An op-ed in The Hill from the right-wing Heartland Institute showcases a new idea that, at first glance, seems like a joke: The U.S. should drop attempts to address the climate crisis because artificial intelligence needs more power.
Millions of Americans are facing record high temperatures as a “heat dome” settles over the East. Not only was 2023 the hottest year in history, but every month in 2024 has been hotter than it was in 2023. A review of the causes of this record heat suggests that 100% is due to human activity.
However, Heartland editor Chris Talgo says that concerns over using coal-fired power plants to feed AI’s mega-watt hunger are the real threat.
“First, we must stop the foolish movement to transition away from a primarily fossil-fuel based energy grid toward one that relies on unaffordable, unreliable, and unscalable wind and solar power,” he writes.
If efforts to save the planet get in the way of whatever it is that AI is maybe, possibly going to do for us … then the world will just have to go.
Talgo’s op-ed is filled with statements that seem like parody, such as the claim that “so-called renewable energy sources like wind and solar poses the largest threat to an AI-based future.”
When it comes down to it, Talgo’s basic argument is so jaw-droppingly awful that it seems like even The Hill, which is a conduit for anything right-wing think tanks want to slip through its dusty mail slot, would be reluctant to publish.
… the massive, ill-advised push by climate alarmists to transition almost overnight from reliable and affordable energy sources such as oil, natural gas and coal to not-ready-for-primetime green energy is incompatible with the huge amount of energy that AI will require in the decades to come.
U.S. solar installations skyrocketed again in 2023, as the price of photovoltaic panels continues to plunge. Solar added 32.4 gigawatts of electric generating capacity to the grid in 2023, which seems like it should be enough power for an industry that threatens to take away the income of anyone who works for a paycheck.
But as silly and remote as this threat seems, we’ve already seen this scenario play out once before.
Right now, there are entire power plants completely devoted to the process of "mining" for Bitcoin. That includes poorly regulated coal plants that would have been closed were it not for the huge power demands of producing a fundamentally useless string of numbers.
Using coal for something that has absolutely zero societal benefits has become so common that when a power plant is dropped from the electrical grid, crypto-mining firms are sought out to take over the operation before it shuts down.
It would be hard to find a situation that more accurately showcases externalizing costs while privatizing profits than crypto mining. At least when coal-fired plants were generating electricity, communities received power in exchange for pollution. Now they don’t even get that. Coal goes in, energy is produced, but what comes out of the plants are only numbers in a blockchain.
As terrible as that sounds, states aren’t only refusing to regulate it, they are rushing to help.
In 2023, Arkansas passed the “right to mine” bill to protect Bitcoin miners from “discriminatory regulations and taxes.”
In other words, it exempted crypto mining from regulations that affect the siting and operation of other industries, including those that prevented them from operating in residential areas. It didn’t matter if city or county boards wanted to stop an industrial crypto operation from being dropped into the middle of a neighborhood; they had a “right to mine.” Local governments were forbidden from getting in their way.
Arkansas Republicans were thrilled about getting out ahead of other red states, convinced that the state would become America’s crypto hub.
So crypto miners flooded in. A year later, Arkansas is busy trying to regulate the industry it deregulated after finding that people are not thrilled about living next to sheds full of screeching computers mining fake billions for foreign investors.
But crypto supporters aren’t about to restore the full power to regulate mining like any other dirty, noisy, energy-hungry industry. They’re sure the problem can be solved if they deal with “one or two bad actors.”
Compared to crypto, AI is much easier to defend. After all, Bitcoin mined in Arkansas might only fatten the wallet of a Russian oligarch, but any common person can reach into their pocket and touch the art-stealing, hallucinatory, artificial girlfriend experience that is AI.
For Talgo, AI is just an excuse to keep coal-based power plants operating even though they’re more expensive than renewables, produce the nation’s largest stream of toxic waste, and are fed by an extraction industry that leaves communities shattered, bankrupt, and polluted.
The most amazing part is that Talgo’s op-ed does give a passing wave to the idea that AI might not even be a good thing.
“AI will fundamentally change our world and the human experience,” Talgo writes. “Hopefully for the better.”
He’s not just arguing that we drop concerns about the existential threat of the climate crisis, but he’s insisting we do so on the chance that AI isn’t just another existential threat.
It’s hard to believe that this would be a winning argument, but follow the example of crypto. Right now, there is bound to be some state polishing its credentials to become the AI capital of the U.S., and some filthy, unnecessary coal plant at the end of its decades-long life being prepped to generate the text behind a million spambots.
Campaign Action