It doesn’t have a catchy name yet, but the place where artificial intelligence, climate change, data centers, space travel and the cost of hurricanes cross paths is where the most vexing political/economic questions of the next few years are likely to come from.
In 2015, 193 countries and the European Union signed a pledge to work to hold the Earth’s average annual temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. That was called the Paris Agreement.
The optimists who signed that treaty might have foreseen that renewable energy would make spectacular gains by now, and the phasing out of some of the biggest contributors to global warming would have begun. The pessimists might have foreseen that this wouldn’t be nearly enough to withstand the rising pressure of industrialization in the third world and the reluctance of rich nations to meet the goals outlined in the agreement, as demonstrated when President Donald Trump later pulled out of the treaty.
Both the optimists and the pessimists would have been accurate in their predictions about what to expect by this, the first year in which Earth’s average annual temperature is expected to rise higher than the limit set nine years ago. What they could not have predicted is that at precisely this moment, an enormous new challenge would arise in the shape of an enormous new opportunity.
Last month, Georgia Power released a report estimating that, despite years of energy conservation efforts, the utility will have to triple its current output to keep up with demand. You may be holding the reason for this in your hand. It takes 10 times as much electricity to make an AI-driven inquiry on your cell phone as a Google search would have used a year or so ago.
Wall Street has now completely bought in on the promise of AI technology, which has extended the current bull market. Anyone who has fooled around with an AI app can see that the technology can do some amazing things. But a paper published recently by researchers at Apple, which has taken a distinctly cautious approach to AI, questions whether it can really do what the market thinks it can do. Meanwhile, there’s the pesky question of all the water it takes to cool the equipment at the data centers where the digital work of AI and cryptocurrency is done, among other environmental problems.
I threw space travel in the list at the beginning as a jokey allusion to Elon Musk and SpaceX, but the role of a new breed of billionaires in the forging of a solidly pro-AI, pro-crypto, pro-data center new administration isn’t a joke. Their ambitions have melded perfectly with the “drill baby drill” crowd who want to see the unbridling of the oil and gas industry. Space travel is likely to be a higher priority in the next administration than climate change.
This brings us to the hurricanes. In previous years there have been an average of about seven hurricanes in the Atlantic. This year there were 11. Helene, the worst of them, caused more than $200 billion in damage, some $53 billion of that in western North Carolina, a place where people normally don’t worry about hurricanes.
You can deny that climate change has anything to do with this, and, in fact, the next administration is likely to withdraw a second time from the Paris Agreement, which President Joe Biden rejoined. But the spiraling cost of disaster may turn out to be a far bigger obstacle to Musk’s budget-slashing ambitions than he counted on.
This crossroads of competing interests where so much of the future will be decided is global in scope but also intensely local, no matter where you are. In a few hours, the Atlanta City Council will be voting on whether to set aside a recent ban on construction near the Beltline to allow a data center to be built in Adair Park. Helene also caused more than $6 billion in damage to Georgia’s agricultural and timber industry, creating an uncertain future for thousands of farmers and farm families, according to Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper.
At first these two things may seem completely unrelated, but they’re closer than you think. They’re part of something larger happening that we don’t have a name for yet.
