In the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, an AI-powered drone sweeps through the canopy. It is elegant, almost beautiful, in its efficiency. It identifies illegal logging, capturing even slight changes in - vegetation density.
Three thousand miles away, in Arizona's drought-stricken communities, the data centres powering such AI systems drain local aquifers. This is today's climate-tech paradox: Solutions that increasingly resemble the problems they claim to solve.
If 2024 marked humanity's first breach of the 1.5° Celsius threshold, 2025 opens to a perfect storm: a fractured climate diplomacy still reeling from Baku's acrimonious compromise on global climate action; the spectre of a second Donald Trump presidency; and a tech industry whose climate promises have proven hollow.
While the Silicon Valley script remains familiar with carbon-capture breakthroughs, a nuclear renaissance, Al-powered climate solutions Microsoft and Google both reported higher emissions in 2023, driven by AI-linked data centres. Hundreds of others are way off their targets too.
It's a precarious moment: the loudest champions of technological solutions, men such as Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, are poised to influence a presidency historically hostile to climate action.
Their accelerationist vision, which prioritises unfettered technological development over environmental concerns, threatens to turn climate tech from a tool of mitigation into one that will deepen global inequities.
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Denne historien er fra January 01, 2025-utgaven av Hindustan Times.
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