EAT ROCKS, MR. COMPUTER

Donald Trump’s would-be top environmental official wants to use his powers to boost artificial intelligence. Spoiler alert: That’s bad news for the climate, as Stephanie Ebbs writes.

• Why the heck is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, former GOP congressman Lee Zeldin, shouting from the rooftops about how much he loves AI? In a recent appearance on Fox News, Zeldin handed out some standard Republican talking points about slashing “left wing” regulations and establishing “energy dominance” (Note: That’s code for boosting dirty fossil fuels). But he also said something you don’t normally hear from an environmental regulator: Among his top goals will be making “the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” Uh… is that supposed to be the EPA’s job? But Zeldin’s hardly speaking off-script here. Trump made the same point when announcing Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) as his pick for Secretary of Interior, saying his administration will support “DRILL BABY DRILL” specifically to “win the battle for AI superiority.”

• There’s a direct link between AI, regulation, energy and climate. That’s because generative AI is the great gas guzzler of computing. ChatGPT needs 10 times more computing power than a regular internet search. As the industry expands dramatically, so do its energy needs. Imagine, for example, how much power your computer burns through when you use it all day. Now imagine millions of servers around the country chugging away on all those ChatGPT queries, using many times that amount to answer all kinds of questions (and to tell people, oh, I don’t know, to put glue on their pizza, or to eat one rock per day — real things that Google’s AI system recently recommended). Google’s emissions of greenhouse gasses, which are waste products responsible for climate change, have surged by almost 50 percent since 2019 largely due to the energy demand of its data centers — in spite of the company’s plan to become a “net zero” emitter by 2030. As these tools become harder to avoid, so have concerns that their insatiable demand for electricity could become a lifeline for fossil fuels.

• What else happens to your laptop? It gets hot. The same thing happens to all those computers in the data centers. The difference is, these centers have so many that they require millions of gallons of water as coolant, often from local water systems. For ChatGPT to write a single 100-word email, it gulps up more than a bottle’s worth of water. And these data centers are everywhere — even in parts of the country struggling with drought.

Read between the lines: Zeldin and Burgum are suggesting they see no problem powering the AI revolution with dirty fossil fuels.

• AI has been growing faster than clean energy or the government can keep up. The EPA regulates pollution from power plants, and Biden-era rules have required them to do a lot more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That’s made it more expensive to burn coal, which is partly why so many coal power plants have closed. But experts say Zeldin could relax environmental permitting or change the rules to make it easier for data centers to keep expanding and use fossil fuels as a cheap source of energy. At least one AI data center has already helped keep a coal power plant open that otherwise would have been shuttered.

• The emissions from burning fossil fuels are the biggest reason our climate is warming. Scientists from all over the world say the best way to combat climate change is to phase fossil fuels out as quickly as possible. But fossil fuel use worldwide continues to hit record highs and renewable energy isn’t being deployed fast enough. The new Trump administration’s explicit efforts to gut the IRA’s clean energy provisions in favor of fossil fuels could slow that down even more.

• “The last thing we should be doing is undermining new and clean sources of energy in response to the AI boom,” UCLA Environmental Law Professor Ann Carlson, a former Biden administration official, told What A Day. Carlson said we should be prepared to see the EPA try to justify weaker climate rules by arguing that AI needs the energy boost. “But the best way to address that demand is through new generation, and the cheapest new generation is renewable – wind and power,” she said.

AI could also provide fresh hope in the fight against climate change, if it speeds up research on climate solutions or tracks problems like deforestation. The question now becomes whether it will be deployed to generate smart climate answers — or be an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.

One more thing: The Associated Press interviewed a dozen Indigenous people about their thoughts on climate change and its impact on the planet. It’s worth the read.

