Essay by Eric Worrall
What happened to the Net Zero Banking Alliance again?
Amazon partnered with Dominion Energy to build solar farms in Virginia to power its cloud-computing service. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Companies will still face pressure to manage for climate change, even as government rolls back US climate policy
Published: April 11, 2025 10.44pm AEST
Ethan I. Thorpe Fellow at Private Climate Governance Lab, Vanderbilt University
Michael Vandenbergh Professor of Law and Co-Director, Energy, Environment and Land Use Program, Vanderbilt University
Zdravka Tzankova Associate Professor of the Practice in Climate & Environmental Studies, Vanderbilt UniversityAs the federal government moves to eliminate U.S. climate rules, companies still face pressure to be better stewards of the planet from their customers, investors, employees, local communities, lenders, insurers, global trading partners and many states.
Each of those groups knows it will face increasing costs from rising temperaturesand extreme weather if corporations don’t rein in their greenhouse gas emissions.
…
Companies have also helped drive the expansion of renewable energy, motivated by the competitive economics of renewables and business opportunities. Facebook’s parent company Meta and Google invested nearly $2 billion in projects to provide renewable energy in the Tennessee Valley Authority service area, even though no government required them to do so. And major companies continued signing renewable energy power purchase agreements in 2025.
Microsoft and Amazon are responding to massive new power demand by trying to locate data centers near existing nuclear power plants for cleaner energy supplies.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/companies-will-still-face-pressure-to-manage-for-climate-change-even-as-government-rolls-back-us-climate-policy-251580
I love that they picked Facebook / Meta as an example. While companies like Facebook are investing in renewables, or at least announcing such investments, this isn’t the full story.
That “massive new power demand” is the push for artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence requires crazy amounts of energy because it essentially works by trial and error. AI systems compute and discard trillions, possibly quintillions of possible solutions to a problem before finding a solution which works. If the problem is complex, and has to be solved quickly, for example if the AI is powering a game character in a realtime 3D game, you need acres of computers drawing gigawatts of power to fuel the required computations.
But AI works – since shortly after 2020, all those billion dollar investments started delivering impressive results.
Renewables aren’t reliable enough and are too expensive to provide the kind of power AI requires. Remember these guys are competing head to head with Chinese companies which in some cases are paying less than $0.01 / kWh for reliable coal power. The need for cheap energy to keep up with Chinese AI is what cancelled corporate America’s commitment to climate action.
The climate movement is on its death bed. Greens claiming companies will stick to their commitments despite relaxation of rules in my mind are just like those foolish Eastern block communist leaders who thought they still commanded the support of the people, despite decades of communist tyranny. Anyone who continues to entertain such delusions is about to have a hard encounter with reality.
The following article delves into why AI requires so much energy, and contains a real AI which you can run in your web browser.
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Companies will drop climate change, WHEN government rolls back THE MONEY
Yep. But there are players and forces at work other than governments.
Yes, Leftwing Billionaires are hard at work trying to influence public opinion.
The Trump effect has stalled over here.
Right now Parliament is in an extraordinary sitting to take control of British (Chinese) Steel’s last blast furnaces. Coal has, er , been offered. Jingye has said the furnaces are “no longer financially sustainable”. Everybody says energy costs must come down and then the trail goes cold.
Net Zero is that sacred.
Sadly I think what we are seeing in Britain is a high income country becoming a low income country. Only British voters can prevent this.
Only taxpayers can save steel until 2029
I’m not sure taxpayer funding will save anything. What British Steel and the rest of British manufacturing needs is urgent energy price relief, say by tapping the vast reservoirs of trackable fossil fuel under Gatwick and Lancashire.
This is… a Labour government.
A radical Far Left government, particularly divorced from reality.
They don’t see the disaster they are creating for the UK with their flawed, Net Zero thinking.
It’s a crying shame that the UK is saddled with stupid/delusional leaders such as this.
Or tariffs.
Colonialization as a result of a seafaring culture made Britain wealthy. They parlayed this into being a financial hub for the world. Then Britain spent most of their wealth paying off the US for WW2 armaments. World domination is a fickle goal….Britain’s empire luck has run its course….But everyone would agree the Roman Empire is gone, and Rome is still a nice place to visit…and the Italian government can certainly influence how nice of a place Rome is for its citizens….
Canada is calling for the blast furnaces to be zero carbon by 2035. Same in the UK?
Politicians are not a carbon-based life form.
Though they probably contain sufficient empty calories to power a blast furnace for 1/2 hour
The contaminants in their bodies would play havoc with the make-up of the steel being made.
Would definitely require Liberal Decontamination cycles
Hard to do since I’m pretty sure that the blast furnace process requires generating carbon monoxide and turning it into carbon dioxide by stripping the oxygen off the ferrous-oxide to produce iron.
Isn’t it funny that AI systems require gigawatts to power the computations while an average bloke of IQ100 does a better job in much less time on an energy consumption of about 1KW.
It means that a lot of progress can be made by better algorithms and that the current mega flop approach is a dead end.
Since AI just blobbers useless woke BS I think that already an IQ below room temperature (measured in °C my dear Farenheid friends 😉) does the same job or better.
Absolutely true that current AIs are monstrously inefficient compared to the human brain, but any AI algorithm improvement will not reduce power consumption, it will be used to increase the computation power and intelligence of the AIs.
But the human brain requires a decade or two of energy before it is mature and educated enough to be useful. And that’s not just food calories — there’s also shelter, heat/AC, education and transportation.
