second thing that we see in those regions when you look at aggregated data is that faster demand growth, if there's any fossil fuels at all on a power grid, it tends to help those fossil fuel generators rather than hinder them.
8:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is a dynamic that has occurred with demand growth in many different contexts.
8:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So like post-COVID, there was a big drop in power demand and then a very sudden spike back upwards.
8:18
[SPEAKER_02]: That spike back upwards in power demand is, you know, more and more people started using services and lockdowns reduced, that incentivized fossil fuel usage on power grids.
8:28
[SPEAKER_02]: generally rising power demand tends to help fossil fuels.
8:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the reasons behind that is that even in an area where you have more renewables going, what will happen is those new renewables get diverted into meeting that new power demand as opposed to cutting downwards on fossil fuel consumption.
8:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is a massive generalization, there are exceptions, but generally,
8:48
[SPEAKER_02]: In regions of the world, where power demand is growing and when it's going very very fast, that becomes a major risk because it means calling guests last longer.
8:58
[SPEAKER_02]: They generate more each day and consequently you have worse emissions.
9:03
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't mean that power demand growth itself is inherently bad.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just this risk factor.
9:08
[SPEAKER_02]: that can make us fly off course for our climate targets or things like that.
9:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So those are the two elements that could be company level, and then the country or region level, and the numbers look bad by the way you look at it.
9:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and on that point, you know, when you're talking about that increase in the amount of power that they're using and how that is related to increase in fossil fuel demand, I feel like one thing that has really stood out the past few years is how you had these
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: sustainable as climate conscious, as trying to get their emissions to like net zero or carbon-negative depending on what company you're looking at.
9:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it feels like the way that they talk about climate change, the way that they engage with that issue, seemingly how much they care about it, it seems they've really shifted over that time as well, you know, including in some recent reports that we had come out from the companies themselves where they tried to
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: smooth over the climate impacts of of what they're doing right now.
10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I would run that front like what you have noticed about the way that they're now talking about climate change and engaging with this issue as they are clearly enemies to to our ability to actually address the climate crisis.
10:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, they are.
10:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I have always been interested in greenwashing in general.
10:19
[SPEAKER_02]: But my absolute favorite type of green washing is not necessarily like dodgy claims on packets in the supermarket, but more the type of green washing that is targeted at exactly people like me.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So climate professionals, people who would consider themselves to be somewhat educated, and knowledgeable in the area of climate and emissions and energy, but who are absolutely the perfect mark.
10:44
[SPEAKER_02]: for a company standing up in the year 2021 and saying, we are going to do a big, brave, bold climate moonshot.
10:52
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to use all of our money, all of our capital as a big tech company to get this job done and invest in the technology.
10:59
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to be leaders and we're going to get invited to all the conferences.
11:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think that there has been a reckoning in my movement, climate movement about what it means to have been duped so badly by tech companies who made these promises with zero intention of actually taking business decisions that see them play out as a reality.
11:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And this has been a phenomenon happening for a long time, right?
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: People say they're right things, but they don't do the right things.
11:28
[SPEAKER_02]: That's kind of the basic function of greenwashing.
11:31
[SPEAKER_02]: But I don't think any one predicted just how dramatically tech companies in particular would breach their promises.
11:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And my absolute favorite is Microsoft because they're the ones with the sort of boldest and bravers like Google kind of does this to, but there are a bit more sort of techno-solutionist, whereas Microsoft was very performative.
11:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And they kept talking constantly about their moonshot, right?
11:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they kept talking about how,
11:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, like, the more, like, as 2021, 22, 23 went on, they kept having to adjust the metaphor and talk about, like, oh, well, we sense an astronaut, I think, to space, but we're not at the moon yet.
12:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But we're kind of getting there.
12:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, uh, something happens.
12:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it was last year of this year that just blew my mind where the head of Microsoft said, when they released this sustainability report.
12:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, look, unfortunately, the moon has moved further away from us.
12:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're
12:27
[SPEAKER_02]: We're still aiming for a moon shot, but the moon has, he said, five times, he's specified that the moon has moved five times further away from Earth.
12:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just like, that's not how a moon shot works now, like that's, you have to build a rocket and you go to the moon, but they are flying very specifically away from the moon.
12:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not like they've kind of made a few bad decisions along the way, and they're roughly on track, but a little bit off course.
12:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I find that story really compelling, right?
13:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's not like, yeah, they kind of half asked it but didn't do a good job.
13:05
[SPEAKER_02]: They have very aggressively gone in the exact wrong direction and it's true of every single company you look at, right?
13:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you put their targets and plans and trajectories into a spreadsheet and then you compare it to their actual unadjusted emissions and every single company is flown off in the wrong direction.
13:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope that this
13:26
[SPEAKER_02]: climate professional space, like the type of people who go to the conferences and the type of people who work in sustainability, that's not only should you not take a promise as if it's a piece of climate action that we can bank as success, but you should actually doubt it very intensely.
13:45
[SPEAKER_02]: and I think tech companies have exemplified that not only with a instance here in their promise, they're really aggressively betrayed it, really, really nasty, and I think that it's probably only going to get worse.
14:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think definitely, right?
14:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And even as you're saying that, one of the examples that comes to mind is, I remember Amazon made these big pledges about kind of using renewables, right?
14:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And the deadline came at, it went, it was, the company was clearly not doing it.
14:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And then instead of really responding, it increasingly just cracked down on like the workers and stuff who were demanding that it even just live up to the pledges that it was making not only not just like do better, right?
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So many of these companies are engaging in this.
14:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazon helicoptered a giant sign onto the top of an arena and renamed the whole thing climate pledge arena in Seattle to be clear.
14:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah and Seattle and they got kicked out of several months after that they got kicked out of the science based targets initiative because one of the requirements was that you first set the target and then you publish a plan to reach the target and Amazon just never did the second step.
14:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And they just got kicked out of this.
14:56
[SPEAKER_02]: That's talking, it's an initiative.
14:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I just, yeah, it's incredible.
14:59
[SPEAKER_02]: I could definitely write a book about this.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm sure.
15:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we need that book.
15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to have you on the show.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's a bunch there to dig into.
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And we will continue to dig into it through this conversation, right?
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because, you know, I wanted to understand a bit more about what the numbers are really showing about what we're seeing about this demand and the impacts of it.
15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know there's this recent,
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: international energy agency like world energy report that came out but then I'm sure there's a bunch of other numbers that you have been following as well as you have been keeping up on this but I wonder broadly what we're seeing in the energy demand of data centers and also then what that means for climate change right as an issue that that we're very concerned about that a lot of listeners will be concerned about and that the companies as you were saying claim to be concerned about for a long time
15:46
[SPEAKER_00]: even if they weren't, weren't taking the action.
15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we're seeing there in the actual data.
15:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's just starting at the highest level, which is, which is just fundamentally for the energy system of the world, how are emissions going?
15:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Like how's decarbonization and renewables and fossil fuels going?
16:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And I track this really closely, right?
16:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I first of all, I care about what the absolute numbers say, like our emissions going up, but down, of course, they went up slightly
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: for the world's energy system went up slightly, that's not good, but then my next question is how much did they go up and how does that compare to the old projections like what we're re-expecting and it's not great.
16:26
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at all the different projections of where we would possibly be in the year 2025 from older reports were about in the middle and so we're not on the best case scenarios, not on the worst case scenarios, but emissions are increasing.
16:39
[SPEAKER_02]: and they're increasing in line with a trajectory that leads the world to heat by two point five, two about three degrees.
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's a lot, right?
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: That's quite this very, I think you're audience probably knows.
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: That's quite catastrophic.
16:51
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really, really bad.
16:52
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to get off that trajectory.
16:54
[SPEAKER_02]: But then, of course, the international energy agency is report really provides quite a detailed breakdown of why things have shifted in the recent history for the world's energy
17:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, there's a bunch of different reasons, right, like China, for instance, is still generating more electricity using coal, they're building a very vast amount of new renewable energy as well.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So that could be way, way worse than it is.
17:17
[SPEAKER_02]: There's other parts of the world that are developing fast using gas, and that's pretty bad because that has quite a severe climate impact itself.
17:25
[SPEAKER_02]: But what immediately drew my eye is that, of course, the United States is one of
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It's historically the United States is the world number one emitter when you look at the Think about the atmosphere as a bucket which country is contributed most of the bucket of greenhouse gases and it's the United States throughout history and so there are a big player, right?
17:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So even small percentage changes in what happens in the United States has a major impact globally to our entire species climate story.
17:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So data center development is actually laid out really nicely in the International Energy Agency report, but data center development has been concentrated in the United States.
18:08
[SPEAKER_02]: United the United States has power grid that are predominantly by fossil gas and a bit of coal.
18:14
[SPEAKER_02]: What happened in the past year is that for the first time coal increased in its power generation, not for the first time ever, but is in for the first time since the sort of early 2010s, if I remember correctly.
18:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And we've been seeing this emerge in the power generation data, sort of over the year.
18:30
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think we're going to get to the end of the year and be truly shocked at how bad it is, right?
18:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, this is really, really significant.
18:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of people are slightly baffled by it because they're like, I thought that there was some, at least some renewable energy development underbite in the US.
18:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And then what was, but what happened is that renewable energy was siphoned off to meet new demand.
18:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that was still not enough to meet the demand growth in the United States, the only way to meet that demand growth was to have more generation from existing coal and gas fine power stations.
19:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is the exact dynamic that we've kind of been warning about, where you can kind of look at the renewable growth and go, oh yeah, that's nice.
19:11
[SPEAKER_02]: There's some more solar panels and some more wind turbines, but the system dynamics of rapid growth,
19:18
[SPEAKER_02]: particularly growth that's like geographically concentrated in certain areas and like high fossil fuel areas is of course that you see more fossil fuel being used.
19:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so 50% of power demand growth in the US from 2023 to 2024 is from from data centers.
19:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there are some about 10% error bars on that from the report and the majority of global fossil fuel CO2 growth was from the United States.
19:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when you sort of break down like what caused the height, this is from the global carbon budget report that was released partly co-authored by some friends, climate scientists, friends, I have here in Oslo, the largest single chunk from any country in that growth in global emissions from the US, from energy in the US, right?
20:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So what we can see from this, both from the IA report and the global carbon budget report, is that data center growth is not like
20:15
[SPEAKER_02]: a little non-story that might be an issue for a few little regions here and there.
