A.I. Is Making a Record-Hot Summer Even Grimmer

Beneath the deluge of election news, two remarkable statistics made smaller headlines this past week. First, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that last month was the hottest July on record, following the hottest June on record, in what is so far the hottest year on record. Second, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that, in the first half of 2024, the U.S. added more electrical generation capacity than they have in two decades: 20.2 gigawatts, with another 42.6 gigawatts planned for the second half of the year.

You might be inclined to interpret this as good news: After all, 59 percent of that new capacity seems to be coming from solar power. But this is being added to what existing plants already generate. Existing plants scheduled for retirement—coal, natural gas—aren’t being phased out as quickly as you might expect. In fact, coal and natural gas plant retirements slowed in this same period, with only about 5.1 gigawatts retired as opposed to 9.2 in the same period last year.

The current electrical generation boom, Bloomberg reports, seems largely to be responding to the increased demand from “data centers and artificial intelligence.”

Liza Featherstone has previously written at TNR about the staggering environmental toll from artificial intelligence, including so-called generative A.I.—you know, the awkward-creepy chatbots that sometimes deliver an eerily coherent answer that’s fit for a fifth grader’s science paper, and other times spit out utter gibberish. (Or the image tool that allowed Donald Trump to claim that Taylor Swift had endorsed him for president. She hadn’t.)

The understandable fixation with the cultural and political consequences of this kind of technology, Liza wrote in March, risks “obscuring the more direct, physical problems with the technology,” like its rapacious water and electrical consumption. The International Energy Agency’s predictions for A.I. energy use by 2026 would be the “equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.” Simultaneously, Liza pointed out, data centers will be sucking up raw materials that are urgently needed for the clean energy transition: like lithium, for example.

As the world was baking this summer, Big Tech was doing its darndest to kill any goodwill people might have for its A.I. projects. In June, Meta notified European users that its privacy policy was changing, allowing the company, in the words of the nonprofit organization that subsequently filed complaints in 11 European countries, “to use years of personal posts, private images or online tracking data for an undefined ‘AI technology’ that can ingest personal data from any source and share any information with undefined ‘third parties’” with “no option of ever having it removed.” (Meta has been training A.I. on U.S. users’ public posts for a while now.)

Microsoft A.I. CEO Mustafa Suleyman then did one better. In an interview later that month, he insisted that anything on the “open web” was fair game, counting as “freeware”—a statement many understandably found exploitative and hypocritical.

During the Olympics, Google ran a dystopian ad in which a father, instead of helping his track-and-field-obsessed daughter compose her own fan letter to her Olympic hero, had Google’s generative A.I. tool, Gemini, “help” her instead. Viewers found it distasteful, and Google pulled the ad.

And it almost goes without saying that Elon Musk’s A.I. venture, Grok-2, was a bust: Mere weeks ago, lacking appropriate content controls, it quickly flooded the social media site now known as X with violent and sexual images of Disney and other copyrighted cartoon characters.

So here we are, in a record-hot summer in a record-hot year, with coal plants being kept online in part to meet the increased demand from bumbling A.I. technology. It would be one thing if that demand were coming from, say, the sudden adoption of electric vehicles by tens of millions of Americans. It’s another thing entirely if the energy transition were to be slowed by Big Tech stealing people’s personal life updates or generating graphic images of Goofy.

Good News/Bad News

A federal judge ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service during the Trump administration did not properly account for the risks from oil spills to endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, and that the federal government has to do more to protect marine life from offshore drilling.


Akielly Hu at Grist reviews the many signs that the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron doctrine is already starting to slow or reverse the implementation of climate and environmental policies, such as the U.S. Air Force now saying they now can’t be required to clean up the drinking water they contaminated with PFAS.

Stat of the Week
1.6 degrees Celsius

Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels—for years considered a vital goal for avoiding climate-related disasters—is going to be very, very hard, a new study says; the new best-case scenario may be 1.6 degrees.

What I’m Reading

Here’s how much cropland could be freed up if Americans ate half as much meat

TNR has run lots of pieces on the environmental cost of meat consumption. But a new study shows that cutting meat consumption by half might free up land that altogether would be about the size of South Dakota:

The organization argues that if those acres weren’t used to grow crops, they could instead be transformed into carbon sinks or used to restore threatened ecosystems. That would deliver climate benefits on top of the reduction of animal agriculture’s more direct emissions sources: manure and cow burps.

The U.S. currently devotes a tremendous amount of land to agriculture: Over 60 percent of land in the contiguous U.S. is used for agriculture, and 21 percent of that is cropland. A majority of the nation’s cropland—78 percent—is used to raise crops that are primarily used to feed animals.

Read Frida Garza’s full report at Grist.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.