Tag: global-heating

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.

We are in a new age of war and extremes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.3.26) ensuring a statement against the bombing of Iran and identifying some of the dangers of US imperialism. Most essentially, the need to protest. Right now 56% of UK voters (and 51% of US voters – none of whom read this(!)), oppose Trump’s murderous illegal bluster, and we must ensure their views are seen on the streets and in the media. If all that is seen is BBC pro-war nonsense and far-right media memes, populations will shift into acceptance of war economies and war ideology. “Protest and Survive” as the old saying goes!

Unedited version below or expand the pic for the published article.

We are in a new age of war and extremes

Stability has been blown away. We are In a new age of war and extremes, Most of us don’t want life to get any worse than it is now, and yet it is getting worse. The most dangerous sensation in such circumstances is that gnawing feeling of powerlessness.

Yet another illegal war has begun, unapproved by the democratically elected majority in Washington USA or Parliament UK, this time bombing the ninety-three million people Iran. Various opinion polls have shown the majority in Britain to oppose the war on Iran, from a simple self-interested concern for the financial impact if not a humanist care for the lives of civilians everywhere. But what can we do?

The years of imagery of the total destruction of Gaza, the crumpled concrete and mangled steel of apartments, streets and entire neighbourhoods, the burnt and crushes bodies of children in Palestine are now accompanied by the familiar mushroom smoke plumes and colossal streaks of flame over Tehran, Iran. Humanity must not become desensitised to the cries of and for Humanity.

US Secretary of State for War, Pete Hegseth, has set out his endgame for Iran: the total destruction of the country’s infrastructure and many of its people: “With complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile.” Some of his military commanders have been invoking far-right extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical ‘end times’ to justify involvement in the illegal Iran war to US troops.

We can oppose the Iranian government and oppose the imperialist war against it. We can support the Iranian civilians who bravely protested against Khomeini’s brutal Police last month, at least twenty-thousand shot on the streets, and at the same time understand that bombing children from on-high does not liberate the children. Under the rockets of Israel and the bombs of the USA, some flown out of the UK, we shall see more mass murder not freedom.

We may be able to understand the logic of the Iranian diaspora across the world protesting in favour of Trump and Israel as liberators. But we should not agree with them. We only need to reflect upon the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya to understand that western bombing leaves formerly modern economies in ruins, the infrastructure crushed back, in the words of president George Bush Jnr, “to the Stone Age”.

Then the western corporations moves-in to rebuild in their own image, for their own profit, leaving the local economies devastated and impoverished. The war on Iran is an imperialist war like all others, Israel the preferred launching pad for the US in the Middle East, seeking complete control in the interests of US economic security and power, not those of Iran or anywhere else.

The potential to destabilise the adjacent countries and, indeed, the West, is very real. The autocratic governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and even Egypt are already very vulnerable and in tension against each other. Not least, against all the deniers, the very real impact of global heating caused by climate change is having dramatic impacts on their people’s access to drinking water, any loss of electric power stopping their energy-thirsty desalination plants and wrecking both food production and social stability.

The very idea that the bombing or Iran will have positive outcomes for the people of Iran, even in “the long term”, goes against all evidence from history and today’s material conditions. Contrary to the pretext for the bombing, Iran had no nuclear weapons and no stated intent, whilst Israel has 400 nuclear warheads and is threatening their use. But what can we do?

We can demand our own government plays no part in this destruction. The fact that US B-1 Lancer bombers flew from UK’s RAF Fairford this weekend means we are party to the war, whatever defamatory names Trump calls Starmer. Turkey’s attacks on Iran represent the engagement of NATO – an escalation of itself.

We can support the people of Iran and the Middle East in their demands for human rights, the end to dictatorship and the fight for the self-liberation of their own countries. Last weekend a hastily-called demonstration of over 50,000 marched through London to the US Embassy, calling to stop the bombing. In opposition to the protests there and across the country, Neo-fascist organisers and far-right protesters joined with Iranian royalists to counter the anti-war demonstrators, echoing the war cries of Trump and Netanyahu.

We have to protest against war. If we don’t, the voices for more conflict will grow louder. If we do not stand up now, the organisers of division, promoting war, racial hatred and western “white supremacy” will be allowed to grow more powerful, the lack of opposition imposing passivity. We must prove in practice, in person and in public that we, the majority, want Peace.

Trade unions must be involved in processes to end conflict and build a peace grounded in social justice. Join us on the streets!

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