Al Gore downplays AI threats and touts its climate potential

Former US vice-president Al Gore has gone against the tide of concern about the existential threats posed by AI, arguing that the technology could help in the effort to limit global warming.

Gore played down fears that data centres powering AI could worsen climate change, saying technology could instead make energy systems more efficient.

Speaking on the release of a sustainability trends report by Generation Investment Management, the asset manager he co-founded more than two decades ago, Gore said AI presented a “great opportunity for further increasing the energy transition” by promoting renewable power sources.

“The emissions from AI should be put in perspective,” he told the FT, adding that its energy consumption and consequent greenhouse gas emissions were a “cause for concern but not panic”.

“If you take all of the AI data centres put together, it’s only a fraction of the emissions from uncovered landfills in the world,” he said.

Generation has exposure to AI across several investments, including in clean data centre developments in Brazil, publicly listed companies such as Microsoft and Intuit, and private companies such as Weka, which seeks to make data storage more efficient, and energy system software company Kraken.

While AI could help with greenhouse gas emissions, Gore acknowledged that there were other issues with advanced AI that “need priority attention”.

Addressing the dire warnings about the safety of AI and escalating calls from inside and outside the industry for slowing the rate of progress to avert unintended consequences, he backed the need for controls.

“The fact that AI is being developed rapidly means we need to find the ability to regulate it, so that it can be developed and deployed safely,” he said, advocating co-operation between the US and China on both AI and climate risks.

Gore, whose Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth on climate change was released 20 years ago, pointed to “persuasive research” suggesting that the AI could lead to far greater reductions in emissions than it generated.

He noted a report from the Grantham Institute last year that estimated that AI could cut global emissions by up to 5.4bn tonnes annually by 2035, across areas such as power, transport and food.

However, a recent study by former Microsoft analysts published in the Nature journal found that AI-driven productivity gains in the oil and gas industry would substantially increase global emissions and outweigh any potential gains from clean energy.

This builds on widespread concerns about the environmental consequences of the rapid rollout of data centres, including increased pressure on water supplies and an expansion of fossil fuels to meet increased power demand in the AI race.

The Generation report acknowledges AI will place “sudden and profound demands on a power grid that is not ready for them” but this is balanced by the “boon” for sustainability by helping to improve efficiency, eliminate waste and solve longstanding problems.

The International Energy Agency has estimated that global electricity consumption for data centres will double to reach about 945 TWh by 2030, representing just under 3 per cent of total global electricity consumption.

It forecast that electricity consumption by data centres would grow by about 15 per cent annually in the run-up to 2030, or four times faster than the growth of total electricity consumption.

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