Essay by Eric Worrall

What happened to the Net Zero Banking Alliance again?

Amazon partnered with Dominion Energy to build solar farms in Virginia to power its cloud-computing service. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Companies will still face pressure to manage for climate change, even as government rolls back US climate policy

Published: April 11, 2025 10.44pm AEST

Ethan I. Thorpe Fellow at Private Climate Governance Lab, Vanderbilt University
Michael Vandenbergh Professor of Law and Co-Director, Energy, Environment and Land Use Program, Vanderbilt University
Zdravka Tzankova Associate Professor of the Practice in Climate & Environmental Studies, Vanderbilt University

As the federal government moves to eliminate U.S. climate rules, companies still face pressure to be better stewards of the planet from their customers, investors, employees, local communities, lenders, insurers, global trading partners and many states.

Each of those groups knows it will face increasing costs from rising temperaturesand extreme weather if corporations don’t rein in their greenhouse gas emissions.

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Companies have also helped drive the expansion of renewable energy, motivated by the competitive economics of renewables and business opportunities. Facebook’s parent company Meta and Google invested nearly $2 billion in projects to provide renewable energy in the Tennessee Valley Authority service area, even though no government required them to do so. And major companies continued signing renewable energy power purchase agreements in 2025.

Microsoft and Amazon are responding to massive new power demand by trying to locate data centers near existing nuclear power plants for cleaner energy supplies.

…Read more: 

https://theconversation.com/companies-will-still-face-pressure-to-manage-for-climate-change-even-as-government-rolls-back-us-climate-policy-251580

I love that they picked Facebook / Meta as an example. While companies like Facebook are investing in renewables, or at least announcing such investments, this isn’t the full story.

Facebook Commissions a 2GW Fossil Fuel Powered Data Center

That “massive new power demand” is the push for artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence requires crazy amounts of energy because it essentially works by trial and error. AI systems compute and discard trillions, possibly quintillions of possible solutions to a problem before finding a solution which works. If the problem is complex, and has to be solved quickly, for example if the AI is powering a game character in a realtime 3D game, you need acres of computers drawing gigawatts of power to fuel the required computations.

But AI works – since shortly after 2020, all those billion dollar investments started delivering impressive results.

Renewables aren’t reliable enough and are too expensive to provide the kind of power AI requires. Remember these guys are competing head to head with Chinese companies which in some cases are paying less than $0.01 / kWh for reliable coal power. The need for cheap energy to keep up with Chinese AI is what cancelled corporate America’s commitment to climate action.

2025: The Year of the Gigawatt AI Project

The climate movement is on its death bed. Greens claiming companies will stick to their commitments despite relaxation of rules in my mind are just like those foolish Eastern block communist leaders who thought they still commanded the support of the people, despite decades of communist tyranny. Anyone who continues to entertain such delusions is about to have a hard encounter with reality.

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The following article delves into why AI requires so much energy, and contains a real AI which you can run in your web browser.

Artificial Intelligence: A Working Demonstration, and Why Big Tech Ditched Big Green