Despite increasingly catastrophic weather events occurring across the globe, climate change expert Paul Bledsoe is optimistic there is still time to ward off the worst of climate disruption caused by emissions of greenshouse gases, but time is running out. And he sees reducing what he calls "super pollutants," such as methane and HFCs, rather than simply reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, as offering the most efficient appraoch to stemming the worst of the worst when it comes to climate disruption.

"If we can just over the next 20 years reduce these super pollutants, begin to reduce CO2, I think we can just stave off the worst," he says. "We can prevent the true catastrophe, but we need to act, and we need to act more urgently."

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The data industry is in a land rush to develop new data centers to meet projected demand due to artificial intelligence. Rapidly bringing many new, large data centers online translates into a sharp increase in demand for electricity at a time when consumers and politicians are concerned about rising electricity prices. At the same time, communities and their political representatives are increasingly working to block the siting of data centers in their communities.

The industry is attempting to meet "unprecedented demand for the services that are powered by data centers" as the amount of computing time and computer power by users has grown dramatically since the pandemic, says Aaron Tinjum, executive vice president for policy, regulatory, and strategy at the Data Center Coalition. "That's even setting aside any sort of conversation around artificial intelligence, and really a point of emphasis in all of that is that it is homes and it is businesses, it is utilities that are necessitating more data center infrastructure than ever before, and so our members are working to meet that demand."

Tinjum sought to push back against the data industry being tarred as a primary cause of increasing electricity prices, noting that there are so many other factors contributing to the recent upsurge in electricity costs, such as generation shortfalls, transmission constraints, and supply chain issues. "Yes, data centers have had an impact on capacity prices, but that can't solely be assigned to data centers when we're talking about things like market design, we're talking about things like price caps, we're talking about accelerated plant retirements, and the interconnection backlogs to connect any new resources that would offset the reduced supply side resources," he says.

"This is really infrastructure that our modern economy and daily lives have become dependent upon, and one of the most necessary inputs in meeting that demand is electricity," he notes. "Energy is the single highest operating expenditure for a data center, so they are naturally incentivized to be as efficient as possible in addition to whatever sustainability commitments they may have already in place."

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William S. Becker, the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former Department of Energy official, discusses the fossil fuel industry "cartel" that has aligned itself with congressional Republicans and the Trump administration to frustrate concerted policies in response to the threat from climate disruption.

"It's a huge industry. It's got a tremendous sunk investment," Becker observes. "It's been around for 200 years. It's fighting to keep access to something on the order of, well, tens of trillions of dollars of fossil fuels that are still underground. Science is saying that about two thirds of them have to stay there in order to keep climate change under some bearable level, at some bearable level. So it began late in 1989, the fossil energy industries and companies formed a coalition to begin resisting climate science and discrediting it, and we've been at this ever since."

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