Tech Won't Save Us - Data Centers Are a Climate Enemy w/ Ketan Joshi

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Ketan Joshi to discuss how hyperscale data centers are fueling the consumption of more oil and gas, what that means for climate targets, and the insidious relationship between the tech and fossil fuel industries. Ketan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo working with climate and environmental groups. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Ketan has a page on his website sharing fascinating data sets. The International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook report was just released for this year. xAI was caught using enough illegal methane generators to power a city at a facility that powers Grok. Here is an in-depth look behind the scenes at the construction of the new data center from xAI, including the purchasing of a power plant just across the state line. Google's Chief of Investment loves Doug Burgum’s (Trump’s Secretary of the Interior) commitments to power AI growth with fossil fuels. Microsoft has been investing in nuclear energy. Learn more about the Enabled Emissions Campaign. Shout-out to the book Empire of AI by Karen Hao.

That's not how a moon short works, man. Like, you have to, you 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 in exactly the wrong direction. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Katan Joshi.

Katan is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo, working with climate and environmental groups. As I record this, COP 30, the big international climate conference, is wrapping up. We will see what comes out of it. 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. We'll see. Anyway, 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. And Katan has been following very closely the recent data coming out on the high energy demand of data centers, how they're contributing to growing energy demand around the world, 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 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 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, things that are not wholly new, but have taken on a new form given the political dynamic and given the business models

that they are pursuing with generative AI and data center expansion. 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, and as the world continues to warm, and emissions are not falling nearly fast enough. 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 as they continue churning 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 on this 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, 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 rein in. and not just for its social consequences, but as Katan makes clear, its environmental consequences as well.

So I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Katan. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. 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, while getting access to ad-free, episodes of the show and even stickers if you support at a certain level, you can join supporters like Kindwin from Australia, Ginny in Montreal, and Paul in Vienna by going to patreon.com

slash Tech Won't Save Us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Katan, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, how's it going? It's nice to be here. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a long time coming to finally get you on the show. Obviously, we've been in touch for ages. I've been following your work for even longer, I'm sure. It's great to have you on the show because I feel like you have been doing really fantastic analysis of 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 like 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. So let's start big picture. You know, we're now a few years into this basically generative AI hype wave started November of 2022. So we're pretty much like right on three years, if my math is right? 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. 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? 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 terawatt hours from one year to the next. Why? What was that increase made up of? Were you generating more images and videos? Was it more people doing video calls? It's a total mystery. And so, And so to answer the question that you've mentioned there, we kind of have to turn to proxies, which is a bit strange, 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 the energy consumption and

emissions associated with tech companies, and most of that energy for most of the companies will be related to data centers. Not only is that increasing year-on-year, the rate by which it increases, is also increasing. And so this is something new. It's that second part where it's accelerating. That is something that wasn't happening before, right? So if you kind of go back to like 2016, 2017,

and you looked at 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 made. So the more money they made are the more customers they had or the more users they had, more energy they can. consumed. And what you can see in the data, it's quite amazing, is about three to four years ago, it decoupled from what the companies do as businesses, right? So for every one user or for

every dollar of revenue that they bring in, they're burning more energy each year. This is a really important dynamic because it kind of shows you they're not getting returns for the power they're purchasing, right? They operate on power grids or they run power stations and we can come later on. And they pay money for fuel or for access to the grid and to purchase energy. So this is really something that's worth noting, right? They're using more and more energy, but they're not making more money, the more energy they use. The second thing we can look at is just aggregated energy data, and particularly the way power generation works across different grids. 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? I mean, of course, it's not always going to be data centers in regions where you have growing power demand. 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. And this is a dynamic that has occurred with demand growth in many different contexts. So like post-COVID, there was a big drop-in power demand. and then a very sudden spike back upwards. That spike back upwards in power demand as more and more people started using services

and lockdowns reduced. That incentivised fossil fuel usage on power grids. Generally, rising power demand tends to help fossil fuels. And one of the reasons behind that is that even in an area where you have more renewables growing, what will happen is those new renewables get diverted into meeting that new power demand as opposed to cutting downwards on fossil fuel consumption.

