A NUCLEAR SOLUTION?

Baku proved the Global North will not pay its dues. Elon Musk has proved climate heroes can switch sides. A 'Manhattan Project-like invention' can't fix this. It just can't be more of the same

- Binayak Dasgupta

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.