How AI causes serious environmental problems (but might also provide solutions) | DW Business
Summary
TLDRThis script explores the dual-edged role of AI in environmental conservation. While AI excels at analyzing vast data sets to optimize energy use and predict climate patterns, its resource-intensive nature poses environmental challenges. Data centers' high energy and water consumption, especially in drought-stricken areas, raise sustainability concerns. Companies like Microsoft are investing in carbon offsets, but questions remain about the effectiveness and potential greenwashing. The script calls for sustainable AI development, community involvement in governance, and stricter regulations to mitigate AI's environmental impact.
Takeaways
- 🧠 AI's Potential in Climate Solutions: AI can analyze vast amounts of data quickly, which is invaluable for optimizing energy use and making decisions to reduce waste.
- 🏢 Energy Efficiency in Buildings: Companies like Adian use AI to help facility managers run commercial buildings more efficiently, potentially saving up to 40% of energy and CO2 emissions.
- 🔍 AI's Speed and Analysis: AI's ability to read and analyze data rapidly is a significant advantage over human researchers, allowing for swift responses to environmental issues.
- 🌡️ The Environmental Impact of AI: The operation of AI, particularly in data centers, consumes substantial resources like water and electricity, contributing to environmental challenges.
- 💧 Water Usage Concerns: Large-scale AI operations, such as data centers, can strain local water resources, as seen in the controversy over Google's data center in Chile.
- 🔥 Energy Consumption and Emissions: Training and running AI models require significant energy, which often comes from fossil fuels, contributing to CO2 emissions.
- 🌐 Global Data Center Growth: The expansion of data centers worldwide is expected to double energy consumption by 2026, highlighting the growing environmental impact of AI.
- 🌿 Sustainable AI Initiatives: Some companies, like Microsoft, are investing in carbon offset projects to counterbalance the environmental impact of their AI operations.
- 🏛️ Regulatory Efforts: Governments and regulatory bodies are beginning to address the environmental impact of AI through new rules and legislation, like the EU AI Act.
- 🌳 Green Alternatives: Tech companies are exploring renewable energy sources for data centers, such as solar and wind power, to reduce their carbon footprint.
- 🌍 Community Involvement: The script emphasizes the importance of involving local communities in AI governance to ensure sustainable and considerate technological development.
Q & A
What is the potential of AI in addressing the climate crisis?
-AI has the potential to analyze large amounts of data quickly, which can help in optimizing energy use in buildings, mapping Antarctic icebergs, tracking deforestation, predicting weather patterns, and suggesting efficient waste management systems.
How does AI technology contribute to the problem of climate change?
-AI, particularly through data centers, consumes significant resources like water and electricity. The energy used often comes from burning fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.
What is the role of Adian in managing large commercial buildings?
-Adian is a startup that helps facility managers run large commercial buildings efficiently by using AI to analyze data from the building's technical systems and suggesting optimizations to save up to 40% of energy and CO2 emissions.
How does Adian's AI system assist with error resolution in building systems?
-Adian's system allows facility managers to query error codes directly, and the AI, using the building's historical data, can provide specific instructions on how to resolve the issue, making the process faster and more efficient.
What are some of the environmental impacts of data centers?
-Data centers require large amounts of water for cooling and consume significant electricity, which often comes from non-renewable sources. This can lead to conflicts over water resources and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Why were Google's plans for a data center in Chile put on hold?
-The plans were halted due to local concerns that the data center would consume a large amount of water, 168 liters per second, in an area already facing a severe drought, potentially impacting the local community's access to drinking water.
What is the embodied carbon of training a single AI model?
-Training a single AI model produces more than five times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions generated from a car in its lifetime, including emissions from manufacturing the car and its fuel consumption.
What steps is Microsoft taking to address its carbon footprint with AI expansion?
-Microsoft aims to be carbon negative by 2030 and is investing in carbon dioxide removal credits from a biochar facility that turns forestry waste into a form of charcoal, which is then buried to enrich soil and sequester CO2.
What is the EU AI Act, and how does it relate to environmental impact?
-The EU AI Act is a set of rules that will impact businesses using AI, emphasizing the development and use of AI systems in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner, although it does not provide specific guidelines on what this entails.
What is the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, and what commitment does it entail?
-The Climate Neutral Data Center Pact is an agreement signed by around 100 data center operators, promising to operate climate-neutral data centers by 2030, aiming to reduce the environmental impact of their operations.
