By Rowan Yaeger

   Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly marketed as a part of the solution to the climate crisis. Tech companies promise smarter energy grids, optimized transportation, and predictive tools that can help scientists track rising temperatures and extreme weather. But beneath that optimistic framing lies an eerie contradiction: the rapid expansion of AI itself carries a growing environmental cost, one that is rarely discussed during public conversations about sustainability.

   Training large AI models requires enormous computational power. That power comes from data centers that consume vast amounts of electricity and water, often in regions already strained by heat or drought. As AI systems grow more complex, so too does their appetite for energy. The irony is difficult to ignore, technologies designed to help us understand and manage climate change are accelerating the very problem they claim to address.

   What makes this especially troubling is how invisible the cost is to everyday users. Asking a chatbot a question or generating an image feels weightless and immaterial. There is no smoke, no immediate sign of damage. Yet each interaction relies on servers searching continuously, cooled by energy-intensive systems that leave a carbon footprint far larger than most users imagine. 

“A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes ten times the electricity [when compared to a Google search, which typically uses 0.0003 kWh],” reported by the International Energy Agency. 

In other words, convenience masks the consequences.

Faced with these hidden costs, it may be tempting to conclude that AI is just another harmful excess of the modern world, a technology whose environmental damage outweighs its benefits. However, reducing the issue to a simple choice between acceptance and rejection misses the larger problem at hand.

 AI has genuine potential to assist climate research, from modeling climate systems to improving renewable energy efficiency. But potential does not excuse recklessness. The real issue is the unchecked expansion of AI without accountability. When companies compete to build bigger, faster, and more “powerful” models, environmental harm becomes an acceptable side effect rather than a serious design concern. 

If AI is truly meant to be part of a sustainable future, its development must be guided by responsibility, not hype. That means transparency about energy use, serious investment in renewable-powered data centers, and a rejection of the idea that technological progress must always mean scaling up. Smarter systems do not have to be larger ones.

Ultimately, the climate crisis is not just a test of innovation, it is a test of values. Artificial intelligence forces us to confront a familiar question in a new form: just because we can build something, does that mean we should expand it without limits? Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, should not come at the expense of the planet that sustains it.