Tag: emissions

Human Intelligence at a Premium

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column on the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (11.8.26), beginning what should prove to be a series of arguments against the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its gas-guzzling infrastructure. My comments are edited at the paper each time, and you may spot the changes by use of the word “I”. I don’t write it in the first person for any publication, so this is a glaring correction signifying other changes. The process has been exaggerated since the legal challenge to an earlier column of mine, by Zionists. Ho hum, such are the times, but I can assure you I check my facts and research daily, not once a week!

It’s also never my headline.

The unedited version is below and at my Blog site, or expand the picture below to read the published version.

Stop AI Now!

What is the very worst thing we can do in a drought? Commit to more water use. It’s obvious really. Consequently, we are each told to preserve water, from fewer showers to hosepipe bans. Suddenly water is our individual responsibility.

That is a Great Lie. One of the many of this freshly dystopian era. We know that the water companies who have invested over the past half-century in their shareholder’s dividends rather than our water infrastructure leak a quarter to a third of all the treated drinking water through rusted pipes before it reaches our homes.

We know that industry uses 80% our potable water, only 20% coming through our taps for rehydration, washing and gardening.

Clearly it’s not all down to us.

Yet, in this Age of Climate Change, the industrial corporations supported by government are creating new demands on water supplies that eclipse anything we can manage in terms of water conservation.

The Data Centres being fast-tracked in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) require quantities of clean, processed drinking water as the first priority for the privatised water companies who already cannot maintain domestic supplies.

It is not the private consumer who is profligate. We are not guilty parties.

By 2030 data centres across the world will require the same water-useage as 1.3billion people. Currently there are at least 2.1 billion people in the world living without access to safe water at home, with one in four people without safely managed drinking water.

This is not just an issue for people in the Global South, already reeling from fires and floods. Climate change is hitting the rich North West is suffering too. In the United States, the sudden investment in AI Data Centres, representing the deepening Cold War competition with China, is resulting in these new massive industrial facilities pulling millions of gallons of the precious public water reserves dependent on groundwater, springs, wells, and aquifers that recharge too slowly. The long-term effects on farms, livestock, creeks, tourism, fishing and conservation are already visible.

Parts of the US are not only in drought but in a crisis caused by the diversion of water from agriculture and homes to Data Centres. Entire electricity generating plants have been diverted away from domestic supply to provide the huge power required by these computing hubs, with decommissioned old nuclear power plants reopened. Fossil-fuelled electricity generators feeding these megawatt guzzling computers are exacerbating the climate crisis. Microsoft has released emissions data showing an increase of 25% in the past year alone, matching Google’s increase of 25% and Amazon 16%, breaking all climate pledges to mitigate the climate catastrophe.

The International Energy Agency estimates that a typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much as 100,000 households. Some of them that we’re seeing built are 20 times that amount. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.

The lesson for the UK is that we should think very carefully before supporting AI Data Centres. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.

Burnham’s government has just appointed a Minister for Artificial Intelligence. The job of Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan, MP, is to work with private AI companies, offering them billions of pounds in tax incentives to fast-track the “AI revolution” here in the UK. It’s likely to be money down the drain.

In North Devon, A data centre covering 850 acres including a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is set to be twice the size of the largest AI data centre so far approved in the UK. Whilst our farmers will lose their lands and food production, the most serious loss is water access, already precarious.

Data centres not only require fresh drinking water from public treatment centres, they then have to further purify the water to remove particulates, limescale and so on, that can clog the cooling systems of the hot computer chips and batteries. The water is not recycled but mostly lost through the process.

This loss to our public supplies is serious.

There are many, many reasons for opposing Artificial Intelligence, the so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood. AI represents the opposite of human progress. Automated to minimise human employment, the Great Lie of a beneficial revolution for human liberation is best recognised through its priority use for military weapons development, autonomous drones and missiles, AI-designed biological weapons, trojan hacks destroying public service infrastructure and corrupting government information. The so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood – AI offers the opposite, automated to minimise human employment.

