Tech Won't Save Us - The AI Buildout is a Boon for the Fossil Fuel Industry w/ Ketan Joshi

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Tech companies are working with the fossil fuel industry to push unnecessary data center projects while misrepresenting the climate impact — and governments are letting it all happen. Ketan Joshi joins Paris Marx to discuss how the data center buildout is driving a surge in fossil fuel investment, and how it’s all playing out in Australia.Ketan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo working with climate and environmental groups.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.Also mentioned in this episode:Click here to get your first month of Proton Mail for just $1.Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at hyperscalebook.com.Ketan wrote a report on how Big Tech is greenwashing their destructive climate impacts.Ketan worked with Greenpeace to put out a report on how NVIDIA is greenwashing to hide their climate impacts.Ketan worked with Greenpeace on a report that explores how Australia’s data center buildout is completely derailing their renewable energy transition.Support the show

So the fossil fuel industry getting super excited, the tech industry carefully but clearly getting involved with the fossil fuel industry, and then the government trying to get the public response of like, thank you for regulating the scary, you know, like the scary new industry, but not actually regulating them properly. That is a really nice set of dynamics that I think other parts of the world can look at and be like, we do not want to do what Australia is doing. Hello and welcome to Techwol and 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. He's been releasing a bunch of fantastic reports recently looking at AI and data centers and so many different aspects of that. Of course, you'll find links to those in the show notes, but we'll be discussing them in this episode as well. Katan was on the show, I believe it was earlier this year, where we were talking about the climate impacts and the environment. impacts of data centers. So I figured we would start by digging into that a little bit more, because

as you're probably aware, if you were listening to our Data Vampire series last month, my book Hyperscale comes out this month in October, which I would very much appreciate if you go pre-order a copy, comes out on October 20th. And of course, pre-orders really help authors and new books, because it is a signal to booksellers that there's interest in this, right? It tells them that they should bring in more of these books because people actually want to buy it and read it. It's a topic that people are interested in. So if you do enjoy this conversation, if you appreciate the work that I do, pre-ordering a copy of my book would really help me out and I would really appreciate it. And you can find out more by going to hyperscalebook.com. Now, beyond the climate impacts of data centers,

we also talk about invidia itself, you know, the chips that go into all these data centers, the climate impacts of that. And I also wanted to talk about a specific example of where we're seeing this data center build out happen around the world. And, Catan, even though he lives in Norway, is originally from Australia. And so he has also been looking into the impacts of data centers in the country that he's from and wrote a fantastic report looking into that. And so I figured, you know, after we talk about the climate impacts, after we talk about the chips, after we talk about the impacts of data centers more broadly, that it would be cool to kind of zoom in on a specific location to see how this is all playing out.

And Australia was, you know, the perfect place to do that. It's also, of course, a location that we don't often talk about the impacts of data centers in, but as we're seeing in so many other parts of the world, the opposition to data centers and the proposals for data center projects are really growing there as well as in other places, many of them, of course, being powered by fossil fuels. So I think that you're really going to like this conversation. Over the next couple months, I'll be kind of interspersing conversations about data centers with some other major issues, especially around AI and the discourse that we've been seeing

around that lately. I do want to cover that on the show. So stay tuned in future weeks for those conversations to come out as well. All as we head into the end of the year, it's crazy to think it's September already, where we'll be looking back on the year and having some bigger conversations about the tech industry and the impact of tech on our lives as we close out 2026 and who knows what 2027 will have in store. But as always, if you enjoy this conversation, 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 and, you know, the work that I do more generally,

you can go to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a supporter. And of course, I would very much appreciate if you went to pre-order my book, Hyperscale by going to Hyperscalebook.com where you can find pre-order links and more information. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Katan, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. It's lovely to be back. Awesome. It's always great to chat with you. Every time I talk to you, I feel like I learn so much because your insights on this topic and like the environmental dimensions of the tech industry are just like fantastic, right? And so essential, which is why I keep wanting to talk to you and have you back on the show. And I'm sure why all these organizations keep wanting you to write fantastic and brilliant reports for them covering so many dimensions of this. In this conversation alone, we'll be going over recent reports that you've written this year. about the climate dimension of AI, what is happening with Nvidia and, you know, kind of of its climate impacts. And of course, what we're seeing in Australia, right? A place that I feel like a lot of us aren't paying so much attention to, but where we see the data center fight really,

really growing recently. And so I want to, you know, I want to get to Australia a little bit later. But earlier this year, you were on the show, and we talked about the climate dimension of AI and of data centers, right? You know, the kind of growing emissions, what was driving that? And so I wanted to kind of pick up on that and to see how things have shifted over the past year. And so I wonder for you, when you think about these massive hyperscale data centers and the generative AI tools that they power, what stands out to you in terms of how we've seen that develop in 2026 and the real things that are kind of like red flags for you that we should be paying attention to? Yeah, definitely the obvious thing is just the size and the number over. proposed gas-fired power stations. It's quite a nice simple story, right? Like there's no weird

grid power dynamics that you need to understand. They are literally just building a very large fossil fuel power station on the site of the data center and plugging it directly into it and then just burning through a phenomenal amount of fossil fuels to run the data center. And the plan is to build bigger and bigger ones, right? So compared to a year ago, there's actually a great tracking project called Global Energy Monitor and they track like oil and gas and fossil fuel projects around the world and they make all this data freely available

and so what they do is they compare each half year, they compare that report to the previous one to sort of show what's changed and easily the biggest change in the world across like all of the planned power plants everywhere in the world the United States

and their planned gas-fired power stations increased by such a significant amount that it's just hard to believe. And many of those projects are explicitly for data centers. So some of them are on power grids that have a lot of data center development on them. So you can kind of attribute, you can generally pretty confidently say, well, that's because of the data center. But there's also a huge number that, like, they call, you know, whatever data center gas plant, you can sort of see the full list. And there's one that, you know, we'll go into a bit later when we talk about

NVIDIA. But it's the second biggest on the list. It's twice the size. of the current biggest operating gas plant in the world, which is a Saudi Arabian gas processing facility. And so, like, these mega projects are just getting worse and worse. And then the other thing that's worth noting is that I always like to track what's actually happening. So, like, one side is like the projections and the plans and the huge projects and that big list. But I'm always curious to know, you know, what is actually happening on the ground.

Are they building them? You know, are they burning fossil fuels? I have to say, I'm pretty surprised that many of these big projects have now entered into construction. So at the very least, we can say things are progressing as they hope, which is bad for us.