20:20
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that's pulling the levers for the entire story of climate change and how fast we're growing emissions globally.
20:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Even though it's not something that's happening like systemically everywhere in the same way that people are driving more combustion engine cars, or there's like heavy industry is shifting.
20:39
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that is related to a small number of companies, a small number of regions and predominantly majority of data sent to growth globally is in the US.
20:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I obviously had dismissed on the grounds that, well, you know, data sent to cities like small geographically concentrated things that might cause issues locally, but aren't really big deal nationally or globally.
21:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's that's completely debunked now.
21:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we can say that's not true.
21:08
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22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: When we look at these increases in the United States, you were saying in the carbon budget report, it shows that the United States is the biggest contributor to this increase in global emissions.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Does the data then show that the bulk of those increases in the United States are coming from data center expansion?
22:28
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no analysis done of what percentage of that is from data center expansion specifically.
22:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think we can very reasonably and reliably say it's a substantial proportion because half of all demand growth in the US was from data centers, from 23 to 24.
22:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is specifically for electricity.
22:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously there are other sectors in the US side, there's heavy industry, actually the oil and gas industry has been consuming way more energies than it has historically.
22:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's contributing as an issue.
22:59
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, data center growth is a major major part of it.
23:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, kind of actually say, they're obviously with every single year on year comparison, right?
23:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There's always going to be a multitude of factors, but what we're seeing is that data center growth is so significant that it's stopped being in the other category.
23:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And now it's in the data center growth category, right?
23:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And you'll notice this is actually, I don't know how much you like reading system plans, like grid planning system plans.
23:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I do love doing that.
23:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is a really consistent thing.
23:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that data centers have stopped being like a, yeah, you know, just put it in the commercial loads or commercial buildings or whatever.
23:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And now it is its own category.
23:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's significant enough that I think that that says, okay, we should care about this now, even though if you would have put it in percentage terms of everything.
23:48
[SPEAKER_02]: They kind of look small.
23:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the IA actually does this in their report where they're like, yeah, sure there's demand growth from data centers.
23:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's also about the same percentage from heating and cooling and EVs.
24:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just like, those are different things.
24:04
[SPEAKER_02]: We understand what cooling is for, right?
24:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, he keeps you alive during a heat wave.
24:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And we understand what transport is for it.
24:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Moose your body from one place to another.
24:14
[SPEAKER_02]: but we do not know what data center is for, right?
24:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's not clear why data centers are now competing with all electric vehicles or all heat pump installations or keeping people warm in winter.
24:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there is no clear explanation of why it is now its own category in that scale of demand growth.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And just to build on what you're saying, like, we also see a number of reports from around the United States of these utilities effectively having to build out so much more capacity because of data centers.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, these growing conversations about what that means for power bills and the amount that people are paying for energy in the United States and how that's potentially going to become a big political issue later this year when the midterms come up.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Because this is feeling a lot of anger at a time when cost of living is still a big problem.
25:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is one of the reasons that this interest me quite a lot, and when you mentioned cost of living is because there's certainly been a very strong push in the climate space to adjust how we talk about climate and particularly how we talk about climate policies and energy policies to focus on cost of living, right?
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So obviously a lot of people are doing it really, really tough that energy bills are going up and so many different parts of the world.
25:29
[SPEAKER_02]: that's down to fossil fuels to a very large chunk.
25:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, just fossil fuels are expensive, in general, that more instability, more global instability means more messy supply chains, etc.
25:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, of course, when you have rapidly rising demand growth, it's not just the demand growth that makes power bills go up.
25:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you have municipalities and councils and governments funneling money towards subsidizing data centers and all that sort of stuff.
25:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I sort of see like this like self-critical approach in the climate space where it's like, oh, we don't talk enough about energy bills and things like that.
26:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But the way I see it, like it's actually quite shocking that the conservatives or the tech rose or those that sort of general nexus, get away with very directly and actively worsening the situation, whilst claiming to be people who care about energy affordability.
26:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, I just see that as something really significant, right?
26:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not in any way clear that right wing politics is good for energy affordability.
26:33
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't actually sincerely care about it, even though somehow they're presented themselves as being the ones who do.
26:39
[SPEAKER_02]: I find that quite unfair and silly.
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I was wondering as well, like, when you're looking into these reports, what are you actually seeing on the way that this is contributing to, say, renewable build out the industry, if we're talking about the tech industry and the data center industry has been talking a lot about how nuclear energy is going to power data centers and all this kind of stuff.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, they love to talk about how
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So much of the future data center capacity is going to be powered by renewables to try to distract from the picture of fossil fuel reliance and things like that, but what are we actually seeing about the type of energy that they're that they're depending on and whether these narratives that they're trying to use actually are justified or are as you were talking about earlier another form of greenwashing.
27:21
[SPEAKER_02]: When I started out in my career in the renewable energy industry, like I used to work for a wind farm company, right?
27:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And the general idea was that companies like Google and Amazon were our friends, because what they would do is enter into these deals called power purchasing agreements or PPAs with a renewable energy developer, for instance, right?
27:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And go, okay, well, you build your wind farm.
27:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we'll guarantee that we'll buy the power from that thing for the next 20 years.
27:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the developer can go to a bank and say, hey, look, Amazon's going to buy my power for the next 20 years.
27:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So please lend me 3 million bucks to build this wind farm.
27:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And so by doing that, they helped the development of some renewable energy, not all of it.
28:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, a far smaller fraction than you might imagine.
28:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But we still had this feeling in our hearts.
28:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, okay, these companies are there to help us, right?
28:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, they're doing the right thing.
28:10
[SPEAKER_02]: they got to cancel out the emissions on their sustainability reports down to zero due to those deals, right?
28:17
[SPEAKER_02]: They sort of treated as a form of offsetting.
28:19
[SPEAKER_02]: But we were interested in, you know, ourselves, I guess that they're renewable energy industry.
28:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And now I'm older and wise, or I'm like, I don't think that's a good trade off at all.
28:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's actually really bad because we get a misleading picture of the company's emissions.
28:33
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a while ago, right?
28:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that was
28:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And the companies know in the US in particular, they have a dysphotic government that is there to assist them, right?
28:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's less of a focus on climate or at least in their view, particularly for an immediate, there's less of a focus on climate, even if people in the normal world still care about it, what they're doing now is in fact using that same momentum and power and influence to directly incentivize fossil fuels rather than renewable energy.
29:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think people have quite gotten a grasp on how massively this all has shifted.
29:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a few examples of this XAI building a very large number of fossil gas burning turbines.
29:15
[SPEAKER_02]: They basically constructed a power station just to power the chatbot on X. I mean, that's really quite remarkable.
29:23
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that's widely known outside of our kind of like spaces, but the size of this
29:29
[SPEAKER_02]: gas power plant essentially that was constructed to run that data center is really shocking.
29:34
[SPEAKER_02]: They're building a much, much bigger one, a much bigger data center and not only are they're building a new bigger fossil gas power station to power it.
29:42
[SPEAKER_02]: They had to build it across state lines.
29:44
[SPEAKER_02]: They had to sort of nudge it across the state lines who avoid air pollution requirements, which is shocking.
29:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Meta is another good example, or if they've got a two
29:55
[SPEAKER_02]: not only are they building a gas-fight power station to run that thing, they used a bunch of dodgy project names like LLCs, projects, socrates it was called to hide that it was been behind that data center, which happens all the time, right?
30:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's really, really dodgy.
30:09
[SPEAKER_02]: 10 years ago we were like, oh, that's nice.
30:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazon is doing a power purchasing agreement with our wind farm.
30:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And now these companies are just just brazenly saying, no, no, no, we're using fossil fuel.
30:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Like
30:21
[SPEAKER_02]: momentum and power that they had for renewable energy a decade ago, they're applying to fossil fuels.
30:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Same thing with nuclear, but there's a different dynamic there, because existing nuclear will recently shut down nuclear, they can help keep it open.
30:36
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of these nuclear plants are aging, I was recently looking at the data for the world's global nuclear fleet, and it's just getting older and older and older.
30:46
[SPEAKER_02]: That's sort of not great in that it creates this false sense of reliance for power stations that are just too old and should be replaced.
30:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And it should be replaced with the cheapest and most reliable new form of energy.
30:59
[SPEAKER_02]: That's bad.
31:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But where it gets significantly worse is that there's a nexus of Silicon Valley tech boroughs and deregulation sort of like a permitting reforms
31:12
[SPEAKER_02]: who want to deregulate the nuclear industry in the United States.
31:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a really good 404 media piece on this recently, which I highly recommend.
31:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But I've been tracking this a bit and the deregulation of not just existing nuclear power stations, but sort of experimental new small modular reactors.
31:30
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a company called O'Clow, for instance, that has been trying to
31:33
[SPEAKER_02]: damaged the nuclear regulatory commission in the US to some degree it's working and that's going to have shocking consequences, right?
31:41
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really bad.
31:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the last thing to mention there is Google recently was at a conference and along with Doug Bergam, I think it was and Doug Bergam gave a speech and Doug Bergam is senior energy-related politician in the US.
31:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The covering
31:57
[SPEAKER_02]: But he's basically out there saying, yeah, climate change is not that serious, and we want to do CCS and gas.
32:04
[SPEAKER_02]: CCS is carbon capture and storage, which has a record of just not working.
32:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, again, that creates a false reliance, right?
32:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's kind of the situation that they're at now, right, where the tone is changing.
32:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think actually in the climate space, we haven't even really come to terms with it or caught up with it.
32:22
[SPEAKER_02]: How much these companies have changed in their tone.
32:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Google is increasingly supporting these things to the extent where a senior member of Google's executive team was at that same conference where Doug Bogum was speaking and said, yeah, that was a great speech.
32:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I love I support it.
32:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was quite a shocking thing to see because you would have kind of expected Google to either say, like, you know, respectfully quiet about it, but no, they came out and said, yeah, this is great.
32:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they've been releasing white papers about CCS and gas,
32:51
[SPEAKER_02]: and they, you know, advanced gameplay that they call it as soon air quotes there and it's not a good position at all.
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33:56
[SPEAKER_00]: There have long been relationships between the tech industry and the oil and gas industry.
34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we had this reporting years ago about how the cloud divisions of Amazon, Microsoft and Google were all trying to make these deals with oil and gas companies to help them, you know, use the data that they have to extract more fossil fuels and do so more efficiently and all that kind of stuff right more efficiently meaning like to get more out of the ground.
