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 you want to leave everything behind at the beginning of the day, this is this: the current trajectory of AI development is not only necessary, as exemplified by the recent release of the more efficient model Deepseek. We must then leave urgently. Otherwise, it will damage you that you cannot roll back.
New research beyond fossil fuels published this week shows the tension that data center growth will only hit Europe. Electricity demand from European data centres could increase by up to 160% by 2030, higher than Spain’s total electricity consumption in 2022. 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. In this room, people from far-flung regions of the globe from Indiana to Chile to the Netherlands are fighting against the cold and hard reality that there is no version of the current AI boom that 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 making it possible to burn fossil fuels while claiming they are 100% renewable. 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 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 need to be responsible for the emissions generated within their supply chains, measuring and transparently affecting the environmental impact throughout the AI lifecycle. There is no need to link yourself to this unsustainable vision for our future. There is nothing inevitable about this technology. 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 have an incredible range to shape the trajectory to ensure that AI meets the needs of the public by putting an end to all cost approaches and turning to more sustainable paths. The market doesn’t deliver us alone. I appeal to you all to do so today.
