Yeah like that was the point was to centralize everything on electric power so you can work on swapping out things like coal for more sustainable forms of electricity.

How that is a negative for data centers are some mental gymnastics I’m not willing to make.

This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There’s room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.

The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.

But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI “finds” the solution to climate change, people will finally listen

I agree with you and I think she was taken somewhat out of context, though it’s not exactly fake or making things up either. My interpretation is that she is agreeing with specific parts of Sec. Burgum’s statements. The headline of the article (calls Trump admin’s climate denialism “fantastic”) is sensationalization. They do link to the source video though and to Google’s whitepaper.

Her remarks are at around 9hr 5m. She says “fantastic” and then talks specifically about nuclear, grid permitting & modernization. She focuses on the “AI arms race” and the need to act quickly on energy policy. She does not make any statement on Burgum’s climate denialism.

Most of what she is saying is in line with what’s in the whitepaper (of which she is an author). And in my view, the whitepaper outlines an energy policy that both achievable in the current administration and reduces emissions. It is certainly not perfect, and I wish the conversation was different, but there’s some good stuff in there.

I have been a volunteer advocating for climate policies at the federal level for the past few years, and we have had a lot of conversations around nuclear, geothermal, clean energy tax credits, permitting reform (NEPA exemptions, transmission). I was happy to see mention of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 in Google’s whitepaper – we lobbied pretty hard for that. It definitely would have reduced emissions.

I don’t personally like that Google is advocating for natural gas, even if they talk about carbon sequestration and satellite based emissions monitoring in the same breath. Natural gas is definitely part of the current state of climate / energy policy conversation, and we’d rather have natural gas than coal. In my advocacy work, I don’t demonize natural gas, but I try to shift towards talking more about geothermal and nuclear to cover base load power needs.

Burgum’s comments are around 47m and there is definitely a lot of denialism in there. But he also talks about decarbonization, sequestration, cleaner sources of base load power (hydro). A few years ago, Republicans were not using any of this sort of language, and we’ve been part of helping to change that. Our strategy has included a strong focus on common ground around energy, and side-stepping the climate change debate entirely.

If the end result is a reduction in emissions then personally I don’t really care as much about ideological purity. The article to me seems more focused on purity and less on the full context.

It’s almost like corporations don’t give AF and will burn society down for a few bucks.