Ketan Joshi

Lovely to speak to the Guardian about whether you should quit the use of generative AI for environmental reasons!

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“Meta, Google and Microsoft have all baked [generative AI] deep into their systems,” Joshi says. “I see this all as very much part of the tactic of trying to embed these systems into society and instil dependency in a fashion similar to the growth of single-use plastics in the 1970s.”

Cheers to everyone who delayed fossil fuel phaseout by saying "you can't switch off fossil fuels overnight"

Because thanks to them everyone now has to face a situation where fossil fuels are switched off overnight 🙃🙃🙃

Google already ramping up its drops to friendly journalists to try and pressure the government to weaken taxation of big tech, threatening not to build its huge, energy-sucking data centres in the country if its forced to pay its fair share

Felt like the right time to update this chart....

Norway is at ~100% EVs for new sales, but 7 out of every 10km driven in 2024 was reliant on fossil fuels. Cars stick around for decades - so change is slow.

Protecting people from fossil fuel crises means EVs, yes, but *fast deep cuts* means huge $$ in public and active transport. Speed matters for both climate and cost.

(2025 data should be out in a month)

Anthropic promise to take their US approach in Australia

- Disclose nothing about their emissions and energy
- Urge the federal government to build fossil fuels
- Cite greenwashing Substack posts instead of meaningful data

https://www.afr.com/technology/anthropic-to-build-power-fund-grid-upgrades-for-data-centres-rollout-20260312-p5o9sq

Grandfather, you lived through an explosion of renewable energy beyond even the most optimistic forecasts. Yet fossil fuels persisted. What happened??

Well, grandson, you see, a very large number of professional people thought a sentence-generating software program had a little guy inside it. And then,

Public service announcement: this is a FOSSIL FUEL CRISIS

Not an 'energy crisis'. People need energy: it keeps them alive. This is a crisis due to forced dependency on the most unreliable and unstable fuel product in human history.

THIS IS A FOSSIL FUEL CRISIS.

I cannot ever stop tearing my hair out about climate activists being labelled 'unrealistic' when the fossil fuel business bros persistently do shit like this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/27/cheniere-trump-irs-alternative-fuel/

I think it's now become relatively clear that in all but a few rare cases, unplanned and uncontrolled data centre growth premised on hollow hype invariably boosts fossil fuels.......

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2drxgz7x8o

Something tells me this Carney moment isn't going to go as viral as the last one.....

https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/25/carney-allowed-gas-powered-ai-centres-after-lobbying-from-alberta-energy-company/

There is no end to the charts that purport to show AI has been the 'fastest adopted technology' ever. Putting aside the big Q's about whether that's even true, the flip side is left out.

For most of us, this technology has done nothing but make our lives worse, and make us feel bad.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/technology/ai-boom-backlash.html

Excellent new Climate Council report directly naming the villains behind high power bills in Australia: expensive fossil gas and comically unreliable coal power.

Power bill relief will mean getting rid of these ASAP. Read this report, it's good!

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/power-games-whos-driving-high-power-bills/?apcid=0066ea68d1b9c8e112dca201

HEY! Here's a new piece for The Point, part 3 of my ongoing series on carbon capture.

This one's on why demanding subsidies for an absurd activity basically guarantees perpetual public funds (which help support fossil fuel expansion)

https://thepoint.com.au/opinions/260225-ccs-part-three-why-ccs-subsidies-are-a-perpetual-scam

Woah!!!

A bit late to this, but this graphic by Amy Westervelt is **extremely** important. It's another reminder that "just stop mentioning climate change" isn't an option, as advocates, analysts and communicators. Amy and others have been pointing this out for a long time, but it feels more important than ever.

https://drilled.ghost.io/yes-climate-still-matters-heres-how-it-connects-to-every-other-crisis-in-the-world-today/

Everything is collapsing in on itself

Breathing a huge sigh of relief: because media, politicians and institutions stopped talking about climate change, the laws of physics governing Earth's heating in response to greenhouse gases accordingly changed, and now climate change is no longer a security threat.

It was close there for a moment folks but we're in the clear 😅

Your daily #petrotech - the NZ gas lobby just flat-out saying out loud that data centres are going to be powered by their lovely fossil fuels

Your daily #Petrotech update: yet another plan to increase fossil gas production to supply data centre energy hunger

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/williams-weighs-buying-gas-producing-assets-enhance-ai-energy-supply-2026-02-06/

It is so fundamentally obscene and offensive that any data centre developer feels brave enough to tout "jobs created" as selling point when the core selling point of the product they offer is to explicitly cut as many jobs as possible

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/10/telstra-ai-job-cuts-offshore-workforce

Just so its clear: data centres are not "critical infrastructure".

They are Mystery Factories that can perform computation for any digital output: from crypto scams, to hospital databases, to on-demand child abuse material, reams of unstoppable generated slop content, telemetry for helicopters.....shoving that all under one single, broad and politically-charged label opens the door to wasteful, harmful and environmentally harmful behaviour.

One single paragraph in the latest IEA report that neatly summarises the late-2020s vibes for coal

https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2026#overview

This whole report is great but the one thing that REALLY stands out is the fact that the EU could've fully shut down reliance on Russian fossil fuels had they aligned with their climate targets

Add that to the grim picture of EU households wildly overpaying for energy to further enrich those of us in Norway.....

https://energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/CREA_EU-CO2-emissions-fossil-fuel-imports_2025.pdf

- China's growing through climate-saving cleantech

- America's growing through climate-wrecking sloptech

- Europe's.....kind of doing neither?

^^^ my takeaway from the IEA's new Electricity report

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/f545917a-b119-4495-957b-fcc263deb391/Electricity_2026.pdf

FRIENDS

Here's a new one for The Point -> Aus plans to have a central role at COP31 pushing for a fossil phaseout.

But that statement came at a time when a remarkable new record was hit, which I found in some government data.........go watch, or read -->>>

https://thepoint.com.au/off-the-charts/260204-bowen-set-for-cop31-as-australia-hits-coal-export-record