People who live in the atmosphere, that's not very good for us. But it's good for them because they are actually seeing the construction process commence for the, you know, gigawatt scale data centers and the very large gas facilities that go with them. So that's really bad.

And then, you know, there's kind of the grid side of things, which is a bit more mixed. There are some companies that have, you know, may big renewable energy investments, but they're a minority. There was a new report out just yesterday from an analytics firm called Energy tag where they just compiled a whole bunch of data center projects. And they said, what energy source is this particular data center project linking to itself? And by my calculations, in terms of like energy generated,

the gas projects were six times the number of renewable projects. And so that's a terrible ratio, right? And one I was just reading half an hour ago of Amazon. Amazon also has, you know, if you look at it in terms of just the capacity of the power stations, it looks like it's half and half, like half renewables, half gas. But renewables generate less as a proportion of the capacity than gas does. So it's actually more like a quarter renewables and three quarters gas. Roughly, it's probably a little bit worse than that.

I'm being a bit generous. And Amazon is at Climate Week, you know, today, it's in literally today, they're saying, you know, they got asked, I think, for the first time about their gas plant. This is like their first ever public statement about the gas plant. And they basically just said, oh, yeah, well, look, you know, we're not dropping our renewable energy targets, but we don't think that it's like a linear pathway to get to net zero by 2050. And it's just like, what do you think, like, what do you think the pathway is? Because they're just going directly upwards on the chart of emissions.

And so that's not, I mean, that's like exponential. in the opposite direction. It's okay. It's okay. Once all the direct air capture and the carbon capture and sequestration comes online, that line will come all the way back down. No problem, right? So things have gotten worse, and not just in the sense that the pipeline is getting worse,

but in the sense that we can see through satellite imagery bits of construction stuff being laid on the ground. And I think a lot of people were skeptical, like, oh, no, no, these projects are never really going to get built. But at the very least, we can say they're on the way to being built, and that's not good. Yeah. And that was even something I was going to ask you about, right? Because I feel like we have been seeing these stories for the past number of months that it's like, okay, they do have the plans to build out this capacity of data centers or of gas, of what have you.

But for whatever reason, they're being stalled. We're not seeing these things like enter into construction and whatnot. But based on what you're seeing, you know, there's still a really worrying amount of construction that is, that is ongoing. going that is picking up, which obviously, you know, theoretically would lead to the completion of projects that are going to be spewing out loads of new emissions, right? Yeah. And then the other thing as well to note on that is that a lot of the, particularly the really large, like multi-gigawatt gas plants.

And so just to give a sense of scale, like a gigawatt gas plant is like to run a city or a state, right? Like we're not talking about like your neighborhoods, you know, power station. These gas plants are being built in a modular way. So the idea is you kind of get like a quarter of it in the ground. and then you just see, you just take a look at your finances and you take a look at the situation. You're like, okay, now we're going to build an exporter. So in a sense, that's like, it's not as scary because you don't have one huge gas plant being built in one go.

But in another sense, you could end up with worse emissions because like, let's just say they kind of get halfway through and the bubble pops. You still end up with a really, really huge new gas plant that will need someone to use and to burn fossil fuels, right? Like even if that's not a data center, it's some other thing. And there's actually a really great interview with Bloomberg, Bloomberg analysts recently. I don't think they know that we, like, activists, like, listen to this sort of stuff. Because they just say a lot of stuff out loud.

I highly recommend listening to, like, you know, gas analysts and stuff like that because they just really admit all this stuff. And, you know, this analyst was just like, yeah, yeah, we're not worried at all about, like, the data center bubble popping because we'll just be gifted with, like, this bounty of fossil fuel infrastructure, which we can then just use for, like, the power grid or some other industry or like, you know, Bitcoin mining or something else, right?

Like they're just like, we don't care. We've got all these gas pipelines and coal plants that have had their lives extended five years. So they're not bothered at all. The data center companies might be bothered by the idea of the bubble popping, but the fossil fuel companies are like, we don't give a shit. We're just getting a huge amount of money poured into fossil fuel infrastructure. And we're going to be totally fine.

And they say as much, you know, when they talk about it. it's really worrying to hear, you know, exactly what you're saying there, right? That they're like, okay, even if we don't have the data centers, that's fine because we'll use all this new fossil fuel infrastructure for whatever else, right? And that suggests to us that even if the data center AI bubble kind of implodes, we basically still have all of these new emissions effectively locked in, right? Because now this is on the grid or this is built and they're going to find a use for it. they're not just going to abandon all of this, you know, massive investment that they've made over the past few years. You know, as far as you are seeing right now, what is the climate and emissions impact of all of this gas that we're seeing built out in order to power data centers?

And what does that mean for, you know, our hopes of hitting climate targets in the coming years? You know, so many countries had targets around 2030 and 2035. What does it mean for that? the United States greenhouse gas emissions, there's been a few analyses basically kind of updating the situation, right, now that all of these data centers kind of just emerge. And I think each of these analyses takes, I would argue, a slightly too optimistic view. Like that they sort of downplay data center grid level emissions and gas emissions a little bit. But even then, you know, you sort of get to see, like they do like a normal scenario. and then like a high data center scenario. And like the US, for instance,

there's this sort of a between the 4 to 5% increase in the total in the country's greenhouse gas emissions. And the United States has the second highest grid emissions on the planet, right? Like just before China, it sounds like a small percentage, but that is like, you know, country-sized amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. And I would argue an underestimate, you know, just based on the dynamics that I know of how it happens in the US. one estimate, another one that I saw just recently was Bloomberg, you know, calculating the greenhouse

gas emissions of all the planned data center specific gas plants, of which I think there was like 95 or something if I remember correctly. And it was like 320 megatons, which is, I have a chart in the recent report I released, comparing that to the total economy-wide emissions of several countries. that is about the same as all of the United Kingdom. So not just the power grid in the UK, but everything in the UK, all transport, all industry, all the power sector, all homes. That is gas-fired power stations to run new data centre.

