Senior Science Reporter
Justine Calma is a senior science reporter at The Verge, where she covers clean energy and the environment. She’s also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Since reporting on the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Justine has covered climate change on the ground in four continents. "Power Shift," her story about one neighborhood’s fight for clean energy in New Orleans was published in the 2022 HarperCollins anthology, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She previously covered environmental justice at Grist and taught a nonfiction climate writing class for the MFA program at The City College of New York. She is an alumna of Columbia Journalism School's Toni Stabile investigative program and the Ida B. Wells fellowship at The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.
We are talking about the the same industry profiting by creating the climate crisis. Shell previously promised to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which is impossible unless the company pivots away from dirty energy. Shell’s blaming consumers for its own lack of follow through, saying “investment in oil and gas will be needed” to meet demand.
They’ve used AI for years to find new oil and gas reserves. Now, more advanced AI is helping them drill oil wells more efficiently. Within a few years, a significant chunk of wells could be drilled autonomously, Bloomberg reports. That brings costs down and helps dirty energy compete with renewables like solar and wind, which have become cheaper alternatives to fossil fuel power plants that wreck air quality and cause climate change.
Electricity shortages could become a big problem over the next several years unless the US races to get more sources of clean energy online, The Washington Post reports. Data centers for AI and crypto mining are huge energy vampires. And the resurgence of domestic manufacturing for everything from semiconductors to EV batteries and solar panels are also expected to put extra strain on aging power grids.
[The Washington Post]
Because of all the energy it consumes, AI might actually make things worse by driving up greenhouse gas emissions. There’s also the risk of AI being weaponized to spread climate disinformation. You don’t have to take my word for it; this report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition brings together current research on the issue.
That’s the highest it’s been since 2021, before the long, cold crypto winter brought that price crashing down to less than $20,000.
A friendly reminder: the higher that price gets, the more energy Bitcoin mining typically burns through and the greater its greenhouse gas emissions.