My native intelligence considers AI data centers

Yes, they're fast, and yes it's time to slow the heck down

From Evan Simon and Floodlight, thermal imaging in January shows the unpermitted gas turbines firing away to train Elon Musk’s weird racist Grok AI in Mississippi

For a variety of reasons, I’ve found the data center debate to be difficult to get a real handle on over the last year. But I think a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and I will do my best here to share it with you. Remember, I’m just one human brain, and I have not (illegally) digested every single book ever printed; I can’t draw you a picture of a data center licking an ice cream cone; and if you asked me to render this essay in the style of Emily Dickinson I would fail. Still, for what it’s worth:

First source of confusion: how much demand for AI will there actually be?

This depends on how useful it turns out to be, and that is still a very open question. Yes, AI executives are busy insisting it will upend everything and everyone—the AI chief at Microsoft said last week that all white-collar jobs using computers will be wiped out in the next 12 to 18 months—accountants, project managers, marketing staff. But there’s another school of thought—most ably represented by an AI researcher named Gary Marcus—that thinks the hallucination-prone large language models are good at writing certain kinds of code but not getting much better, and in fact may be at about the limit of their abilities.

There’s a second question resting on top of that one: whatever AI can do, will it make a lot of money doing it, thus justifying the enormous investments currently being made or planned for data centers? The stock market apparently thinks so—AI makes up some stupendous percentage of its gains in recent years—but there are, as you have heard, fears it might be a bubble. The most eloquent—indeed logorrheic—source of those fears is Ed Zitron, a blogger who has followed the various money trails and concluded that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no real prospect of making back the scads of money that they’ve spent, and that sooner or later the bubble will indeed do the thing bubbles do.

These are crucial questions for us because as long as the bubble keeps expanding, there will be insatiable demand for more electricity for more data centers, and if it pops that demand will start to drop dramatically, especially since much of it is still semi-speculative—that is to say, there are far more data centers on the drawing board (to use an old-fashioned image) than under construction.

In fact, it’s been remarkably hard to estimate how much demand for electricity is actually going to go up, precisely because there’s so much speculation here. In an interview that got pretty wonky even for him, the invaluable David Roberts last week talked to Clara Summer, a public advocate at the PJM Interconnection Board, PJM being the the largest regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States, managing the high-voltage electric grid for 67 million people across 13 states from Delaware to Illinois. Anyway, Summer explained that any given data center might be applying for permits to build in four or five different jurisdictions

There is a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and said, “I am interested in being in this area,” versus a data center that has entered into a contract with a utility and put down money.

One estimate has that the number of requests for potential data centers to connect to the grid is five to ten times more than the number of actual data centers that will be built.

Obviously, however, there are plenty of data centers going up. Some are truly terrible (the picture at the top of this newsletter comes from the joint investigation by Floodlight News and the Guardian of an xAI facility in Mississippi; it has followed the path of Musk’s egregious data center in the poor part of Memphis, both using portable gas turbines that pollute the air, and all in an effort to support an artificial “intelligence” that goes on long happy rants about Hitler; it won’s surprise you that the NAACP was early in expressing concern) and some are less terrible: Google just signed up for two big solar farms in Texas to support its data centers.

The default, sadly, seems to be headed towards the Musk model. With grid providers unable to build generating capacity fast enough to keep up with demand, data centers developers are going BYOG—bring your own generation,. Here’s a long and detailed new report about how the G generally turns out to also stand for gas, in this case onsite gas turbines, with not much concern for the climate or local air pollution risks. (Or for the amount of water required—here’s a recent account from Brad Reed of a single Pennsylvania data center that will use 40 percent of the town’s excess water). Here’s a kind of worst-case scenario from John Kostyack, a DC-based consultant:

By the end of this decade, capital spending by tech, real estate, and utility companies will likely represent the largest private-sector infrastructure spending spree in world history. McKinsey, for example, estimates a whopping $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030.

Although forecasts of the scale of data center buildout vary widely, anything near this projected scale has enormous climate implications. The most obvious concern is the emissions generated in powering the massive hyperscale complexes, which are being designed to consume as much as 2 gigawatts (GWs) of power–roughly 15 times the capacity required by the entire city of Philadelphia during summer peak load. According to energy analyst Rystand’s 2025 review of industry announcements, data centers consuming up to 100 GWs of power could come online in the next 10 years.