So not like the whole data centre industry, but just the ones that are planned. And it's a testament to both the sheer absurd inefficiency of the software systems they're running, but also the weird desire, intense desire, that they have to run it off fossil fuels. Those two things together, you end up with, like, numbers that are just so big that people find them a little bit that hard to process because you're like, so that's adding in a

United Kingdom worth of emissions. That seems bad. Absolutely. It's like when you talk about, say, a cluster of data centers being, like, requiring a gigawatt of electricity, it can just feel so divorced from anything. But when you do talk about, like, all of these data centers needing as much power as the United Kingdom, it does just sound completely absurd, right? Like, how is this even possible that this industry in the past few years is adding so, or, you know, planning to add so many more gas plants

and so much additional emissions that that is really what we're facing, you know? And I wanted to pick up on one other thing with you, which I think will help us to transition into, you know, looking at the broader supply chain and what you've been doing on Invidia, but also the claims that they make around AI, right? You know, that it's not just that, okay, you know, we're building out all this gas to power all of our data centers and this is just the way it is. But this kind of framing, this kind of greenwashing of what they're doing to say, yeah, we're doing this, but actually we're helping the climate. AI is going to be good for the environment. Can you talk to us about what you're seeing there and how they're actually trying to like make this argument work in any kind of coherent way?

Yeah, we, we, I was, I was, um, supportive. by a consortium of climate groups in February of this year. And we had a real go at this idea. Because it was one that we saw all the time, particularly in like, you know, not just sustainability reports, but companies were saying it to governments, specifically to argue against themselves being regulated.

And it was working. And there's a story that Google would tell all the time, most recently to an EU policy submission process, that AI can reduce the world. world's greenhouse gas emissions by 5 to 10 percent. That is, just to give you a sense of scale, to align with a 1.5 degree temperature trajectory, which, you know, we know we've missed already, that volume of emissions is half of what you need to get to that level of emissions cut. So it's like massive. It's like half of the world's most ambitious climate goal. And they were just

throwing this out there everywhere. And so when I wrote this report, you know, I sort of went back to an analysis that I did tracing this back to where did this come from? Because they talk about, like, oh, yeah, research shows, you know, analysis shows. And it was Boston Consulting Group having a chat, just a casual chat with one of their clients who was like, oh, yeah, I reckon AI has saved me about 5 to 10 percent, you know, of like energy consumption. And they were like, yeah, let's extrapolate that to the entire human project of climate action over the next decade. just shooting the shit with a client and then all of a sudden Google grabs onto this and is like, this is our justification to build off our gas plants and data centers.

I'm not exaggerating. That's very literally what happened. And Google is not a small company, right? Like, they are highly influential. And so that was like the impetus for us being like, okay, well, we need to really dig deeper into all of this stuff, right? And find out what's going on. What we basically found is, first of all, they muddle up different. forms of machine learning. So the older stuff, like the wind forecasting and the grid management,

they refer to that as AI, but they also refer to the massive consumer generative models that people are familiar with, like ChatGBT and Gemini. And they lump it all together, and they're like, well, sorry, but you can't have one without the other. So all of the lovely climate solutions that Google is funding, they're like, yeah, well, I'm sorry, but if you want that, you also have to let us have, you know, these like phenomenally energy-intensive models. And in the past, I wish I could describe this chart properly in audio format. And I'm going to try. But basically, Google's energy consumption has been going up steadily over the past. You know, I've got data going back to 2016, right? And you go up to 2024. And it's increasing each year. And then the amount by which

it increases slightly accelerates, you know, like it's just sort of rationing up by like a terawatt hour, terawatt hour. I think every sort of year it was adding about two terawatt hours onto its energy consumption. In 2024, that two shifted to 12. And then after that, it was, I think, like, 13 or 14. And that is, like, it goes from being not a linear change, like it was accelerating slightly to just being absurd, right? Like, the acceleration is beyond belief. And so Google really ramped up that narrative of like, if you want to have nice climate solutions, you have to let us do our generative AI thing, which is not literally what they said, but it's by implication, it's like if you regulate us, you won't get any of these lovely climate

solutions, kind of holding them hostage in a sense. And we debunk that whole idea that you can just sort of mush them together because you can't have one without the other. right? You can have the laptop running the wind forecasting thing without also having the, you know, 15 trillion gigawatt data center destroying a community's livelihoods. We also found, interestingly enough, that even if you ignore that element and you look at just the traditional AI solutions that they talk about, those themselves are not actually that well supported as having like major deep gigaton scale global emissions cuts like I described, like Google was originally saying, they tend to just be like sort of minor efficiency boosts.

Like you can kind of manage the grid better. They're kind of like software solution. It's like me having access to Microsoft Word instead of writing out my reports on paper, right? Like it's not a game changer. It's kind of useful, but it's not going to make me, you know, a trillion times more effective, right? So that was the other thing we found is that they tend to use quite weak evidence. Like they'll kind of refer to a company statement saying, AI solution is amazing. And we thought we were like, okay, well, that's not strong evidence that you can

then conclude to say, well, AI is a net benefit for humanity and climate action. You know, we've had some success in combating that narrative like the International Energy Agency is now really careful to distinguish, to carefully distinguish between the different types of things that they're talking about. Google really didn't make that claim in their latest sustainability report, which was great. Well, less bad. They said a bunch of other stuff, which was a bit annoying. which I criticize in a recent blog post. But a couple of days ago, you know, Al Gore is out there, you know, talking to the media. And he's talking about like, oh, yeah, you know, like research shows that AI will be a net benefit for humanity.

And I was like, oh, man, you know, we still have a lot of work to do, you know, because we really, it's, you know, at the time we're recording this, it's New York Climate Week, right? So maybe that's just in the air a bit. But I have been spending a lot of time being very disappointed. people and we've got a lot of work to do to really dispel this because it's not just the tech companies that say this right like there are often a lot of like sort of climate groups that have associations with tech companies or who are generally aligned with them that repeat this as well so a lot of lot to do i'm not surprised by like the disappointment there you know but it's just as you're saying like it's in the air right it's like what all these people are being told to

echo to parrot and it's also not even being told right it's just like, this is what the narrative is. This just becomes something that people accept, like, in the way that, you know, so many people started parroting and talking about how AI is apparently going to, like, threaten humanity in 10 years or something like that, right? It just becomes part of the conversation. And then you have these people kind of echoing it, you know, kind of continuing to expand it. But speaking of those greenwashing claims, you know, one of the people who has been making those and about the data centers, but also about other things, is Jensen Wong of NVIDIA, CEO of that company.

