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This column originally ran on July 1, 2024. OutKick is rerunning the piece as part of our Thanksgiving Best-of series. 

The climate cultists have spent the past month vandalizing ancient stones in Stonehenge, spraying orange paint on private planes, interrupting sporting events, and continuing to demand you stop using gas and wood stoves.

All the while, the activist groups ignore recent studies warning of an actual threat to the climate: artificial intelligence. 

As a practical matter, AI’s insatiable demand for energy is destroying our power grid. 

Leading tech companies are in a futuristic arms race to create the most omnipotent software ever developed. Some experts project that electricity consumption for AI systems could soon require adding the equivalent of a small country’s worth of power generation to our planet.

The electricity needs from data centers, the nondescript warehouses with racks of servers that power AI technology, already outpace the available power supply in many parts of the globe.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects data centers to use 1,000 terawatts hours annually by 2026, roughly the equivalent of the electricity consumption of Japan, a country with a population of 125 million.

By 2034, global energy use for AI is expected to top 1,580 terawatts, at which point, only 16 nations, including the US and China, would require a higher percentage of energy demand.

“The dramatic increase in power demands from Silicon Valley’s growth-at-all-costs approach to AI also threatens to upend the energy transition plans of entire nations and the clean energy goals of trillion-dollar tech companies,” according to a Bloomberg story earlier this month.

Quantitatively, just one Meta-owned data center complex in Iowa burns the annual equivalent amount of power as seven million laptops running eight hours every day. A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the IEA, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. In the UK, AI is expected to suck up 500 percent more energy than it does not over the next decade.

“By the end of the decade, AI centers could consume as much as 20% to 25% of U.S. power requirements,” Rene Haas, the CEO of chip-design firm Arm Holdings, warned recently. “Today that’s probably 4% or less. That’s hardly very sustainable, to be honest with you.”

While tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar, or geothermal power to cancel out emissions, their zero-carbon energy purchases require heavily polluting fossil fuel plants to stabilize the power grid, a Washington Post article detailed earlier this month.

OutKick asked several climate extremist groups, including Just Stop Oli, why they ignore AI’s devastating impact on the climate they purport to be so concerned about. Unfortunately, we never heard back.  

The answer is, however, obvious. Climate activists are not serious or intelligent people. They are pawns. Like most activist groups, they act at the behest of the powerful people who radicalize and fund them.

And the growth of AI is the product of two of the most powerful groups in America: tech companies and the politicians they influence.

Via Getty photos.

In 2023, lobbying on behalf of AI set yet another record with 460 organizations spending on federal lobbying — 302 more than in 2022. That marks a 7,567% increase from 2016, when just six organizations lobbied on AI-related issues.

The four leaders — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta – each spent more than $10 million on lobbying. However, as policy specialist Hamza Chaudhry explained to Time – because the definition of lobbying only includes speaking with staffers about specific laws – those figures likely underestimate the amounts of money that tech companies spend on influencing lawmakers.

Despite what they say and do with their money, the elites don’t actually care about energy or the planet.

AI accelerationists Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are three of the lead funders of climate change activism (no wonder the climate extremists never protest outside those energy-sucking data centers), yet have each downplayed AI’s strangling of the energy supply. 

“Let’s not go overboard’ on worries about AI energy use,” Gates said last week while dismissing the data and defending Microsoft’s reported investments of over $100 billion in AI. 

“They don’t really care about Mother Earth. They push the religion of tree-hugging to emotionally manipulate people into giving up our rights and freedoms in the name of bettering the planet,” OutKick host Tomi Lahren said in a statement for this article. “The elites will NEVER give up or sacrifice their way of life to better the Earth and that would include their private jets, mega mansions, and AI.”

Especially AI.

Simply put, Silicon Valley and Washington elites are willing to risk fracturing the power grid in favor of the benefits that smarter-than-human intelligence can bestow upon them. 

AI affords tech and political leaders a level of power that exceeds the fears of their greatest dissenters by way of technology far more sophisticated and subservient than man.

Ambitions for AI are endless. Already, AI software is designed to replace federal workers, reduce human-to-human experience, increase control over information, and simplify personal data collecting (spying). But those are only precursors to third-level advancement, in the form of AGI (artificial general intelligence).

AGI was created to reduce the need for people through robots that surpass human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever explained in 2022 that “in the future, it will be obvious that the sole purpose of science was to build AGI,” and that “the long-term goal is to build AGI that loves people the way parents love their children.”

The sex robots, automated teachers, and robotic alternatives to the nuclear family are en route.

The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit organization that aims to steer transformative technology toward benefiting life and away from large-scale risks. The organization published an open letter warning that advancements of AGI outpace research of its consequences.

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1] and acknowledged by top AI labs.[2] As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life and the Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources,” the memo reads.

“Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

Consequently, rapidly developed super-humanly smart AI technology will be released into society no matter how much energy is sucked up in the process.

“The elites push AI knowing it could cause blackouts for the same reason they push EVs which overwork the power grid- they don’t really care what the consequences are for us little people,” added Tomi Lahren. “That’s collateral damage in their quest for money and power.”

The greediest oligarchs in America have tethered their future prosperity to the dystopian seeds of a full-scale artificially intelligent society that will severely disempower the human race. They are willing to fracture the power grid in exchange.

Imagine the New York City blackout of 1977, but globally and with all-encompassing robots. Meanwhile, the climate pawns demand you turn down your air conditioner this summer.