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Tuesday, 2 June 2026

Climate Coach: What your ChatGPT habit is doing to the planet

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Climate Coach
Down-to-earth advice for life on our changing planet.

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome. I’ve been busy reporting on the future of electric vehicles, but I’ll be back with a new column next week.

In the meantime, here’s one I wrote last year about how ChatGPT guzzles energy — but not from answering simple questions.

See you soon,

Michael

As researchers scrutinize Big Tech’s utility bills, artificial intelligence has earned a reputation as a thirsty, energy-hungry beast. A single Q&A session with a large language model (LLM) can consume more than a half-liter of fresh water to cool servers, by one estimation. Asking ChatGPT one question reportedly consumes 10 times as much electricity as a conventional Google search. And generating an image is equivalent to charging a smartphone.

But should we worry about it?

Five years ago, there was a similar panic over streaming video. A frenzy followed a French think tank’s estimates that streaming a half-hour Netflix show generated as much CO2 as driving almost four miles. Globally, this implied, the streaming giant was consuming enough electricity annually to power Britain in service of shows like “Tiger King.”

But it turned out that those estimates relied on faulty assumptions about the energy use of data centers and streaming video. The actual emissions, former International Energy Agency analyst George Kamiya calculated, were 25 to 53 times lower. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.)

As AI commandeers more of our digital lives, it’s worth asking again: Is this technology as voracious as we fear? If so, what can we do about it?

So I teamed up with decarbonization analytics company Planet FWD. We analyzed the emissions associated with our digital lives, and what role AI is playing as we pelt it with questions billions of times per day.

Individuals asking LLMs questions, our data suggests, are not the problem. Text responses don’t consume much energy. But AI’s integration into almost everything from customer service calls to algorithmic “bosses” to warfare is fueling enormous demand. Despite dramatic efficiency improvements, pouring those gains back into bigger, hungrier models powered by fossil fuels will create the energy monster we imagine.

Here’s what AI means for the emissions generated by our digital lives.

How has AI changed your life? Write me at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.

Click here to read the column

From The Post:

A deadly heat wave hits Europe, and decades-old temperature records fall

An owl trapped in concrete got a painstaking feather transplant — then flew off

Don’t grill meat to a char and 5 other ways to have a safer summer

From elsewhere:

The fight to protect pollinators and people from the ‘pesticides that are everywhere’ (Grist)

Thanks to two new laws, more Virginians can save with community solar (Canary Media)

Jeff Bezos’ $10-billion climate pledge is falling dangerously behind (Los Angeles Times)
(Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post)

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday.

See you June 9,

Michael Coren, Climate Coach

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