How are some governments and companies addressing the strain of data centers on power grids and resources?
-Governments like Singapore have enacted moratoriums on new data center constructions, while companies are experimenting with green alternatives such as using solar energy and wind power to run their data centers.
Outlines
🤖 AI's Role in Climate Crisis: Savior or Contributor?
The script explores the dual nature of AI in the context of environmental conservation. It acknowledges AI's potential to analyze vast amounts of data quickly, which is instrumental in optimizing energy use in buildings and suggesting efficient waste management systems. However, it also highlights the significant energy and water consumption of data centers, which can lead to environmental issues like the depletion of local water sources. The episode discusses how AI can help in energy optimization and the challenges it poses due to its resource-intensive nature.
💧 The Environmental Impact of AI and Data Centers
This paragraph delves into the environmental implications of AI, particularly focusing on the resource demands of data centers. It discusses the controversy surrounding Google's data center in Chile, which faced opposition due to its high water consumption in a drought-stricken area. The paragraph also addresses the broader issue of AI's carbon footprint, from the energy used in training models to the ongoing electricity needs of data centers. It raises questions about the sustainability of AI and the need for corporate responsibility in mitigating its environmental impact.
🌱 Balancing AI Advancement with Environmental Sustainability
The final paragraph discusses the efforts of tech companies to balance the advancement of AI with environmental sustainability. It mentions initiatives like Microsoft's aim to be carbon negative and the use of biochar to sequester carbon dioxide. The paragraph also touches on the challenges of regulation, with the EU's AI Act and the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, and the need for more comprehensive environmental considerations in AI development. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of community involvement in AI governance and the potential for AI to contribute positively to climate change mitigation, while also recognizing its current environmental demands.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Artificial Intelligence (AI)
💡Climate Crisis
💡Data Centers
💡Energy Optimization
💡Greenhouse Gas Emissions
💡Sustainable Development
💡Biochar
💡Carbon Offsets
💡Regulatory Bodies
💡Climate Neutral
💡Computational Cost
Highlights
AI's potential to help solve the climate crisis is discussed, but it's also acknowledged as part of the environmental problem due to its energy and resource consumption.
AI consumes significant resources like water and electricity, which raises concerns about its environmental impact, especially as technology advances.
Plans for a Google data center were halted due to local concerns over the potential depletion of drinking water resources.
AI's capability to analyze vast amounts of data quickly can optimize energy use in buildings, potentially saving up to 40% of energy and CO2 emissions.
Adian, a German startup, uses AI to help facility managers run commercial buildings more efficiently by analyzing building data and resolving errors quickly.
AI's speed in data analysis is invaluable to researchers and scientists seeking climate solutions, such as mapping Antarctic icebergs and tracking deforestation.
The environmental cost of AI includes the energy and water needed for data centers, which can strain local resources and contribute to climate change.
Training a single AI model can produce more CO2 emissions than a car does in its entire lifetime, including manufacturing and fuel consumption.
Microsoft aims to be carbon negative by 2030 and is investing in carbon dioxide removal credits to offset its emissions, including those from AI operations.
The EU AI Act emphasizes the need for AI systems to be developed and used sustainably, though it lacks specific guidelines on environmental impact.
Communities affected by AI operations, such as data centers, should have a voice in AI governance to ensure sustainable practices.
Governments like Singapore's are aware of the strain data centers can put on power grids and have implemented moratoriums on new constructions.
Tech companies are experimenting with green alternatives for data centers, such as using solar and wind power, but most still rely on fossil fuels.
The EU's AI Act is more focused on the digital environment than the natural one, but the climate impact of AI is becoming increasingly significant.
As AI advances, the need for more data centers and the associated environmental consequences will continue to grow.
The future of AI's role in climate change is uncertain, but its current state requires a substantial amount of natural resources for training and operation.
The discussion calls for more regulations to address the environmental impact of AI and considers the need for community involvement in AI governance.