And of course, none of these data centers, certainly the ones for AI, can operate without his chips and the graphics processing units that his company makes. They have become absolutely essential to this moment. But often when we talk about data centers and AI, his company can often be left out in talking about the broader impacts and certainly the climate impacts that come along with that. And of course, you know, you looked into that recently. because, you know, it's not just that it gets left out,

but the company is also quite opaque, as far as I understand in what they share and the details that they provide. So what do we know about the actual climate impacts of NVIDIA and how that compares to what its leadership actually says about, you know, what the company is doing? Yeah, I mean, they're one of the most interesting companies in this whole space because they, no one quite knows what to feel

or think about them. You can't really slot them into a nice category, of what we understand to be heavy industrial polluters, because they're kind of like this weird intermediary between the worlds of like the gas plants and the data centers themselves and things like that, right? Like they kind of just sit as this weird center of the galaxy. They are the richest company on Earth, right?

Like by market capitalization, by like a good margin. And they have a lot of influence, right? Like when I was researching this report, which again was just funded by a consortium of climate and corporate accountability groups with Greenpeace East Asia added on as well because they've been working on NVIDIA issues for a while.

What we found is that NVIDIA was constantly referred to as the Bank of AI. Have you heard this? I have yet. This is like, and I was just like, wow, that's fascinating because in the climate space, people have targeted banks for a long time, right? Like people have basically said,

even though your literal emissions on paper are almost nothing, you are financing and facilitating and earning money from fossil fuels, at a scale that is just unbelievable. And so I kind of thought, you know, this is actually a great thing to start thinking about now because there's so much focus on the data center developers and the hyperscalers. We can build on that and expand it outwards in the context of this specific emissions analysis. NVIDIA has a lot of scrutiny around its finances and its dealmaking and things like that.

And what we found, Greenpeace East Asia, had done some work on the company's supply chain. they buy a lot of these chips that are manufactured in an emissions intensive way in Southeast Asia, particularly on power grids that have a lot of coal and gas on them. But they're running on electricity. A good chunk of the chip manufacturing process is electrical energy. So you can, you know, relatively easily fight to decarbonize that element of it. And so Greenpeace East Asia have been pushing for this. But for this one, we went back to 2020 in their sustainability reports,

just to compare, just to kind of paint the picture of what has happened. And it's quite a phenomenal rise. So there's a 725% increase in the emissions of the bits and pieces that they have to buy to manufacture the products, right, to make the hardware that they're selling the graphical processing units or GPUs. I have another chart in there of basically they used to make most of their money from selling video cards. And now the ratio is like almost too absurd to even state.

like the vast, vast majority of their money comes from selling the bits and pieces for data centers that do AI functions, or mostly generative AI functions. And so you can pin that increase in emissions on them just manufacturing the hardware to be used in these data centers, right? Sorry, not manufacturing, but producing, I should say,

because they don't actually manufacture or fabricate themselves, but they put it all together and they package it up and they sell it. Today's sponsor is Proton Mail. Most email providers don't just offer an email service. They build a business around your data. The more they know about you, the more valuable your inbox becomes to advertisers. Proton takes a completely different approach. It's funded by subscribers, not by advertisers.

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When I left Gmail, it's the option that I chose for my email service. As a Tech Won't Save Us listener, you can get your first month for just $1. You'll find the exclusive link in the show notes to do that. Start now for just $1. Does that make it easier for them to kind of hide their emissions or kind of obscure their emissions where they often get TSM or one of these other companies to actually do the manufacturing piece and then they kind of claim it's off their books or something? Like how are you seeing that? Yeah, absolutely. And they, it is technically on their books, right?

Like they report what's known in sustainability nerdspeak as scope three, which is basically just the emissions. outside the company when you buy something or when you sell it, what happens outside of the boundaries of what you're sort of personally responsible for. They do report it, but one thing that's missing, you know, really badly from their report is just like where those chips come from and the individual details of how they're dealing with those suppliers. One company that does this really well is Apple. Apple has so much detail in there. I mean, I have a lot of gripes with how they, you know, do their emissions and who knows how the AI stuff is going to change that for them. But they do report their supplier engagement really, really well.

And with enough detail that you can scrutinize it and go, well, you're leaving out, you've got this massive gap over here or you're doing really well over here. And Vidi just, they give you a headline number, which is the number that we talk about in the report. But they don't give you enough detail to scrutinize it, which sucks because they have so much power. They should absolutely be disclosing more information on that. And then the other side of the story in terms of their indirect emissions or like kind of, you know, what they would describe as outside of their responsibility. is what happens after they sell it. They have a big graphical processing unit that's full of the chips that they've bought

and that's been manufactured. And they sell it to a company and it gets put into a data center and used. And companies like Intel and AMD, they all report what happens in this process, right? Like after you sell it, Microsoft actually reports all of its product use emissions. So when somebody buys like an Xbox or Surface Pro,

it's actually a huge chunk of their total emissions is like the grid emissions of just plugging something into the wall socket in your home, and then a coal plant or a gas plant spins up a little bit more to generate, to run that thing, including renewable. So again, I have lots to criticize about Microsoft, but they have infinite money. You know, they can afford to disclose this stuff and calculate it because it doesn't take a lot of effort. And so we thought that was really shocking for Nvidia.

Just to give you an example of how weird it is that they don't disclose this number, there was a shareholder resolution brought forward basically saying, like, what are you doing? You know, please just share this number. Like, that's just like basic information we need to know about who you're selling your chips and hardware to. And the oil fund voted in favor of the shareholder proposal. That's Norway's oil fund, the largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet. NVIDIA is the oil fund's largest single investment. And it's like 1.6% of the total oil fund's investments, which is pretty substantial, right?

right, like everything else is very, very diversified across a lot of sectors. But a lot of stock is held for the Norwegian citizens in NVIDIA, right? Like, I think I personally, you know, probably you could attribute some of that to my, you know, because it's all Norwegian people have a part of this. And even the oil fund whose CEO has the worst case of AI psychosis I've ever seen in any executive ever. There is a LinkedIn video of him cutting a cake for his birthday and it's an agent. It's like a robot-shaped cake that he's cutting into because he's just so obsessed with AI. Even the oil fund was like, Nvidia, you should really be sharing your product use emissions.

So if the oil fund, you know, which is a fund of fossil fuels with an AI obsessed CEO is saying, why aren't you sharing this? This is like the absolute bare minimum. It's why is the richest company in the world not sharing this? It's a really shocking thing that we found. And so we estimated it ourselves. Epoch AI has estimates of the total power consumption of the chips they've sold. We did the numbers.