Much of this power would come from gas-fired power plants. Researchers at Urgewald estimate that roughly 37% of the gas plant capacity proposed in the last 2 years is linked to data centers and AI infrastructure. Thanks in significant part to data centers, the US has overtaken China as the world’s largest developer of gas plants, with 125 GWs of planned new capacity, up 120% from 2024.

Faced with this level of speculative craziness, local opponents and an increasing number of national groups are calling for a moratorium on the buildout of data centers. As Jenna Ruddock wrote in December:

Confronted with similar stakes, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake. From Maryland to Missouri, at least fourteen states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development. In early December, over 200 groups – from faith groups in Florida and Louisiana to physicians in Texas – publicly called for a moratorium on new data center construction nationwide.

Bernie Sanders became the highest profile Democrat to join the call for a moratorium, but as Politico reported in January it’s been hard to find others who are quite as outspoken. Most temporized—for instance, Rep Jasmine Crockett, running for Senate, said AI “can bring real economic opportunity to Texas,” but “we must demand transparency, accountability, and responsible growth.”

But this is very soft ground for politicians, who haven’t found their footing yet. Late last week Sanders joined California representative Ro Khanna for conversations with AI executives; he emerged to tell a Stanford audience

Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.

It seems to me that the call for a moratorium is sound; we should pause before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere. Whether that’s possible is not clear. The Trump administration, amidst its myriad corruptions, is making the case that we must keep ahead of China. What that means is unclear: the Chinese are indeed building AIs of their own, but they seem to be developing architectures that use less energy. And of course they are building out huge amounts of clean electricity, to use for transit and heating and, if they want, artificial intelligence. So far the big difference with the Chinese models is that they’re transparent and open. Which, by the way, complicates the task of American AI entrepreneurs who want to get rich via their proprietary systems.

That getting rich part, of course, now means using AI to try and game our politics, and indeed in recent weeks a new generation of AI-fueled bots seem to be infecting our political system. An AI platform apparently managed to generate 20,000 comments telling California regulators to ignore air quality concerns

Environmental and public health advocates are calling on California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate an AI-powered campaign that allegedly submitted public comments attributed to residents without their consent to oppose Southern California clean air standards. The extent of the AI astroturf campaign remains unknown – who funded it, whose identities were used without consent, and whether California law was broken. Watch the press conference recording here.

The call follows a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing how CiviClick, an AI-powered advocacy platform, was used to generate more than 20,000 public comments opposing standards proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). When staff at the AQMD followed up with a sample of people to verify comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency or had knowledge of the message.

Even so, the campaign for a data center moratorium seems to be gathering steam—one of the most recent pushes emerged in New York State where Third Act’s organizing director Michael Richardson was among the proponents. He said, quite sensibly I think:

“At a time when New York State should be leading the rapid transition to solar and wind energy generation while also ending further buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure, the permitting of data centers with massive energy needs will only feed into the fossil fuel industry’s narrative that to keep this technology running we have to put a pause on dealing with climate change for now. The pause should be the one put on the data centers – not renewable energy projects.”

Indeed, if we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. But in the politically charged year in which we find ourselves, I think intelligence requires us to slow down.

A real shoutout, as I close, to the 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who last week turned down a $15 million offer for his land from a data center developer, instead giving it to a land conservancy for $2 million. Let’s give Mervin Raudabaugh the final word:

“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.

“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”

In other energy and climate news

+Matthew Zeitlin reports that the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling may be a help for clean energy.

“I think the biggest impact of the ruling will be for solar and batteries, because they face some of the largest tariffs, and so we’ll see the biggest cost reductions,” Oliver Kerr, North America managing director at Aurora Energy Research, told me. Some manufacturers have already made refund requests — though again, who knows how that will play out.

Solar investors responded with cautious optimism to the court’s tariff ruling. Shares in Canadian Solar, a solar manufacturing company that has been whipped around by tariffs, shot up after the decision was released.

+Amazon deforestation definitely decreasing! Rhett Ayers Butler reports that

Data released by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that 1,325 square kilometers of forest clearing were detected between Aug. 1, 2025 — the start of Brazil’s deforestation year — and Jan. 31, 2026. That is down from 2,050 square kilometers during the same period a year earlier and represents the lowest figure for this interval since 2014.