And so this is a massive generalisation. there are exceptions, but generally, 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 coal and gas last longer. They generate more each day. And consequently, you have worse emissions. That doesn't mean that power demand growth itself is inherently bad. It's just this risk factor that can make us fly off course for our climate targets or things like that. So those are the two elements that. at the company level and then the country or region level. And the numbers look bad either way you look at it. 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 tech companies that really like to frame themselves as sustainable, as climate conscious, as trying to get their emissions to like net zero or carbon negative, depending on what company you're, are looking at. 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, seems to have really shifted over that time as well, including in some recent reports that we had come out from the companies themselves where they tried to smooth over the climate impacts of what they're doing

right now. I wonder on 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 our ability to actually address the climate crisis. Yes, they are. I have always been interested in greenwashing in general, but my absolute favorite type of greenwashing is not necessarily like dodgy claims on packets in the supermarket, but more the type of greenwashing that is targeted at exactly people like me. 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 for a company

standing up in the year 2021 and saying, we are going to do a big, brave, bold climate moonshot. 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. We're going to be leaders and we're going to get invited to all the conferences. 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. And this has been a phenomenon happening for a long time, right? People say the right things, but they don't do the right things. That's kind of the basic function

of greenwashing. But I don't think anyone predicted just how dramatically tech companies in particular would breach their promises. And my absolute favorite is Microsoft, because they're the ones with the sort of boldest and bravest. Like Google kind of does this too, but they're a bit more sort of techno solutionist, whereas Microsoft was very performative. And they kept talking constantly about their moonshot, right? Like they kept talking about how, 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 sent an astronaut up into space, but we're not at the moon yet. But we're kind of getting there. And then something happens. I think it was last year or this year that just blew my mind where the head

of Microsoft said when they released a sustainability report, yes, look, unfortunately, the moon has moved further away from us and we're still aiming for a moon shot, but the moon has, he said five times, he specified that the moon has moved five times further away from Earth. And I'm just like, that's not how a moonshot works, man. Like that's, you know, that's, you. you have to, you 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 in exactly the wrong direction. I find that story really compelling, right? Because it's not like, yeah,

they kind of half-assed it, but didn't do a good job. They have very aggressively gone in the exact wrong direction. And it's true of every single company you look at, right? Like you put their targets and plans and trajectories into a spreadsheet and then you compare it to the actual unadjusted emissions and every single company is flown off in the wrong direction. I hope that this serves as a lesson for those of us in the climate professional space, right? 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. And I think tech companies have

exemplified that not only were they insincere in their promise, they're really aggressively betrayed it, really, really nastily. And I think that it's probably only going to get worse. Yeah, I think definitely, right? 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? And the deadline came, it went, it was, the company was clearly not doing it. 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? So many of these companies are engaging in this.

Amazon helicoptered a giant sign onto the top of an arena and renamed the whole thing, climate pledge arena in Seattle to be clear yeah yeah in 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 you set the target and then you publish a plan to reach the target and Amazon just never did the second step and they just got kicked out of the science best targets initiative I just yeah it's incredible I could definitely write a book about this yeah I'm sure I'm sure maybe we need that book I wanted to have you on the show, like there's a bunch there to dig into, and we will continue to

dig into it through this conversation, right? 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. And I know there's this recent international energy agency like World Energy Report that came out. But I'm sure that 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 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, even if they weren't taking the action. So what are we seeing there in the actual data? So it's just starting at the highest level, which is just fundamentally for the energy system of the world, how are emissions going? like how's decarbonisation and renewables and fossil fuels going? And I track this really closely, right? Because first of all, I care about what the absolute numbers say. Like, are emissions going up or down?

