Researchers, engineers and politicians convened to discuss the global need for energy and the intersections with climate change and artificial intelligence (AI) at a March 19 panel.
The Free Speech Project, a Georgetown University initiative which aims to foster dialogue and civic engagement, and the Future of the Humanities Project, a collaboration between Georgetown and the University of Oxford which examines intersections between public life and humanities, co-hosted the panel. The event included four panelists who had different specialties in energy policy.
Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank, said climate change discourse is more nuanced than it appears online.
“What people should understand is that the discussion among experts is much more rich and nuanced than what you’ll get if you go out on Twitter or even in the mainstream media, where things tend to collapse into good guys and bad guys,” Pielke said at the event.
Tina Fawcett, the acting energy program lead at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, a research institute exploring climate change solutions through educational partnerships, said balancing the interests of various stakeholders is a complex task.
“There are three typical things people think about in energy policy: energy security, energy access and economics and environmental sustainability, and they’re often called the trilemma — how do you meet these three goals at the same time?” Fawcett said at the event.
In particular, Fawcett identified the strategy of some climate advocates to disrupt the construction of fossil fuel pipelines that has resulted in legal charges, sparking controversy around the role of free speech in environmental protection efforts.
Pielke said that although he appreciates climate advocates for speaking out, he believes blocking fossil fuel pipelines is not the most effective strategy for solving climate change.
“If the United States shuts down its fossil fuel production, it’ll go to the Middle East; it’ll go to Russia; it’ll go to other places around the world because, given a choice, people will want energy rather than not have energy, and they’ll want cheaper energy rather than expensive energy,” Pielke said. “So the route to as quickly as possible moving off of fossil fuels is to develop alternatives that can replace them at lower costs at same or better reliability and not sourced from volatile places around the world.”
Fawcett said cost considerations incentivize companies to prioritize earnings over environmental protection, citing as an example BP, a British multinational oil and gas company. BP announced Feb. 24 it would abandon its renewable energy goals and return its focus to fossil fuels.
Fawcett said emerging private actors, rather than existing fossil fuel companies, may be pivotal in the renewable energy transition.
“They were branding themselves as Beyond Petroleum and they were investing in renewables and so on, but they’ve obviously decided that’s not their core business, which is a real shame,” Fawcett said. “But maybe what that tells us is that the private sector that’s going to lead us toward the renewable energy transition is not the incumbent oil and gas businesses, because some of their assets are going to have to stay in the ground.”
Keith Amey, a former engineer and energy expert at the British nuclear decommissioning site Sellafield Limited, said the public and private sectors should work together to improve the energy supply system to increase public access to electricity.
“The energy supply system in certain places definitely needs beefing up,” Amey said. “On the west coast in Cumbria, we’ve got loads of wind turbines all working beautifully, and quite often we can’t use the power they’re producing because the transmission lines south are just not large enough to take the capacity.”
The increasing use of AI has also raised questions about its ability to accelerate — or potentially mitigate — the impacts of climate change, according to the panelists. By 2027, the AI sector is expected to consume 85 to 134 terawatt hours each year, equivalent to the annual energy demand of the Netherlands.
David Jones, a former Conservative Party member of Parliament for Clwyd West, United Kingdom, said AI can help to find more efficient ways to meet energy demands.“It does seem to me that there are going to be huge demands for energy from AI,” Jones said. “But AI could be put to work to try to find solutions to the problems of energy demands. Algorithms improving energy efficiency could be developed by AI probably far more quickly than they could by humans.”
Fawcett said there is still more work needed to solve the urgent issue of climate change despite improvements.
“There’s lots of good stories to tell, and that’s a source of optimism because we can always find good examples in some places,” Fawcett said. “But overall, as a world, we’re not changing fast enough.”