Over a longer horizon, the picture is similarly positive from a conservation perspective. Alerts for the trailing 12 months totaled 3,770 square kilometers, compared with 4,245 square kilometers at this time last year, also the lowest since 2014. These figures come from INPE’s DETER system, which uses near-real-time satellite imagery primarily to guide enforcement. While less precise than annual surveys, DETER is widely regarded as a reliable indicator of short-term trends.

Much credit to the great environment minister Marina Silva

Speaking at a press conference announcing the data last week, Silva said the decline reflects coordinated government action. She noted that most high-deforestation municipalities have now joined federal initiatives aimed at curbing illegal clearing.

“Of the 81 municipalities with the highest deforestation rates, 70 have already made this commitment,” she said, referring to the Union with Municipalities program, adding that authorities are deploying resources from the Amazon Fund to support enforcement and prevention.

+Venerable ocean advocate David Helvarg writes on the great kelp forests of the West Coast

Kelp forests are a challenging cold-water realm, but for those of us who dive into these marine forests in places like Monterey in Northern California or Catalina off L.A., they are an entrancing cathe- dral of light and life. Here you’ll find orange garibaldi (like goldfish on steroids), wolf eels, leopard sharks, curious harbor seals and multicolored marine snails known as nudibranch. They are vibrant, entangling and light-shifting habitats of wonder and warning in our rapidly changing seas.

Historically, overfishing, loss of predators like sea otters, pollutionand overharvesting have posed the main threat to kelp forests. Today, it’s marine heat waves. A 2026 study carried out by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and 30 other institutions around the world reports the ocean absorbed more heat in 2025 than ever before. This in turn has set off a record number of marine heat waves that can increase regional water temperatures 5-10 degrees, enough to radically alter ocean conditions.

+A story that surprised me: Romania, not long ago a backwater of Soviet-era heavy industry, is emerging as one of the world’s renewable-energy success stories. Ajit Naranjan has a nuanced account

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

The country has decoupled economic growth from pollution faster than anywhere else in Europe, and perhaps even the world. Its net greenhouse gas emissions intensity fell by 88% between 1990 and 2023, the latest data shows, meaning each dollar’s worth of economic activity heats the planet almost 10 times less than it did before. Emissions have plunged by 75%.

Meanwhile, in remote mountain villages of Ukraine, renewable power is keeping the lights on despite Vladimir Putin’s best efforts. Alessandra Hay in the Kyiv Independent:

Russian attacks have decreased Ukraine's electricity generation capacity to 33% of its prewar levels, according to government estimates. The severity of the damage and ensuing blackouts have exposed the weaknesses of centralized power infrastructure, accelerating the country's push toward decentralized and renewable energy sources. In 2020, green energy made up 9.2% of the total energy consumed in Ukraine, while in 2023 this rose to 22%.

+As we bid arrivederci to the Milan Olympics (and the combination of Alysa Liu and Donna Summer was something else!) here’s an account of how winter sports may proceed in the years ahead—giant tarps covering hills of snow left over from last winter to get the season started. From Jeva Lange:

Using patented tarps and siding created by a Finnish company called Snow Secure, the facilities cover the snow … and then wait. As spring turns to summer, the pile shrinks, not because it’s melting but because it’s becoming denser, reducing the air between the individual snowflakes. In combination with the pile’s reduced surface area, this makes the snow cold and insulated enough that not even a sunny day will cause significant melt-off. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson once likened the phenomenon to trying to cook an entire potato with a lighter; successfully raising the inner temperature of a dense snowball, much less a gigantic snow pile, requires more heat.)

Shockingly little snow melts during storage. Snow Secure reports a melt rate of 8% to 20% on piles that can be 50,000 cubic meters in size, or the equivalent of about 20 Olympic swimming pools. When autumn eventually returns, ski areas can uncover their piles of farmed snow and spread it across a desired slope or trail using snowcats, specialized groomers that break up and evenly distribute the surface. For Santa Caterina, the goal was to store enough to make a nearly 2-mile-long cross-country trail — no need to wait for the first significant snowfall of the season, which creeps later and later every year.