Transcripts
how can I help save the environment it's
a question someone might ask an
artificial intelligence tool like chat
gbt which has made serious gains in
terms of what it's capable of and though
there's talk that AI might hold the
answers to the climate crisis it's also
part of the problem one that's only
going to get bigger as the technology
advances and its use grows if you train
on twice as much data it takes twice as
much energy running AI consumes real
resources water and electricity and so
do we when we extract solutions from it
that's why plans for a Google data
center were recently put on hold locals
realized it could mean the end of
drinking water for their neighborhood
and so we're asking is AI going to help
solve the climate crisis or make it
worse in this episode of transforming
business there's one thing AI can do
that people can't reading and then
analyzing huge amounts of data quickly
there's literally hundreds of thousands
of data points coming in from a large
building like this one into our system
data that can help us make decisions
like how to optimize the use of energy
in a building so that none of it goes to
waste Henri zorf is a chief technology
officer of Adian a small startup based
in Cologne Germany adan's product helps
facility managers run large commercial
buildings like this one as efficiently
as possible imagine you have a facility
manager in the technical building room
and there's an energy system maybe the
heating or Cooling and it's displaying
an error code error code
15 that person would have first to find
the uh manual for the heating or the
cooling and look up what is error code
15 or that person could just ask our
system hey Adian I'm in the technical
building room uh standing in front of a
whatever fison heating I'm getting
displayed error code 15 how do I resolve
it and then our system knows the entire
history of that building datawise that
combined with the generative AI can
actually like search through the history
and then just tell that person okay for
a code 15 in summer you have to do this
and that and by the way he is also the
manual aian says it can help a building
save up to 40% of energy and CO2
emissions in buildings this large making
a small tweak can have a big impact ad
Defan uses AI to do a lot of different
things to help it structure and analyze
the hundreds of thousands of data points
it gets from a building's technical
system to factoring in variables like
outside climate and building
materials each building is individual
meaning it has uh different tenants it
has different usage behaviors it has
also from how it was built different
thermal behavior um if you have a wooden
building as composed as opposed to a
concrete building that's very that's
very different Adian is capitalizing on
ai's ability to read and analyze data in
a sliver of the amount of time it would
take the world's best researchers to do
the same this speed is what makes AI so
valuable to researchers and scientists
looking for solutions to The Climate
crisis scientists are now using AI to
map Antarctic icebergs 10,000 times
faster than humans and to track
deforestation in real time to better
predict weather patterns and to suggest
more efficient Waste Management Systems
there's no doubt AI has the potential to
do good things for the climate but not
everything about it is a gift to the
environment take this hum for example
which residents in Chandler Arizona here
247 it's the sound of a data center
processing the billions of requests it
gets throughout the day think of AI as
the brain and data centers as the body
that supports the brain to work there
are more than 8,000 data centers in the
world according to the International
Energy agency data center energy
consumption is expected to double in
2026 to what it was in
2022 when I started doing AI research a
decade ago I could run most of the AI
systems I was using on my laptop this is
Jesse Dodge he's an AI research
scientist but today we're using
supercomputers right um some of the
large AI systems that people are
familiar with like the chat Bots or the
image generation systems those run on
really large
supercomputers and consume a potentially
very large amount of electricity these
very large amounts of electricity
produce very large amounts of heat and
also that hum you just heard to keep the
data centers from overheating they must
be cooled down and this is usually done
in one of two ways using air
conditioning or water and lots of it
let's say I engageed in a 15 question
conversation with chat gbt over how I
could be more environmentally conscious
experts calculate I would be consuming
about a half liter of fresh water and
this is where AI can be a little
problematic access to clean water is
competing with um let's say local uses
for it this is what got Google into a
bit of hot water soon after it announced
plans to build a $200 million Data
Center in the workingclass neighborhood
of cios in Chile we all use uh Google
search and other Google tools so
initially the neighbors were quite happy
that Google had chosen this area for
building their their data center this is
Sebastian Leed an AI ethics and Society
lecturer at Kings College London they
saw it as as you know synonymous with
progress development a new poll of
innovation in the area but once they
took took a look at Google's
environmental impact report for the data
center they were startled by what they
learned they found out found out at some
point that this Google data center was
going to use 168 L of water per second
in an area facing drought a drought that
is now in its 15th year and caused
elected officials to ration water in the
capital of Santiago but after Fierce
protests from the community the permit
was put on hold a local environmental
Court told Google it needs to modify how
it plans to cool its servers and
Google's plans for a data center in