BRO-ZONE LAYER

Conservatives, right-wingers and members of the so-called “manosphere” have been complaining for years that social media censors conservative voices. But, surprise, surprise, it turns out that idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Millions of Americans get their news from influencers on social media… who are right-leaning men, according to a study published today. In fact, men outnumber women in the news influencer space — defined as people with over 100,000 followers on major social media platforms — by a roughly 2-to-1 margin, a Pew Research Center study found. Almost half of all influencers had no clear political ideology. But 27 percent were described as right-leaning, while 21 percent were left-leaning.

In other words, contrary to the idea that conservative men are somehow stifled from getting their message out online, the reality is that both men and right-leaning news influencers have an outsized influence when you actually crunch the numbers.

“If we don’t fight for change and build systems to amplify more women and progressive voices online, we will be stuck with a media landscape that continues to exacerbate inequality and warps our political landscape for the worse,” Taylor Lorenz, author of a book about social media and online culture, wrote on her Substack.

One way to fight back: Buy InfoWars and tell Alex Jones to go kick rocks. We love you, The Onion.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

A lawyer for two adult women who testified before the House Ethics Committee told ABC News that they alleged that Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general, paid them both for sex, and that one of them witnessed Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17 years old at the time. Gaetz has denied all wrong-doing — but it’s getting tricky to even keep track of all the allegations at this point.

Trump confirmed that he plans to declare a national emergency to use the military to carry out his mass deportation plan. “TRUE!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, after the president of a conservative group posted about the president-elect’s intentions. I can’t believe this is how we’re going to learn about major policy decisions for four years.

Trump is standing by his pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, according to the New York Times, following reports that the Fox News host was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017 and entered a settlement to pay her an undisclosed amount of money (though no charges were filed). Hegseth has claimed the encounter was consensual.

Trump picked Brendan Carr, a prominent big tech critic, to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Carr has described Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft as the “censorship cartel,” a sign that he’ll go to battle against tech companies deemed too liberal. He’s also a fanboy of billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk — and wrote the Project 2025 section about the FCC. Remember when they said “Project 2025 won’t be in the Trump administration?” Well, haha, J.K. guys! Here it is.

The Kremlin accused the U.S. of adding “fuel to the fire” after the White House changed its policy, allowing Ukraine to use long-range weapons to strike inside Russia. Ukraine has long begged for the capability, but the Biden administration wouldn’t allow it over fears that it could escalate the war.

A group of senior White House staff members wrote a letter condemning the Biden administration for its policy toward the Israel-Gaza war, a last-ditch effort to pressure the U.S. to take a harder line against Israel before Trump takes office. Meanwhile, Pope Francis called for an investigation into whether Israel’s war in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide.

On a related note, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, has no experience in diplomacy and is likely to view the region’s conflicts as “one giant real estate deal,” a person in Trump’s orbit told the Wall Street Journal. Flashback to the time Jared Kushner marveled that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable …  if people would focus on building up livelihoods.” Behold, incredible statecraft.

Trump apparently forced his new national health guru, noted brain worm survivor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to pose for a picture eating McDonald’s over the weekend, in what some people online compared to a hazing ritual given RFK Jr.’s pronounced distaste for processed food. The Kennedy family scion has disparaged the fast food served by Trump’s entourage as “poison.”

The ACLU knows exactly what kind of threats we’re up against in a second Donald Trump term.

Mass deportations. Nationwide abortion bans. Unprecedented expansion of executive power and crackdowns on free speech and other First Amendment rights. Project 2025.

The ACLU is prepared for these threats. They took legal action against Trump’s administration 434 times when he was first in office, and they will do it again. The ACLU has the playbook to fight back – and win – once again.

Join the ACLU today to help protect immigrants’ rights, abortion rights, free speech and so much more in a Trump presidency.

The ACLU is built for moments like this. With your support, they will hold the Trump administration accountable and defend our most fundamental civil rights.

Join today to ensure the ACLU can put lawyers in courtrooms, advocates in front of state legislatures, and organizers in communities all over the country who will stop the Trump administration from enacting their extreme Project 2025 agenda