Feb 8, 2025
Eric Engle
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
An AP newswire piece in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel last weekend contained a section that jumped out at me. The piece read, in part, “…a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, said it developed a large language model capable of competing with the world’s best, without having to use top-flight chips. The disruption raised questions about whether all the investments expected for AI chips, data centers and electricity is really needed.”
Intriguing. While politicians from both parties used news of DeepSeek to generate another hair-on-fire panic about China and the national security implications of Chinese everything, a little easily missed reporter’s analysis in an AP piece I found on the back pages of a local paper revealed a key truth: we don’t need all these power-hungry data centers, we just need a little global cooperation.
Truths like this, though, don’t sit well with industries like fossil fuels. You see, they want to power these data centers with gas and coal and hydrogen derived from gas. They want countries overseas to do the same so they can build their liquified natural gas and coal export facilities with all the related infrastructure here, predominately in environmental justice communities, while this new administration rids the federal government of the very concept of environmental justice.
AI is another genie let out of a bottle impossible to put back in. Like a genie, it can help accomplish some amazing things that humanity could really benefit from in both the short and long term. But, also like a genie, it can be extraordinarily dangerous (think deepfakes, mis-and-disinformation bots, even SkyNet from the Terminator movies). AI’s most pressing immediate threat is soaring electricity consumption at a time when all human beings need to consume less electricity, more efficiently than ever, sourced from renewables.
Leave it to those profiting inconceivably from the status quo to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing a president and congressional majorities sympathetic to protecting their profits. They have already begun dismantling portions of crucial renewable energy and energy efficiency gains desperately needed to combat the global climate crisis. Only now, they’ve rebranded. Instead of bringing to mind images of filthy old coal plants and frack pads and blighted tar sands fields in Canada, they want you thinking about supercomputing and AI and “clean” hydrogen and all that futuristic fancy stuff!
It makes me think of a Golden Girls episode (I’m a die-hard Golden Girls fan) where a funeral director named Mr. Pfeiffer (the “p” is not silent) tells the girls that “here at Forever Peaceful Mortuary, we’ve gotten rid of all that morbid death stuff.” To which Sofia replies “whaddya runnin’ here, a sushi bar?” We need a wisecracking Italian lady like Sophia Petrillo to ask these oil and gas and coal companies with their hydrogen schemes and efforts to eliminate competition from renewables what they think they’re runnin’ here! Actually, our incredible member Giulia Mannarino fills that role very well!
It’s not that a lot of these companies can’t also make money in renewable energy. They can and they have. It’s not that renewables require any more government subsidy than fossil fuels. They don’t. In fact, fossil fuels have consistently been some of the most heavily government subsidized commodities in the world. The trouble is that once you provide customers with the means to capture the electrons of the sun’s rays and of moving wind and water, you can’t keep charging them (with heavy markup) for the costs of securing more inputs.
Once you solve for intermittency with battery and other storage and delivery options and given the high degree of recyclability of the component parts of renewable energy and energy storage methods, you’re out of excuses to constantly “drill, baby, drill.” If you also manage to use GREEN hydrogen (hydrogen derived from separating water molecules using a renewably powered electrolysis process) to decarbonize sectors like steel and cement production, well, there goes that remaining demand for things like metallurgical coal.
Technological improvements in heat pumps, to give another example, are driving down the popularity of gas utilities in homes for indoor air and water heating and cooking due to greater efficiency and lower costs. While plastics polymers and petrochemicals are still a driving force for use of natural gas liquids, 40% of the plastics market could be gone tomorrow (disposable plastics) and sustainable agriculture and research into polymeric alternatives will continue to address the rest.
The best path both today and going forward is in renewables, maximized energy efficiencies, sustainability, and a circular waste economy. One promising potential for AI and super or quantum computing is finally solving nuclear fusion, which would permanently solve our energy woes, but we can’t get there from here by continuing to rely heavily on filthy, dangerous, expensive, and climate-destabilizing fossil fuels. Doing so just doesn’t make sense or cents.
