The Panic Industry’s New Target - WSJ
A generation coached to fear climate change is now fretting over AI and data centers.
When
Eric Schmidt, speaking last week to the University of Arizona’s
graduates, rhapsodized about the coming artificial-intelligence
revolution, some in the crowed jeered. “I know what many of you are
feeling about that,” the former Google CEO said. “I can hear you.” Mr.
Schmidt then continued with his prepared remarks: “There is a fear in
your generation that the future has already been written, that the
machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is
breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess
that you did not create.” He went on to urge graduates not to let fear
rob them of personal agency—a fine, saccharine message.
Where
does Mr. Schmidt think young people got the idea that “the climate is
breaking”? Where did the “fear” he laments come from? In part from the
scores of climate-panic groups to which the Schmidt Family Foundation’s
11th Hour Project has granted hundreds of millions of dollars over the
last 20 years. One detail particularly amuses: When 11th Hour first
appeared, in 2006, it funded screenings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient
Truth,” a documentary designed to terrorize viewers with 90 minutes of
bleak prophecies, now happily exploded. The outfit, like scores of
others founded and funded by other progressive billionaires, spends its
resources opposing fossil-based energy and trumpeting the dangers of a
warming world.
Mr.
Schmidt exemplifies the propensity among a few tech titans to pretend
they’d never urged anyone to panic about a coming climate apocalypse.
Last year Bill Gates posted an essay on his website purporting to scold
alarmists and express his own moderate view of the climate question,
namely that it is a “very important problem” but doesn’t doom
civilization. You have to wonder, then, why Mr. Gates has sent so much
of his money to Arabella Advisors. Arabella, a pass-through entity now
called Sunflower Services, funds a dizzying array of groups that exist
to alarm the public over an imminent climate apocalypse and to portray
carbon-emitting energy as an existential threat to humanity.
Messrs.
Schmidt and Gates may think they can allay the fear and despair they’ve
helped to inspire by issuing a few oracles on the unwisdom of
catastrophism. But nobody staffing the multibillion-dollar ganglion of
climate nonprofits and activist groups plans on taking a more measured
view of the coming cataclysm. The prospect of annihilation keeps the
money flowing.
Having
taught a generation of liberal-minded Americans to live in fear of
global ruin, Silicon Valley’s big shots now feel exasperation that those
same Americans think artificial intelligence menaces their families and
livelihoods.
Hence
the panic over data centers. A Gallup poll published last week
concludes that 7 in 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers
in their area. Actually Gallup asked if respondents would support or
oppose “the construction of a data center in your area to support artificial intelligence.”
Leave out AI and the results would likely run in the opposite
direction. Explain further that data centers enable cloud
computing—somewhere inside one is that season of “The Pitt” you just
watched—and attitudes may further soften.
You
would think, from some of the shoddier press coverage, that data
centers and AI arrived in tandem yesterday. In fact, modern data centers
first appeared in the 1990s, when companies learned the benefits of
fast internet connectivity and information storage. Today they support
the apps on your phone and provide backup power to hospitals and banks
during outages.
The
rise of AI technology, which requires far more energy than ordinary
computing, has occasioned data centers’ dramatic numerical growth. The
centers’ association with artificial intelligence has in turn generated
suspicion of them among ordinary Americans, who, for entirely valid
reasons, dislike the idea of college kids using chatbots to write papers
and terrorists using them to build dirty bombs. And most people feel at
least some apprehension about smartphone addiction and social media use
among the young.
But
the people showing up at county council meetings to protest the
construction of a data center didn’t for the most part come by their
convictions the old-fashioned way, by reading and thought. These
activists, many of them attached to 501(c)(3) organizations, got their
talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same
moneyed outfits the Schmidt and Gates foundations spent the last two
decades bankrolling.
Call
it the Busybody Economy. Organizations designed to worry about future
calamities can be counted on to find new calamities to worry about. Data
centers serve that purpose nicely: Like all large-scale building
projects, they ruffle local feathers; and their purpose, unlike an
airport or a shopping center, requires explanation and so lends itself
to conspiratorial Facebook posting. That several big-name progressive
nonprofits now call for a moratorium on data center construction—Bernie
Sanders’s group Our Revolution, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth,
among others—does not surprise.
Tech
billionaires—Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Steve and Connie
Ballmer come to mind—never guessed that the network of climate groups on
which they lavished their millions would eventually turn on their
industry. A truth too inconvenient to foresee.
Time to ban religion for making young people panic over hell, which is literally child abuse
If billionaires lobby about something, that means that must be wrong and propaganda. So can we finally ignore climate change hysteria?
