As The World Burns

 For some time, Google has been placing a proud bit of brag at the bottom of their search page proclaiming how long they have been carbon neutral. If you look for it now, it's not there. It was removed because of  "the rapid expansion of power-hungry artificial intelligence caused Google's overall carbon emissions to surge, making it unfeasible to claim operational neutrality without making misleading claims."

Want to know how I found that out? I looked it up on Google. 

Meta, also known as The Facebook, recently kicked aside their clean energy pledge as they surged forward in their efforts to build gas-powered data centers. The agreement, known as RE100, is "a global initiative bringing together the world’s most influential businesses committed to using 100% renewable electricity in their operations." This initiative proudly names more than four hundred companies that have signed on to be a part of this program, including Apple, Microsoft, and the aforementioned Google. Facebook used to be part of that list, but not if it means they would have to give up building giant, smelly data mines. 

So, as it turns out, data seems to have overtaken climate as a concern. The ability to turn your family photos into cheap cartoon renderings of themselves is not more important than our ability to live and breathe on the earth. 

This past week I struggled with my own version of this type of schadenfreude as I read of the struggles of our first paper trillionaire. All of a sudden it seems as though he can't sell an electric dumpster fire of a truck to save his empire. Additionally, the flock of greedheads who gathered to snap up stock in his spaceship program have also given up interest. This pains me because there was a time when I would have been actively rooting for anyone who said they were going to get us all to drive electric cars and fly to outer space. Now I am happy to see him his empire disappear. 

Here I sit, waiting for the billionaire who will come along and save us all.