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fossil fuel industry
Make Polluters Pay for the Poles and Wires
The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
Oct 29, 2025
We talk a lot about the cost of energy, but not enough about what’s actually driving it. Across the country, electricity bills are climbing not because of regulation, as the industry claims, but because of the growing costs of the climate crisis itself. The storms, the fires, the floods, and the heat are battering an electric grid that was mostly built half a century ago, and the costs of repairing it are being quietly folded into our monthly bills.
The other side wants you to believe it’s “climate” that’s driving up prices, and they’re right, just not in the way that they mean. It isn’t climate mandates or clean-energy standards. It’s climate disasters. And the truth is, the fastest way to lower costs isn’t to slow down the energy transition, it’s to speed it up. Clean energy brings cheap, reliable power online faster and protects families from the kind of fuel price spikes that come with oil and gas dependence.
That’s where climate superfund laws come in. New York and Vermont have already passed versions that require the biggest polluters to chip in for climate damage. These laws follow the same principle that governs toxic-waste cleanup. If you made the mess, you help pay to clean it up. States are starting to realize that the funds from a climate superfund could cover part of the cost of hardening the grid, things like replacing wooden poles with steel, elevating substations that flood every few years, building microgrids so hospitals and schools can stay open during blackouts, and funding new and more reliable clean energy projects. These projects would help to ease the pressure on ratepayers while making the systems themselves more resilient.
For years, utilities and regulators treated big storms as one-off emergencies. A few poles went down, they rebuilt them, everyone moved on. But the “one-off” has now become, dare I say, the “new normal.” In Maine, the cost of storm recovery has risen more than 30 fold since 2020. Every time a nor’easter slams through the state, Central Maine Power spends millions to replace equipment and clear lines, and then regulators approve a new rider or adjustment that gets added to customer bills. It’s the same story across the country.
The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox.
In California, billions have gone toward wildfire mitigation after blazes sparked by utility equipment destroyed entire towns. To prevent future fires, power companies are burying lines, trimming trees, insulating wires—all necessary, and all very, very expensive. According to state filings, utilities’ wildfire-related costs are contributing to 7-12% bill increases for residential customers. What began as infrequent emergency response spending has become a permanent part of doing business for utility companies across the country.
A new national analysis from the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows how big this problem has gotten. Utilities in 49 states and Washington, DC have already raised rates or proposed to raise within the next two years. By 2028, those hikes will add nearly $90 billion to household energy bills. That’s billions with a b. And for many families, that means another $30 or $40 a month on top of everything else they’re already struggling to afford.
The reasons are tangled together. The grid is old and failing faster under stress. The price of natural gas has spiked again, partly because exports of natural gas have linked American prices to volatile global markets. And new power-hungry data centers are popping up so quickly that utilities are scrambling to build the power plants to feed them. But one of the biggest single drivers remains extreme weather. Each storm and heatwave adds another layer of cost to a grid that was never built for this world.
The Government Accountability Office has warned that climate change will stress every part of the energy system and that failing to adapt will cost billions of dollars more in the long run. Yet the way we pay for that adaptation hasn’t changed at all. Utilities rebuild, regulators sign off, and the public pays. Fossil-fuel companies whose emissions are fueling the disasters that make all this necessary contribute all of nothing.
It’s tempting to think of this as just another utility issue, a problem for regulators and accountants and not us. But to me, it’s really a measure of how far the climate crisis has crept into our daily life. The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox. We can keep pretending it’s inevitable, or we can start sending the bill to the companies that profited from creating the problem.
Climate superfunds won’t solve everything. But they’d at least start to balance the scales. The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
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We're on the Verge of Exceeding 1.5°C of Warming, But It's Not Too Late for Action
With the mounting economic and human toll of climate disasters and the benefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!
Oct 28, 2025
Nations will soon be gathering in Belém, Brazil for the annual United Nations climate “conference of the parties”—COP30—against a backdrop of incredibly challenging geopolitical and climate realities. Grossly insufficient action from world leaders has already resulted in worsening climate extreme events and has put the crucial, science-informed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels out of reach. As I write this, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic are bracing for the monster Hurricane Melissa—the most recent example of the deadly and costly damages from the fossil-fueled climate crisis.
