Bringing shame back to fight big tech’s climate arrogance
By Ketan Joshi
Australia’s data centre industry offers itself as the saviour of a lagging renewable build-out, yet refuses to even clean up their own mess, writes climate writer and analyst Ketan Joshi.
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It feels like we’re in an era where calling out hypocrisy feels futile. Trump is the President of the United States of America: the uber-hypocrite; the man who’s unlocked the secret to shamelessly doing and saying whatever you want, without consequence. Trump’s own proud hypocrisy has created a permission space for bad behaviour from many. Particularly, from high-polluting companies.
Here’s my contention: what we need to do is bring back shame. That doesn’t happen automatically. You have to fight for it; scramble and struggle to build it from the ground up. But I feel like in this exact moment we’re in, there’s no better candidate for bringing back shame than the world’s technology companies; most of all those invested in selling the services and infrastructure of modern “artificial intelligence” (AI).
The past few weeks, we’ve seen a litany of commencement speakers in the United States loudly booed and jeered by angry students upset at being lectured about the inevitability of a technological force that does nothing but hurt them. I cannot describe how good it feels to hear those boos. Shame is coming back.
This is an excellent start, and I really hope this trend starts branching out into corporate all-staff meetings, family dinners and journalist newsrooms; please, friends. Just boo and jeer with abandon.
My own little sub-task in this effort to bring shame back to hubris-soaked big tech is making sure they cannot obscure the very, very significant amount of climate damage done by a massive global explosion of data centres. The combination of an intensely energy-inefficient product and the intense corporate anxiety around “racing” to deploy AI as fast as possible has resulted in data centre expansion that invariably ends up turning to fossil fuels as a quick and dirty shortcut to growth.
As I found in a previous report I led for a consortium of corporate accountability and environment organisations, one of the key tactics used is to promise “AI” will be good for climate; a trick they pull by confusing the actually-useful and narrow forms of machine learning (like wind forecasting) with the bloated, generalised and energy-hungry systems that are infecting the world’s information space at a blinding rate.
This ‘tactical vagueness’ lays down the perpetually-around-the-corner promise of AI salvation, permitting companies to pollute freely on this hollow, cynical forecast. And honestly, we’ve seen a lot less of it since our report jeering the companies doing this the most.
A few months back, I was commissioned by Greenpeace Australia Pacific to dig deep into how these trends of data centre growth and greenwashing are emerging in Australia. The full report is out now, and I can just say, it is way worse than I expected.
Australia’s data centre industry, now represented by a lobby group (Data Centres Australia, DCA), has been loudly promising that data centres will become a major driving force in Australia’s lagging energy transition. There is nowhere near enough being built to reach Australia’s target for 82% renewables by 2030 (where the vast majority of existing coal is shut down in the next four years). Intuitively, I can see how it makes sense to celebrate the odd data centre signing a power purchasing deal with a wind developer to get more clean stuff online.
But when you look at it from the perspective of the system, and the climate, it does not make any sense at all. Increasing power demand just means you have to build even more renewable energy to hit the 2030 target; like stretching a finish line another 500 metres in the hope it encourages the runners to sprint faster.
Maybe they’ll just build the same amount of renewable energy as they add onto the grid in the form of new data centre demand? At least then they’d break even and do no harm. This is the shameless part: as we detail in the report, when they were faced with a mandate to do exactly this, the DCA angrily pushed back. Suddenly, it’s all too hard: the connection queues are too long, there aren’t enough projects, there’s simply nothing that can be done.
This heel-turn mode switch from brave climate heroes to passive victims of the planning system is absolutely classic high-polluting industry behaviour. They’ll skip from promising salvation to pleading powerlessness in milliseconds. The fossil fuel industry loves pumping up carbon capture and storage, for instance, until the moment it becomes mandated. Then, you cannot stop them talking about how unreliable, expensive and infeasible it is. It is one hell of a manoeuvre, and it takes nuclear-grade shamelessness.
As we show in our report, it is hypocritical for Australia’s data centre industry to offer itself as the saviour of a lagging renewable build-out, given how fast they have been to refuse to even clean up their own mess. Thanks to this hostility towards actually building a massive amount of new wind and solar, the projected levels of new data centre growth will end up incentivising coal and gas on the power grid. We also detail a range of plans to plug data centres directly into massive new gas plants. All of this directly and indirectly jacks up power prices, worsens air pollution and, most importantly, makes the planet heat faster and more dangerously.
My message is pretty simple. Booooooo. You don’t get to claim climate saviour-ship if you’re fighting like demons against even being held to your own promise. You should be ashamed. And you know what? It kinda feels like shame is coming back in a big way.
About the author
Ketan Joshi is an independent writer and analyst based in Oslo, Norway, consulting to climate, corporate accountability and environment groups. He recently wrote “The AI Climate Hoax” funded by a consortium of groups and contributes to The Australia Institute’s series on fossil fuel phaseout and CCS. He is a committee member of Comms Declare.
