AI | Has It Become Another Greenwashing Ploy?

Through The Smog Shall I Stand, Heroically; Clad In Green And Bathed In Light

Victorian writers, although not fully cognisant of the meaning, often wrote of the smog and pollution spawned from the great centres of progress. In hindsight, we can recognise the grandeur of the occasion; after all, it marks humanity's first steps towards the modern climate crisis. In the eternal words of Armstrong: ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ And much like the moon landing, not everyone believes it happened. For the record, it did.

Thankfully, in the developed world, we have all but eliminated smog in its literal form. However, through the power of social media, mass marketing, and wilful ignorance, it has been nurtured and gestated into its metaphorical form, albeit under the guise of a pseudonym: Greenwashing.

Greenwashing & AI: A Social Media Phenomenon

Now, for the uninitiated few who have not heard of this term, worry not. For I shall describe it with a simple example. Imagine, if you will, a soft drinks company that sells cola. This company sells its products in plastic bottles, the production of which generates significant greenhouse gas emissions. These bottles litter the streets in small numbers domestically and in endemic numbers in the third world. Many of these bottles end up in the ocean, choking dolphins, turtles, and other sea animals.

Selfless social media users band together and rightly declare it an outrage. Through a series of five-second TikTok videos and coloured squares on Instagram feeds, they mark the unjust death of Danny the dolphin and demand change.

The soft drinks company works quickly to avert the minor public relations quibble resulting from their rapacious activities. To placate the short-attention-spanned internet populace, they pledge to reduce the non-recyclable plastic in their products and publicly announce a donation to an NGO, who may or may not be corrupted by the corporations that have handed them vast sums of money. Some of the stronger and smarter corporations have figured out they can set up their own organisations and write the donations off as tax-deductible.

The illusion of action leaves the social media users satisfied with how impactful they have been, and they subsequently move on to the next global problem.

Meanwhile, the obvious solution was to demand that the soft drinks company sell its products in glass bottles. Or, if they were feeling lazy, in cans larger than the ones they already sell. Yes, it might take more work and effort, but some of the children of the third world may yet live to see another sunrise. But I digress.

The View Of AI Having Taken Off The Green Tinted Glasses

The point I'm making is that AI infrastructure generates a huge environmental impact, and for the most part, this is slipping under the radar with the assistance of carefully curated greenwashing.

Ask any multinational corporation how AI is going to reduce their environmental impact, and they will gleefully recount an exaggerated version of the efficiencies it will generate. But if you look a little closer, you’ll see they’re doing what they’ve always done: passing the consequences down the chain.

AI doesn’t come from thin air; it comes from servers located in data centres that currently account for around 1.5% of global electricity use. And as you can imagine, this is set to skyrocket. A study estimating the impact of just the NVIDIA server units expected to be built by 2027 puts the figure at 85.4 TWh annually. To give you some perspective, the average UK home uses 3,509 kWh. Doing the maths, you could power over 24 million households. So, not far off a small country's worth of power.

Now, this figure isn’t factoring in other companies cashing in on the AI boom, which they surely will. Nor does it include the emissions generated from the manufacture of physical products and the subsequent supporting infrastructure. So, it is safe to assume the final figure will be far higher.

Which leads us to conclude that AI isn’t the great green wonder set to carry us into a brighter tomorrow; it is, in fact, dusty and soot-covered.

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