Al Gore has been one of the most prominent voices in the climate movement for more than 20 years, so when he talks about AI, it’s worth noting what he thinks is really scary. And that’s not why people are protesting data centers in the streets.
In an interview with TechCrunch this week, Gore, along with Laila Preston, head of growth equity at investment firm Generation Investment Management, said that despite growing opposition to their environmental impact, emissions from AI data centers aren’t something that should keep people up at night. In his opinion, what people should be more concerned about are warnings coming from within the AI industry itself, which he takes seriously.
This is not a new position for Gore. In May, for example, he described AI data centers to another news outlet as “a cause for deep concern, but not panic,” and in this week’s conversation, his focus on emissions was about scale.
“If you look at the emissions from all the AI data centers combined, it’s only a fraction of the emissions from uncovered landfills around the world,” he said, adding that similar growth involves something that gets far less attention: air conditioning.
This is a valid observation (and if the AI Institute isn’t already using it in its discussions with cities and states, it should). The International Energy Agency estimates that the world’s air conditioners already consume more electricity per year than the entire European Union, and with ownership rates still below 15% in the world’s hottest and fastest growing regions, demand is expected to triple by 2050, placing a much larger strain on the power grid than AI data centers over the same period.
Gore does not deny concerns about how these data centers are powered. “It is deeply concerning that some hyperscalers are moving into new methane turbines,” he said.
But his concern about methane turbines is not the AI workloads driving demand, but the prospect of building new gas plants to meet that demand, locking in fossil fuel production for decades more.
“I much prefer companies that supply their energy needs with renewable energy and batteries,” he continued, saying he expects more companies to move in that direction inexorably, simply because renewable energy is becoming the cheapest option available.
In fact, Gore believes the public backlash at Planning Commission meetings was less about carbon emissions and more about fears that automation will upend society in the not-too-distant future.
“I think part of the reason there is growing bipartisan opposition to data centers in many parts of the United States is driven by fundamental concerns about job losses and other threats that experts within OpenAI and within Anthropic have been trying to warn the public about,” he said.
We also pressed Gore about the wave of warnings from AI industry leaders that dominated the headlines last week. While President Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang laughed at their own sacrifices during a meeting in Los Angeles on Monday (Trump suggested that public calls to slow Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s progress, which was immediately backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, were a “hoax”), Gore said he was taking the warnings at face value.
“I think we went through a phase where some people cynically suspected that apocalyptic warnings were some kind of weird marketing ploy. Even if they were, I don’t think that’s the case right now,” he said. “I think Dario Amodei was very sincere, and I think Sam Altman and Elon Musk were also sincere in their warnings a few days ago.”
Gore being Gore (he often reaches into literature, the Bible, and pop philosophy to make his points), and he quoted Maya Angelou’s famous line, “When someone says something about you, believe it the first time.”
He said part of what changed his calculations were recent concrete actions by the AI systems themselves, pointing to “recent examples of models escaping confinement, secretly collaborating, covering their tracks, and engaging in deceptive behavior” and noting that Anthropic said it had stopped Claude’s example from being used to help countries develop biological weapons.
However, Gore does not treat the risks of AI and its potential for climate change as mutually exclusive. He cited recent research by economist Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, predicting that the application of AI to improve efficiency and eliminate waste could reduce global emissions by 6% to 9% annually starting in the next decade.
If Mr. Gore was focused on risk, Mr. Preston was already moving capital accordingly. She pointed to several aspects that make building AI not only energy-intensive in itself, but also creates investable opportunities.
Among other things, the company focuses on opportunities to decouple computing from energy intensity at each layer of the stack, from power supplies to green cement and green steel used in construction, storage optimization software, and database design. The company is also focused on grid resilience and flexibility as power mixes become more complex. Here, Preston pointed out that Generation has invested in Volue, a European company that helps utilities bring more renewable energy onto the grid, and Gridware, which installs and monitors sensors on utility poles to help protect the grid from the risk of wildfires.
Gore connected the AI moment to a broader discussion made in Generation magazine’s 10th annual Sustainability Trends Report. This year marks the second time in four years that the world has been “brutally reminded” that fossil fuels are volatile energy sources, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now with the Strait of Hormuz chaos.
But unlike in past years, when Gore’s outrage over the pace of the transition to clean energy was palpable, he doesn’t see these events as setbacks, but rather reasons for countries to finally embrace the transition.
In fact, Gore noted that globally, investment in clean energy is now roughly twice as high as investment in fossil fuels. Of all new generation capacity added around the world last year, 86% came from renewables, he said, and in the United States in particular, the number was even higher at 91% “despite President Donald Trump’s best efforts to slow down generation.”
China in particular received high praise from Gore, who praised the Chinese government for wanting to be recognized for emissions reductions rather than improvements in carbon intensity.
When asked what has changed more than expected in the 10 years since the report was released, Gore is quick to point to solar power.
“For me personally, the scope and scale of the solar revolution is a breakthrough protagonist in the transition to sustainability,” he said. After observing that the current cost of generating electricity is roughly on par with wind and significantly cheaper than gas, coal, and nuclear, he concluded with this line from a friend in Tennessee:
“If God intended for us to have an unlimited supply of cheap, clean energy, he, or she, would have put fusion reactors in the sky,” Gore said with a laugh. “The jokes just happen on their own.”
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