Meanwhile, here’s the matchless Mikaela Shiffrin on the sad state of skiing:

“It is something that’s very close to our heart, because it is the heart and soul of what we do,” Shiffrin told AP after racing Sunday. “I would really, really like to believe and hope that with strong voices and sort of broader policy changes within companies and governments, there is a hope for a future of our sport. But I think right now, it’s a little bit of a ... it’s a question.”

+Not the kind of headline you really like to read, from the Guardian: Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds.

Damian Carrington reports that the mosquito that transmits chikayunga loves the world we’re creating on its behalf

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said.

The analysis is the first to fully assess the effect of temperature on the incubation time of the virus in the Asian tiger mosquito, which has invaded Europe in recent decades. The study found the minimum temperature at which infections could occur is 2.5C lower than previous, less robust, estimates, representing a “quite shocking” difference, the researchers said.

+Meg Tanaka reports on a new study that finds that half the pavement in giant Los Angeles County may be unnecessary.

Los Angeles is often described as a concrete jungle, a city shaped by asphalt, parking lots and other hardscape. Now, for the first time, researchers have mapped that concrete in detail, and they claim a lot of it doesn’t need to be there.

A new analysis finds that some 44% of Los Angeles County’s 312,000 acres of pavement may not be essential for roads, sidewalks or parking, and could be reconsidered. The report, DepaveLA, is the first parcel-level analysis to map all paved surfaces across L.A. County, and to distinguish streets, sidewalks, private properties, and other areas. The researchers divided all pavement into “core” and “non-core” uses.

A street, for example, is core. Then they paired that map with data on heat, flooding and tree canopy, creating what they intend as a new framework for understanding where removing concrete and asphalt could make the biggest difference for people’s health and the climate.

Organizers have what they call a Living Infrastructure Field Kit—check it out

+Chris Jones probably won’t win his race for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. But the former research engineer—who left his state job after pressure from the state’s corn lobby—is using his race to help highlight just how damaging the ethanol industry has become to the state’s ecological and public health. Charlie Hope D’Anieri reports

One of Jones’s most controversial arguments is that ethanol, a notorious third-rail topic in farm country, has to be phased out in order for water quality to be restored. Ethanol is shorthand for a usually corn-derived biofuel. The industry was marginal until 2005, when the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated oil refineries blend a minimum ratio of ethanol into U.S. gasoline. Production grew meteorically. About half of Iowa’s corn now gets made into ethanol. This means that half of the production of the most productive corn state, on untold acres of some of the highest-yielding farmland in the world, is burned in cars—an oddity that is only possible because of federal policy. In our food system, there’s abundance, there’s waste, and there’s ethanol, which is the perfect encapsulation of the horror of both.

+Thanks to fellow Vermonter Ben Cohen (yes, that Ben) for letting me know about a new film from Abby Martin about the environmental impact of the Pentagon. She’s touring the documentary now; see it if it comes by you.

And Ben also reminded me about the ongoing Free Ben and Jerry’s campaign, to convince its current owner, the ice cream giant Magnum, to sell the enterprise to socially aligned investors. Ben and Jerry’s has been an outsized player in campaigns for social and environmental justice for years; it would be as dumb to squelch that voice as it would be to remove the cherries from Cherry Garcia

+From Dana Drugmand, an important accounting of the ways the Trump administration is trying to coerce other countries into joining its anti-climate crusade

Just this week, for example, US Secretary of Energy (and former fossil fuel executive) Chris Wright rebuked the International Energy Agency for accounting for climate change in its energy outlook scenarios and threatened that the US would withdraw from the agency if it continued its climate focus. Following Wright’s remarks, the IEA omitted climate change from its list of priorities in a ministerial meeting summary document, Politico reported.

In another recent example, the Trump administration has reportedly been pressuring other countries to reject a Vanuatu-led draft UN resolution endorsing the ICJ’s landmark climate change advisory opinion. Vanuatu – a tiny Pacific Island nation threatened by rising sea levels – led the charge to get the UN General Assembly to vote on a resolution seeking the ICJ’s input on climate change. That resolution passed in 2023, and last year the court delivered its opinion in what many observers said was a landmark moment for climate justice. Now, Vanuatu is looking to take the next step by having the UNGA adopt another resolution that would welcome the opinion and start to translate it into “concrete multinational action.” The resolution would call on countries to take actions like adopting national climate action plans aligned with the goal of limiting global heating to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and creating an international registry to record climate damage claims.

