New Climate Study Seeks To Punish AI Companies For Their Excellence

Just when you think the climate alarm industry could not possibly get any more absurd than it has already become, they go and prove you wrong again. This week’s example of this enduring phenomenon comes from a glaring headline attached to a story from the leftwing billionaire-funded media operation, Inside Climate News: “AI Applications for Oil and Gas Companies Worsen Climate Pollution.”

This story details the findings of a study recently published in the journal Nature conducted by the Enabled Emissions Campaign (EEC), which was founded a pair of artificial intelligence developers turned climate activists. As is sadly typical of such “studies,” about 2 minutes of web searching reveals that the EEC — through its own funders at the Oil & Gas Action Network — is also funded by leftwing billionaires and their various foundations and NGOs, including Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 

Oh. How tiresome and completely unsurprising.

All that background having been stipulated, the central finding in the EEC leftwing billionaire-funded study is that “AI tools used by oil and gas companies have made production faster, cheaper and more profitable, expanding output that otherwise wouldn’t happen.” In other words, the AI tools deployed in the oil and gas industry are turning out to be highly effective at doing the jobs they are supposed to do.

So, you might ask if you possess common sense, how is this a bad thing? Naturally, it all boils down to the mania about what they deem to be too much carbon dioxide — plant food, the fundamental building block for all life forms on Planet Earth — in the atmosphere. The study says that, because these AI tools are so amazingly good at their assigned tasks, the rising oil and gas volumes they’ve helped stimulate will increase global carbon emissions by 0.47 to 1.8 gigatons every year. 

This is the sort of counterproductive navel gazing that only gets funded in societies in which people are so prosperous that they no longer have real problems to worry about. Even more tiresome is the contention from the authors that AI developers must now be held accountable for producing AI tools that are just too darn efficient at achieving their assigned tasks. This would be hilarious — or at least amusing — were it not so dangerous for the future of our society. 

The drop-dead funniest part of the Inside Climate News story comes when it quotes Will Alpine, the study’s lead author, lamenting the fact that these super-effective AI tools fail to discriminate between energy sources and thus accelerate whatever energy source they’re applied to. Alpine complains that AI “can advance renewable energy, strengthen the grid, and improve efficiency. But it has also been boosting the productivity of the fossil fuel industry for years, and our research shows that effect is asymmetric: it acts as an economic lever that reinforces the viability and dominance of fossil fuels.”

And there you have it, the fundamental bias always on display from climate alarm activists. If the playing field in the energy space remains level between energy sources, their aspirational energy transition is rendered impossible to achieve. Why? Because the weather-reliant, intermittent alternatives they’re pushing are fundamentally inferior to the fossil fuels they desire to replace. 

This simple reality driven by the laws of physics and thermodynamics gives rise to their demands that governments must throw away trillions of dollars on renewable energy subsidies, banks and investment houses must deny capital to fossil fuel companies, and now, that AI developers must be “held accountable” — i.e., punished — because the tools they market fail to also discriminate between what they view as “good” energy sources and the “bad” ones.

Any sane society which hoped to prosper and encourage human flourishing would condemn this sort of abject nonsense as a spoiled child’s view of how the world should work. But in a society driven by a religious zeal to pretend that plant food is somehow a pollutant, the nonsense is eagerly published in what once was a scholarly journal. 

Because, science, or something.

You just could never make this stuff up.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.