Artificial intelligence spells a real climate disaster – The Irish Times
Artificial intelligence spells a real climate disaster – The Irish Times
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 01:00:00
Source Domain: www.irishtimes.com
- The AI hype emphasizes its benefits like increasing productivity, medical advances, and revolutionizing education, with claims of solving the climate crisis.
- Privileged actors, including big tech firms and government, are benefiting financially from the rapid expansion of data centres that underpin AI.
- Ireland’s National AI Strategy and its Minister for Higher Education are promoting extensive use of AI tools, despite the energy-intensive nature of AI.
- The data centres powering AI are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, contributing significantly to climate change and undermining national and international climate policies.
- The escalating energy demand from data centres is straining resources, worsening energy poverty, and leading to extreme electricity prices in Ireland.
- AI data centres are also contributing to biodiversity loss and community disconnection, among other environmental impacts, which are ignored in favor of AI adoption.
- The tech industry is collaborating with fossil fuel companies to promote extraction, and actively obstructs ecological regulation.
- Resistance to the climate and other harms of AI is growing, with higher education institutions, communities, journalistic efforts, and civic society organisations leading the charge.
