From The "No Shit!?!" Files - AI/Crypto/Datacenter Buildout Making Already Elusive Emissions & Climate Goals Impossible

[hatrack]

Surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence is putting humanity’s climate goals out of reach, extending the life of fossil fuels and driving up emissions in the U.S. power sector while contributing to deadly extreme weather, according to two new reports published Wednesday. With power- and water-hungry data centers forecasted to come online at staggering speeds to serve big tech companies’ seemingly bottomless appetite for AI infrastructure, utility companies have turned to fossil fuels to help meet the explosion in demand for power.

It’s a sharp departure from earlier forecasts of only modest, gradual growth in electricity demand, potentially threatening large countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels. President Donald Trump and his administration have spoken glowingly about how AI will reinvigorate U.S. coal and other fossil fuel markets. “Accelerating from deployment to a deeply decarbonized, resilient energy system is proving far more complex than simply adding megawatts,” said Prakash Sharma, vice president for scenarios and technologies at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, in a press release accompanying his company’s new report.

EDIT

The United States has signaled a willingness to offer tax breaks and open public lands to data centers—warehouses of servers whose computing power drives AI services and much of the internet, many of which will be powered by fossil fuels, according to International Energy Agency estimates. Data center energy demand “is threatening to sabotage the country’s already faltering climate goals,” wrote John Fleming and Jean Su, with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a report published Wednesday. Fleming and Su found that, if AI data centers powered by fossil fuels grow as forecasted, all other sectors of the U.S. economy would need to cut emissions by 60 percent in order for the U.S. to meet its emissions targets. “A gas-fed AI boom is going to hurdle us past any chance of keeping to our climate goal or maintaining a safe and healthy future for our planet,” said Fleming, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “To the extent that data center buildout is needed at all, it should be powered only by clean, renewable energy.”

McKenna Beck, the Ralph Cavanagh climate solutions fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in either report, agreed with that conclusion, and warned that the current demand for AI runs the risk of spoiling climate pledges at the local level, too. “The reports confirm what we’ve been seeing in states on the ground for the past year—that there’s a real risk of states with stated climate goals backsliding on those,” she said. As an example, Beck brought up North Carolina, which erased its 2030 climate goals this summer in the face of rising electricity demand.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102025/ai-data-centers-push-climate-goals-out-of-reach/

[cachukis]

1. The capitalistic model is to race to the front. Lot of

bleeding before the play settles. The game and reward move the action.
The settlement will come at a cost. Big money controls the table and yet innovation exposes brilliance.
We all contribute to get a seat at whatever chance looks promising.
Would have thought we would have seen the rules changing, with less stress.
Melissa? Where did she come from?