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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you, ChatGPT, live without fossil fuels?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGreat question \u2014 and the honest answer is no.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI is expanding rapidly \u2014 from casual consumers using ChatGPT or Grok \u201cbecause it\u2019s fun\u201d to businesses leveraging its power to save<\/a> Israeli bee populations or combat American sex traffickers. It\u2019s hard to even wrap your head around the amount of energy required to satiate the curiosity of 5 billion people<\/a>. Let\u2019s use Business Energy UK\u2019s explanation<\/a> of the mechanics of AI energy usage: \u201cEvery time you prompt Midjourney or ChatGPT to generate an image, an explanation or an email, the host company\u2019s servers run thousands of calculations to deliver the goods. This process uses vast amounts of energy. To keep the servers from overheating, water systems are often used to absorb the heat and carry it off to cooling towers to evaporate.\u201d<\/p>\n One ChatGPT-generated email uses enough energy to power 14 LED bulbs for an hour \u2014 and enough water to fill a bottle, just to cool the servers \u2014 according to a recent study<\/a> by The Washington Post and the University of California. Seem pedestrian? Consider this analysis<\/a>, again from Business Energy: ChatGPT uses four times the energy needed to put on and televise the Super Bowl every week. In a month: enough to charge more than a third of a million cars. In a year: more than the energy consumption of 117 countries. Again \u2014 that\u2019s just ChatGPT.<\/p>\n The scope of AI\u2019s energy demand has significant implications for environmentalists\u2019 dreams of hitting net-zero, especially when you consider the factors at play. First, the rapidly expanding growth of AI usage in both the private and public sectors, evidenced by all the usage data you just read about. Second, the increasing importance of AI dominance in our national security debates, requiring further innovation and energy usage, a trend that the Trump administration is laudably embracing<\/a>. Thirdly, neither of those trends shows signs of reversing anytime soon.<\/p>\n Take those three issues, and you start to see why the madness of net-zero is being rejected so strongly. There are, quite simply, unprecedented energy questions being asked of the world. And it turns out that \u201cwhat if we made less energy\u201d isn\u2019t a serious answer. Or an answer at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rise of AI, and its corresponding mammoth energy demands, highlights a truth that only becomes more obvious by the day: the net-zero coalition really never had workable solutions to the end of fossil fuels. There are many reasons for this, including that many of their demands were foisted by activists on companies that actually know how to manage and create energy (for a perfect example, see the entire saga<\/a> of ExxonMobil vs. nuisance corporate activists incensed by the company\u2019s audacity to do business in oil and gas).\u00a0<\/p>\n Demands that were half-heartedly capitulated to (as was the case for many net-zero commitments) can be easily discarded \u2014 BlackRock\u2019s exit<\/a> from the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiatives is no great mystery unless you believe that most American companies seriously want less energy at their disposal. They don\u2019t. Neither do most Americans. At most, the country is split evenly<\/a> on whether energy reduction policies help the economy, and a majority aren\u2019t on board<\/a> with a fossil fuel phaseout. Why should they be, especially as AI continues to shape the world\u2019s industries? All one has to do is look around to see that AI, barring some true cataclysmic setback, is here to stay, and its energy demands aren\u2019t going anywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n American leadership on AI is a crucial priority, in ordinary business and the defense industry alike. Building a pathway to that leadership relies on rejecting much of the overregulation dogma that\u2019s come out of Europe. Perhaps it\u2019s no accident that it involves rejecting much of Europe\u2019s anti-energy dogma, too. These things go hand-in-hand. As former national security advisor Klon Kitchen notes<\/a>, \u201cWashington has been hesitant to challenge European regulatory overreach in the tech sector. That must change. The AI era is not one in which the US can afford to be reactive.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u2019s right \u2014 and the implications of this regarding how we view energy production has become clear. This isn\u2019t just about ChatGPT loading correctly tomorrow morning \u2014 it\u2019s about ensuring that the free world is at the forefront of one of the most dramatic reorderings of industry in the history of our species. AI\u2019s transformative power rests upon several large pillars, one of which is fossil fuels. Until we build a better pillar, we\u2019re insane to consider kicking away the one that\u2019s holding up the house right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cCan you, ChatGPT, live without fossil fuels?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cGreat question \u2014 and the honest answer is no.\u201d\u00a0 AI is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-13767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}