Of course, they went up slightly from 2023 to 2024 emissions 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 were we expecting? And it's not great. It's kind of, if you look at all the different projections of where we would possibly be in the year

2025 from older reports, we're about in the middle. And so we're not on the best case scenarios, we're not in the worst case scenarios, but emissions are increasing, and they're increasing in line with a trajectory that leads the world to heat by sort of 2.5 to about 3 degrees. And that's a lot, right? Like that's quite, that's very, I think your audience probably knows that's quite catastrophic. That's really, really bad. We need to get off that trajectory. But then, And of course, the International Energy Agency's report really provides quite a detailed breakdown of why things have shifted in the recent history for the world's energy system. 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. So that could be way, way worse than it is. 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. But what immediately drew my eye is that, of course, the United States is one of the world's biggest emitters in absolute terms. 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

has contributed most of the bucket of greenhouse gases, and it's the United States throughout history. And so they're a big player, right? So even small percentage changes in what happens in the United States has a major impact globally to our entire species climate story. 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. The United States has power grids that are powered predominantly by fossil gas and a bit of coal. What happened in the past year is that for the first time, coal increased in its power generation, not for the first time ever, is in for the first time since the sort of early 2010s, if I remember correctly.

And we've been seeing this emerge in the power generation data sort of over the year. But I think we're going to get to the end of the year and be truly shocked at how bad it is, right? Like this is really, really significant. 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. And there was. But what happened is that renewable energy was siphoned off to, meet new demand. 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 fire power stations. 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. There's some more solar panels and some more wind turbines. But the system dynamics of rapid growth, particularly growth that's like geographically concentrated in certain areas, certain like high fossil fuel areas, is of course that you see more fossil fuels being used. And so 50% of power demand growth in the US from 2023 to 2024 was from data centers. 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. and so when you sort of break down like what caused the high this is from the global carbon budget report that was released partly co-authored by some friends climate scientist friends I have here in Oslo the largest single chunk from any country in that in that growth in global emissions was from the US was from energy in the US right 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 a little non-story that might be an issue for a few little regions here and there, this is something that is pulling the levers for the entire story of climate change

and how fast we're growing emissions globally. 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, this is something that is related to a small number of companies, a small number of regions and predominantly the majority of data center growth globally is in the US. And so I often see it dismissed on the grounds that, well, you know, data centers are these like small, geographically concentrated things that might cause issues locally, but aren't really a big deal nationally or globally. And I think that's completely debunked now. I think we can say that's not true.

I travel a lot. That means I don't have time to cook and over time I've even lost some of the confidence in my ability to whip up a nice meal. That's why I was intrigued by HelloFresh. They have chef-crafted recipes and send fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. And now, HelloFresh has doubled its menu, with more than 100 options each week, including new seasonal dishes and recipes from around the world. That was great news for me as a vegetarian because it means even more choice. Plus, you can dig into bigger portions that'll keep everyone satisfied. My recent order had meals like an Indian-style coconut chickpea and lentil doll and a linguine with savory mushroom sauce. I'm excited to try them when they arrive.

The best way to cook just got better. Go to hellofresh.com slash tech 10 FM now to get 10 free meals plus a free breakfast for life. One per box with active subscription, free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com slash tech 10 FM, T-E-C-H-10 FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. 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. Does the data then show that the bulk of those increases in the United States are coming from data center expansion? There's no analysis done of what percentage of that is from data center expansion specifically.