Political headwinds—including the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and clean energy policies in the United States—and the fossil fuel industry’s continued deception and obstruction are conspiring to make this a very fraught moment for climate action. Yet, with the mounting economic and human toll of climate disasters and the benefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!
The Significance of a Brazilian COP
The significance of this COP taking place in Brazil, a COP that should forefront the rights of Indigenous communities and the protection of the Amazon forest, cannot be overstated. Across the world, frontline communities bearing a disproportionate toll of climate impacts need solutions that prioritize their needs—not the profits of big polluters and billionaires seeking to evade their responsibility for driving the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the complicated logistics and high accommodation costs for this COP are already creating concerns about inclusivity, especially for those with fewer resources.
The COP Presidency’s Global Mutirão is a bracing call to action. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago and CEO Ana Toni have laid out a strong vision for a focus on implementation of actions to address climate change, not just a list of future aspirations. They have been engaged in diplomacy all year, bilaterally and multilaterally, to try to lay the groundwork for consensus at COP30 even in the face of geopolitical tensions.
My colleagues and I will be on the ground in Belém, shining a light on the latest science and what it means for decision-makers, people, and the planet as we fight for climate justice alongside civil society representatives from Brazil and across the world. You can follow along with our blog series on COP30.
Breaching 1.5°C of Global Warming Is Alarming, Enraging, and Heartbreaking
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ stark remarks on the 1.5°C climate goal, made at the 75th anniversary of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) last week, hit hard: “…one thing is already clear: we will not be able to contain the global warming below 1.5°C in the next few years. The overshooting is now inevitable, which means that we are going to have a period, bigger or smaller, with higher or lower intensity, above 1.5°C in the years to come.”
Unfortunately, Secretary General Guterres has simply confirmed what several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists, Union of Concerned Scientists scientists, and many others have been sounding the alarm about since the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report was released.
Ten years after securing the Paris Agreement, the fact that the world is now on the verge of exceeding 1.5°C of warming on a long-term basis—after already surpassing it temporarily for a full year in 2024—was not inevitable. It is an absolutely enraging, shameful, and heartbreaking consequence of continued delays and obstruction of ambitious action. The fault lies entirely with gutless, self-interested political leaders—especially those from richer, high-emitting nations—and the fossil fuel industry, which has continued to brazenly and shamelessly prioritize its profits over the planet.
No country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required.
Breaching 1.5°C will undoubtedly unleash further damaging and irreversible climate harms on the world, but it is not a cliff edge. Climate impacts unfold and accelerate on a continuum, and even now, at about 1.3°C of global warming, we are—and have been—seeing profound harms to people and the planet.
Our response now—because humans still have agency over this dire problem we have caused—will make a crucial difference in the extent of the harms to come and what we can do to prepare for them. How much past 1.5°C temperatures overshoot, and how long that overshoot lasts, will depend crucially on our emissions choices. Those factors will make a tremendous difference for the magnitude of impacts like climate-driven extreme heat in the future. We must also ramp up our investments in resilience to help prepare people for graver threats as temperatures increase.
But some planetary boundaries, once crossed, can set off feedback loops in Earth systems that we will not be able to control. For example, some impacts, like the further irreversible loss of land-based ice, can set off additional multi-century accelerating sea-level rise beyond what is currently locked in, and that cannot be turned back once it gets going even if we manage to bring temperatures back down after overshooting 1.5°C.
The choices our political leaders make now—including at COP30—will determine the future we leave to our children and grandchildren. Those choices include prioritizing actions to:
- Sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions, phase out fossil fuels, and drive toward net negative heat-trapping emissions;
- Invest in climate resilience;
- Share the burdens and opportunities of climate action equitably;
- Secure justice for people on the frontlines of the climate crisis; and
- Demand accountability for fossil fuel companies and others who have contributed the most to the climate crisis.
