AI is the future of tech, but its effects on the climate could change everything
Over the last few years, the tech industry and their energy-hungry data centers have been responsible for large increases in climate emissions, with Microsoft’s emissions growing 30 percent since 2020 and Google’s emissions up almost 50 percent over the same period. In addition, tech is investing trillions in artificial intelligence technologies that will demand still more energy. Natural gas is lining up to satisfy a major part of this increase.
This gives tech the opportunity for a double win on climate — using their AI prowess to help fashion solutions to slow warming, while ensuring that the natural gas they use has the lowest methane leak rate. Reducing methane emissions is the best strategy we currently have for slowing near-term global warming and avoiding potentially catastrophic climate tipping points. Plugging methane leaks also stops the waste of natural gas, saving money and aligning with President Trump’s hydrocarbon emphasis.
Climate emissions continued to increase last year, contributing to record global temperatures that are inflicting devastating climate disasters on average people — including most recently the citizens of Los Angeles, where climate driven wildfires are expected to cost more than $200 billion in damages.
Now, $200 billion is a sobering number. But it’s nothing compared to the $38 trillion a year of climate damages we’re expected to suffer by mid-century, as we hurtle toward superheated global conditions. These risk triggering climate tipping points in key natural systems like the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, locking in a hothouse planet of chaotic dislocation of people, resources, and enterprises for centuries.
To prevent the worst of these outcomes, cutting methane emissions, which over the next 20 years will be about 84 times more potent in warming than carbon dioxide, should be a top priority. For those like Donald Trump and his allies who want to expand America’s hydrocarbon energy supplies, ending wasteful leaks of natural gas also makes sense, since it can be accomplished quickly with existing technologies.
Big Tech should act now, in the early days of AI.
At the moment, a ChatGPT query uses 10 times the electricity of a standard Google search. The AI-driven boom could account for nearly half the growth in U.S. electricity consumption from 2023 to 2028, requiring utilities to boost annual generation by as much as 26 percent.
Recently, the Chinese company DeepSeek has claimed it may lower AI energy use and thus emissions, but as Nikki Hsu, a utilities analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, noted, "Nobody knows if the chips are really more efficient.” Overall, the MIT Technology Review notes that DeepSeek was found to have a similar energy efficiency to the Meta model, but DeepSeek tended to generate much longer responses and therefore was found to use 87 percent more energy.
Even if DeepSeek can reduce AI electricity consumption, the industry will continue to need far more power going forward. To meet this, Chevron, GE Vernova and Engine No. 1, just announced a new venture to build natural gas plants to directly power data centers. Exxon announced a similar investment in natural gas.
The tech industry has so far says it intends to use clean energy sources to meet their growing energy demands, but many of the sources they are counting on, like small modular nuclear power, will not produce significant electricity for many years. That means electric utilities will inevitably be turning to natural gas for new supply, with attendant methane emissions.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are pushing the permitting of new natural gas pipelines as part of energy legislation in 2025, but without adequate methane leak protections. Indeed, the Republican Congress plans to repeal the pricing of methane emissions, while the Trump administration intends to overturn key methane regulations of the oil and gas sector that would otherwise eliminate 58 million tons of emissions nationally by 2038 — and deliver net health benefits worth up to $98 billion.
In the face of these rollbacks, the tech industry needs to develop specific methane mitigation plans for whatever amount of natural gas its ends up using. Such a methane plan should include:
- developing and executing strategies with regional utilities with whom they partner to limit methane from existing and new natural gas generation;
- working directly with the natural gas industry to engineer new and existing gas pipelines and systems to be methane-leak free;
- using AI to create new strategies for the U.S. to achieve zero methane emissions, including supporting new satellite detection technologies, and limiting methane from landfill waste and eventually agriculture sources; and
- partnering with climate experts to educate policymakers, businesses and other key stakeholders on the importance of mitigating methane emissions to overall climate protection.
Supporters of increased natural gas production should recognize that cutting methane from American gas is also a key element in marketing gas domestically as well as in promoting U.S. exports to our European allies and other markets, since gas from Russia and elsewhere has far higher emissions of methane.
For climate advocates, the next decade is precisely when methane emissions must fall — or risk increasingly disastrous climate change impacts. To ensure a modicum of climate safety, methane emissions need to be reduced dramatically. Leading tech companies have the opportunity to play a leading role, as Google’s DeepMind AI has done by reducing energy use for cooling centers by up to 40 percent.
Either way, to save gas or protect the planet, we need Big Tech to rise to the occasion.
Durwood Zaelke is president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and adjunct professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. Paul Bledsoe is a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy. He served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under former President Bill Clinton.
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