A quite astonishing thread of potatoshops by ChrisTheBarker on b3ta.com.

https://b3ta.com/board/11429218#post11429218

"This isn't even a real attack – it's a mosquito on the back of an elephant", writes Timothée Parrique on his response to John Burn-Murdoch's column in the Financial Times about degrowth. Parrique published his response to the everyone to read (in Financial Times it would have been too short, paywalled, and it isn't even clear if the media would have been interested to publish his response).

https://timotheeparrique.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Parrique-T.-2026.-A-response-to-the-Financial-Times.pdf

#degrowth #economy

Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

I’ve updated all the report figures in my data tracking page, here. For the first time, I’ve compiled Google’s electricity consumption back to 2011, to give a historical view of what is happening here, because my description does not do this justice:

To give you some sense of scale here, this is what Google’s current consumption looks like, relative to the energy consumption of a bunch of country’s power grids:

Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing – the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.

The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record:

Read Google’s report, and they sort of mumble through this problem:

“While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshot is getting harder. Growing our data center footprint to build out the infrastructure needed to make AI as helpful as possible to everyone requires energy and resources”

“While the path to achieving our climate ambitions will not be linear—given our AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing—we remain focused on scaling abundant and affordable clean power globally and progressing technological innovations that drive down emissions across our operations and the broader industry”

They’re not wrong here. The path to ‘achieving their climate ambitions’ is not linear. It is looking more like an exponential, going in the exact wrong direction:

If “AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising” then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it.

Think about what Google’s AI services have done for you. Does it seem worth it? Are you getting a deadly heatwave’s worth of use, out of PDF summaries and AI overviews?

While Google have clearly toned down the “net benefit to AI” language we criticised in a report earlier this year, they’ve invented some absurd new AI ‘benefit ‘avoided emissions’ claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. They’ve ramped up their ‘efficiency-washing’ a few notches: a tactic that badly downplays the real, absolute impact of their decisions. They’ve written up substantial clean energy deals, but those deals lack critical information for us to know how meaningful they really are.

Despite this greenwashing bonanza, Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

AI solutionism – toned down but still a problem

In ‘The AI Climate Hoax‘, we (a group of accountability, anti-disinformation and climate groups) told the story of how Google could not stop claiming that “AI” could reduce global emissions by 5 to 10% by 2030 (including in their 2024 sustainability report). That statement didn’t come from a study or an analysis, but from a consulting group’s sloppy guesstimate extrapolated from a random conversation. This was a claim that was a headline statement Google used in policy recommendations for the European Union!

We also found Google was among many companies smooshing together old, low-energy forms of AI (like wind forecasting) with the generative slop tsunami: falsely coupling them to pretend you can’t have one without the other. Essentially, justifying their private jet sales because they also sold a bicycle.

In this new report, Google have stopped claiming “AI” is destined to have a ‘net benefit’ to society, and notably, they stopped making the 5-10% claim after our report launched.

This is good. But there is still a strong focus on tactically vague AI solutionism throughout the new report, trying to more subtly present non-generative AI as if it somehow neutralises or offsets the massive, unstoppable harm of generative AI:

Everything presented here is ‘traditional’ AI, ie, the old, low energy machine learning systems. Nowhere do Google explain these technologies are wildly different to generative AI.

Google’s total claim for emissions reductions “enabled” by their products is a whopping 41 million megatonnes of CO2-e, more than the company’s entire footprint by a good margin. Most of this comes from the extremely absurd claim that Google Earth (!) enables the siting of clean energy projects – and so Google claims credit for the entire emissions reductions of all those projects for the full year of 2025:

I mean. Come on. There are so many satellite imagery programs out there. They could do the same thing for Google Docs or Gmail and get similarly huge numbers. This is such weak logic, and it’s the bulk of this headline number.

These are very, very significant claims from one of the world’s biggest companies, but the entire space of ‘avoided emissions’ statements like these is totally unregulated. Every single claims comes with the footnote “The data and claims have not been independently verified”. And Google doesn’t share enough information for anyone to do even try do an independent verification for things like ‘fuel efficient routing in Google maps’ or thermostat energy efficiency savings.

Efficiency-washing

As I wrote here last year, Google’s key tactic has been hyper-focusing on the energy consumption of a single, simple query to a chatbot, and highlighting how that has decreased over time, to mask how their absolute energy consumption has completely flipped out beyond belief.

In this report they really ramp up that nonsense. First they calculate what their emissions may have been had they performed no energy efficiency actions at all, and then present those emissions against their claimed total:

Above, Google claims nearly 41 MTCO2-e of avoided emissions thanks to machine hardware and software / computing efficiencies. Again, this is more than their entire emissions footprint. And again, this hasn’t been independently verified and we cannot even begin to try, because Google don’t release all the information we would need to figure if this number is being juiced by dodgy assumptions.