Latest Science and Data Show Climate Action Is Far Offtrack
Despite all the loud alarm bells, most indicators continue to show a world far offtrack. Data from a recent report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) show that global carbon dioxide emissions were at an all-time high in 2024, with the biggest increase from 2023 to 2024 since modern measurements began. In addition to emissions from burning fossil fuels, a strikingly anomalous factor in 2024 was the high levels of emissions from wildfires in North and South America, including in Bolivia, Brazil, and Canada. Meanwhile, the Production Gap Report shows that nations’ fossil fuel production plans are on track to be twice as much in 2030 as would be consistent with a 1.5°C pathway. And countries’ current emission reduction commitments (aka Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) are collectively well short of Paris Agreement-aligned goals.
The 2025 NDC Synthesis report and the forthcoming 2025 UN Environment Programme Emissions Gap report further underscore these realities and highlight the very real risk that without immediate action the world could be on track for a global average temperature increase of more than 2.5°C, even approaching 3°C above preindustrial levels. A 3°C world would be catastrophic—with unrelenting extreme heatwaves, major coastal cities inundated by rising seas, food and water shortages, loss of coral reefs and die-back of tropical forests, harms to human health and other disastrous impacts. Meanwhile, the forthcoming 2025 Adaptation Gap report, themed "Running on Empty," will highlight the huge shortfall in investments in resilience to help frontline communities cope with climate impacts already locked in due to heat-trapping emissions primarily from richer nations.
Together, these reports form a dismal assessment of political leaders who are still not acting in line with what science or equity shows is necessary, despite years of high-minded promises and even as people are enduring crushing climate impacts.
Seven Things to Watch at COP30
While the context for COP30 is daunting, and the process of negotiations ahead is likely to be frustrating, global cooperation is absolutely essential to solve this challenge. There are no shortcuts around that. Every country must have a role, a responsibility, and a voice—no matter how big or small, or how powerful or not they are. That said, richer nations and major emitters of heat-trapping emissions have unique responsibilities to act boldly.
Here are seven things I’ll be watching for:
- Will nations remain steadfast in their commitment to the Paris Agreement? At the UN climate summit in September in New York it was clear that nearly every nation recognizes the utmost importance of the Paris Agreement goals for their self-interest and the global collective interest to limit dangerous climate change. The Trump administration, which has shamefully announced its intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time, is an isolated rogue actor, acting against the interests of the American people. At COP30, will the BRICS nations, the European Union countries, and others step up to fill the leadership vacuum and drive forward ambitious climate action? Many US states, subnational governments, and businesses also remain committed and will be in Brazil to show the other face of the US.
- How will countries’ emissions reduction commitments (aka NDCs) stack up collectively? So far, the NDC announcements have been a real mixed bag and collectively the announcements have fallen well short of what’s needed. The UN’s NDC Synthesis Report underscores the huge gap in ambition, with most major emitting countries still far off course in terms of their emissions trajectories, putting the world at risk of over 2.5°C of warming. Many countries have yet to even announce their updated NDCs. Closing that ambition gap will require rapid implementation, transparent progress tracking, and stronger accountability mechanisms before 2030.
- How much progress will be made on transitioning away from fossil fuels, tripling renewables, and doubling energy efficiency by 2030? Renewable energy progress—especially propelled by China and India, among others—is cause of optimism. Renewable energy is not just ramping up but actually displacing fossil fuels, and now that momentum must be accelerated. However, coal, oil, and gas are simply not being phased out fast enough, despite countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels made at COP28.
- Will there be any breakthroughs on climate finance? Last year’s COP in Baku, billed as the climate finance COP, ended in deep disappointment and a breakdown of trust between richer nations and lower income nations because of the paltry finance pledges offered. This year, it will be critical to rebuild that trust, including sending a strong signal about a plan for provision of finance for both cutting emissions and for adaptation—the latter of which has long left behind and is an urgent priority for developing nations.
- Will there be an ambitious, fair agreement on safeguarding tropical forest ecosystems? Fittingly, this Brazilian COP taking place in the Amazon must prioritize a strong agreement to help protect tropical forests, a crucial aspect of climate action, centering the needs and perspectives of the people and other species who live in and depend on them. Negotiations on the Tropical Forest Forever Facility will be keenly watched as a barometer of success at COP30.
