Trump knows winning the AI race is more important than climate change

OPINION:

Lost in the fury and energy of the Trump administration’s first week or so was an executive order from President Trump (“Putting America First in International Agreements”) directing the immediate withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement.

That agreement was supposed to lead to net zero greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2050. In case you missed it, the agreement has been a bust. Even with a pandemic destroying economic growth for two years, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise.

A few months before the executive order, as part of an annual report on its environmental progress, Google reported that its greenhouse gas emissions have increased almost 50% since 2019. The report placed the increase squarely at the feet of increased power demand from the data centers foundational to artificial intelligence. In May, Microsoft reported the same sort of increase in its greenhouse gas emissions and, again, placed responsibility for the surge in power on demand from data centers.

These two events — the president’s exit from the Paris Agreement and the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from two of the larger and (notionally) greener companies on the planet — are products and heralds of the new energy and environmental reality in the United States and much of the world.

The reality is that the need for reliable and affordable power for the data centers, the promise of those data centers, and the fear that we might lose the competition to bring artificial intelligence to the marketplace are now the most important features of energy policy, having thoroughly and completely displaced any concern over climate change.

Think about the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for a moment. A short eight years ago, the very same action was subject to weeks of back-and-forth within the executive office of the president and intense, if pointless, media scrutiny. This time, the decision took about 10 minutes and the media mostly yawned. Similarly, the companies have received hardly any negative media coverage about their run-up in greenhouse gases. The legacy media understand that audiences don’t care anymore.

The administration has moved on to consider revisiting the Environmental Protection Agency endangerment finding, which provides the basis for regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Congress is about to reject Team Biden’s waiver for California, which, as a practical matter, allows that state to determine what kinds of cars and trucks the rest of us can buy.

Companies such as Google and Microsoft spend most of their time talking about how best to minimize their exposure to the power grid rather than on how best to expand and build out transmission lines to bring solar and wind power to electric customers. Utilities worry about building enough natural gas pipelines and power plants to meet the increased demand, estimated to be as much as 400 gigawatts (or about 40% of the electricity generated by all the power plants in the United States) in the next few years.

Consumers, of course, want what they have always wanted: reliable, plentiful and affordable power. They have little interest in paying anything extra to address climate change or force a transition to alternative forms of energy. However, there is a national and bipartisan understanding that artificial intelligence is the new space race, one we dare not lose to the communist, slaving, genocidal regime in Beijing.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.