What’s Wrong With A-I? Two Words: Carbon Dioxide

What's HOT in Global Warming Series by Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Artificial Intelligence (A-I), through stocks such has Nvidia has become the hottest ticket to heaven, when it’s not the road to hell in the S&P 500. What other stock could lose $600 billion worth of paper value in one day, and then make it back? At a White House dinner in September, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta would spend $600 billion on data centers and related infrastructure.

Either way, at the rate that the biggest capitalist juggernauts of our time (did I hear Amazon, et al.?) are building power plants to manufacture energy that will power these monstrosities, the Earth loses. And why is that? With their fossil fuel energy demands, these plants are going to produce massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

You say you haven’t heard? The Omaha World-Herald and The New York Times haven’t spent a thimble of energy on A-I from this angle? Oh, the World-Herald did give a spare two and a half inches November 4, 2025, describing how Amazon closed a $38 billion deal with Open AI “that will enable the ChatGPT maker to run its artificial intelligence systems on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s specialized AI chips through Amazon’s Web Services.

Isn’t this the same Amazon that recently laid off almost 30,0000 human beings? If you have been a large stockholder in Nvidia, however, you may have smiled over a small slice of Nvidia’s brief spurt to $5 trillion in market value. Microsoft nicked $4 trillion.

So much for high finance, Dr. “What’s Hot,” you promised a chime about how A-I is spoiling the Earth. Lend an ear.

Thanks to Stephen Witt, writing in The New Yorker (“Information Overload,” November 3, 2025, pp. 20-25), we now have an idea of how much this revolutionary new way of handling information will cost the Earth. Chatbots, left unchecked, have the potential to exacerbate the heat wave that is already engulfing our only home, potentially ruining the atmosphere for a very long time to come.

These data centers are not small-ticket items. Witt wrote that President Donald Trump has made the construction of data centers a national priority.

However, not all of us, or our children, will get a ticket to Mars with Elon Musk.

According to Mr. Witt, author of The Thinking Machine, a history of Nvidia, who visited China and found that “robots are everywhere. I saw them stocking shelves and cleaning floors at a mall. When I ordered food to my hotel room, it was delivered by a two-foot-tall, wheeled robot in the shape of a garbage can, with the voice of a child.”

Otherwise, and more to the point, I suppose, these companies are planning to buy up “quality” content on the Internet, such as ebook texts, disregarding the majority of content, which is regarded as junk. For the upscale content (I have several books on the Net), the day may come when Nvidia and its kind will be out buying copyrights as bots learn how to replicate themselves. Some of these data centers cover an area equivalent to about 20 football fields.

All of this is about to hit a data center near you, probably fueled by fossil and nuclear fuels. So far, this brave new world is looking like the old world, where, according to Witt, “Data centers are beginning to put intense pressure on America’s electricity grid.” The sole functioning reactor at Three Mile Island was acquired for use as a data center but was closed down in 2019 as it proved unviable. However, plans are underway to reopen it in 2027 as the Crane Clean Energy Center, Witt wrote. Farmland is being acquired for the construction of more data centers.

“American utilities sought almost thirty billion dollars in retail rate increases in the first half of 2025,” wrote Witt. Vast amounts of new “waste” carbon dioxide will soon be pumped into the existing overload, accelerating the already accelerating rise of the carbon dioxide curve that is distorting our weather. Sales of ordinary farmland are being quoted, according to Witt, at more than a million dollars an acre.

Top-grade topsoil is being stripped away to make room for a carpet of data centers. After all, who needs corn when we have data, especially data that is produced by carbon dioxide emissions?

The favored fuels for data centers at present are natural gas and coal, including a huge gas reservoir in Appalachia called the Marcellus Shale, as well as coal deposits that are being reopened. This is because countries in the Middle East and China are also opening “enormous” data centers, Witt wrote. The data centers are set up to work 24 hours a day, producing as much as four million pounds of carbon dioxide every hour, “about the same as 4 million idling cars,” wrote Witt.

So there you have it: new data from fossil fuels. As for Donald Trump, the use of the phrase “climate change” has been strictly forbidden in government communication. The very idea has been exiled from discussion, as if all those scientists who have compiled a record proving its veracity have vanished. “1984” has arrived in the White House.

It all brings to mind a verse from an old Bob Dylan song: “There’s something going on here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

Bruce E. Johansen has written and published several books on this climate change during the past 25 years, the most recent of which is Nationalism vs. Nature: Warming and War, from Springer publishers in Frankfurt, Germany.