- Will COP outcomes be protected from interference from fossil fuel interests? Petrostates and increasingly large numbers of fossil fuel company lobbyists have worked behind the scenes and publicly to co-opt the UN COP space and water down global climate agreements that they see as a threat to their profits. Their lies and disinformation about climate science and renewable energy are a significant obstacle to progress and must be called out and resisted.
- Will civil society voices, especially the voices of Indigenous Peoples, get a fair hearing? While civil society representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, our voices as observer groups in the broader COP space are crucial to remind political leaders of who they are supposed to be serving (not fossil fuel executives and billionaires!) and that they must prioritize fairness and science in their deliberations. Through engagement with country negotiators, side events, press conferences, and public demonstrations, we will work to register our views loudly and clearly.
What Will It Take for COP30 to Be Successful?
The 10 years since the world secured the historic Paris Agreement have been a time of both incredible progress in renewable energy and worsening climate impacts, illuminating who the real climate champions are and who are the obstacles. COP30’s success depends on whether countries can rise above narrow self-interest and recommit to ambitious action. It depends on whether a shifting world order can unlock progress and leadership from new quarters. It depends on isolating the Trump administration and resisting its anti-science rhetoric and actions, as well as its efforts to upend multilateral diplomacy to solve global challenges.
I am going to Brazil in sober mind frame, deeply worried about the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration. But much as the US is an outsize actor on the global stage, this international climate meeting with 190+ countries is also a reminder of the wider world and each country’s vital place in it. The 1.5°C goal is enshrined in the Paris Agreement because of the bravery of small island nations that carried the refrain of "1.5 to stay alive" at COP21 in 2015. Vanuatu and a group of small island nations led a heroic effort to secure a landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice this year, affirming states’ legal obligations to address climate change. Meanwhile, renewable energy is taking off around the world because it is now the cheapest form of electricity in most places. No country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required.
In Belém, I know I will find inspiration and courage from the global climate justice movement, from Indigenous Peoples who have stood firm to defend their lands and communities in the face of brutal attacks, and from passionate young people who are the planet’s future. I know I will come back reenergized for the right and necessary fight here at home
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Green Energy Is Still a Better Bet Than AI
The buildout of lots and lots of power-gobbling data centers is not as inevitable as it appears.
Oct 15, 2025
Caveat—this post was written entirely with my own intelligence, so who knows. Maybe it’s wrong.
But the despairing question I get asked most often is: “What’s the use? However much clean energy we produce, AI data centers will simply soak it all up.” It’s too early in the course of this technology to know anything for sure, but there are a few important answers to that.
The first comes from Amory Lovins, the long-time energy guru who wrote a paper some months ago pointing out that energy demand from AI was highly speculative, an idea he based on… history:
In 1999, the US coal industry claimed that information technology would need half the nation’s electricity by 2020, so a strong economy required far more coal-fired power stations. Such claims were spectacularly wrong but widely believed, even by top officials. Hundreds of unneeded power plants were built, hurting investors. Despite that costly lesson, similar dynamics are now unfolding again.
As Debra Kahn pointed out in Politico a few weeks ago:
So far, data centers have only increased total US power demand by a tiny amount (they make up roughly 4.4 percent of electricity use, which rose 2 percent overall last year).
And it’s possible that even if AI expands as its proponents expect, it will grow steadily more efficient, meaning it would need much less energy than predicted. Lovins again:
For example, NVIDIA’s head of data center product marketing said in September 2024 that in the past decade, “we’ve seen the efficiency of doing inferences in certain language models has increased effectively by 100,000 times. Do we expect that to continue? I think so: There’s lots of room for optimization.” Another NVIDIA comment reckons to have made AI inference (across more models) 45,000× more efficient since 2016, and expects orders-of magnitude further gains. Indeed, in 2020, NVIDIA’s Ampere chips needed 150 joules of energy per inference; in 2022, their Hopper successors needed just 15; and in 2024, their Blackwell successors needed 24 but also quintupled performance, thus using 31× less energy than Ampere per unit of performance. (Such comparisons depend on complex and wideranging assumptions, creating big discrepancies, so another expert interprets the data as up to 25× less energy and 30× better performance, multiplying to 750×.)