“The resolution attempts to turn the ICJ’s interpretation of key legal standards into a practical roadmap for state accountability which is likely to trigger political pushback from higher income high emitting countries wary of their historical responsibility and financial liability,” Candy Ofime, climate justice researcher and legal advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

Perhaps no country is pushing back more aggressively than the US, which circulated guidance to its embassies and consulates abroad saying that it “strongly objects” to Vanuatu’s proposal, as the AP reported. The US argues the resolution poses a major threat to US industry, and it is urging other countries to demand that Vanuatu withdraw the draft proposal.

+Fasika Tadesse and Akshat Rathi bring the news from Addis Ababa: Ethiopia is banning the import of fossil fuel cars, and drivers are quickly adjusting to electric vehicles:

“The Ethiopia story is fascinating,” said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. “What you’re seeing in places that don’t make a lot of vehicles of any type, they’re saying: ‘Well, look, if I’m going to import the cars anyway, then I’d rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.’”

Bethelhem Eshetie gave up driving her taxi two years ago. The rising cost of gas and the spare parts needed to keep her old car on the road meant that she couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet. “It was no longer worth it,” she said. Six months later, though, she was back on the road, this time in a brand new BenBen E-Star, an electric vehicle made by the Chinese carmaker Chang’an.

Unlike the second and third-hand vehicles that make up most of the traffic in Addis Ababa, the EV is new, reliable, and relatively affordable to run. “I like the car’s comfort, its air conditioning system,” she said. “And not having to go to the repair shop regularly.”

The stupidity of Trump’s decision to try and kill off the EV industry is so obvious that even the rightwing Free Press is noticing. Michael Dunne’s account contains an interesting nugget: car dealers systematically undermine EVs because since they have so few moving parts they don’t provide much in the way of service and repair income. Dunne also explains why this is a big deal beyond, you know, destroying the climate:

America needs to be good at manufacturing EVs because we need to be good at building the batteries and high-efficiency motors that power them. In the future, these technologies will power everything that matters.

Meanwhile, Ford—though it wrote off billions in EV investments earlier this year—is still planning to make a cheap electric truck for the American market, and more details emerged this week. From Mack Hogan:

The company is launching its moonshot EV platform with what’s effectively a battery-powered equivalent to the massively popular Ford Maverick. Truck fans may bluster at calling such a vehicle a “truck,” as the Maverick’s car-based platform and softer shape is less brutish than traditional F-150s and Rangers. But the Maverick’s popularity speaks for itself.

Expect the UEV truck to blur the line further, as Ford says ultra-slippery aerodynamics were crucial to this program.

As one example, Ford points to the truck’s mirrors, which use the same motor for power folding as they do for adjustment. This allowed them to reduce the size of the mirror by over 20%.

That alone is good for 1.5 miles of range, Ford claims.

+From the good folks at As You Sow, new data showing how much more money you could be making if you invested in clean energy

As of January 26, 2026, the Clean200—measured on a sustainable revenue-weighted basis—generated a total return (gross, USD) of 282.9% since its July 1, 2016 inception, compared with 111.0% for the MSCI ACWI/Energy Index of fossil fuel companies.

To put it in another way, $10,000 invested in the Clean200 on July 1, 2016 would have grown to $38,290 by January 26, 2026, versus $21,100 for the MSCI ACWI/Energy fossil fuel benchmark.

Over the same period, the Clean200 also outpaced the broader MSCI ACWI, which returned 221.3%.

+And finally, as another nor’easter shows up in New England (and man what a beautiful stretch of winter it’s been). new numbers are making it clear just how well the wind farms that Trump wants to shutter performed during this winter’s coldest weeks. From Maria Gallucci:

The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities, including during last month’s Winter Storm Fern, experts said at the event.

The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island, New York, had a ​“capacity factor” of 52% last month. The metric reflects how much electricity the project actually generated compared with the maximum amount it could generate in a given period. That puts South Fork Wind on par with New York state’s most efficient gas plants.

“The wind capacity in the Northeast is absolutely amazing, particularly over the winter,” said Mikkel Mæhlisen, vice president of the Americas Generation division for Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables.

It’s kind of unbelievable that this is what the government is trying to put a moratorium on!