Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing

Source: Slashdot

Findings

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy‑hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to the analysis. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy‑hungry chatbots and image‑generation tools driving the sector’s explosive growth of gas‑guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found.

The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot were leading to a material, verifiable, and substantial reduction in planet‑heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry’s tactics were “diversionary” and relied on tried‑and‑tested methods that amount to “greenwashing.”

He likened it to fossil‑fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. “These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business,” said Joshi. “Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it.”

Joshi said the discourse around AI’s climate benefits needed to be “brought back to reality.” “The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion,” he added.