{"id":485353,"date":"2026-02-17T08:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T08:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/485353\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T08:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T08:24:08","slug":"claims-that-ai-can-help-fix-climate-dismissed-as-greenwashing-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/485353\/","title":{"rendered":"Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown<\/a> refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector\u2019s explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found.<\/p>\n

The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels<\/a> and Climate Action Against Disinformation<\/a>, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google\u2019s Gemini or Microsoft\u2019s Copilot were leading to a \u201cmaterial, verifiable, and substantial\u201d reduction in planet-heating emissions.<\/p>\n

Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry\u2019s tactics were \u201cdiversionary\u201d and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to \u201cgreenwashing\u201d.<\/p>\n

He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business,\u201d said Joshi. \u201cBig tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the claims that were scrutinised came from an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, which was reviewed by leading tech companies, and corporate reports from Google and Microsoft<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The IEA report \u2013 which devoted two chapters to the potential climate benefits of traditional AI \u2013 had a roughly even split between claims that rested on academic publications, corporate websites and those that had no evidence, according to the analysis. For Google<\/a> and Microsoft, most claims lacked evidence.<\/p>\n

The analysis, released during the AI Impact Summit in Delhi this week, argues the tech industry has misleadingly presented climate solutions and carbon pollution as a package deal by \u201cmuddling\u201d types of AI.<\/p>\n

Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face<\/a>, an open-source AI platform and community, who was not involved in the report, said it added nuance to a debate that often lumped very different applications together.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we talk about AI that\u2019s relatively bad<\/a> for the planet, it\u2019s mostly generative AI and large language models,\u201d said Luccioni, who has pushed the industry to be more transparent about its carbon footprint.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we talk about AI that\u2019s \u2018good\u2019 for the planet, it\u2019s often predictive models, extractive models, or old-school AI models.\u201d<\/p>\n

Green claims even for traditional AI tended to rely on weak forms of evidence that had not been independently verified, the analysis found. Only 26% of the green claims that were studied cited published academic research, while 36% did not cite evidence at all.<\/p>\n

One of the earliest examples identified in the report was a widespread claim that AI could help mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.<\/p>\n

The figure, which Google repeated as recently as April last year, came from a report it commissioned from BCG, a consulting firm, which cited a blogpost it wrote in 2021 that attributed the figure to its \u201cexperience with clients\u201d.<\/p>\n

Datacentres consume just 1% of the world\u2019s electricity but their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. The IEA predicts they will account for at least 20% of the rich world\u2019s growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade.<\/p>\n

While the energy consumption of a simple text query to a large language model such as ChatGPT may be as little as running a lightbulb for a minute, partial industry disclosures suggest, it rises considerably for complex functions such as video generation and deep research, and has troubled some energy researchers with the speed and scale of its growth.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Google said: \u201cOur estimated emissions reductions are based on a robust substantiation process grounded in the best available science, and we have transparently shared the principles and methodology that guide it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft declined to comment, while the IEA did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Joshi said the discourse around AI\u2019s climate benefits needed to be \u201cbrought back to reality\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacentre expansion,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-485353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485353","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=485353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}