How Do We Power Down?
ICYMI, here’s a post I put up on our Patreon back in March that, in anticipation of Season 5 (which we’re now partway into), considers the environmental problems posed by the use of cryptocurrencies and generative AI and the general problem of how do we power down our societies a bit without being overrun by societies that opt not to power down?
Christina here... I don’t know if any of you caught it, but Elizabeth Kolbert, who specializes in writing about climate change and our efforts (or lack thereof) to stop driving it, recently had another interesting article in the New Yorker. This article explored, to quote the title, the “obscene energy demands of AI,” or more specifically, of AI, like ChatGPT and Midjourney, that processes astronomical amounts of information every time it is used.
To take a moment to be totally self–centered about this, how interesting—and how timely! Ariel and I just discussed solarpunk’s use of and attitude toward AI, especially the image generating kind, when we recorded THE FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON 5—WOOT!—which you’ll have early access to toward the end of this month. But, for all that we found to consider about it, we didn’t touch on the enormous electricity consumption associated with AI image generation. Which now puts me, personally, far more solidly in the this is a bad idea camp, even if people are using AI to put POC into amazing imaginings of a super future. But Elizabeth Kolbert’s article—which you should definitely read!—gives me this chance to broach the subject, even if it is a few weeks before Season 5 begins, and explore it briefly further.
To give you a brief sneak peak: in our Season 5 opener, Ariel and I talk about solarpunk’s relationship with tech. Because solarpunk is both highly tech–centric and highly tech–skeptical, which is kind of a cool combination. Solarpunks are always asking should we or shouldn’t we use that tech and wouldn’t the world be a better place if we weren’t all always asking that question! Meawhile, the should we or shouldn’t we of AI and cryptocurrencies are already points of, if not contention, then at least deep disagreement between solarpunks. Again, I’m pretty much in the NOPE camp, all the more so now after reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s article.
As Elizabeth Kolbert explains, along with cryptocurrencies, AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney are shocking electricity hogs and... which I hadn’t previously realized... prolific producers of e–waste (because there are so many servers involved and they need to be replaced as they age). As she points out in the article, a single Bitcoin transaction produces the equivalent amount of e–waste as an iPhone. If that’s the case, there’s no way that all but a tiny fraction of the world can switch over to using digital currencies. Even worse, if that’s the case, shame on people making their fortunes buying and selling them. The world just doesn’t have the resources to sustain that! Not without environmental and ecological devastation and a heavy price in human lives and well being. But I think the most important thing Elizabeth Kolbert points out in her article stands already in the subheader: “How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?”
One of the interesting things that certain historians (and the evolutionary biologist Geerat Vermeij, of whom I am a big fan) have pointed out is that there is a directionality to history. If you over look the bumps and wiggles and occasional serious crashes, over time, populations that use lower amounts of energy per capita per year have given way to (or been crushed by) populations that use higher amounts of energy per capita per year. You can see this in the general takeover of Earth’s ecosystems by human beings and you can see this over the course of human history. Our trajectory has taken us from manpower only, to using animals and burning wood to get work done, to moving on to fossil fuels, solar, wind, and nuclear energy and hydropower to increase our productivity and our ability to move ourselves and our stuff around. For centuries already, no other animal on Earth has had as much power per capital at its disposal as we do. Meanwhile, the countries with the highest per capita uses of energy have come to rule the world politically, economically, and even to some extent culturally.
If you looks at the shifts from using our own hands to get work done (back until the Neolithic sometime), to using wind and animals to get work done (like milling grains and ploughing) to burning wood and then later coal to run steam engines and the on to burning fossil fuels in internal combustion engines, it’s easy to see that each one has been a big step up in our per capita energy use. It’s also easy to see that we have not yet reached the ceiling! Throughout our fossil fuel phase; even as we improved our machinery and made it more energy efficient, this never resulted in a drop in per capita power expenditure. Instead, we used the increased efficiency to get more power out of our machines, making them bigger, faster, stronger, more complex, and less expensive, and therefore more widely available to more people. All of which led to massive increases in per capita energy use. We have always been as powerful as we can literally afford to be rather than using increases in energy efficiency to lower our per capita use of energy.
Even now, as our vehicles and toys and tools have become more energy efficient, we’ve responded by buying more of them and doing more things with them. At this point, who doesn’t have a computer or a laptop, plus maybe a tablet, and definitely also a smartphone. Who doesn’t upload photos and documents to “the cloud” of distant servers that guzzle up enormous amounts of energy? Who doesn’t do Google searches at the drop of a hat instead of hauling themselves to the book or library that would also hold the answer? We take advantage of all of these possibilities because they are there (and in part because we don’t want to be left out or left behind). But, most importantly, we use all of the extra energy it takes to fuel these things because we can afford to pay for it. ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney guzzle increasingly incredible bundles of electricity, but, still, chatting with ChatGPT or getting it to write an essay for you is a hell of a lot easier on the personal budget than reading by candlelight was 200 years ago... even though it consumes orders of magnitude more energy.
The problem with all of this inventing of new ways of consuming power is, of course, the climate is in crisis thanks to our continuing pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in large part via our production and consumption of energy. For our own good and that of the rest of Earth’s surface biosphere, we ought to have hit net zero greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, or better yet ten years ago already. Instead, the goal keeps receding into the distance, even as we develop our capability to generate electricity via renewable, low–carbon means, because our per capita energy use just goes up and up and up. That’s where this idea that shifting toward a lower per capita power consumption is, on some level, inherently impossible rears its very ugly head. Shifting to a lower energy use is against the way systems naturally evolve and totally counter to the way human beings inherently operate (which is to say, we tend to do what’s possible—and push that envelope—rather than doing what’s wise). Another great obstacle to lowering our per capita energy use per year is that the society that powers itself down a bit puts itself at the mercy of the societies that keep striving for more power per capita. At some point, they’ll have the machinery, weaponry, wealth, and resources to wipe the powered down societies off the map. So why would you open yourself and your fellow citizens to that sort of existential risk?
Our failure to power down our societies is not inevitable, of course. We are animals capable of reason. Dilemmas like these are why we have governments, negotiations, diplomats, international law, and treaties. But treaties only work until someone decides to break them—case in point, Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons in 1994 for promisesnot to be invaded by Russia, the US, or the UK.
This means right now, humanity is in terrible situation with difficult options. We need to power down our lives because the way we live and the way we consume things, including power, is unsustainable. It would take three Earths and all that and we really need to stop emitting greenhouse gases to the atmosphere NOW. We’re already in pretty serious hot water on the climate change front. But to do so is counter to our tendency to innovate and adopt new technologies and to do absolutely the most we can afford to do (and buy absolutely the most we can afford to buy). Meanwhile, powering down would very possibly leave us at the mercy of societies that chose not to go that route.
Who is trying to steer us through this mess toward a better rather than worse out come? Honestly, where is the global leadership on this front? Nowhere in sight. Because no politician in the world is going to suggest that we need to become less powerful. And no country in the world is going to rein in AI and cryptocurrencies, not unless all the others and all the big businesses and all the tech companies agree to these things. I hate to say it, it’s really, really hard to see that happening. There’s simply too much power and money to be made.
If there is a role for solarpunk here, it is in imagining pathways out of this mess. How could we come to power down the world a bit and begin living actually sustainably? Because right now really, all this talk about sustainable technology is just a silly, soothing bit of mumbo jumbo. Not when, at the same time, cryptocurrency and AI use is going through the roof.
Get on it, solarpunks! We need visions, and even, simply, to get the word out that this is a serious problem.