We ran it against some like grid emissions factors. And we found that Nvidia's product use emissions are probably around about the same product use emissions of the Russian-owned coal companies, a state-owned coal company. It's like about sort of, it could be up to about like 20 to 25, megatons, a very, very conservative estimate because we don't include all of the cooling and the overheads and everything else in a data center. We use a conservative utilization factor, which is basically of all the power it could consume, how much do you think it will, which is like how hard they run the chips. And so all these numbers, we were really careful to take a very

conservative view. And it still comes out just like massive, you know, like really, really huge. And so we follow that up by talking about a deal that got announced, you know, in the sort of late stages of writing this report with this one project, this phenomenal project, which I think I mentioned earlier, which is the Ports Pike Gas Generation Facility in Ohio, which is a data center has a 9.2 gigawatt gas plant proposed, which on the list of all proposed gas plants is number two, you know, know, planet-wide. That's the second biggest. Number one is also a data center in the US, and it's only a couple of, you know, 100 and megawatts more. If it were to be built, it would be twice the size of the next biggest operating gas plant, which is a Saudi Arabian facility. And then if it were to be built, it would be half the size of the largest power station ever constructed, which is the three gorgeous dam in hydro plant in China. Invitae, trumpeted, very loudly, look at us, you know, we're the exclusive supplier of chips to this project.

With great pride and, you know, they really blasted it out anywhere, everywhere. This is the soft bank energy project, which is, you know, like, there's a lot of, I know there's a lot of, like, you know, very complicated financial relationships going on there that I don't fully understand. But what I do get is that Nvidia saw this, like, one of the most significant fossil fuel projects ever proposed of any kind. and was just like, yes, we want to be the sole supplier of chips to this. And so you get an idea of why Nvidia would be like, no, I'm sorry, we're not disclosing our scope three user emissions because even if investors, as big as the oil finder saying,

we want to know this information, Nvidia doesn't want them to know it, obviously, right? Because they're just, they're not sharing this information that they could easily could. Yeah, it's shocking to hear it, right? especially where I feel like that dimension of the conversation doesn't so often enter into the discussions about the impacts of data centers and that sort of a thing. I wonder, you know, having done this research and looked into the emissions from Nvidia, how do you think that complicates or kind of adds to the broader discussion about data centers and AI and the climate impacts that we're seeing from it when we, you know, start to look not just at what the data centers exist, the power, but the supply chain that then feeds into them that is essential for powering all this AI and for the justification for the data center in the first place.

Yeah, I think it starts to bring the conversation into more of a traditional climate and fossil fuel discussion, which is that you've got this webbed network of different players who all make money at different points in the supply chain for fossil fuels. I'm sure you would have seen like those memes that sort of go around where it's like, the numbers always change, but it's always something along the lines of like 100 companies are responsible for 80% of emissions.

And they're kind of mangling what is actually quite a meaningful report, right? Which is this annual report that looks at not the companies that burn the fossil fuels, but the ones that produce the fossil fuels, right? So, and that percentage that you hear, you know, 100 companies, blah, blah, blah, it's referring to that, which is the first step in unlocking fossil fuels from underground. And those companies actually have some responsibility, right? Because they're making obscene amounts of money by being the ones to dig it up and process it and supply it to the world. And by being like such eager and excessive oversuppliers of fossil fuels, that encourages more people to burn fossil fuels and use them.

And I think that Nvidia are really like one of the first, you know, AI majors or something. I don't know. You can think of a better term for that. But, like, they are one of the first, like, absurd oversuppliers, right? Because they just want to just pump out this product everywhere in the world, do as many deals as possible, make as many of these, like, complicated, you know, cross-webbing, like finance deals as possible, just to cement this in as something that people rely on and use way, way, way too much.

And obviously that intersects with the fossil fuel industry. And I think that we can start to understand the AI. environmental and climate story in a really similar way to how we understand fossil fuels, right, which is that you kind of just have this like stack of terrible companies, each, you know, taking their cut in some awful way until it ends up with it being burned, you know, for whatever reason in whatever machine. You can think of the same thing with just like extremely energy inefficient computing hardware being being used for a process that is itself very, very inefficient. So yeah. And when we look at the,

the hardware itself, because I know that you touched on this in the report as well. I know that Nvidia and Jensen Wong like to claim that the hardware is getting so much more efficient and those sorts of things, but what do we actually see in the hardware itself, its energy use? And obviously, it is, you know, helping to drive some of these wider things, right? Because if these are the chips that you're buying, then obviously that requires a certain amount of energy in order to power them. And, you know, they are going to be what kind of, you know, AI is designed around or designed to use and that sort of thing. What do we see in the hardware?

Like, how is that kind of fueling this whole picture, too? There's a great line from the sustainability guy. And I can't remember how many zeros were in this number. But he says that something along the lines of, like, we've had like a hundred thousand times or ten thousand times efficiency increase since the 2020s. And I'm sure it's true, right? Like, I wouldn't be surprised if that's, you know, roughly correct. it's funny to then compare it to what we see in terms of their emissions impact, which has increased, you know, several hundred, several hundred or, you know, even thousands of times potentially. I think that's really important because the efficiency narratives work really well for, you know, like, let's just say climate week, New York crowds, right? Where people are like, oh, great, you know, you're becoming more efficient. That's what we want. That's what we want to hear. But people often talk about this thing called Jevons paradox, which is this idea that, you know, is you make something more efficient. It just

incentivizes more headroom for more to be used. But I don't really use that term, right, because it's not a paradox. It's more of a choice. It's more of like, you know, we made something more efficient and then we just did the worst possible next step, which is we use more of it. We see lots of good efficiency, right? Like as household fridges became more efficient, we didn't just buy a second fridge because you only really need so much fridge. I guess some people probably did buy a second fridge, but not enough to undo the efficiency gains, right? When it to these chips, what we found in this report is that their most efficient chip has also been sold at the greatest volume and the product size, right? They're cramming eight cores into this

like one thing, right? And they basically see it. Sometimes they talk about it in the context of sustainability. So they're like, yeah, this is sustainable innovation, you know, our most efficient chip, blah, blah, blah. And then other times when I guess they think that people like me aren't really listening, they start talking about how explicitly the purpose of that is to be able to have customers fit more hardware and get more AI out of the one product purchase. What we see, of course, then is the effect on the real world, which is that the emissions and energy impacts of these facilities goes up. The more efficient they get, the worse the problem gets. That is just the nature of the desperation and the psychosis and the sort of impatience behind all of this infrastructure