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, was from data centers from 23 to 24. And so this is specifically for electricity. Obviously, there are other sectors in the US. So there's heavy industry. Actually, the oil and gas industry has been consuming way more energy as historically. So that's contributing as an issue. But yeah, data center growth is a major, major part of it. And so I can't actually say there are obviously with every single year on year comparison, right? 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. And now it's in the data center growth category. And you'll

notice this actually, I don't know how much you like reading system plans, like grid planning system but I do love doing that. And this is a really consistent thing is that data centers have stopped being like a, oh yeah, you know, just put it in the commercial loads or commercial buildings or whatever, and now it is its own category. And that's significant enough that I think that says, okay, we should care about this. Now, even though if you were to put it in percentage terms of everything, they kind of look smallish. And the IEA actually does this in their report, where they're like, yeah, sure, there's demand growth from data centers, but there's also, you know, about the same percentage from like heating and cooling and EVs. And I'm just like, those are different

things. Like, we understand what cooling is for. right like it keeps you alive during a heat wave and we understand what transport is for it moves your body from one place to another but we do not know what data centers are for right 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 like there is no clear explanation of why it is now its own category on that scale of demand growth 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.

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, because this is fueling a lot of anger at a time when cost of living is still a big problem, right? And data centers are contributing to that. Yeah, this is one of the reasons that this interests 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? So obviously a lot of people are doing it really, really tough. Energy bills are going up in so many different parts of the world. That's down to fossil fuels to a very large chunk, right? I mean, just fossil fuels are expensive in general, but more instability, more global instability means more messy supply chains, et cetera. And then, of course, when you have rapidly rising demand growth, it's not just the demand growth that makes power bills go up. Obviously, you have municipalities and councils and governments funneling money towards subsidizing data centers and all that sort of stuff. Now, I sort of see like this self-critical approach in the climate space where it's like, oh, we don't talk enough about.

energy bills and things like that. But the way I see it, like, it's actually quite shocking that the conservatives or the tech bros 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. And so I just see that as something really significant, right? Like, it's not in any way clear that right-wing politics is good for energy affordability. They don't actually sincerely care about it, even though somehow they've presented themselves as being the ones who do. I find that quite unfair and silly. I was wondering as well, 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. And, of course, they love to talk about how so much of 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? When I started out in my career in like the renewable energy industry, like I used to work for a wind farm company, right? 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, and go, okay, well, you build your wind farm. We'll guarantee that we'll buy the power from that thing for the next 20 years. 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. So please lend me $3 million to build this wind farm. And so by doing that, they helped the development of some renewable energy, not all of it. And in fact, a far smaller fraction than you might imagine. But we still had this feeling in our hearts, like, okay, these companies are there to help us, right? Like, they're doing the right thing.

They got to cancel out the emissions on their sustainability reports down to zero due to those deals, right? They sort of treat it as a form of offsetting. But we were interested in, you know, ourselves, I guess, of the renewable energy industry. And now I'm older and wiser. I'm like, I don't think that's a good trade-off at all. I think that's actually really bad because because we get a misleading picture of the company's emissions. That was a while ago, right? Like, that was the 2010s. We're now in the 2020s.

And the companies know in the US in particular, they have a despotic government that is there to assist them, right? And there's less of a focus on climate, or at least in their view, particularly from the media, there's a 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. And I don't think people have quite gotten a grasp on how massively this all has shifted. There's a few examples of this. X-AI building a very large number of fossil gas-burning turbines. They basically constructed a power station just to power the chatbot on X. I mean, that's really quite remarkable. I don't think that's widely known outside of our kind of like spaces, but the size of this gas power plant, essentially, that was constructed to run that data center is really shocking.

They're building a much, much bigger one, a much bigger data center. And not only are they building a new, a bigger fossil gas power station to power it, they had to build it across state lines. They had to just sort of nudge it across the state lines who avoid air pollution requirements, which is shocking. Meta is another good example. They've got a two-kikawatt data center in Louisiana, and not only are they building a gas-fired power station, to run that thing. They used a bunch of dodgy project names like LLCs, Project Socrates, it was called, to hide that it was then behind that data center, which happens all the time, right? Like, it's really, really dodgy. Ten years ago, we were like, oh, that's nice. Amazon's doing a

power purchasing agreement with our wind farm. And now these companies are just brazenly saying, no, no, no, we're using fossil fuel. Like, the same momentum and power that they had for renewable energy a decade ago, they're applying to fossil fuels. Same thing with nuclear. But there's a different dynamic there because existing nuclear or recently shut down nuclear, they can help keep it open, right? Like 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.