***
Eric Engle is board president of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
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Posted: February 8, 2025 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: The right path forward
Feb 8, 2025
Eric Engle
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
An AP newswire piece in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel last weekend contained a section that jumped out at me. The piece read, in part, “…a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, said it developed a large language model capable of competing with the world’s best, without having to use top-flight chips. The disruption raised questions about whether all the investments expected for AI chips, data centers and electricity is really needed.”
Intriguing. While politicians from both parties used news of DeepSeek to generate another hair-on-fire panic about China and the national security implications of Chinese everything, a little easily missed reporter’s analysis in an AP piece I found on the back pages of a local paper revealed a key truth: we don’t need all these power-hungry data centers, we just need a little global cooperation.
Truths like this, though, don’t sit well with industries like fossil fuels. You see, they want to power these data centers with gas and coal and hydrogen derived from gas. They want countries overseas to do the same so they can build their liquified natural gas and coal export facilities with all the related infrastructure here, predominately in environmental justice communities, while this new administration rids the federal government of the very concept of environmental justice.
AI is another genie let out of a bottle impossible to put back in. Like a genie, it can help accomplish some amazing things that humanity could really benefit from in both the short and long term. But, also like a genie, it can be extraordinarily dangerous (think deepfakes, mis-and-disinformation bots, even SkyNet from the Terminator movies). AI’s most pressing immediate threat is soaring electricity consumption at a time when all human beings need to consume less electricity, more efficiently than ever, sourced from renewables.
Leave it to those profiting inconceivably from the status quo to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing a president and congressional majorities sympathetic to protecting their profits. They have already begun dismantling portions of crucial renewable energy and energy efficiency gains desperately needed to combat the global climate crisis. Only now, they’ve rebranded. Instead of bringing to mind images of filthy old coal plants and frack pads and blighted tar sands fields in Canada, they want you thinking about supercomputing and AI and “clean” hydrogen and all that futuristic fancy stuff!
It makes me think of a Golden Girls episode (I’m a die-hard Golden Girls fan) where a funeral director named Mr. Pfeiffer (the “p” is not silent) tells the girls that “here at Forever Peaceful Mortuary, we’ve gotten rid of all that morbid death stuff.” To which Sofia replies “whaddya runnin’ here, a sushi bar?” We need a wisecracking Italian lady like Sophia Petrillo to ask these oil and gas and coal companies with their hydrogen schemes and efforts to eliminate competition from renewables what they think they’re runnin’ here! Actually, our incredible member Giulia Mannarino fills that role very well!
It’s not that a lot of these companies can’t also make money in renewable energy. They can and they have. It’s not that renewables require any more government subsidy than fossil fuels. They don’t. In fact, fossil fuels have consistently been some of the most heavily government subsidized commodities in the world. The trouble is that once you provide customers with the means to capture the electrons of the sun’s rays and of moving wind and water, you can’t keep charging them (with heavy markup) for the costs of securing more inputs.
Once you solve for intermittency with battery and other storage and delivery options and given the high degree of recyclability of the component parts of renewable energy and energy storage methods, you’re out of excuses to constantly “drill, baby, drill.” If you also manage to use GREEN hydrogen (hydrogen derived from separating water molecules using a renewably powered electrolysis process) to decarbonize sectors like steel and cement production, well, there goes that remaining demand for things like metallurgical coal.
Technological improvements in heat pumps, to give another example, are driving down the popularity of gas utilities in homes for indoor air and water heating and cooking due to greater efficiency and lower costs. While plastics polymers and petrochemicals are still a driving force for use of natural gas liquids, 40% of the plastics market could be gone tomorrow (disposable plastics) and sustainable agriculture and research into polymeric alternatives will continue to address the rest.
The best path both today and going forward is in renewables, maximized energy efficiencies, sustainability, and a circular waste economy. One promising potential for AI and super or quantum computing is finally solving nuclear fusion, which would permanently solve our energy woes, but we can’t get there from here by continuing to rely heavily on filthy, dangerous, expensive, and climate-destabilizing fossil fuels. Doing so just doesn’t make sense or cents.
***
Eric Engle is board president of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
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Category: 2025, 2025 February, Climate Corner, Eric Engle
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