to build out. It makes me think as well about the major companies, you know, as we were talking about earlier, where they will discuss how they have this new kind of way of building a data center or a cooling system in a data center that makes it efficient or whatnot. But they certainly don't want you to look at how they're building so many more data centers to make that completely irrelevant, right? Like, you know, the single data center is more efficient or, you know, more or less energy intensive or something like that. But they're building so many data centers alongside it that it's completely irrelevant. But, you know, speaking about emissions, speaking about gas, as we have, Australia also enters into this picture, you know, obviously a country that is very dependent on its

fossil fuel industry, and that has really been shaped and kind of captured by the fossil fuel industry in many ways for a long time, but still wants to appear as though, you know, it is kind of acting on climate change and is not a climate villain in the way that we see, you know, some other countries around the world. You know, data centers have become a huge issue in the United States, right, and have been for a little while now. But we are seeing more and more countries start to experience something similar, right? In Canada, where I am, you know, in the past kind of six to nine months, we have really seen not just the proposals for data centers, but the opposition to data centers really take off. And so I wonder what has been happening down in Australia and how

its existing kind of dominance of the fossil fuel industry has played into the conversation happening down there? Yeah. I did a recent report for Greenpeace Australia Pacific on this, and we kind of covered two big areas, which I think still summarized it quite nicely, and I can maybe quickly talk about a third as well. The first is basically just what happens when you plug a lot of big data centers into the power grid in Australia. There's been not anywhere near enough renewable energy getting built, which is so strange, you wouldn't know it by looking at the way, you know, renewables and energy are covered in Australia. It kind of, there's a lot of, I would say, premature victory, you know, sort of being celebrated. Emissions are falling, but they're not

falling anywhere near as fast as was predicted. And that's a problem because there's just not enough renewables being built for the climate and energy targets they've said. And so then you add in data centers into the mix, right, where the target, the goal where the renewables were trying and get to, it's just move further away because data centers just increase their future demand. So you have to build extra renewables just to be in the same spot that you were before, let alone actually, you know, advance. And so there's this whole narrative of like data centers are helping the energy transition by incentivizing new renewables, but they're adding a lot of new demand and only adding a tiny sliver of new renewables. And so the net result of that is

just more emissions, like that it's just mathematically what happens. And I have been, so mad to see people fall for this line of like from the tech industry being like, I don't know, we're helping the energy transition. We're helping climate change. But just mathematically, there is no way they're doing that unless they were to build like double the amount of renewables as the data centers that they build, which they just, they would never do because they aggressively oppose that even, you know, the basic concept. So that's one problem. The second problem here is that the gas industry in Australia has been freaking out. They don't really think that they can keep selling gas to Asia, which has been really fucked over by the conflicts,

like all of the geopolitical issues and conflicts that have arisen in the past few years, not just the Iran-Homuz crisis, but over the past half decade, gas just keeps fluctuating so wildly, and people just get more and more angry. And so it's destroying a lot of demand for gas in Asia. And all these Australian producers are like, shit, who's going to buy our gas? You know, they have so many planned gas fields. And so, data centers come along and they're like, oh my God, yes, this is perfect, you know. And the narrative that has been constantly going around is actually specifically data centers for training AI being built in like the northern and sort of west, northwest Australian regions

where there's a lot of like planned gas fields. So you just plonk a data center there and you run it entirely on gas. Like you had built gas power stations on site like literally next to the gas field. like in the report, I muck around with some of the calculations for the climate impacts of this. And it's like, you know, just one of those fields, the entire Northern Territory, it would be like more emissions than the entire Northern Territory, all of the pre-existing industry and fossil fuel industry there, because they're just like, yeah, yeah, we'll do five gigawatts, who cares? So they're kind of throwing around these ideas.

And they sound ridiculous, right? but there are some very, very serious American and other gas companies who are getting involved now. The plans are actually solidifying, and they're becoming more and more likely as every day goes by. So that's the second thing, right? Like it's just the desperation of the gas industry is driving a lot of these data center, fossil fuel data center projects. And then the third thing that has kind of emerged more since we wrote this report in May has been the government basically saying, chill out. We're very responsible. We're not just doing this like willy-nilly. We're going to do very responsible regulations for data centers. And there are lots of people who are like experts on

like, you know, community impacts and water impacts who've basically called these proposed government regulations out as insufficient. But my area of expertise is climate and energy. And they're so bad. What I basically found in a recent blog post is that the data center lobby basically demanded that the independent statutory body that provides advice to the government on this have, so the government said we want to have 100% renewables for all new data centers. And then this body said, yeah, you can do that. But what we suggest is that you do it through this like offsetting scheme, which is basically you can buy a certificate from a pre-existing renewable energy for.

facility, just zoom out, right, and imagine this situation. So you've got a data center that just gets plonked into Australia. And then they're like, they're buying these certificates from an existing wind farm. So they don't add any new renewable energy. So they're just drawing from the grid. So you have a situation where emissions on the grid are going up. But if you were to look at the regulation and you look at the climate reports of all the companies and all the government statements, you would say that they're all 100% powered by renewables. What's the problem? I don't see what any issue is here, right? And then they propose this thing called a glide path, which is like it eventually does require new renewable projects, but even then, you can't say that that new

renewable project was from the data center company. It just could just be what happens anyway, because, you know, new projects are getting built. So it's the same problem. So Island had this, you know, as you know, like this massive moratorium on data centers. And one of the reasons was to have time and space to think about regulation. But then they proposed this glide path concept, where you basically just have like eight years of just pumping emissions into the atmosphere. And then they're like, yeah, yeah. We'll deal with it in eight years, you know, like, I'm sure we'll have new renewables by and so don't worry too much about it. And it's basically just saying, just don't worry about the next sort of half decade to one decade.

Because it's so urgent that we build these data centers and capture this opportunity that they're kind of formally saying, fuck it, we don't care about the emissions. We just want this to happen. And we don't care about the harm that will occur from the power system that they're drawing from or the new gas plants that get built. And that is really shocking to me, right? Like, I found that to be such a failure of basic considerations on this question. But it didn't really draw a lot of outrage or criticism because I think people find it a bit confusing and a bit complicated, right? They're like, oh, yeah, but no, they said that it was like 100% renewables, you know, so I don't understand what the problem is.

So that's one thing that I really fail to crack, right? Like, I think it's like an ongoing project. But it's really, really important because we're now in the phase where governments are like listening to the angry cries of the public and then like, oh, fuck, okay, now I've got to like propose something. and what they might end up proposing is something that looks like regulation but isn't really regulation. That is a massive risk at the moment, like faux regulation. And you can see this occurring in many different parts of the world.

