Join us on Monday, March 24
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.
On Monday, March 24, I will be participating in a conversation hosted by Climate One at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco; the event’s title is “Are We Smart Enough to Curb AI’s Environmental Impacts?”
There is still time to purchase tickets if you’d like to be part of the audience, in person or online. In the meantime, here are a few things I've been reading in anticipation of the discussion:
“Considering Generative AI’s Environmental Impact”: “The industry is on an unsustainable path, but there are ways to encourage responsible development of generative AI that supports environmental objectives”: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Google “Environmental Report 2024”: “We know that scaling AI and using it to accelerate climate action is just as crucial as addressing the environmental impact associated with it”: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf
“American AI companies have very different ideas about regulation and how best to thwart China”: “OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all called for the streamlining of permitting around transmission lines, to encourage a faster energy buildout to support new AI data centers”: https://fortune.com/2025/03/17/us-ai-action-plan-proposals-openai-anthropic-google-microsoft/
CA Assembly Bill 222: “Data centers: energy usage reporting and modeling”: “This bill would require the Energy Commission to require operators of data centers to annually report energy consumption and performance data, as specified…. The bill would require the Energy Commission to adopt energy efficiency performance standards, as described, for data centers. The bill would require the Energy Commission to adopt regulations to implement these requirements on or before January 1, 2027”: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB222
“Climate change could slash global GDP by a third by century’s end”: “Minimizing the damage from climate change requires investments in mitigation and adaptation to increase ninefold and thirteenfold, respectively, by 2050… according to new research from the Boston Consulting Group and the University of Cambridge”: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/18/2025/climate-change-could-slash-global-gdp-by-a-third-by-centurys-end
For much more on related topics, see the recordings from our recent conference: "AI and the Environment: Sustaining the Common Good."
Image: Cristóbal Ascencio & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / Better Images of AI / Glitched Landscape / CC-BY 4.0