I'm writing this article about AI cooking the planet…on a Mac that probably murdered three dolphins in production. Over wifi that's burning coal somewhere in West Virginia. Getting responses from Claude that are honestly better than 90% of humans I've worked with.

We're all hypocrites here.

I spent 2022 helping Shell and NVIDIA sell their "sustainable" data center cooling. Literal fossil fuel juice to cool computers. Now I'm exposing the whole racket while simultaneously being neck-deep in the very tech I'm criticizing.

At least I'm honest about it.

Shell and NVIDIA aren't the villains here. They're the dealers, and we're the junkies lined up around the block at 3 AM asking if ChatGPT thinks our ex still loves us.

Every time you ask AI whether a hot dog is a sandwich instead of using your own brain, you're voting for this future. Nobody's forcing you. You LOVE this shit.

This conversation right now is probably burning enough electricity to power a Guatemalan village for a week.

And I'm having the time of my life.

Remember when AI was supposed to cure cancer and solve climate change? Instead, here's what we got:

Sales bots that spam you at scale. "Hi [NAME], I noticed you breathe oxygen. Our solutions can optimize your respiratory experience!" Congratulations, we've automated harassment. Every LinkedIn message now sounds like it was written by a robot pretending to have read your profile while having a stroke.

A calculator that's only 85% accurate. AI is like having a math tutor who's usually right but occasionally insists that 2+2=fish. Sure, it seems amazing until you realize you're fact-checking everything because it confidently makes shit up. I'm not going back to an abacus for accounting, but trusting AI with anything important is like trusting a compulsive liar who's really good at sounding confident.

Gibberish disguised as writing. Half the internet is now AI-generated word salad that sounds profound until you actually read it. "Synergistic paradigm shifts leveraging holistic methodologies." That's not writing, that's what happens when you feed a thesaurus meth.

Industrial-scale plagiarism. But hey, at least the plagiarism is efficient now.

The tech bros promised us digital salvation. What we got was a really expensive way to annoy people faster while stealing their work more efficiently.

Back in 2022, I helped craft that Shell/NVIDIA white paper. Here's what I learned crawling through their data:

The Hardware Reality:

Shell's DLC Fluid S3, made from natural gas because irony is dead, makes these things 27% more efficient.

That's like switching to filtered cigarettes while chain-smoking three packs a day.

The Consumption Explosion:

Every ChatGPT query burns 10x the energy of a regular search. We're literally setting the atmosphere on fire so robots can write worse poetry than your drunk uncle.

While we're torching the planet, we're also running history's greatest IP heist.

OpenAI is worth $157 billion. The average author makes $20,000 a year. Do the math.

You spent 3 years painstakingly writing your book and some Stanford dropout just fed it to an AI that'll shit out knockoffs faster than Shein dupes Balenciaga.

Anthropic settled their lawsuit with a check and a wink. The message is "yeah we stole, but we're rich now, so... deal with it."

And we all keep using it anyway.

Data centers don't pop up in Palo Alto. They’re built where land is cheap and people can't afford lawyers.

Microsoft's Netherlands facility uses 84 million liters of water annually. That's drinking water for 1,700 humans, all so hedge funds can ask AI about crypto futures.

The communities getting fucked are the same ones that always do. Except now it's algorithmic.

Shell's cooling tech is legitimately more efficient. So what? When demand increases 1000%, a 27% improvement is a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

Every tech company claims “carbon neutrality” through creative accounting. That's like me claiming I'm a vegetarian because I ate a salad before my steak.

The emissions still happen and the planet still fries. Physics doesn't negotiate.

We're not going backwards.

We're not giving up AI any more than we gave up cars when we learned about emissions.

The solution isn't better cooling or greener energy. It's being honest about what we're doing and making conscious choices about what's worth burning the planet for.

AI writing your emails? Probably not worth it. AI discovering new antibiotics? Maybe worth considering. AI helping you cheat on homework? Definitely not fucking worth it.

For Tech Workers: Stop building features nobody asked for. That AI chatbot replacing human customer service? Push back. Demand real consumption and impact data, not percentages. Got internal reports showing the truth? The world needs to see them. I'm not saying how. I'm just saying.

For Everyone: Every query is a vote. Support human creators instead of feeding the theft machine. Vote for people who understand that "innovation" shouldn't mean "incineration."

For Companies: You want to keep making billions without being the assholes who cooked the planet? You need people who understand both the addiction and the cure. People who've been in the rooms, know the physics, know the PR, and aren't afraid to tell you the truth.

We built this mess together. We can fix it together. But it requires something Silicon Valley hates: honesty.

The companies powering this revolution have a choice. Keep pretending everything's fine while the planet burns, or work with people who understand that sustainability isn't about looking good, it's about survival.

I've been on both sides. I wrote the greenwashing. I know where the bodies are buried. And I know how to build something that actually works without killing us all.

The path forward exists. It requires admitting we're all hypocrites, accepting the physics we can't change, and making hard choices about what's actually worth the cost.

Shell, NVIDIA, OpenAI, you know how to reach me. Let's stop pretending and start fixing.

We're all going to hell together. Might as well figure out how to install air conditioning on the way down.

Share this with that friend who thinks AI is saving the world. Send it to your company's sustainability team. Hell, send it to Shell and NVIDIA. Let's have the conversation they're paying millions to avoid.

Receipts matter when you're calling out billion-dollar bullshit