AI Won’t Kill Us With Robots It’ll Do It With Heat

The Machines Are Already Humming

Under the thick, swampy air of Louisiana, the future is quietly coming to life and it hums. In Richland Parish, Meta is constructing a data center so massive that Mark Zuckerberg claims it could stretch across Manhattan from Harlem to Union Square. That’s not poetic exaggeration; it’s a staggering industrial footprint. This single complex will need 2.3 gigawatts of power double what New Orleans consumes on its hottest summer day.

To keep it running, Entergy, the local utility, is building three new natural gas plants its first in decades. And that’s where the story turns dark. Every one of these plants is a 30 year commitment to burning fossil fuels in a region already drowning, literally, in the consequences of climate change.

A New Appetite for Old Energy

Across the U.S., the same pattern is playing out. AI is supposed to be the miracle technology of our time, but what it’s really doing right now is guzzling electricity. Power demand in the U.S. is rising again for the first time in more than ten years, thanks largely to data centers filled with racks of servers that must stay constantly cool.

Trump, ever nostalgic for soot, wants to bring coal back to power them. Big oil, meanwhile, is grinning ear to ear. Financial outlets like Fortune are telling investors not to abandon fossil fuel stocks because artificial intelligence that shiny, almost mythic idea will “reassess the clean energy transition.” In plain English: AI’s energy needs are reviving the fossil fuel industry we were supposed to be phasing out.

And yet, you’ll often see calming headlines assuring us that an “AI query” uses only a tiny bit of electricity. That’s like saying a single car trip doesn’t emit much while ignoring the endless traffic jam stretching behind it.

The Numbers That Lie

These reassurances usually come with an asterisk or several. They leave out AI generated videos and massive model training cycles, which are among the most energy hungry processes humans have ever devised. The Washington Post recently cited a “negligible” energy footprint for AI searches though its columnist works for a company offering “AI powered carbon assessments.” That’s like asking a tobacco company to estimate your lung capacity.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos who owns that same newspaper is knee deep in AI and data center investments. You don’t need to be cynical to see the conflict of interest; you just need to be awake.

The Sales Pitch of Salvation

Big Tech’s counterargument is always the same: yes, AI consumes a lot now, but it will eventually help us solve climate change. Somehow. It’s a promise that always sounds suspiciously like “we’ll figure it out later.”

For now, their “breakthroughs” are less about saving the world and more about generating content: CGI Marilyn Monroe on a dragon, pornographic chatbots, and algorithms that rewrite your essays so you sound slightly less human. Meanwhile, real scientists keep publishing studies showing that constant AI use is degrading our own thinking and writing skills.

So we’re burning the planet and maybe our brains for better chatbots.

An Excuse to Keep Burning

We keep hearing that we need more power to fuel the “AI revolution.” But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe AI is the perfect excuse for oil and gas companies to extend their reign a little longer.

A few years ago, it was the war in Ukraine. When Russia invaded in 2022, Europe panicked and cut off Russian gas imports. Germany, we were told, would freeze in the dark. To the rescue came the U.S., building massive LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminals along the Gulf Coast. Louisiana communities now live in their shadow, breathing toxic air so Europe can keep its lights on.

Ironically, Germany didn’t freeze and now that it’s pivoting toward renewables, those LNG terminals remain. The contracts are long term, the profits too sweet to abandon. So, conveniently, a new justification appeared: “AI needs more energy.” Problem solved for the gas companies, anyway.

A Landscape of Machines

The pattern repeats. Entergy keeps building gas plants. Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly running dozens of unpermitted turbines in Memphis. OpenAI, flush with billions, is developing “Stargate” a sprawling data center in Texas that could demand more power than the entire state of New Hampshire.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, even mused in a podcast that much of the world will eventually be “covered in data centers.” He said it like someone describing a future garden though what he’s planting will only grow heat and smog.

In this vision, fossil fuels are the silent partner. Gas is fast, reliable, and politically convenient. Solar and wind would need massive storage capacity to provide constant energy, which means batteries, space, and investment things the fossil fuel industry loves to label as “impractical.” So, once again, the path of least resistance wins.

The result: the electricity powering these AI systems is nearly 50% more carbon intensive than the national average. And once these plants are built, we’re stuck with them. They’ll run for three decades long enough for half of Miami to be underwater.

What’s Already Burning

The danger here isn’t some hypothetical future where rogue robots turn on humanity. The danger is here, now in the heat waves that kill hundreds of people every summer in the Gulf South, in homes that insurers refuse to cover, in barrier islands that have already vanished.

In Louisiana, it’s not abstract. People die of heat exhaustion. Families rebuild after one hurricane just to watch another erase their progress. Every new gas plant means another few decades of this. Another few decades of preventable suffering.

The Real Threat

The apocalypse won’t come with a robot uprising. It’ll come humming softly, wrapped in server racks and corporate PR about “innovation.” It’ll come with another power plant breaking ground, another politician cutting a ribbon, another community choking on “progress.”

Maybe that’s the great irony: AI won’t kill everyone you love because it hates you. It’ll do it because it doesn’t care. Because it runs on systems that reward convenience, speed, and short term profit and because we keep pretending that the smoke pouring from those systems is just “the cost of the future.”

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: TheNation