How the heck is it May already?! Good Lord, the summer is coming by quickly. Do you know what that means? Green IO is coming to town in New York from May 13th - May 14th. Basically, think of all the awesome researchers that work in the AI and environment space: Boris Gamazaychikov, Dr. Sasha Luccioni, Susannah Hill, etc. They are all going to be there in New York around that time! I will be there as well which will be exciting.

Some interesting news articles/blog posts of the week:

Ciao, 👋

Nate

The Data Center Capital: Growth, Land, and Local Consequences (AI & Environment): Julie Bolthouse, Director of Land Use at the Piedmont Environmental Council, joins In Our Backyard Podcast to discuss Virginia's rapid expansion of data centers and how these facilities are reshaping landscapes, straining resources, and raising tough questions about energy consumption, water usage, and air quality.

IEA's New Energy and AI Report: Thomas Spencer and Siddharth Singh (AI & Energy): David Sandalow speaks with Thomas Spencer and Siddharth Singh, lead authors of the IEA's updated Energy and AI report. They cover the growth in power demand for AI, the roles of natural gas, nuclear, and batteries in data centers, the impact of AI clusters on electric grids, and emerging physical AI applications like robots and autonomous vehicles.

Big Tech's Climate Blind Spot: How AI Supercharging Fossil Fuel Production w/ Holly Alpine (AI & Environment): In this episode of Tangelic Talks, co-hosts Victoria Cornelio and Andres Tamez sit down with Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions campaign and former Microsoft sustainability leader, who left Big Tech to expose how advanced AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more fossil fuels at a scale that dwarfs everything the sustainability side is doing.

Strategic Polysemy in AI Discourse: A Philosophical Analysis of Language, Hype, and Power (AI & Policy/ESG): This paper examines the strategic use of language in contemporary AI discourse, focusing on the widespread adoption of metaphorical or colloquial terms like "hallucination," "chain-of-thought," "introspection," "language model," "alignment," and "agent."

Counting Own Goals: High-Level Assessment of the Economic Relationship Between the ICT and the Oil and Gas Sectors and Its Environmental Implications (AI & Environment): Using economic data from 2000–2022, the authors find that approximately 2% of annual ICT financial flows were directed toward Oil & Gas, with more than $4 going to O&G for every $1 the ICT sector sent to renewable and nuclear energy in 2022.

Global Data–Water Symbiosis Reduces AI Infrastructure's Carbon and Water Footprint (AI & Water Resources): The authors construct a global geodatabase of over 4,775 data centres and 57,547 municipal wastewater treatment plants across 98 countries to quantify the benefits of combining treated water reuse with bidirectional thermal recovery for AI infrastructure cooling.

Nuclear Energy Fuels AI Boom in SEA Data Centers: Strategic Market Report & Industry Playbook (AI & Energy): An analysis of how Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) can address Southeast Asia's growing energy crisis in data center infrastructure, covering country-specific nuclear strategies across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The Future of Climate Tech 2026 (AI & Sustainability): SVB's annual analysis of the climate tech industry tracking VC investment trends, federal policy headwinds, electrification demand, and the profitability pivot reshaping the sector.

State of the Fossil-Free Internet 2026: The Dirty Data Centre Edition (AI & Sustainability): The inaugural annual report mapping the obstacles to a fossil-free internet by 2030, with focus on the rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, the concentration of corporate power (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control 58% of hyperscale capacity), and three pathways to decarbonization.

Cutting Waste with AI: Forecasting, Planning and the Cost of Inefficiency (AI & Multiple Applications): On Decision Loop, Christine Babington sits down with Svante Göthe, Head of Sustainability at RELEX Solutions, to get into the mechanics of waste reduction — what it actually covers, why it keeps sliding down the priority list, and what it takes to fix it at scale.

Building a French Data Center Company (AI & Digital & Cloud Sustainability): DCD's Seb Moss speaks with Arnaud de Bermingham of OpCore about geopolitical shifts driving European data sovereignty demand and AI reshaping data center power density requirements.

Build Flexible and Secure Power Infrastructure for a Sustainable Future at Scale (AI & Energy): NVIDIA's lightning talk on enabling the entire power ecosystem from chip to grid — using AI for energy demand forecasting, digital technologies inside data centers to manage peak loads, and accelerated computing to simulate the grid.

EARTH AI (AI & Environment): A high-performance explorer for clean energy metals using AI to accelerate critical mineral discovery. Location: North America.

NextEra Energy, Inc. (AI & Energy): One of the largest electric power and energy infrastructure companies in North America and a leading provider of electricity to American homes and businesses. Location: North America.

Back Market (AI & Circular Economy): Founded in 2014, Back Market is a global marketplace for premium refurbished electronics, working to make refurbished tech trustworthy, reliable, and affordable. Location: Europe.

MyCapitol (AI & Policy): A nonprofit AI-powered platform providing free access to U.S. congressional policy intelligence — bill tracking, representative information, and lobbying disclosures — with plain-language summaries, semantic search, and an AI chatbot ("Ask Billie") for legislative queries. Price: FREE.

CompassionBench (AI & Biodiversity/Ecology): A public AI compassion leaderboard that benchmarks how well frontier large language models reason about animal welfare. Built by Compassion in Machine Learning to help advocates choose better tools and to push AI companies toward considering animal compassion in model development. Price: FREE.

Earth Index (AI & Geospatial Analysis): An AI-powered satellite imagery search platform built by Earth Genome that lets environmental defenders apply labels to train models that detect features anywhere on the planet — illegal mining, large-scale livestock facilities, deforestation, waste sites, and other ecosystem disturbances — in minutes rather than months. Price: Freemium.

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Thanks for reading the 39th issue of The Climate Code! It means a lot to me and we have more coming in the future, so definitely stick around! 💚

Nate

P.S.

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