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 and should be replaced with the cheapest and most reliable new form of energy. That's bad, but where it gets significantly worse is that there's a nexus of Silicon Valley, tech bros, and deregulation, sort of like a permitting reform slash abundance agenda type people who want to deregulate the nuclear industry in the United States. So there's a really good 404 media piece on this recently, which I highly recommend. 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.

There's a company called Oaklo, for instance, that has been trying to damage the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US. To some degree, it's working, and that's going to have shocking consequences, right? Like, that's really bad. 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.

I can't remember his exact. title, but he's basically out there saying, yeah, climate change is not that serious and we want to do CCS and gas. CCS is carbon capture and storage, which has a record of just not working. And of course, again, that creates a false reliance, right? So it's kind of the situation that they're at now, right, where the tone is changing. And I think actually in the climate space, we haven't even really come to terms with it or caught up with it, how much these companies have changed in their tone. 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 Bergen was speaking and said, yeah, that was a great speech. I love, I support it, you know. And it was quite a shocking thing to see because you would have kind of expected Google to either stay like, you know, respectfully quiet about it. But no, they came out and said, yeah, this is great. And so they've been releasing white papers about CCS and gas.

And they, you know, advanced nuclear, they call it. I was just doing air quotes there. and it's not a good position at all. There's something special about the memories made over the holidays. With an aura frame, you can relive your favorite holiday traditions every single day. Every year, my family plays a game where everyone brings a gift, then we pick numbers for who gets to choose first. But if you have a lower number and choose your gift first,

those who go later can steal it, if they like it more than their own. It's always a lot of fun and produces some hilarious photos. When you get an aura frame, you can add unlimited photos and videos for free by downloading the ORA app and connecting to Wi-Fi, then you can easily add more throughout the year straight from your phone. You can't wrap togetherness, but you can frame it. For a limited time, visit AuraFraFrames.com and get $45 off or as best-selling Carver matte frames, named number one by wirecutter

by using promo code Paris at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code Paris. This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year. So order now before it ends. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. There have long been relationships between the tech industry and the oil and gas industry, right?

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. But then I feel like there's been something distinct the past few years where we see these growing get-togethers meetings between the fossil fuel industry and between the tech industry, in part organized and pushed by the Trump administration more recently, but I feel like that's

been going on for a bit longer. I wonder what you make of kind of what we're seeing there with these growing ties between these industries. There's a confluence of interests here. And so there's a lot of companies that have some segment of the supply chain for fossil fuels, right? People who dig them up, people who build pipelines, process LNG, ship it across the world, build power stations. It's quite a lot of money in that entire supply chain for coal and gas. And I mentioned coal and gas specifically because this is relating to power generation, right? They have been freaked out for a decade since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. They absolutely loathe 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. And so they are basically on high alert 100% of the time searching like hungry animals for someone to burn the fossil fuels, right? Because they're in this constant state, it's actually becoming a self-reinforcing thing, right? 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, 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. Can't wait, yeah.

And like every bit of grain washing, right, like it doesn't really matter what the false promises, you kind of just have to utter the words and that's enough, right? It doesn't matter if it actually happens or not. 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. There is definitely this growing connection between big tech and fossil fuels. It's certainly represented in like you look at conferences. and you look at particularly the big fossil fuel conferences

like Sierra Week in the US and tech 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 they kind of just mean the thing that will result in the burning of our product over the next 20 years if you ask them to define it they wouldn't know they would have no idea and yeah

it's worth also just mentioning you mentioned it briefly that tech companies supply software tools, digital software tools, to increase the extraction of fossil fuels. 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're trying 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 it's the best place to put your drill. And so, yeah, 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 worsen an already very, very bad environmental problem. And the companies have learned pretty quickly to be a little bit more quiet about it. They don't sort of have the same like flashy web pages like, oh, we're helping ExxonMobil increase the extraction. But there's a really great campaign by Will Alpine and Holly Alpine. both former Microsoft employees called the Enabled Emissions Campaign, and they've been working on trying to get a bit more attention on it. It's a great campaign. It's fascinating to see what they're doing.

