How Green Are You? How Green IS Green? And, What is Your Worst Existential Fear?

The Paris Olympics have begun. Controversy continues to swirl around players, coaches, events, venues, and air conditioning.?

Air-conditioning?

Paris vowed to be the most eco-friendly game host ever. Among its various Green initiatives, it was decided that athletes would not have air conditioning in their rooms or anywhere in the Olympic Village.?

Team USA didn't just protest against the wishes of the Green Organizing Committee; they also provided their athletes with their own units, sparking, of course, controversy. In the words of Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris: "I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity."?

And there you have it: a better shot at a Gold Medal than the long-term viability of our planet?.

KNEE JERK ALERT: Honestly, I am not interested in debating the pros and cons of cooler rooms for the athletes…OR if the USA Team should have considered the efficacy of the underfloor pipe system the French installed or the impact of the conflict on future generations.?

I merely recounted this story to provide contrast to a much bigger…(more insidious) attack on our environment that many seem to ignore or overlook, and that is the huge power suck that our enhanced massive data computations drain from our grid and the soaring emissions it all creates. AI and Crypto are two of the worst offenders:

?NPR reported, "According to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query. And as AI gets more sophisticated, it needs more energy. In the U.S., a majority of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas which are primary drivers of climate change."??

According to Forbes:

"Many top companies leading the AI vanguard today like Microsoft, Meta, Google and OpenAI are not totally transparent about the energy and climate impacts of their AI research and products but reports suggest they are becoming bigger carbon emitters and, in turn, bigger contributors to climate change."

Yet, while some fervently believe that AI (itself) will solve the problem and save us all, NPR reported:

"Google released a new sustainability report….Deep within the 86-page report, Google said its greenhouse gas emissions rose last year by 48% since 2019. It attributed that surge to its data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.

"As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging," the report reads.

?NPR further reported:??

"Google has the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. Since 2007, the company has said its company operations were carbon neutral because of the carbon offsets it buys to match its emissions.

But, starting in 2023, Google wrote in its sustainability report that it was no longer 'maintaining operational carbon neutrality.' The company says it's still pushing for its net-zero goal in 2030."

Simply put…16 years after declaring their own carbon neutrality, they have reversed course in pursuit of...AI.?

NPR stated that Microsoft is joining Google in this pursuit: "In its sustainability report released in May, Microsoft said its emissions grew by 29% since 2020 due to the construction of more data centers that are 'designed and optimized to support AI workloads.'"

"'The infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector,' the report reads."

Finally, and still as reported by NPR:

"'There's a whole material infrastructure that needs to be built to support AI,'" says Alex Hanna, the director of research for Distributed AI Research Institute. She worked on Google's Ethical AI team, but left the company in 2022 over the handling of a research paper that highlighted the environmental costs of AI."?

Hanna believes the environmental costs of artificial intelligence are only going to get worse unless there's serious intervention.

"'There's a lot of people out there that talk about existential risk around AI, about a rogue thing that somehow gets control of nuclear weapons or whatever,'" Hanna says. "'That's not the real existential risk. We have an existential crisis right now. It's called climate change, and AI is palpably making it worse.'"

We are panicked about air-conditioning in Paris heralding the end of days and about AI initiating an Apocalypse….Maybe we have it all wrong, and it's our pursuit of ever more data processing that should be our worry…at least until we have the energy issue sorted out.

Perhaps we should have taken the philosophical musings about data literally:

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion Engine." —Peter Sondergaard

Oil and combustion engines….not very eco-friendly….N'est Pas?

AI…Will it solve the riddle of saving our planet (and us) before it destroys the environment completely, and that's before it unleashes the apocalypse? A story for another time…

Your view??