But that doesn’t mean that the AI industry, and its utility and government partners, won’t try to build ever more generating capacity to supply whatever power needs they project may be coming. In some places they already are: Internet Alley in Virginia has more than 150 large centers, using a quarter of its power. This is becoming an intense political issue in the Old Dominion State. As Dave Weigel reported yesterday, the issue has begun to roil Virginia politics—the GOP candidate for governor sticks with her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, in somehow blaming solar energy for rising electricity prices (“the sun goes down”), while the Democratic nominee, Abigail Spanberger, is trying to figure out a response:
Neither nominee has gone as far in curbing growth as many suburban DC legislators and activists want. They see some of the world’s wealthiest companies getting plugged into the grid without locals reaping the benefits. Some Virginia elections have turned into battles over which candidate will be toughest on data centers; others elections have already been lost over them.
“My advice to Abigail has been: Look at where the citizens of Virginia are on the data centers,” said state Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents part of Prince William County in DC’s growing suburbs. “There are a lot of people willing to be single-issue, split-ticket voters based on this.”
Indeed, it’s shaping up to be the mother of all political issues as the midterms loom—pretty much everyone pays electric rates, and under President Donald Trump they’re starting to skyrocket. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: He’s simultaneously accelerating demand with his support for data center buildout, and constricting supply by shutting down cheap solar and wind. In fact, one way of looking at AI is that it’s main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand.
If this sounds conspiratorial, consider this story from yesterday: John McCarrick, newly hired by industry colossus OpenAI to find energy sources for ChatGPT is:
an official from the first Trump administration who is a dedicated champion of natural gas.
John McCarrick, the company’s new head of Global Energy Policy, was a senior energy policy advisor in the first Trump administration’s Bureau of Energy Resources in the Department of State while under former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.
As deputy assistant secretary for Energy Transformation and the special envoy for International Energy Affairs, McCarrick promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas to Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and advocated for Asian countries to invest in natural gas.
The choice to hire McCarrick matches the intentions of OpenAI’s Trump-dominating CEO Sam Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”
Sam Altman himself is an acolyte of Peter Thiel, famous climate denier who recently suggested Greta Thunberg might be the anti-Christ. But it’s all of them. In the rush to keep their valuations high, the big AI players are increasingly relying not just on fracked gas but on the very worst version of it. As Bloomberg reported early in the summer:
The trend has sparked an unlikely comeback for a type of gas turbine that long ago fell out of favor for being inefficient and polluting… a technology that’s largely been relegated to the sidelines of power production: small, single cycle natural gas turbines.
In fact, big suppliers are now companies like Caterpillar, not known for cutting edge turbine technology; these are small and comparatively dirty units.
(The ultimate example of this is Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, a superpolluter, which I wrote about for the New Yorker.) Oh, and it’s not just air pollution. A new threat emerged in the last few weeks, according to Tom Perkins in the Guardian:
Advocates are particularly concerned over the facilities’ use of Pfas gas, or f-gas, which can be potent greenhouse gases, and may mean datacenters’ climate impact is worse than previously thought. Other f-gases turn into a type of dangerous compound that is rapidly accumulating across the globe.
No testing for Pfas air or water pollution has yet been done, and companies are not required to report the volume of chemicals they use or discharge. But some environmental groups are starting to push for state legislation that would require more reporting.
Look, here’s one bottom line: If we actually had to build enormous networks of AI data centers, the obvious, cheap, and clean way to do it would be with lots of solar energy. It goes up fast. As an industry study found as long ago as December of 2024 (an eon in AI time):
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.
As one of the country’s leading energy executives said in April:
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” according to Next Era chief executive John Ketchum l. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.”
But we can’t do that because the Trump administration has a corrupt ideological bias against clean energy, the latest example of which came last week when a giant Nevada solar project was cancelled. As Jael Holzman was the first to report:
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power–equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen, and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration.