There is a growing list of reasons to oppose and shut down Artificial Intelligence. It’s the last thing we need right now. We appear to have given up on human intelligence – all the evidence and information surrounding AI should offer any rationale brain an abundance of proof that we have to stop it, now.

COP28 used for Corporate Deals!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 27th November 2023. It was then of little surprise that, days later it emerged the President of COP28, Sultan Al Jabar, was quoted as saying that fossil fuels were not responsible for climate change (I paraphrase, but you get the gist). the corruption is beyond question, their culpability amounts to the greatest genocide in human history.

It should be of no surprise that the person in charge of this week’s Climate Conference is using the event to sign deals to extract more oil. The United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) has been held almost every year for more than three decades now and has achieved little or nothing. Some years ago it set targets for the global reductions in the emissions that warm the planet and destabilise the climate. In 2023 the emissions continue to rise, the target now requiring a 45% reduction in all our gases by 2030. 

It’s probably the case that no one believes the targets can possibly be reached. We are fast descending into a prolonged period of catastrophe for humanity and Nature’s Ecology. We are deep into the 6th Great Extinction of plant and animal life on the Planet, with Britain being the region most divested of wildlife on the Planet. 

The Climate Catastrophe, repeatedly predicted for over a century, is now with us, with 20,000 children forced to move forever from their inhospitable birthplaces every day. We face one billion, one thousand million humans, leaving their homelands in the Tropics, the southern states of the USA and southern countries of Europe, the centre of India and Southern China by the 2040’s.

Food shortages due to extreme weather conditions as well as long term regional climate changes will most certainly produce repeated global food shortages and transport disruption by the mid 2030’s if not much sooner. The resultant wars between states for the resources to maintain their societies have been predicted but are now actually with us – more than one hundred conflicts across Africa alone, and armies lining-up inside Europe itself. 

Civil wars sparked by food-shortages and unmanageable inflation levels are ensuring brutal repression of entire populations. The fear of mass migration is being ramped-up to ensure we are all desensitised to the plight of tens-of-millions of human beings, most but not all people of colour. Racism as a tool to dehumanise is being used to watch and ignore the development of refugee camps, millions of families living in crowded tents reliant on charitable food and water aid, and guarded by militia ready to shoot those who chance their lives on fleeing Northward for life and income.

So the revelations about the Conferences being used as bargaining bases to ensure higher emissions is just the latest damning indictment of the entire system. The United Nations is supposed to be the place where nations are brought together for international solidarity and support. It is not publicised as the broker of Corporate deals. The highest principal of the COP President is to rise above personal and national net rests to seek solutions for the common good. If the President of the COP process is seeking self-interest, then why shouldn’t everyone else? Trust in the COP process has collapsed. 

The COP28 Conference is supposed to be focussed upon the cutting the fossil-fuelled global warming emissions of C02, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and Fluorinated gases – all potent greenhouse gases. The drive towards renewable energy, greater energy efficiency leading to the reduction in the demand, and support and justice for those who are suffering the terrible consequences of climate change should be the focus for all decisions.

But the President of the COP28, the man presiding over the entire affair, is using the stage to ensure far more emissions. Dr Sultan al-Jaber is the head of the United Arab Emirates’ Oil company Adnoc. His company is talking with delegates to the COP28 about liquid natural gas projects in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, in collaboration with Germany and Egypt. The oil and gas deals carry-on being sealed, ensuring the predicted rise in global temperatures by at least 3Celcius by 2100, creating chaos to all human societies across the world.

This is corporate genocide on a global scale, funded and supported by corrupt government politicians focussed solely on short-term personal gain. From below, millions of conscious and empathetic human beings will be protesting throughout COP28, for human suffrage, climate justice and system change. The oil magnates and Sultans must be deposed. We have to force the end of fossil-fuel industries and global warming emissions now, or witness the end of human civilisation.