There was a US state just a few days ago, oh my gosh, I wish I could remember what it was. I think it was Pennsylvania, where they proposed a ban on gas power for data centers. But then you look a little bit deeper into the wording, and it's actually, a ban on 100% gas. So it could be 99.9% with one solar panel on the roof. That's so wild. Every data center in Pennsylvania now

it just has the one single solar panel up there. It's like, hey, we're getting some, you know. Yeah, sorry, I need to check that state. But yeah, it's a US state, and it's just, you know, a nice example of where a time-poor journalist will write that up as a win for environmental regulation of data centers. But then you spend,

you know, half an hour, just reading the document and you're like, that's not a win. I wanted to ask you, you know, what you've been telling us there is obviously very concerning, right? Unfortunately, not surprising, but it's certainly not what you would want to see. And it's no surprise that people in Australia are starting to really push back on, you know, what is planned here, what the industry is planning and how the government is enabling it. Can you talk to me a bit about how, you know, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who's with the Labor Party, is handling this and is trying to like thread the needle between on the one hand accepting all this investment but also trying to make it palatable to the public. And also on the other hand,

how we're seeing kind of the lobby groups for the tech industry and the data center industry and the fossil fuel industry in Australia come together in a really significant way that certainly we have seen in other places. You know, we've seen in the United States, but feels very notable to see the degree to which these two industries are coming together and seeing common cause on gas in particular. Yeah, I'll start with the second question because just yesterday, the head of the data center lobby in Australia attended a conference and News Corp conference that was, you know, entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry and was basically a fossil fuel industry conference, right? Like they call it energy, but it's, it was just like a litany of all the biggest fossil fuel

companies just talking about how great fossil fuels are. And of course, you know, the tech companies are there and the data centers are there. And they're all, you know, basically discussing in their very carefully worded language about reliability and the need for stable 24-7 power, which has always been their code words for just burning the dirtiest crappiest fuel that you can for electrical energy. And so it went in the report, in the Greenpeace report, we also detail how the head of that data centers group actually went to the literal fossil fuel industry conference. in Australia. It was on a panel sponsored by Chevron, our friends at Chevron, and they're basically talking about the same thing, right?

Where what they'll do is they'll kind of throw out a few words in favor of renewables. But then they start talking in this special code about reliability and, you know, stable 24-7 power. And it's the way that they talk to each other about fossil fuels. And the media outlets will just be like, oh, great, okay, you know, very literal-minded journalists,

we'll just write it up as if they're talking about, like they care about reliability when that is not really how the grid works right like that is not how you know the reliability the grid occurs so that's really bad um and then albinisi in particular has been a really fascinating you know person to watch with this data centers issue uh i think it really frustrates him he doesn't albinisi is a is a politician who uh is only happy when he's in a special little zone of like the issues that he cares about and thinks about anything else tech data centers, climate change, energy, he hates all that stuff. And you can see it in his face, right? Like he looks so strained. He's just not interested. I don't think he even cares that

much about fossil fuels because he's just not interested in it. It's just kind of like, you know, he needs to go along because there's such a powerful lobby in Australia. But like, don't have to make me deal with this too much. I have my other issues that I prefer to be talking about. Yeah. Absolutely. And it goes the same way with most issues, right, where, you know, there'll be a public outcry, something will force the government to pay attention to something. And then they'll be like, okay, we're going to regulate it. We're going to do something about this. Don't worry, we're in charge. And then the, like, the corporate lobby group will just come along and very, very gently suggest something. And the government is like, yeah, okay, that's it. Yep, we're doing that. Just instantaneously, you know, and you can tell by the way that the lobby groups respond because they're always like, this is a very sober. and pragmatic and realistic set of regulations. You know, we agree with the very adult, serious, you know, policies proposed here. And then it's like, okay, well, yeah, like, that's their victory cry. That's the victory cry of the corporate lobby group is.

Look how pragmatic this is. And so that's exactly what's happened, right? They're like, yeah, this is really good. You know, we agree with all this. In particular, they don't want to be made to have the responsibility of the impacts on the power grid. so not just emissions, but the costs that gets imposed, the new transmission lines and substations and all that extra stuff that you need to build to accommodate at the scale they want to.

You mentioned before the comparison to the US. I did a calculation a couple of days ago that basically just, you know, the percentage of data centers on the US grid, which is, you know, comfortably number one in the world, will probably be about the same as Australia. If, you know, it kind of goes by like the slightly higher end of projections for Australia and you go by the middle scenario in the US, it will be the same by 2030. You're sort of like in the early 2030s. And so I don't think people realize that, you know, like Australia, there was another report, you know, a few days ago, Australia is like number three in the world for, I think they measured it by investment. So it doesn't have the biggest projects, but as a proportion of the country, it's like a disproportionate amount of data center capacity occurring in Australia, like one of the biggest in the world. world for sure. And so all of these dynamics, so the fossil fuel industry getting super excited, the tech industry carefully but clearly getting involved with the fossil fuel industry, and then the government trying to like get the public response of like, thank you for,

you know, regulating the scary, you know, like the scary new industry, but not actually regulating them properly. That is a really nice set of dynamics that I think other parts the world can look at and be like, we do not want to do what Australia is doing. Definitely, definitely. And I wonder, you know, once we see that kind of reliance on gas, but also the significant expansion and data centers planned in Australia and happening in Australia, what does that mean for the country's climate targets or, you know, kind of any indication that they might get there.

And is the growing public opposition in Australia starting to challenge some of the ambitions of the industry or force governments, whether on the federal level or the state level, to actually start to maybe do something about this? Oh my gosh, that's a great question. Well, on the climate targets element, I maintain a sort of tracking process, basically, for Australia's emissions. I've been doing it since, you know, before I left. And what I do is I track every projection of future emissions against what actually happens, right? Like the measured emissions of the country. and for a while Australia was really overperforming. Like, do you know what I mean?

Like, I think it was a mix of, it was a mix of, like, very pessimistic projections and underestimated renewable energy success. But for the past sort of three or four years, and I don't think this is well recognized, like, within the country, Australia has been underperforming, right? So it's, even though it has, like, this amazing, in particular with solar growth, that is still not enough to deal with the fact that, like, not just current but future demand has been growing way, way more than anybody expected.

