The AI Revolution is upon us, and it’s a doozy.  Whether AI becomes a boon or a bane to civilization is one of the most consequential questions and challenges of our time.

From a climate perspective, the AI Revolution is not off to a good start. In their haste to meet the enormous demand for AI and their panic about falling behind (FOMO), many big tech companies, which until recently were allies of the climate movement, seem to have thrown their sustainability commitments out the window.

Take Microsoft. In West Texas, Chevron is building a 2.67-gigawatt natural-gas power plant to run a new Microsoft data center. Thirty miles away, on an 8,000-acre site in Pecos County, Amazon is building its own. Between the two, they could add more than 10 gigawatts of power capacity and as much as 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly half of Washington state’s total annual emissions, where both companies are headquartered.

This is happening nationwide. Gas plant development in the U.S. nearly tripled last year, with more than a third of it built to feed data centers like these.

That’s a huge problem.

If solar and batteries are faster/better/cheaper than gas, then why are the tech companies, more often than not, turning to natural gas?

Speed. The industry’s FOMO is so extreme it is willing to pay a premium for quick energy. “Behind-the-meter” gas turbines can get deployed faster than new transmission lines or clean-energy permits.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration is doing all it can to tip the scales in favor of fossil fuels. This summer, the EPA exempted power plants from acid rain pollution limits if they exclusively serve data centers, reasoning that a plant not connected to the public grid doesn’t count as a “utility.” In May, it proposed allowing developers to begin building the non-emitting parts of these plants before they even hold an air permit. So developers are skipping the wait and building their own gas plant-fired server farms.

It is technically feasible to power data centers responsibly and ethically with renewable energy, cool them with recycled water, and equitably share their economic benefits with affected communities. Over the longer term, the superior economics of solar and batteries may persuade data center operators to swap out their gas turbines for more reliable renewables and batteries as they become available.

But in the short term, tragically, the economic incentives are pushing the industry in the wrong direction.

When economics pushes industries toward bad decisions, public opposition and policy must be marshaled to counter them.

Let’s make our voices heard in Congress, in state capitols, and in the boardrooms of the companies building out these data centers!