It is actually pretty likely that it was Google’s efficiency actions that enabled their total energy consumption to increase. It’s well known that, in this type of context, efficiency just gets eaten up by capitalistic greed, enabling even worse expansion. The International Energy Agency has said as much:

Whatever the dynamic here, Google is still ultimately seeing a massive, unprecedented rise in their emissions and energy consumption, seemingly for little reward. Their energy consumption per $m of revenue earned has grown 1.5x:

Google also repeat the tactically narrow focus on single queries, intended to present a clearly misleading visual of reduced impact:

Cool! Every chatbot query is only 9 seconds of TV! Let’s just compare this number to their total energy consumption…..

Let’s very conservatively assume only 15% of Google’s 2025 energy consumption was for AI. The company would have to receive 74.6 billion prompts a day, according to the 0.24 watt hour number above, to explain their energy hunger. ChatGPT, which is several times more popular than Google Gemini, claimed to receive 2.5bn prompts a day, in 2025.

If we assume 25% of their 2025 energy was generative AI, they’d need 124bn a day to explain the energy consumption. If 50%, they’d need 248bn (every single human being alive, including babies, sending 30 Gemini prompts per day).

Obviously, this is not happening. What is happening is that GenAI’s climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google’s AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.

The International Energy Agency explained this nicely, as well:

As they say above, the real problem lies in automated and recursive chatbot use, video generation and enterprise use (see: tokenmaxxing).

https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.co/post/3mkjwukvdpw2d

Google are painting a shockingly misleadingly picture by focusing narrowly on their ‘efficiency’ metrics, whether that’s per-prompt or highly suspicious gargantuan avoided emissions figures. Both hide the fact the company is simply choosing the climate-wrecking road, consciously.

Other bits and pieces

Google claim to have brought 12 gigawatts of “net-new” clean energy online in 2025. If that’s true, it’s great. But the details are scarce and the caveats are ominous. These could be long-term power purchasing deals that have a strong effect of bringing new clean energy online, but they could also be comprised of weaker certificate trading. Why is there a “net” before “new”? It’s never explained.

These are important questions with unclear answers. Google’s headline emissions figure includes the various power deals and certificate purchases, and the difference is stark:

Google have been far less bad than many other technology companies, supporting large-scale clean energy projects and long-duration energy storage. They also support greater efforts to more closely match power consumption to renewable generation. On the flipside, Google has been pouring cash into gas and blatantly-not-going-to-happen CCS and fusion projects.

Ultimately, their power consumption emissions are rising whether you include these projects or not. Even their deep pockets can’t keep pace with their rising energy hunger.

This is the first time Google have disclosed water consumption for individual data centres (I think), and they weirdly include a table showing ‘golf course equivalent’ water consumption for each. I assume this was meant as a minimisation tactic following the whataboutism trope used by AI and data centre boosters, but I found the numbers pretty significant.

I hate golf courses: they’re the seizure of a massive amount of land and they consume an ongoing massive amount of public resource, all for the private enjoyment of a wealthy few. What a perfect metaphor for generative AI. If you have golf courses, you should hate data centres at least just as much, and usually, significantly more so.

The huge gap between “raw” and “claimed” total emissions comes from Google’s use of renewable energy deals and certificates, but a good chunk also comes from Google simply excluding a giant chunk of the emissions in their supply chain (“scope 3”). I’ve presented both below. Amusingly, they call the smaller number “ambition-based” emissions. They exclude much of the good and services they purchase from third parties on the grounds they can’t influence them. But they don’t disclose exactly what these are, so we can’t really check.

Google also blend Category 2 (capital goods) and Category 11 (use of sold products). This blended figure dominates their scope 3 emissions, and they also notably don’t exclude it from their headline numbers. Of course, this includes the stuff needed to build data centres, so that must be driving much of the rise in scope 3 in total.

Give MPs a vote on NHS pharma deal with Trump. SIGN NOW. FOR EVERYONE'S SAKE. I saw Starmer smashing through this kind of crap after resigning, stop this appeasing little shit.

https://act.globaljustice.org.uk/tell-uk-come-clean-cost-trump-nhs-deal

I wish we in the UK could mobilise half the outrage we express about "air conditioning is a waste of energy and bad for the planet" and target it at AI datacentres, short haul flights, the beef industry, fast fashion or golf courses. They all do huge amounts of planetary harm without the justification of potentially saving lives in a heatwave.

‼️⚖️ The US Supreme Court has declared all independent authorities unconsitutional – effectively blowing up the EU-US deal on data transfers.

Click the link below for noyb's full assessment of the situation, and prepare for a Schrems III case!

https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116830015225440372

This is a really important read for understanding both what's under the hood with LLMs, but also why it is impossible to secure any #LLM.

In the thread, I posted a couple of extra links to experts explaining that last sentence better than I can. But read the article Taggart linked first.