And renewables haven't been getting built enough. And so the net result of that is that Australia is not only projected to not hit its 2030 and 2035 climate targets. Australia is getting further, like the gap in between those lines is getting bigger, like a little bit bigger and bigger each year as each year's projection accounts for more and more load growth in the power sector from data centers, along with like a few other factors, like there's more demand from cooling in summer because climate impacts are worse than expected. There's sort of a sort of collection of things, but this is one of the things that's big enough

for the government departments themselves to mention in these annual updates where they're like, yeah, it's like data centers. For them to explicitly say it and admit it in the reports is a big deal, I think. there are elements of the climate movement and like energy and pro-electrification spaces in Australia and I guess other parts of the world too that are either dismissive or in favor of tech growth and data centers particularly in this narrative of like well we can just power it all cleanly you know and be like an exporter of AI services to the world because it's all running on our clean solar power and it's a nice idea, but it's just not what's playing out at all.

The companies aren't building renewables, the government isn't incentivizing renewables. Australia is still the number one per capita coal power user on the planet. Australia's two biggest data center states, New South Wales and Victoria, have double the emissions intensity of the three states in the US with the most data center growth. I don't think people realize how much worse it is to build a data center in Australia for emissions. than it is to do it in like these like already long-suffering American states where communities are so pissed off and the power grids are really dirty. Australia is still worse. And so, you know, this dream of like we'll be like an exporter of green AI to the world is really great on me because I think that it's quite an irresponsible thing to suggest.

It's okay though because gas is green, right? You know, if we use it, it's natural after all. That's natural gas. Yeah, no, that's wild, right? And of course, for people who aren't familiar in New South Wales, where Sydney is the biggest city, Victoria, where Melbourne is, you know, the two biggest cities in Australia. No surprise that that's where so many of the data centers are going. You know, there is a big push right now for moratoriums against data centers to stop the construction completely, at least until there are better rules and regulations and frameworks in place to account for the demand that we're seeing from these infrastructures, also to consider what they're actually powering and whether that makes sense. What do you think is kind of the approach that we should be fighting for here? Is there an alternative to what we're seeing? Should we just be shutting it all down? Are there ways that we can do this in a better

fashion? What do you think? Yeah, I think we is like, when I say we, I mean, really broadly, like not just the climate movement, you know, but like anti-data center groups in general and, you know, tech-critical movements underestimated our own power a little bit. Maybe, you know, we've been a bit like sort of beat down over the past, like half decade and we feel like we are powerless, but the push for moratoria in particular has been remarkably successful in many, many different parts of the world, even if that push just ends up with like, you know, a sort of mild pause or like a new set of restrictions or regulations, it's still, you know, partly successful. And what that means, the most important lesson really is that we need to actually start thinking about what we want

because we were chasing after the car and we caught it. It's like really shocking. But now it's like, okay, we have to think about what we want. And I think that's why I spend so much time thinking about what it means to have an energy regulation of a data center. Like, you know, what kind of law would you slap on a data center? And my contention, you know, I'm always primarily, in favour of moratorium, because I think they're really the antidote to the impatience and the rush and the irrationality of the push behind them. But once you have that, I think that basically having an extremely strict mandate for the construction of renewables, and the basic guideline that I think that should be followed is like, just look at the gas. You know,

Nvidia is supporting this facility that literally is building an entire new gas-fired power station that is owned very, very clearly and instigated very, very clearly by that consortium of companies. And that is why we criticize it, right? Because we say, well, you're responsible for that gas plant. It didn't just kind of spring up coincidentally at the same time. You did that. So that level of ownership and direct causality, that should be the absolute baseline for renewable. energy mandates for companies. And they will absolutely scream about it. But the climate crisis is real,

like the impacts are happening here and now. It should all be linked back to the urgency, the actual urgency, not the ridiculous hype narratives of like AI Doom, but the actual urgency of dealing with the ever-ratcheting upwards impacts of climate change. So they'll kind of moan about it, right? But it's like, we are making you do this because we want to stop people from dying from the impacts of your data center. And it should be treated that way in the same way that you would, I don't know, have like a seatbelt mandate in a set of legislation from when you introduce cars somewhere. It should be treated pretty much the same way. This is a law to stop people from dying from your product. People in the energy space, I think, are not entirely ready for like,

for that, which is why I constantly bring up gas, because I'm like, they can do it when they want to, right? Like they can absolutely build whatever the hell they want when they want to. It's under construction like they're doing it. It's really not a problem for them. They can afford it. They just oppose it because they get online, you know, six months quicker if they build like some filthy gas turbine instead. The other thing that I really think is worth mentioning there is it has to be paired with a reestablishment of like a central planning approach to climate change and energy. because you might end up there with a situation where like a bunch of companies are building renewables in a terrible haphazard community angering way, which we also don't want. There are different models for this, like, you know, you can have the companies like put into a fund that, you know,

and then the government looks after the power lines and the renewables and things like that. But whatever way we do it, we need to have an overarching tracking view of how, or what is happening on power grids. There is a real complacency that has emerged in, um, climate and energy spaces. Sorry to self-criticise my own movement so much here, but I've had a week and I'm really, you know, maybe it's just, you know, climate week, but we're not tracking in enough detail and with enough critical scrutiny what is happening on power grids. We kind of got a little bit complacent about renewable energy and it's like, oh yeah, you know, it's just going to grow infinitely and solve the problem. And it's not what's happening. And the more attention we pay to that,

the more we also kind of deal with this data center issue at the same time, because, you know, they're occurring on power grids too. So that's why I'm constantly ranting about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and, you know, the measures of emissions from power grids, because it's not something a lot of people still talk about. There's a feeling that it's kind of a solved problem, but it's, but it's not. Yeah, no, definitely not. And I think it's important that you point out the piece around actually building this renewable energy in a way that is kind of in line with the community too, right? Because we have also seen the fossil fuel industry take advantage of renewable projects that are kind of forced on communities, you know, that are not done with proper

community consultation and that can be used to turn people against, you know, renewable energy projects. And they can very much be done in ways that are in line with community, you know, that are even beneficial to community, again, if they're done properly, if they're done with the right intentions. But Katan, I think you've given us a great picture of, you know, the environmental perspective on these data centers, aspects of it, we don't always think about, including the chips, and why, you know, certainly we hear a lot about what's happening in the United States, in parts of Europe, but it's important to pay attention to what's happening in other parts of the world because there are things that we can learn from that, like in Australia as well. So thanks so much

for taking the time. Thank you for having me. Always lovely to be back. Katan Joshi 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 Kylie Houston. Tech Won't Save Us relies in 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 pleasure of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.