AI energy consumption is presently high and rising due to “demand” increase for the new tech. But eventually the number of new questions that require AI searches will decline, asssuming someone is smart enough to categorize and reissue past searches….the power consumption of the chips will decline, and a sort of reverse Moore’s Law will occur where power consumption will drop by half every couple of years. Our grid will be bigly oversized at that point, investors are likely to get caught holding the bag for all manner of energy generation monetary losses. Will AI will recommend the excess be demolished ? Or remain available to keep electricity prices low ? Or be optimized for revenue of the AI owners ? Hmmmmm…
It is a clash between Climate Belief, which is based on lies, and the pocketbook, which is based on Reality. In the end, Reality will prevail. It just might take a while.
AI is an incredible waste of resources and a foolish pipedream to pursue here at the gloaming of civilization. One day it’s going to rank beside the Sphynx, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Flavian Amphitheater as a piece of monumental brutality engaged in by overripe empires on the decline; but, being an entirely ethereal thing, unlike those others, it won’t even make good ruins.
But it will wrought much ruin.
Wreak. Wrought is the Past Tense.
I’m past tense!
The only consolation we’ll have after the demise of AI and Western civilisations is that Keith Richards will still be wielding his guitar with his fossilised fingers.
How Parliament works…
“if the AI is powering a game character in a realtime 3D game, you need acres of computers drawing gigawatts of power to fuel the required computations”
seems like a waste of resources
Off topic- but it snowed last night and continues to snow here in Wokeachusetts. Probably 3″ on the ground. But… but… I thought the planet was going to burn up and the oceans would be boiling by now. /s
“…game character in a realtime…”
How much money does that game character bring in, in realtime, and how much processing power does it take?
we told the story of the family whose children emptied their parents’ bank account buying players in the video game Fifa. – BBC
Roy Dobson, from Chorley in Lancashire, UK, discovered that his 11-year-old son Alfie spent almost £6000 (around $7465) on in-app purchases over the course of just two weekends. – Techspot.com
I wonder how much of that money is returned.
oceans would be boiling
They are. The white stuff is just the condensed steam 🙂
The Bleak Defeatist Rise of “Climate Realism” is the latest from the lefty mag The New Republic, Trump is hurting them…hehehehehe.
“Microsoft and Amazon are responding to massive new power demand by trying to locate data centers near existing nuclear power plants for
cleanerMORE RELIABLE energy supplies.”There, fixed it.
“[Companies] are responding to massive new power demand by trying to locate data centers near existing nuclear power plants for cleaner energy supplies.” They are not seeking cleaner energy supplies, they are seeking reliable energy supplies and nothing is more reliable than nuclear.
Yep, AI dies on the vine if their power source is constantly interrupted.
Some scientists claim that Antarctic ice cores show that the deaths of 56 million indigenous people in the New World over 150 years caused a reduction in CO2 in the atmosphere. I dunno…..methinks the scientists are reaching….really reaching.
Some scientists are barking mad.
While those 56 million were decaying – making gases** for the atmosphere – what was the rest of the world’s population doing? We need the start date for the 150 years of dying.
** From Duck Assist: “putrescine and cadaverine, which are responsible for the foul odor associated with decomposition. Other gases include hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane, …”
I saw Putrescine and thought Putrecene.
Putrecene: the time of the death of Catastrophic Climate Change
Putrecene – we’re standing in it.
The story line is 56 million were growing plants for food and that resulted in less CO2, but in 1492….Columbus and his measles and smallpox wiped out 56 mill and therefore more CO2 – you cannot win.
They didn’t actually die creating a reduction, they were gradually replaced by the European Invaders just as their Millions of Bison were replaced by millions of Cattle.
I will suggest it was mostly virtue signaling to keep the government off their backs. Anyone remember how Bill Gates became such an advocate for leftist causes after the Clinton administration used anti trust lawfare against him?
If you ask me any country sufficiently developed to create an AI structure should be considered a developed nation and not a developing one.
Well the fellow that ran that banking mess, Mark Carney, is running for PM of Canada (thanks to the Liberal party being able to prorogue Parliament for months, so as to ordain a new leader), and the MSM is in love with him and hoping for his baby. They have done this by the continued “hair on fire because of Trump” meme, and the Liberal’s “new” position that “carbon taxes” for the consumer were wrong (even though they introduced them, and promise to only tax industry, which apparently will not be passed on to the consumer) and that this fellow will actually build pipelines for export I(even though he publicly was against them for Canada only a few months ago).
I think Mark Carney is a dedicated Climate Alarmist, which makes Trump an enemy from his point of view, since Trump scoffs at worrying about climate change, so I don’t expect Trump and Carney are going to get along, and Carney seems to think he is a tough guy, so that won’t help matters, either.
If any Canadian provinces end up joining the United States, we want them to leave all the people who vote for Carney in Canada. We already have too may stupid people down here anyway, we don’t need any more in addition. Thank you very much!
These guys are smokin dope, they kind of remind me of Baghdad Bob.
They are “whistling past the graveyard”.
Hold muh Solar Panel warmed Latte…
Every time Miliband makes another public statement about climate change, this video clip should accompany it.
Miliband and his ilk in other nations, are taking their nations right off the Net Zero cliff. They haven’t quite cleared the edge of the cliff just yet, but they are getting very close.
From the article: “The need for cheap energy to keep up with Chinese AI is what cancelled corporate America’s commitment to climate action.”
I think you are correct.
AI has caused the woke computer companies to drop windmills and solar like a hot potato.
Obviously, windmills and solar are not viable options, for the woke computer companies, or the rest of us.
Reality is dawning. And the good news is it is dawning here in the United States *before* we went bankrupt trying to integrate windmills and solar into our electric grids.