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, is how, say, Microsoft or Meta or Google, we'll talk about how, sure, their emissions are increasing, or sure their energy use is increasing, but it's okay because AI will actually help them

to reduce that in the near future. 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 we presume is what is justifying, at least, this massive increase in data center construction and this massive increase in demand.

I wonder what you make of what you're seeing there. There was a really lovely quote from Karen Howe, who wrote the book, Empire of AI, which I think is behind your head there. It is, yes. And she was interviewed on a TV channel, I think, and she was just like, it's really weird. It's actually really, really strange how we talk about AI, right? Like, it's a mixture of technologies that have vast, vast differences between them. It's like talking about transport. There's a huge difference between a bicycle and a plane.

And obviously, there's a huge climate and environmental difference between a bicycle. in 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. You would be like, what do you mean transport as a climate? That doesn't make any sense. There's so many different things that could be. 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 when it is in the form of generative AI that is just generating constantly, even though people aren't triggering it and causing massive increases in data center power consumption.

But at the same time, one of my first jobs was doing data analysis in a wind farm company. And we used neural networks and machine learning tools to help try and improve our wind forecast because it's very important to know when the wind's going to be blowing or not blowing when you operate a wind farm. And so, like, we ran that on a computer in the office, right? Like, that wasn't causing a massive increase in, like, power consumption. 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. How much of that was, like, you delivering climate solutions through AI and how much of it

was generating, like, shitty videos through, like, SORA or whatever? Like, these questions are not being asked, and I hope we can ask them more. One thing to relate it to is I've done a lot of work on. carbon capture and storage and specifically how companies talk about it rhetorically. And what they do is they use it as this like magical sprinkle on their like corporate sustainability reports. You kind of used to see like, you know, there would be like four pages and it would have pictures of some worker in like a hard hat at the C, at the carbon capture and storage facility.

But then you look at the actual numbers that they buried at the end of the report and it would be like 0.5% of their emissions was captured and the rest were just dumped into the atmosphere with zero shame. 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? A lot of pictures, a lot of claims, a lot of nice stories in a glossy PDF. 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. I think that's a good bet. 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. There are a couple of questions I wanted to ask you that are a bit beyond data centers. 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, 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. what are we seeing on that side of things? Is that causing a significant increase in demand? Yeah, what are we seeing there? The level of increased power demand from electric vehicles is, I think,

a little bit lower than people anticipated. I live in Norway, and here in Norway, most of the new cars that are sold are electric, and about so 25 to 28 percent of all vehicles on the road or miles traveled are electric, and the rest are fossil fuels. So about one quarter of the way there. And the increase in power demand when you'll just look at the raw data and I can share a link to this is not insignificant, but it's noticeable, right? And I think that this is something, there's kind of two ways to come at this. First of all, it shows the importance of ensuring that any new electric vehicle power demand makes sense. And so is somebody buying a cyber truck? I saw the first cyber truck in Oslo recently, by the way.

it doesn't pay for parking. 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 the Oslo, which is messy. Oh my God. Is that the way it gets around like vehicle like size regulations and stuff like that? I think they still have to pay the weight tax, which is good. Okay. I mean, it's a nice example though because the heavier a car is the more electrical energy it consumes. It's got to carry around this massive battery. Like, okay, it's fine in Norway, right? Like we have low population and a mostly hydro-powered grid. But think about how this plays out in a country like Australia, where it's mostly coal-fired grid.

