Thomas Ferguson
Yes. That’s very clear. Committees from both the House and, especially, the Senate under Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, produced a series of reports and hearings, starting well before COVID hit. Many, though not all, of their recommendations were bipartisan. Along with this was the growing interest in tech entrepreneurs, claiming that they could do defense better and cheaper than the legacy defense producers.
At that time, Silicon Valley was still heavily green. But that changed rapidly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The energy price shock was terrific, spilling over into food and other commodities. Coal, oil, and liquid natural gas (LNG) interests in and out of the United States quickly started touting fossil fuels as America’s ace in the hole as the world economy began breaking into blocs. A lot of previously sympathetic folks within finance and other parts of big business agreed and started changing their positions too.
Within Silicon Valley, spiraling demands for more and more “compute” for running large language models picked up where foreign policy considerations left off. Suddenly the chlorophyll counts of the techies started dropping fast. They weren’t green anymore; they wanted cheap power any way they could get it. Many started saying stuff that I consider pure wishful thinking, like, “First we’ve got to have AI, and then we’ll use it to help figure out how to undo global warming.”
The steady movement in favor of vigorous action on climate change has withered, not just in the United States but worldwide, as the Gulf states and other producers join the US Republican pushback and higher interest rates make climate investment much more hazardous. In the US, insurers are now quietly picking up some of the pieces, with the rest of the costs dumped on ordinary Americans.
This was the context in which high…
Auteur: Thomas Ferguson