But now it’s dead. One result will be higher prices for consumers. Despite everything the administration does, renewables are so cheap and easy that markets just keep choosing them. To beat that means policy as perverse as what we’re seeing—jury-rigging tired gas turbines and refitting ancient coal plants. All to power a technology that… seems increasingly like a bubble?
Here we need to get away from energy implications a bit, and just think about the underlying case for AI, and specifically the large language models that are the thing we’re spending so much money and power on. The AI industry is, increasingly, the American economy—it accounts for almost half of US economic growth this year, and an incredible 80% of the expansion of the stock market. As Ruchir Shirma wrote in the FT last week, the US economy is “one big bet” on AI:
The main reason AI is regarded as a magic fix for so many different threats is that it is expected to deliver a significant boost to productivity growth, especially in the US. Higher output per worker would lower the burden of debt by boosting GDP. It would reduce demand for labour, immigrant or domestic. And it would ease inflation risks, including the threat from tariffs, by enabling companies to raise wages without raising prices.
But for this happy picture to come to pass, AI has to actually work, which is to say do more than help kids cheat on their homework. And there’s been a growing sense in recent months that all is not right on that front. I’ve been following two AI skeptics for a year or so, both on Substack (where increasingly, in-depth and non-orthodox reporting goes to thrive).
The first is Gary Marcus, an AI researcher who has concluded that the large language models like Chat GPT are going down a blind alley. If you like to watch video, here is an encapsulation of his main points, published over the weekend. If you prefer that old-fashioned technology of reading (call me a Luddite, but it seems faster and more efficient, and much easier to excerpt), here’s his recent account from the Times explaining why businesses are having trouble finding reasons to pay money for this technology:
Large language models have had their uses, especially for coding, writing, and brainstorming, in which humans are still directly involved. But no matter how large we have made them, they have never been worthy of our trust.
Indeed, an MIT study this year found that 95% of businesses reported no measurable increase in productivity from using AI; the Harvard Business Review, a couple of weeks ago, said AI "'workslop' was cratering productivity.”
And what that means, in turn, is that there’s no real way to imagine recovering the hundreds of billions and trillions that are currently being invested in the technology. The keeper of the spreadsheets is the other Substacker, Ed Zitron, who writes extremely long and increasingly exasperated essays looking at the financial lunacy of these “investments” which, remember, underpin the stock market at the moment. Here’s last week’s:
In fact, let me put it a little simpler: All of those data center deals you’ve seen announced are basically bullshit. Even if they get the permits and the money, there are massive physical challenges that cannot be resolved by simply throwing money at them.
Today I’m going to tell you a story of chaos, hubris and fantastical thinking. I want you to come away from this with a full picture of how ridiculous the promises are, and that’s before you get to the cold hard reality that AI fucking sucks.
I’m not pretending this is the final word on this subject. No one knows how it’s all going to work out, but my guess is: badly. Already it’s sending electricity prices soaring and increasing fossil fuel emissions.
But maybe it’s also running other kinds of walls that will eventually reduce demand. Maybe human beings will decide to be… human. The new Sora “service” launched by OpenAI that allows your AI to generate fake videos, for instance, threatens to undermine the entire business of looking at videos because… what’s the point? If you can’t tell if the guy eating a ridiculously hot chili pepper is real or not, why would you watch? In a broader sense, as John Burns-Murdoch wrote in the FT (and again how lucky Europe is to have a reputable business newspaper), we may be reaching “peak social media":
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.
And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns—usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus. Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users—teens and 20-somethings.
Which is to say: Perhaps at some point we’ll begin to come to our senses and start using our brains and bodies for the things they were built for: contact with each other, and with the world around us. That’s a lot to ask, but the world can turn in good directions as well as bad. As a final word, there’s this last week from Pope Leo, speaking to a bunch of news executives around the world, and imploring them to cool it with the junk they’re putting out:
Communication must be freed from the misguided thinking that corrupts it, from unfair competition, and the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.
Stay tuned. This story will have a lot to do with how the world turns out.
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