DeBriefed 19 July 2024: New political players in EU and US; UK govt urged to make up ‘lost ground’ on targets; AI’s climate impact

Ada Carpenter

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

§ This week

Shifting political players

EU LEADERSHIP: Ursula von der Leyen has secured another five years as president of the European Commission following a vote yesterday in which she won the backing of 401 MEPs – 40 more than needed, reported Bloomberg. In her reelection bid, von der Leyen committed to EU climate goals including the still-pending 90% emissions reduction by 2040 target and a new Clean Industrial Deal, Euractiv reported. However, the publication noted that her comments on nature protection were limited to “positive rhetoric” only.

PARIS PM: Elsewhere in Europe, veteran climate negotiator Laurence Tubiana has been proposed as the next French prime minister, with backing from the Socialist, Green and Communist parties in the current hung parliament, reported Climate Home News. Tubiana, who is currently CEO at the European Climate Foundation [which funds Carbon Brief], was one of the “architects” of the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to Bloomberg. 

VANCE’S STANCE: In the US, Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate JD Vance has come under scrutiny for his climate scepticism. The Republican vice presidential candidate is “a staunch supporter of the oil and gas industry and an opponent of renewable energy”, according to the Independent, but has reportedly only held such views in recent years, a shift that coincides with his bid for Trump support. He also has investments in “green” technologies, reported E&E News, but the New York Times emphasised his public anti-climate sentiments and his sponsorship of green legislation repeals as a senator for Ohio. 

AFRICAN COAL: In South Africa, a political ecologist wrote in the Conversation that the country’s newly appointed environment minister has shown support for continuing to use coal and said his government would not be “bullied” into transitioning away from fossil fuels too quickly. It comes as Agence France-Presse reported that the country’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has “reaffirmed the coal-dependent nation’s commitment to moving towards renewable energy, but insisted that communities and workers must not lose out”. 

Labour must ‘make up lost ground’

KING’S SPEECH: The UK’s new Labour government has confirmed a legislative agenda with the environment “front and centre”, reported the Guardian. The king’s speech mentioned that the government will set up the publicly owned GB Energy to “own, manage and operate clean power projects” across the UK, reported BBC News. The company is set to be capitalised with an £8.3bn investment. Meanwhile, Politico reported that Labour is set to appoint a climate envoy, a role that has been empty for more than a year.

NEW ADVICE: The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the UK government on its climate policies, released its annual progress report on Thursday, urging Labour to “make up lost ground” after a lack of sufficient action under the last Conservative government. Carbon Brief covered the recommendations in detail (more on this below). Elsewhere, the Times reported that Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of the industry group Energy UK, has been appointed “preferred candidate” for the next chief executive of the CCC.

§ Around the world

  • ‘HELLISHLY HOT’: A heatwave across southern Europe and the Balkans has led governments to issue severe weather warnings, said France 24, with temperatures rising above 40C.
  • CHINA ‘THIRD PLENUM’: A communique from China’s highly influential “third plenum” meeting called for a “coordinated approach to carbon cutting, pollution reduction, green development and economic growth”, as well as for the country to “actively respond to climate change”, according to state news agency Xinhua.
  • CARIBBEAN VULNERABILITY: In the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, which killed at least a dozen people and destroyed infrastructure across the Caribbean, the Associated Press reported that officials are demanding more funding from “financial and development institutions” to rebuild and address climate change.
  • PROTEST IN PERIL: Five UK climate activists from Just Stop Oil received record-length jail sentences of up to five years for a plan to block London’s M25 motorway, reported Reuters. Meanwhile, the right to peaceful protest in Australia is also “in peril”, the Guardian reported. 
  • GLOBAL FLOODS: Downpours and flooding have killed hundreds in South Asia, caused “emergency alerts” in China, left more than 50 people dead in Niger and caused damage in Toronto, Canada. 

§ $8.4bn

The amount of debt eradicated through “debt-for-nature” swaps from 1987-2023.

§ $7.6tn

The total amount of debt service paid by low- and middle-income countries over the same timescale, illustrating how swap schemes are “far too small to have any impact”, experts told the Carbon Brief.

§ Latest climate research

  • European “fire weather” – conditions favourable to the ignition and spread of wildfires – will become “more severe” due to climate change, showed a new study in Environmental Research Letters. 
  • Optimising the conversion of organic waste into biogas for energy has considerable decarbonisation potential in China, said new research in Nature Communications, which found that their proposed system could contribute 3.77% of the emissions reduction needed for the country’s 1.5C-aligned target. 
  • Nature-based solutions have “consistently proven to be a cost-effective approach” to address disaster risk, reported researchers in Science of the Total Environment.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

Image - UK greenhouse gas emissions, including international aviation and shipping (IAS), MtCO2e. (note)

UK emissions have been falling steadily for years, largely driven by the phaseout of coal and the growth of renewable power. However, only one-third of the reductions required to achieve the UK’s goal under the Paris Agreement of cutting emissions 68% by 2030 are covered by plans the CCC deems to be “credible”, according to its latest progress report. There is an even larger credibility gap for the sixth carbon budget for 2033-2037, with only a quarter of the cuts needed covered by “credible” policies. This is illustrated in the chart above, which shows the emissions cuts needed to reach net-zero (red), compared to cuts expected from policies that the CCC deems “credible”.