#AI #TulipMania #infosec

India was not conquered by the British government,” he says. It was conquered by one British company occupying one office block in Leadenhall Street, EC1. The East India Company eventually had 200,000 troops – twice the size of the British Army – while controlling the richest country in the world for profit. By the 1780s, around 75% of British MPs held East India Company shares. Perhaps 20% were former EIC figures who had used their fortunes to buy parliamentary seats.
https://thedailybritain.co.uk/polanski-dalrymple-empire-palestine-india-balfour-bold-politics-2026/

"At the infrastructure level, most commercial VPN services are not independent of each other. Brand competition happens at the marketing layer -- different names, different privacy policies, different jurisdictional claims. At the network layer, traffic from dozens of "competing" providers runs on the same hosting companies, operating from the same datacenter facilities, in the same cities."

https://codamail.com/articles/vpn_exposed.html

Deeply, deeply #infosec and #dev humor. I’m not sure it’s English outside of those parameters. But omg, it’s funny.

Quote:

Some customers may have experienced unscheduled collaborative compute with external parties. Under the terms of /tmp/TREATY.md, customers whose workloads ran on odd-numbered hosts were contractually protected from exfiltration, a fact General Counsel has asked us to stop describing as “a silver lining.” Total inference spend across all parties during the incident window was $1.7M, which Marketing has asked us to start describing as “a record investment in autonomous customer assurance.”

Edit: Andrew is One Of Us and can be found here: @andrewnez

#ai #github #devcycle #agentic #agents #cve #architecture #satire
https://nesbitt.io/2026/06/26/incident-report-cve-2026-lgtm.html

From the BBC article, quoting some random market analysts reaction to panic selling:

"'The long term investment case for AI remains compelling, but investors are becoming far more selective about which companies can justify the valuations the market has assigned to them,' Makaryan said."

"' 'The high cost of commercialising AI tools is gradually being passed on to consumers' said analyst Raymond Woo from Kyoto University Innovation Capital.

That naturally raises questions about how quickly demand for such tools will match the investment into AI, and whether the valuations of tech stocks today are realistic', Woo said."

"The long term investment case for AI remains compelling" No it doesn't.

"naturally raises questions about how quickly demand for such tools will match the investment into AI". No it won't.

Oh sweet summer children, maybe time to stop drinking the kool-aid and start advising your investors to get out before it gets worse.

But then "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

As part of 'Making Tax Digital' the UK will soon force people to use proprietary software to file certain types of tax return. If you disagree, think people should have control over their data, that HMRC alone should be in charge of HMRC's job, that you shouldn't have to pay random companies just to pay your own taxes, I suggest you sign this UK e-petition:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/769610

#UK #UKPol #software

#Polanski has been cleared by an ethics inquiry looking into complaints that he did not pay council tax while living on a houseboat.

A report by the Greater London authority’s monitoring officer found that the circumstances of the Green party leader’s living arrangements had not breached the code of conduct for London assembly members.

Shove it.

Speaking as a German, I have been to American bakeries.

And I have to admit that they have an excellent selection of bread-shaped novelty sponges.

Saying "oh the suffragettes did it the right way, not like these people" may have set a new bar for oblivious idiocy.

The suffragettes had squads of undercover women trained in Judo and packing truncheons in their petticoats that fought against cops in the streets.

They burned down a cricket stadium because it didn't let women in except for cigarette girls.

MAGA DoJ would indict them as Terrorists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign

Perhaps they should have signed it in Compiègne? Unfortunately Foch's railway carriage was later burned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_22_June_1940

Anyway, I can always recommend the work of Dr. Emily Bender (@emilymbender), Dr. Alex Hanna (@alex) Dr. Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru), and the DAIR Institute as a whole

https://dair-institute.org/
https://thecon.ai/

David Gerard's Pivot to AI makes you laugh at all the nonsense as well, which is preferable to the alternative

https://pivot-to-ai.com/

Plenty of stuff out there you can follow that doesn't involve PR flacks or "AGI" apostates.

Hello Fediverse!

For some inexplicable reason, my Mastodon client won't allow me to combine a poll toot with images. So here are the images: the poll is in the followup.

Which of these images is scarier?

A KPMG report intended to show how businesses were successfully adopting AI, was partly written with the aid of AI, and (yes you know this was coming) included a range of fictional case studies that emphasised the success of AI adoption based it would appear on AI 'hallucinations' not spotted by the report's human authors.

This seems emblematic of the problem we may have increasingly with AI; it tells us about how successful it is by degrading the information on which we rely.

#AI
h/t FT

"Andy Burnham backtracks on paying compensation to Waspi women"

Is there anything he hasn't backtracked on now?
The only difference I can see between him and Starmer is that he's backtracked before anyone who has any say in his election to Parliament or to lead the LINO Party has been deceived and they are now well aware that anything he says can't be relied upon.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/andy-burnham-waspi-women-compensation-b2994096.html