By Catherine Owen Koning, Originally Published in The Monadnock Shopper News, Green Monadnock column, October 2026.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is on everyone’s mind lately. AI has made important discoveries in everything from medicine and technology to climate science and wildlife ecology. However, the potential downsides are huge: Rogue AI or bad human actors could disrupt, hack and damage our lives.
AI is already creating environmental problems. The “cloud” systems that run the internet (not just for AI) need data centers, which are huge physical buildings housing lots of computers; they need a lot of land, energy and cooling. There are 8 million data centers, up from 500,000 in 2012. Data centers consumed 1.5% of global electricity, and 4 percent of total electricity in the US in 2023; it is expected to triple by 2030. Data centers are the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world!
AI searches the web for data; “generative” AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.), also creates new data as a product. Training one of these GAI models produces 5 times the lifetime emissions of the average car. Using these “virtual assistants” consumes 4-10 times the amount of electricity as a simple Google search. Think of THAT before you use ChatGPT to create a photo of a flying dog carrying a birthday cake!
The energy used to power data centers comes mostly from natural gas and other fossil fuels; renewables supply about 25%, while nuclear supplies 15%. Data centers produce 0.5% of global carbon dioxide pollution; by 2030, this will add up to 2.5 billion tons of CO2, more warming pollution than all Middle East countries.
Also, by accelerating productivity, AI will increase climate pollution even more. A recent study out of MIT stated, “…assuming that AI can eventually boost gross world productivity by 25% — a figure that’s well below other, more optimistic projections — the additional production of goods and services would raise energy demand and emissions significantly, increasing expected warming from 3.3° C (about 5.9° F) by 2100 to 3.6° C (6.5° F)”, which would be catastrophic for life on earth. The Paris Climate agreement focused on limiting warming to no more than 2° C (3.6° F).
Water use is another problem. The computers in the data centers need water to run the cooling systems. AI-related technology uses six times more water than the country of Denmark. By 2027, global AI will use between 1.2-1.7 billion gallons annually, about 0.15% of worldwide water use.
The people who suffer the most are those who live near data centers; their wells are running dry, and their electric bills almost tripled in the five years since the data centers were built. Data centers also give off a constant, low frequency humming noise, driving neighbors a little crazy.
And we cannot overlook the social impacts of AI! AI is used to create and spread misleading texts, images and videos, to the point where we don’t know what is real and what is fake. And, there’s this: “Artificial intelligence could kill the entire human species, according to people in the artificial intelligence industry,” (CNN, Sept. 17, 2026);
Can we have our cake and eat it, too? On the environmental side, experts recommend that data center companies should be legally required to: (1) publish annual environmental reports of energy usage, water consumption, and climate pollution; (2) Rely on green energy as much as possible; (3) Reduce their energy use by making AI algorithms more efficient, and recycle water and other components,
On the social side, AI models must have “guardrails” and human moral reasoning built into them.
My own conclusion? Avoid using generative AI whenever possible (who likes “chatbots” anyway?). Use your own brain to search for information, find answers and solve problems. Talk to a person! As someone who remembers when finding the answer to a simple questions such as “how big is the country of Brazil” required a visit to the library, it cracks me up that we have become so lazy that we can’t be bothered to go to a website to find – and CHECK! – answers. Are we on the path to the end of critical thinking? Perhaps we will we end up like the animated movie “Wall-E”, where humans have devolved into chubby beings completely reliant on computers and robots!