On February 11, 2025, AI’s current co-executive director, Sarah Myers West, gave a full keynote speech at the Forum on AI and Sustainability at the AI Action Summit in Paris. Check out the full recording here or read what she said below.
Thank you for welcoming me today. With Amba Kak, we lead the AI Now Institute, a think tank that exists to challenge the current trajectory of AI and bring it along in the public interest. We will work with allies from many corners of society, from technical policies to economic justice to labor groups. We’re all betting on this issue, so I hope that many of them were in this room today.
We are approaching the critical threshold for calculated futures and will need all the help we can get. The AI industry and government are all working on full-scale development of AI infrastructure, helping to implement larger and more implicit model developments. However, there are many reasons to be skeptical of AI boosterism. It is very clear that promoting public AI funding will bring more benefits to businesses, but the benefits for the wider public are much more rough and hypothetical. There is a lot of pathology, from the harm to privacy and security, to the surge in false content, to what brings us all here today. It will harm the climate. If there’s one important takeaway I want to leave you at the beginning of the day, that’s this: the current trajectory of AI development is not necessary, as exemplified by the recent release of something more efficient. Not just the model DeepSeek. We must then leave urgently. Otherwise, it will damage you that you cannot roll back.
New research beyond fossil fuels released this week shows the tension that data center growth brings in Europe alone. Electricity demand from European data centers could increase by up to 160% by 2030. Over the same period, more than half of Germany’s planned cuts were wiped out, reaching 121 million tons of carbon dioxide. This research should be a wake-up call for decision makers that the concept of sustainable and endless growth in data centers is mythical.
We’ve heard a lot now about how to make AI more efficient, and we’ve planned to run a data center on clean energy, and AI can even benefit sustainability. This makes this message very harsh. However, it reflects the movements happening outside this room. People from Indiana to Chile, the era, and the Netherlands are fighting the cold, hard reality that there is no version of the current AI boom. It leads to a sustainable future. And instead of working meaningfully on this reality, the government is responding by criminalizing protests. But it is their water, air and land that are damaged by this build-out. And while things may feel sparkle within this summit, there is a conflict brewing that we cannot look away.
This is because the insatiable energy appetite of the AI industry creates unprecedented tensions in power sources. The growing demand is pushing some of the world’s electricity infrastructure to its limits, extending its dependence on fossil fuels while also exhausting other important resources such as water, land and raw materials. This is a public health issue, with increased pollution and even premature deaths occurring, and experts estimate that the US alone will cost $20 billion a year.
There are many false promises and false solutions in this argument. While big tech companies like Google and Microsoft are now questioning whether they can meet their climate and energy goals, Amazon and Meta are fossil fuels while claiming they are 100% renewable. It is made possible to burn. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, is touted as a solution, but it is primarily a dangerous distraction. The small modular reactor and long timeline of safety risks in using decommissioned nuclear power plants further undermines the reliability of this approach. In addition to this, AI tools are sold to the oil and gas industry, allowing millions of tons of carbon emissions when scientific consensus clearly calls for phase-out of fossil fuels. AI runs on fossil fuels and when used to expand oil and gas extraction, it will not become a “climate solution.”
This is why the Green Screen Union, Green Web Foundation, and more than 100 other organizations issued statements in strong calls last week. The development of AI infrastructure must be suppressed within the limits of what the planet can sustain. This means that the AI industry will need to phase out fossil fuels immediately. Companies must be responsible for the emissions generated within their supply chains, measuring and transparent impacts on the environment throughout the AI lifecycle. It’s inevitable. It has taken many turns in almost 70 years of history and on my more optimistic day I do this job in the hopes of a new approach turning the corner. Criticism is the belief that there is another world that is possible. For room policymakers, we are the trajectory to ensure that AI meets the needs of the public by ending all cost approaches and by looking at more sustainable paths. It has an incredible range to shape. The market doesn’t deliver us alone. I appeal to you all to do so today.
