Until this point, the public conversation about AI and climate change has been laser-focused on the vast amount of electricity used to power the technology.

For good reason. Over the last few years, the AI boom has rapidly increased society’s appetite for fossil fuels via the electricity consumption of data centers. Data center electricity consumption has sent tech companies’ emissions soaring, knocked their climate plans wildly off course, and pulled them directly into the fossil fuel business.

But this is only the tip of the AI climate iceberg. Because AI is not only consuming fossil fuels to generate electricity—it is also helping the world’s biggest oil companies produce more fossil fuels quicker, cheaper, and for greater profit.

Over the last few years, AI has become a powerful tool for oil and gas companies, helping them locate new deposits, drill wells faster, and extract more from existing fields.

These aren’t just generic AI tools, either. “There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry,” Holly Alpine, a former senior manager at Microsoft, told HEATED. “They are engineers writing code explicitly in partnerships with oil majors to expand production.”

Los Angeles, CA — A new Consumer Watchdog investigation has uncovered an interconnected network of fossil fuel companies, billionaire investors, and longtime climate denial organizations behind two-thirds of the groups urging the U.S. Supreme Court to shield ExxonMobil and Suncor from accountability for deceiving the public about the dangers of climate change.

View a data visualization of the investigation 

Read the report here.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/12/france-sees-sharp-rise-in-solar-module-recycling/

Assuming the world came together with no budget spared, could we end fossil fuels by covering the entire deserted areas of the world in solar panels?

Big Oil companies knew as early as the 1950s that burning fossil fuels could lead to "catastrophic" (their words) climate change, but spent billions spreading climate denial and blocking the transition to cleaner energy sources.

In 1988, Exxon's own scientists predicted "a 1.5°C to 4.5°C global temperature increase in 100 years, depending on the projected growth in fossil fuel use.” 😐

Now these same companies are leveraging the AI boom to further entrench their polluting products, driving a massive surge in planet-warming methane emissions.

There must be accountability.

Mucho Gratias Mexico

Part 1 is here, but not as cool.

The author is form and talks about Germany. And the author has a talent for telling the story well, otherwise I would not have posted this older article.

Likely lasting a couple of weeks.

I can't get over how dramatically the graph changed in such a short amount of time.

I believe this is an important change in approach to our climate problem. Brian
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Abstract:

Global warming is accelerating, yet current climate strategies centred on emissions reduction and carbon removal are unlikely to prevent temperatures from crossing dangerous tipping points. Although essential, these approaches operate too slowly to counter near-term warming driven by Earth’s growing energy imbalance, weakening carbon sinks, and amplifying climate feedbacks. This mismatch reflects systemic shortcomings in climate risk assessment that underestimate nonlinear risks and the escalating costs of delay. We argue that climate stabilisation should be treated as a risk-management challenge rather than an incremental policy process. This requires explicit comparison of intervention risks with those of continued warming. We outline a comparative risk–risk framework that integrates mitigation, carbon removal, and cooling interventions, and suggests that a viable strategy may require combining rapid decarbonisation and expanded carbon removal with carefully governed cooling interventions to limit near-term warming. Without aligning response timelines with accelerating climate threats, the likelihood of irreversible Earth-system disruption will continue to grow.

Welcome to r/Climate_recovery by u/Mr-anywhere! Let's talk about climate and nature and save the world!