Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies “are driving emissions sharply higher,” reports the Washington Post:
To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming…
Already, Amazon’s carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world’s biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures.
A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world’s data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem:
Just two gas projects Amazon signed on to for data centers planned in Texas and Pennsylvania “would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country,” an Alabama coal plant powering 1 million homes.
Meta is building a nearly six-square-mile campus in Louisiana “that will consume as much electricity as three cities the size of New Orleans.”
“A sprawling Microsoft project in West Texas involving a giant gas plant built by Chevron and a Google project in Wyoming that would consume five times as much electricity as every household in that state would vastly expand the emissions associated with those companies.”
“A data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will support OpenAI’s artificial intelligence operations will consume significantly more gas power, and, therefore, emit more carbon pollution, than the Microsoft and Google projects combined.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