§ Spotlight

The climate impact of generative AI

Carbon Brief investigates the climate implications of the accelerating use of generative AI tools.

Google’s latest environmental report indicated that its total emissions have increased by almost 50% since 2019 and 13% year-on-year – a change it puts down to the growth of its data centres and rising emissions in its supply chain. 

The report added that rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) services might make it “challenging” to cut emissions due to the “increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute”.

Since March, Google has been integrating its generative AI tool Gemini into search functions, matching the exponential uptick in day-to-day AI use through Chat-GPT, Microsoft Copilot and other such tools. (“Generative AI” is AI that is capable of generating text, images, videos or other data from scratch in response to a prompt.)

But there’s a catch: when a query is sent to a generative AI model (a process known as inference), it uses a lot more energy than a traditional search, creating an expectation that the energy demand of data centres will shoot up as a result.

Soaring energy demand

A recent study, still awaiting peer review, found that a multipurpose AI system could use up to 33 times more energy than computers running task-specific software and that generating two images with AI uses as much energy as charging a smartphone.

Dr Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face and lead author of the study, explained to Carbon Brief that multipurpose models “tend to be larger in size” and are trained for several different outputs, “which makes them more computationally-intensive”.

Training AI models before they are available for use also takes large amounts of energy. OpenAI’s GPT-3 required 1,287MWh during training, enough electricity to power 120 average US households for one year. 

Direct energy consumption is not the only factor to consider. Felippa Amanta, a PhD researcher of digital services at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, told Carbon Brief that “generative AI can have quite unpredictable indirect energy effects from how they’re being used by households”.

People are also using AI assistants for things they never needed it for before – a phenomenon Amanta explained as “induced demand”.

AI is changing our day-to-day behaviour, “from finding recipes, to writing emails, making CVs and the list goes on”, she said. It is this increase in user inference that can drive up data centre energy demands.

A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), released today, said that the rise of AI was putting an increased focus on the energy use of data centres. (AI currently accounts for around 10% of data-centre electricity use.)

It said that electricity consumption from data centres as a whole accounted for a “limited” 1-1.3% share of global electricity demand in 2022. This could rise to between 1.5% and 3% by 2026, according to its projections. (By contrast, electric vehicles are expected to account for between less than 1.5% and 2% by 2026.)

The agency noted that expectations of future data centre energy demand growth were highly uncertain, depending on the uptake of AI services and the efficiency of the chips used to run them. (It noted that chipmaker Nvidia recently unveiled a new chip that was 25 times more energy efficient than previous models.)

As with any electricity-intensive technology, the climate impact of surging AI use will be determined by the extent to which renewables can meet the demand. In April, the Financial Times reported that fossil-fuel companies are hoping that surging energy demand from AI use will “usher in a golden era” for gas production.

Efficiency and regulation

On the flip side, AI has the potential to be a tool for climate action, chiefly by increasing energy efficiency. For example, AI could be used to improve the efficiency of power grids or daily commutes. 

But as generative AI tools become integrated into our lives, there is a risk of a rebound effect, where the ease and ubiquity of AI solutions make us use services more, countering any efficiency savings, Amanta said. 

Another issue facing the rapidly changing AI environment is a lack of transparency.

The climate impacts of AI models can potentially be mitigated by increasing their computational efficiency, powering data centres with clean energy, or using more task-specific models – but a lack of transparent data is slowing the development of legislation to regulate this shift, Dr Luccioni told Carbon Brief:

“The fact that we can’t get an accurate estimate of the energy usage or emissions of the many AI-enabled tools used by millions of people daily is problematic.” 

Without understanding the scope of the issue, it is difficult to regulate energy intensity or add constraints on companies, she added. The IEA’s report also called for more reliable data.

Amanta pointed to examples of policies being proposed in the US and Singapore that recognise the environmental impacts of AI’s growth and aim to regulate their efficiency and sources of energy. The EU’s AI Act, which came into force in June, includes environmental considerations.

§ Watch, read, listen

SEA LEVEL RISE: A coastal village in Myanmar is being eroded away due to rising sea levels and residents are struggling to access fresh groundwater, reported the Mekong Eye.

CLIMATE CONFLICT: Earthrise released a video exploring the intersectionality of climate change and conflict, speaking to Sudanese climate activist, Watan Mohamed.

FACTCHECKING TWISTERS: The new tornado disaster film gets a lot of things right about climate science, said experts in Nature.

§ Coming up

§ Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected].
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