There's already grid constraints. And so imagine everybody buying a new like a Rivian or a new cyber truck or whatever, these massive electric SUVs. And suddenly you're seeing an increase in power demand that is not something that looks a bit small on a chart, but it's actually really, really significant. again. And then people charging at specific times. And so this could actually go quite wrong quite quickly, even though what we're seeing so far, again, it's worth noting Norway has a weight tax, right? Like we, like if you buy a, the bigger the car you buy, the more tax you pay, but I can just see it going so wrong in regions with weaker regulations. Again, I mentioned before, like effective power demand, right? Like rising power demand, it tends to help fossil fuels. And so

if we can avoid new power demand by getting people to use bicycles or public transport instead, the benefits aren't just that somebody gets the benefits of running a bike or using public transport. The benefits are also on the power grid. So yeah, it's not that bad now, but if we're not careful, it could get a lot worse. 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 and electrification, right? I was wondering on, on that point as well. One of the things that stood out in the thread I was reading that you made about the IEA report 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. 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. And I know that you've been writing a bit about how Australia's narrative around exporting natural gas to Asia to offset coal didn't actually really work out. But I wonder what you're seeing in that area, because it just seems kind of wild to me. This is such a good example of something which I think is somewhat underdiscust, and I want to write and speak more about it soon if I can, which is essentially that the act of supplying fossil fuels is something that induces demand. Often when you talk about opposing a pipeline or a gas field or

things like that, you'll 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. 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, all sorts of corruption occur to make sure that somebody will burn the products that they're going to be funneling through that LNG terminal. What we're seeing then, of course, is that IEA report that I did a threat 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 US, from Canada and Qatar. And so it's kind of like this wish fulfillment thing, right? 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. And then of course you dig like even slightly into the assumptions. And they're not impossible. It's certainly a potential future and not one that we want at all. But it sort of reveals, I think, to some extent, how shaky the investment case has been for all of these LNG terminals, right? Because the amount of money that

is going into building them, you would have thought it was in the bag. You would have thought that there's just basically no chance of anything but there being massive demand for this gas. And that is not the case at all when you read the IEA report. I just find it a really shocking example of how aggressively we need to fight at every end of this problem, including both demand and supply. And what's been happening this year, I've been making a little compendium that I need to publish it somewhere. LNG builders, politicians and just general like 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. And it's just like, that didn't used to happen. They used to be really

coy and quiet about it. And now they're just like, yeah, I'm building this pipeline so people burn more gas. And the sort of economic logic of it is that gas gets cheaper. And then because the gas is cheaper, it's more likely to get burned. And I sort of agree. Like the more the cheaper fossil fuels are, the more people are going to burn them. 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. I can just be like, look at what the head of this gas company said. Yeah, they're like totally admitting it right out in the open. And I was wondering 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 the amount of solar that it has built out in the past few years. And it kind of feels like there's a tension between these two systems, one that has been 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, you know, this country that's very much dependent on

the oil and gas industry. 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 dependent. as you were saying earlier on fossil fuels whose price can can fluctuate wildly and be really difficult for countries. I wonder, is that a real story that you're seeing playing out or is it being overplayed? What are you seeing there? This is something you can see playing out as we're recording. It's the sort of final few days of the COP 30 conference in Brazil. And you know, you see this really interesting dynamic now where instead of a really narrow focus on the only way

emissions fall is if a government has a climate policy and a target. And then that's the only pathway to sort of decarbonizing or whatever a society. We're now seeing a mix of, there's more of a focus on green industrialization. There's more of a focus on developments that can potentially default to a cleaner alternative instead of it being mandated by government or by other countries. I don't think that gets us to where we need to go by itself. And the sort of counter as well in that sort of view, I saw a really interesting piece by President Lula from Brazil, and he talks about, you know, it was like just before

COP 30 started. He talks about the potential of using increased oil and gas revenues and expanding fossil fuel production as a way of funding the green transition. And, you know, I live in Norway. I read that sentence and I was like, ah, no, that's not going to happen. 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 because the money from fossil fuels is just too damn good. And so I think that's the flip side is that, you know, there's a, there's a, temptation to say, okay, well, this is just a temporary thing. We're going to sort of assist fossil fuel exploration, but it's a trap and they are addicted, right? Fossil fuels are addictive.