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But then I feel like there's been something to stink the past few years, what we see these growing, get together's meetings between the fossil fuel industry and between the tech industry, impart organized and pushed by the Trump administration more recently.
34:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like that's been going on for a bit longer.
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder what you make of kind of what we're seeing there with these growing ties between these industries.
34:41
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a confluence of interest here.
34:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there's a lot of companies.
34:45
[SPEAKER_02]: that have some segment of the supply chain for fossil fuels, right?
34:50
[SPEAKER_02]: People who dig them up, people who build pipelines, process LNG, ship it across the world, build power stations.
34:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It's quite a lot of money in that entire supply chain for colon gas.
35:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mentioned colon gas specifically because this is relating to power generation, right?
35:07
[SPEAKER_02]: They have been freaked out for a decade since the signing of the
35:13
[SPEAKER_02]: They absolutely love the prospect of declining consumption of fossil fuels and they will do absolutely anything at all in their power to find a customer for the burning of fossil fuels.
35:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they are basically on high alert 100% of the time.
35:32
[SPEAKER_02]: searching like like hungry animals for someone to to someone to burn the fossil fuels, right?
35:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Because they're in this constant state, it's actually becoming a self-reinforcing thing, right?
35:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So because it's in their interests to prop up big tech and say, we basically need to build a vast number of data centers, even if that means rising emissions.
35:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They'll go and do it because then they can just stand up and say, well, artificial general intelligence will solve climate change in 10 years time.
36:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Can't wait.
36:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
36:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And like every bit of great motion, right?
36:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it doesn't really matter what the false promises, you kind of just have to utter the words and that's enough, right?
36:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it doesn't matter if it actually happens or not.
36:16
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that I see a lot more is more and more fossil fuel companies are mentioned in tech company reports and websites and pages and more tech companies are mentioned by fossil fuel companies and on their reports and web pages.
36:33
[SPEAKER_02]: There is definitely this growing connection between big tech and fossil fuels.
36:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's certainly represented in like you look at conferences and you look at particularly the big fossil fuel conferences like zero week in the U.S.
36:49
[SPEAKER_02]: and take companies have a presence there now, and they talk constantly about AI, and they don't even really know what they mean when they say it.
36:57
[SPEAKER_02]: They kind of just mean the thing that will result in the burning of our product over the next 20 years, if you asked them to define it, they would never have no idea.
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, it's worth also just mentioning, you mentioned it briefly, they take companies supply software tools, digital software tools to increase the extraction
37:19
[SPEAKER_02]: and it is actually one of the few forms of AI that seems to do what it says and it's because it tends to be quite narrow, tends to be actually software that's quite old like it has, you know, it's been around for a while and you can really increase the efficiency of predictive AI when you will try to find deposits of oil and gas and you want to put your drill in the right place and you want a system that can reliably predict where the best place to put your drill.
37:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And so yeah, it's a, it's quite shocking because it's one of the few instances where it does actually, you know, there's an AI product that does what it says it's going to do and it's there to Worse and an already very, very bad environmental problem and the companies have learned pretty quickly to be a little bit more quiet about it.
38:03
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't sort of have the same like flashy web pages like our way helping exon mobile increase the extraction.
38:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a really great campaign by Will Alpine and Holy Alpine, both full of Microsoft employees called the enabled emissions campaign and they've been working on trying to get a bit more attention on it.
38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a great campaign.
38:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a fascinating to see what they're doing.
38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: On that point where you're talking about these companies using AI or the way that they talk about AI as a climate solution, one of the things that has stood out reading these sustainability reports, especially in the past few years,
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: How to say Microsoft or meta or Google will talk about how sure their emissions are increasing or or sure their energy uses increasing, but it's okay because AI will actually help them to reduce that in the near future.
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time I've run into that, I'm like this is so deceptive because the type of AI that you're actually talking about to help with any of this is not the generative AI that you know we presume is what is justifying at least this massive increase in in data center construction and in this massive increase in demand like I wonder what you make of what you're seeing there.
39:11
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a really lovely quote for a man, Karen Howe, who wrote the book, Empire of AI, which I think is behind your head there.
39:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, yes.
39:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And she was interviewed on a TV channel, I think, and she was just like, it's really weird.
39:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It's actually really, really strange how we talk about AI, right?
39:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, it's a mixture of technologies that have vast vast differences between them.
39:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like talking about transport.
39:34
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a huge difference between a bicycle and a plane.
39:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously, there's a huge climate and environmental difference between a bicycle and a plane, but it would be so weird if a company just stood up and said, well, we actually think transport is a climate solution.
39:47
[SPEAKER_02]: You would be like, what do you mean transport is a climate?
39:49
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't make any sense.
39:50
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so many different things that could be.
39:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And we really need to reach the same state of confusion when somebody says that AI could be a climate solution, because AI can be a massive, massive, and it already is a very significant impact on climate
40:06
[SPEAKER_02]: generative AI that is just generating constantly, even though people aren't triggering it, and causing massive increases in data-centered power consumption.
40:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, my first one of my first jobs was doing data-centered analysis in a wind farm company, and we used neural networks and machine learning tools to help try to improve our wind forecast because it's very important.
40:28
[SPEAKER_02]: to know when the wind's going to be blowing, I'm not blowing, when you operate a wind farm.
40:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And so like we ran that on a computer in the office, right?
40:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that wasn't causing a massive increase and it's like our work assumption.
40:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I really hope that we reach a point where a journalist can stand up and say to a tech company, hey, your power consumption increased.
40:48
[SPEAKER_02]: How much of that was like you delivering climate solutions through AI and how much of it was generating like shitty
40:58
[SPEAKER_02]: like, these questions are not being asked, and I hope we can ask them more.
41:02
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing to relate it to is I've done a lot of work on carbon counterin storage and specifically how companies talk about it rhetorically and what they do is they use it as this like a magical sprinkle on there, like corporate sustainability reports.
41:18
[SPEAKER_02]: You kind of used to see like, you know, there would be like four pages and it would have pictures of some work here in like a hard
41:27
[SPEAKER_02]: But then you'll look at the actual numbers at the buried at the end of the report, and it would be like 0.5% of their emissions was captured, and the rest would just dump into the atmosphere with zero shame.
41:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suspect that exactly the same dynamic is going on, with the way companies are now talking big tech is talking about AI, right?
41:46
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of pictures, a lot of claims, a lot of nice stories in the glossy PDF,
41:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you look at the actual numbers, not that we have the actual numbers, but if you were to, I suspect that it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what's going on.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a good bet.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, we're seeing a big push around the narrative of CCS carbon capture and storage in Canada at the moment to justify increased fossil fuel production, which is just so frustrating to see.
42:11
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a couple of questions I wanted to ask you that are a bit beyond data centers.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I was interested in, you know, I feel like a few years ago when we were talking about increases in energy demand, we were talking a lot about electric vehicles, right?
42:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And how we were going to have all of these vehicles that were going to demand energy rather than gas or petrol at the pump in order to fuel them.
42:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What are we seeing on that side of things?
42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Like is that causing a significant increase in demand?
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what are we seeing there?
42:38
[SPEAKER_02]: The level of increased power demand from electric vehicles is I think a little bit lower than than people anticipated.
42:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I live in Norway and here in Norway, most of the new cars at a solder electric and about so 25 to 28 percent of all vehicles on the road or miles traveled.
42:55
[SPEAKER_02]: are electric and the rest are fossil fuels, so about one quarter of the way there.
43:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And the increase in power demand when you just look at the raw data and I can share a link to this is not insignificant, but it's noticeable, right?
43:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that this is something this kind of two ways to come at this.
43:13
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, it shows the importance of ensuring that
43:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And so somebody buying a cyber truck, I saw the first cyber truck in Oslo recently, by the way, it doesn't pay for parking.
43:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I looked it up on the parking app, I pretended that I owned it and I put it into the parking app and it gets free parking because it's registered as a business delivery van in Oslo, which is a messy.
43:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, is that the way it gets around like vehicle like size regulations and stuff like that?
43:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they still have to pay the white tax, which is good.
43:49
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, I mean, it's a nice example, though, because the heavier a car is the more electrical energy it consumes.
43:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's got to carry around this massive battery, like, OK, it's fine in Norway, right?
43:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, we have a low population and mostly high drope, how it grids.
44:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But think about how this plays out in a country like Australia.
44:06
[SPEAKER_02]: where it's mostly coal fiber, coal fiber grid.
44:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There's already grid constraints.
44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And so imagine everybody buying a new like a Rivian or a new cyber track or whatever, these massive electric SUVs.
44:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're suddenly seeing an increase in power demand that is not something that looks a bit small on a chart.
44:25
[SPEAKER_02]: There's actually really, really significant.
44:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And then people charting this specific times.
44:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this could actually go quite wrong, quite quickly,
44:36
[SPEAKER_02]: again, it's worth noting, Norway has a weight tax, right?
44:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Like if you buy the bigger the car, you buy the more tax you pay, but I can just say it goes so wrong in regions with weaker regulations.
44:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, I mentioned before, effective power demand, right?
44:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Like rising power demand, it tends to help fossil fuels.
44:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if we can avoid new power demand by getting people to use bicycles or public transport instead,
45:02
[SPEAKER_02]: the benefits aren't just that somebody gets the benefits of running a bike or or using public transport, the benefits are also on the power grid.
45:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's not that bad now, but if we're not careful, it could get a lot worse.
45:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I'm sure, like if we look globally part of that is being delayed by the fact that you know, the United States seems to have really taken the pedal off the gas with transportation electrification, right?
45:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I was wondering on that point as well, one of the things that stood out in the threat I was reading that you made about the
45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: that we were talking about earlier was the increase in building liquefied natural gas in the United States and how much that's increasing and how it doesn't really seem sustainable.
45:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And this really caught my eye because Canada is also embarking on building out a lot of LNG with the goal of exporting that to Asia at the moment.
45:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that you've been writing a bit about how
45:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Australia's narrative around exporting natural gas to Asia to offset coal didn't actually really work out.
46:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But I wonder what you're seeing in that area because it just seems kind of wild to me.
46:04
[SPEAKER_02]: This is such a good example of something which I think is somewhat under disgust and I want to write and speak more about it soon if I can.
46:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Which is essentially that the act of supplying fossil fuels is something that induces demand often when you talk about opposing pipeline or a gas field or things like that.
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: You kind of get this response particularly from the more like very serious person side of climate and the energy business saying, don't bother with supply, you should tackle demand.
46:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But we are tackling demand in that when a company builds an LNG terminal, their mind becomes hyper-focused on ensuring that somebody is going to burn that gas, and they will do absolutely anything and everything in their power to ensure that policies get destroyed, politicians get lobbied,
46:53
[SPEAKER_02]: all sorts of corruption occur to make sure that somebody will burn the products that they're going to be funneling through that LNG tunnel.
47:01
[SPEAKER_02]: What we're seeing then of course is that IA report that I did a thread about was sort of the international energy agency was pressured, reportedly, by the Trump administration to include a scenario that features very specifically the greater burning of those LNG products as they're exported from the U.S. from Canada and Qatar.
47:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's kind of like this wishful film and thing, right?
47:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They want an authoritative agency to be like, here's a scenario where all of the investments made in these LNG terminals makes perfect sense.
47:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, of course, you dig like even slightly into the assumptions.
47:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're not impossible.
47:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's certainly a potential future and not one that we want at all.
47:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But it sort of reveals, I think, to some extent, how shaky the investment
47:52
[SPEAKER_02]: because the amount of money that is growing into building them, you would have thought there was in the bag.
47:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You would have thought that like there's just basically no charge of anything but they're being massive demand for this gas.
48:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is not the case at all.
48:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean you read the iA report.
48:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I just find it a really shocking example of how aggressively we need to find it every end of this problem, including both demand and supply.
48:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And what's happening this year, I've been making it a little compendium and I need to publish it somewhere, LNG, builders, politicians, and just general energy industry people have just been openly saying, well, as we all know, when you build a gas pipeline, it results in more gas being burned.
48:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just like that doesn't use to happen.
48:35
[SPEAKER_02]: They used to be really coy and quiet about it.
48:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And now they're just like, yeah, I'm building this pipeline.
48:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are more people burn more gas.
48:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And the sort of economic logic of it is that gas gets cheaper.
48:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And then because get the gas is cheaper, it's more likely to get burned.
48:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sort of a greedy, like the cheaper fossil fuels are.
48:53
[SPEAKER_02]: the more people are going to burn them.
48:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all terrible, but it is nice that we're in the era of just very forthright honesty where I don't really have to make an argument.
49:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I can just be like, look at what the head of this gas company said.
49:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they're like totally admitting it right out in the open and I was wondering like on that point like one of the things that has maybe given me like a bit of hope recently in I feel like a very grim climate picture is seeing these stories about countries in the global south adopting more renewables building out more solar I know there's a lot of focus on Pakistan in particular and in the amount of solar that it has built out in in the past few years.
49:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of feels like there's a tension between these two systems, one that has been like built up based on fossil fuels that gets its power, its profits and everything from fossil fuels and doesn't really seem to be willing to let that go, whether that's in the United States or even in Norway as you talk about a lot.
49:47
[SPEAKER_00]: this country that's very much dependent on the oil and gas industry.
49:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this newer, I don't know, model I guess that is kind of building up around renewables, where it feels like countries are increasingly recognizing that the cost of building out renewables has come down and that allows you to get off of this dependence, as you were saying earlier, on fossil fuels whose price can fluctuate wildly and be really difficult for countries.
50:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder, is that a real story that you're playing out or is it being overplayed?
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you seeing there?
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something you can see playing out as we're recording.
50:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the sort of final few days it's a cup of 30 conference in Brazil and you see this really interesting dynamic now where instead of really narrow focus on the only way emissions fall is if a government has a climate policy and they target and then that's the only pathway to decarbonizing whatever society.
50:38
[SPEAKER_02]: We're now seeing a mix of this more of a focus on green industrialization.
50:43
[SPEAKER_02]: There's more of a focus
50:45
[SPEAKER_02]: development that can potentially default to a cleaner alternative instead of it being mandated by a government or by other countries.
50:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that gets us to where we need to go by itself.
50:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And the the sort of counter as well in that sort of view, I saw a really interesting piece by President Willa from Brazil and he talks about, you know, it was just before
51:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It talks about the potential of using increased oil and gas revenues and expanding fossil fuel production as a way of funding the green transition.
51:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I live in Norway.
51:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I read that sentence and I was like, ah, no, that's not going to happen.
51:26
[SPEAKER_02]: You're just going to end up with a country that's addicted to fossil fuels and only funds enough of a green transition to look good and doesn't really focus on what needs to be done.
51:35
[SPEAKER_02]: because the money from fossil fuels is just too dang good.
51:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that's the flip side is that, you know, there's a temptation to say, okay, well, this is just a temporary thing.
51:45
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to sort of assist fossil fuel exploration, but it's a trap.
51:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are addicted, right?
51:51
[SPEAKER_02]: fossil fuels are addictive.
51:52
[SPEAKER_02]: That dynamic is certainly playing out.
51:54
[SPEAKER_02]: The other thing that it's probably worth mentioning is India.
51:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I've always been a little bit skeptical of what the Indian government says on climate.
52:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they made a lot of sort of noisy pledges around 2021, particularly focused on solar growth, but actually what has happened in India is that Hydro has come back in a big way, and coal use in the power grid seems to be, I don't think we can definitively say that they're
52:18
[SPEAKER_02]: for another year or two, but it is really remarkable how much coal use in the power grid in India has gone down.
52:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's not like hydro is not a new technology.
52:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just like this latent effects where hydro varies from year to year.
52:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And what happened is they had a good year with hydro.
52:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And they'll have good years and bad years, but this will keep happening and coal use in India will hopefully keep dropping.
52:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not through, you know, with the sort of promises of the
52:49
[SPEAKER_02]: quiet, deep, systemic change that's been happening across India's power grids.
52:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And so solar is part of it, obviously, so as wind farm development.
52:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you mentioned Pakistan's solar boom as well, which again, like I saw headlines about that.
53:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And my first instinct was like, uh, this feels a little bit overblown to me.
53:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I check the data and I was like, wow, fossil fuel use is actually falling, right?
53:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's not like it's not like you had this thing of like rising power demand and then just a bit of solar on
53:17
[SPEAKER_02]: fossil fuel use was actually falling, and to a degree that was, you know, on par with similar European nations, which kind of get all the credit for being like, oh, they're the climate leaders, etc, etc.
53:30
[SPEAKER_02]: But I was like, no, that's exactly what it should look like, right?
53:33
[SPEAKER_02]: That is exactly how it should go.
53:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I was kind of blown away by that, because my own cynicism prepared me to be like, uh, it's actually not as good as it sounds.
53:42
[SPEAKER_02]: But then I looked at it.
53:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, ah, that's actually quite good.
53:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great.
53:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, hopefully those sorts of trends keep up, right?
53:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like, on the one hand, there's all these solar panels that are being made available from China that like enables this to happen.
53:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But then on the other, you have, say, as you were saying, Canada and the United States trying to sell all these countries, a lot more LNG, and it's like,
54:03
[SPEAKER_00]: feels like there's attention as to which way this is all going to go and us countries that are supposed to be so caring and conscious and stuff seem to be pushing kind of the wrong things here.
54:13
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bunch of other things that I could ask you about, you know, we could go on talking forever.
54:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But I figure as we wrap this up and, you know, you mentioned COP30 there and I wanted to bring it back to data centers as we close things off.
54:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder what you're seeing whether it's in COP30 or whether it's from climate groups more generally in terms of the the response to data centers
54:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This is playing into these broader climate discussions and whether there's an opportunity to try to tackle the way that they're contributing to this increase in In global emissions and the difficulty in addressing the climate crisis.
54:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I guess I've touched on the relationship between the climate movement and big tech a few times in this conversation.
54:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's been on my mind.
55:00
[SPEAKER_02]: they had a report out which they partnered with Google DeepMind when they went through a bunch of potential sort of commission before AI for climate type things and they have a little section in there about the potential impacts of data centers.
55:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But
55:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, you see this kind of muddled relationship with what the technology is, what it means, and whether or not you can have one without the other.
55:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And I find that really concerning, right, because actually splitting these things out, taking the good and getting rid of the bad, is really, really important.
55:32
[SPEAKER_02]: The simple fact is that the tech industry has a lot of money, and it has had a lot of money for a long time.
55:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a while now since the creation of the
55:41
[SPEAKER_02]: which is one of the largest single climate and environment funding bodies on the planet.
55:47
[SPEAKER_02]: There is so much hazard in talking about climate threats in a way that might threaten the interests of a tech company or a funder that is associated with tech companies.
55:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And it makes people KG and a bit strange and I don't like it at all and it really makes me want to go back to basics
56:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Cops that he hasn't been as bad as I expected in terms of like hype about AI, there's actually been a really strong focus on indigenous peoples and Amazon and things like that, which I really appreciate, but there have also been a whole bunch of panels about like AI for climate and things like that.
56:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They just don't, they don't really address the question of the heart of this problem.
56:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the other thing that I want to mention is it's just really that I've seen a lot of dismissiveness about the growth of data centers and it really bothers me because it's it sort of,
56:40
[SPEAKER_02]: gets presented as like a small percentage of growth.
56:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that even when you present it as a small percentage of growth, something like data centers shouldn't be up there with all of humanity's cooling or every single electric vehicle on the planet, right?
56:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's just it's such a strange and baffling thing as I mentioned before, right?
57:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
57:01
[SPEAKER_02]: What is this technology doing that's so critical
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: with keeping people alive during heat waves.
57:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can never get a good answer to that question, right?
57:12
[SPEAKER_02]: When it used to be a rounding error in these data sets, people did yell at us for watching too much Netflix and not deleting our emails, etc.
57:22
[SPEAKER_02]: If you remember that, you were like,
57:24
[SPEAKER_02]: digital sort of climate campaign.
57:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think it was like obviously they had a few good points, but it actually was quite small by then, but things have changed completely.
57:34
[SPEAKER_02]: The entire philosophy of the industry has changed.
57:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think the philosophy of the climate movement has changed as well.
57:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we have to become significantly more responsive to this as a threat.
57:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And also part of that is recognizing how fragile things are right now and how much we have to lose.
57:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely.
57:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And they might be at this place now, but it's clear that their intention is to continue the scaling in this growth as much as they can push it.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Good time.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always great to speak with you.
58:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always great to get your insights on all of these things.
58:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.
58:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
58:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me.
58:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Lovely to check.
58:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Katan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by Me Paris Marks.
58:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Production is by Kyle Hucen.
58:17
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58:22
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58:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.