Uruguay also face push back when locals
learned how much water it would consume
and water isn't the only natural
resource that AI requires it needs a lot
of electricity too and most of that
electricity still comes from burning
fossil fuels which release the
greenhouse gas emissions causing climate
change training a single AI model
produces is more than five times the
amount of carbon dioxide emissions
generated from a car in its lifetime
that's including the emissions to
manufacture the car and its fuel
consumption once it leaves the factory
it's an astounding amount training an AI
model and then ensuring its continued
existence through large data centers is
a massive drain on natural resources and
also drives up what researchers call
embodied carbon so that's going to be
the amount of um carbon it took to let's
say build the
hardware just starting by mining the
rare earth minerals that goes into the
gpus shipping that across the world to
then uh be manufactured into a GPU and
then shipping that GPU to its final
destination at a data center that does
incur a really large environmental
impact it's this impact that companies
like Microsoft are trying to take into
account as they set climate goals
Microsoft says it's aiming to be carbon
negative by 2030 not just neut
but negative and one way it's hoping to
get there is through Bolivia more than
9,000 km from Microsoft headquarters in
Redmond Washington is a biochar facility
operated by exom mad green it turns
forestry waste into something that's
called biochar which is essentially
charcoal exom mad green will produce the
biochar containing carbon dioxide and
bury it underground where it can enrich
the soil and keep keep CO2 from getting
into the atmosphere Microsoft has bought
32,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal
credits but that's a tiny fraction of
its overall annual emissions we don't
know how much of that will grow with
AI That's one way that Microsoft can
continue to expand its AI operation and
data centers while saying it's still on
path to being carbon negative but is
that effective enough or is it just a
form of corporate greenwashing if we do
something like bubon offsets that
doesn't negate the action that we took
meaning that doesn't undo the carbon
emissions that we've produced these two
things don't cancel each other out as AI
advances governments and Regulatory
bodies are trying their best to keep up
this year new AI rules passed by the
European Parliament will go into effect
impacting businesses like a Defan the EU
AI act does reference the impact of AI
on the environment it asks that AI
systems are developed and used in a
sustainable and environmentally friendly
manner though it doesn't really spell
out what that means Chile's AI laws
which were drafted before the EU rules
but aren't nearly as comprehensive don't
address environmental impact
either I think what's concerning is not
only that this is not being addressed um
enough as it should I think but also
that the the voice of the people
affected by it is not considered right
so so even if you look at research the
Press uh quite often they report on the
environmental impact but they don't
report on how the situation can affect
the uh livelihood or the well-being of
the communities participating somehow
within the value chain of artificial
intelligence if operating a data center
for your AI model is the reason why a
community doesn't have access to
drinking water is that still sustainable
we need those voices to participate as
well in the governance of AI so if they
for example is coming up with you know
new regulation uh it would be great to
be able to hear those communities as
well because those communities they are
not against technology or AI but that
what they will say is that if we want AI
it has to be built in dialogue with
local communities Singapore's government
was aware of the strain data centers
would have on its power grid so it
enacted a 4-year moratorium on the
construction of new ones that ended in
2022 and they've now accepted build
proposals from these companies
Australia's air trunk Chinese data
center operator GDs and Tik Tok owner
bite Dan and equinex and Microsoft based
in the
US Dublin's power operator placed a
moratorium on data centers in 2022 they
say the Irish Capital could face
blackouts if new ones are
built in Europe around a 100 data center
operators signed the climate neutral
data center pact promising to be what
the title implies
a climate neutral data center by 2030
but is that even feasible tech companies
are experimenting with green
Alternatives like this Google facility
in Belgium which partly uses solar
energy and in 2021 Microsoft said it had
opened three data centers in Sweden that
run entirely on wind power but most data
centers still run on fossil fuels and
rely on local power
grids this first draft of the eu's AI
Act does more for the digital
environment than the natural one but as
AI continues to advance its climate
impact is becoming harder and harder to
ignore if you train on twice as much
data it takes twice as much energy and
so that pattern has really um spelled
over the last 10 years this dramatic
increase in computational
cost AI is the new kit on the Block and
it's hard to predict what the future
will look like there's no doubt it can
help us make massive gains when it comes
to slowing down climate change but in
its current state an AI model requires
an enormous amount of Natural Resources
first to train and then to run and not
all data centers are dedicated to AI use
but we will need to build more of them
as AI advances and become standard use
in business research and public
administration should regulations do
more to address the environmental
consequences of
AI absolutely well that's what chat gbt
thinks anyway what about you let us know
in the comments
[Music]
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