That dynamic is certainly playing out. The other thing that it's probably worth mentioning is India. I've always been a little bit skeptical of what the Indian government says on climate. I think They made a lot of sort of noisy pledges around 2020, 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 like systemically falling for another year or two. But it is really remarkable how much coal use in the power grid in India has gone down. And that's not like hydro is not a new technology. right? It's just like this latent effects where hydro varies from year to year. And what happened

is they had a good year with hydro. And they'll have good years and bad years, but this will keep happening. And coal use in India will hopefully keep dropping. And it's not through, you know, the sort of promises of the Modi government on solar, but it's actually through this like quieter, deeper systemic change that's been happening across India's power grids. And so solar is part of it, obviously. So is wind farm development. And then you mentioned Pakistan's solar boom as well, which again, like, I saw headlines about that. And my first instinct was like, ah, this feels a little bit overblown to me. And then I checked the data and I was like, wow, fossil fuel use is actually falling, right? 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 top. Fossil fuel use was actually falling and to a degree that was, you know, on par with like similar European nations. which kind of get all the credit for being like, oh, they're the climate leaders, et cetera, et cetera. But I was like, no, that's exactly what it should look like, right? That is exactly how it should go. I was kind of blown away by that because my own cynicism prepared me to be like, oh, no, it's actually not as good as it sounds.

But then I looked at it and I was like, ah, that's actually quite good. It's great. And like hopefully those sorts of trends keep up, right? 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 have. happen. 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, it 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. There's a bunch of other things that I could ask you about. You know, we could go on talking forever. But I figure as we wrap this up, and you know, you mentioned COP 30 there. And I wanted to bring it back to data centers as we close things off. I wonder what you're seeing whether it's in COP 30 or whether it's from climate groups more generally in terms of the response to data centers and how 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 global emissions and the difficulty in

addressing the climate crisis. Yeah, I guess I've touched on the relationship between the climate movement and big tech a few times in this conversation because it's been on my mind and cop 30 is certainly enhanced that because of course you have institutions like the stockholm resilience institute for instance they had a report out which they partnered with google deep mind when they went through a bunch of potential sort of like we mentioned before like a i for climate type things and they have a little section in there about the potential impacts of data centers but again you see this kind of muddled relationship with what the technology is what it means means and whether or not you can have one without the other. 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. 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. It's a while now since the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, which is, you know, one of the largest single climate and environment funding bodies on the planet. 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. And it makes people cagey and a bit strange. And I don't like it at all. And it really makes me want to go back to basics as like the absolute basics of why we're doing any of this in the first

place. Cop 30 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. That just don't really address the question at the heart of this problem. And then the other thing that I want to mention is just really that I've seen a lot of dismissiveness about the growth of data centers. And it really bothers me because it sort of gets presented as like a small percentage of growth.

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 humanities cooling or every single electric vehicle on the planet, right? Like it's just, it's such a strange and baffling thing, as I mentioned before, right? Why? What is this technology doing that's so critical that it's competing with keeping people alive during heat waves? And you can never get a good answer to that question, right?

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 out emails, et cetera, if you remember that era of digital sort of climate campaigning. And I don't think it was, like, obviously they had a few good points, but it actually was quite small back then, but things have changed completely. The entire philosophy of the industry has changed.

And so I think the philosophy of the climate movement has to change as well. I think we have to become significantly more responsive to this as a threat. And also part of that is recognizing how fragile things are right now and how much we have to lose. Definitely. 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. Katan, it's always great to speak with you. It's always great to get your insights on all of these things. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Lovely to chat. Katanjoshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo.

Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.