Big Tech's AI Climate Claims Called Greenwashing as Evidence Falls Short

Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn't Offer Much Proof

A few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between five and 10 percent by 2030. This claim was spread in an op-ed coauthored by its chief sustainability officer, and subsequently quoted across the press and in some academic papers. Joshi, an energy researcher, was shocked by the massive numbers Google was touting -- especially AI's purported ability to effectively cut the equivalent of what the European Union emits each year. "I found [the emissions claim] really compelling because there's very few things that can do that," he says. He decided to track down its source. That five to 10 percent number, Joshi found, was drawn from a paper published by Google and BCG, a consulting group, which in turn drew from a 2021 analysis by BCG, which simply cited the company's "experience with clients" as a basis for estimating massive emissions reductions from AI -- a source Joshi called "flimsy." The analysis was published a year before the introduction of ChatGPT kicked off a race to build out the energy-intensive infrastructure that, tech companies claim, is needed to power the AI revolution. A few months after it first stood behind the five to 10 percent estimate, in its 2023 sustainability report, Google quietly admitted that the AI buildout was significantly driving up its corporate emissions. Yet it has continued to tout the numbers provided to it from BCG, most recently last year in a memo to European policymakers. One of the most powerful tech companies in the world using this metric to make "policy recommendations to one of the biggest regions in the world -- I thought that was remarkable," says Joshi. "That instance was what got me immediately very interested in the structure of this claim and the evidence behind it." "We stand by our methodology, which is grounded in the best available science," Google spokesperson Mara Harris told WIRED in an email in response to several questions about the five to 10 percent statistic. "And we're transparent in sharing the principles and methodology that guide it." Harris included a link to the company's methodology on calculating emissions reductions from Google products and partnerships, but did not elaborate on how, exactly, the company applied these standards to the BCG numbers. (BCG did not respond to WIRED's questions.) Tech companies are locked in a battle to develop AI as fast as possible -- one with potentially massive implications for climate change. In the US, the world's biggest data center market, energy pressure from this buildout has resulted in coal plants staying open and hundreds of gigawatts of new gas power in line to be added to the grid, with nearly 100 gigawatts of that power earmarked solely to power data centers. Tech executives have said over and over again that this energy and data center buildout will be worth it, given the possibilities that AI presents for the planet. At New York City's annual Climate Week event last year, the Bezos Earth Fund, Jeff Bezos's sustainability focused nonprofit, hosted a series of conversations on how "AI will be an environmental force for good." In late 2024, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that since the world wouldn't hit its climate goals, it's more important to focus on what AI can do. ("I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem, than constraining it and having the problem," he said.) OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has promised that AI will "fix" the climate.

Study questions claims AI will solve the climate crisis

From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy. It has been a common refrain of late that, as the tech industry's single-minded focus hones in on AI, abandoning climate pledges in the process and embracing quick-to-build fossil fuel power plants to drive its datacenters, the AI being spun up in new mega facilities would simply solve the problem for them. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has pushed that line of reasoning, as has Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, both arguing that AI's long-term climate benefits could outweigh, or help offset, the emissions associated with the growing power demands of datacenters. Others, including the International Energy Agency, claim to have support for the same. With funding from climate action groups, energy analyst Ketan Joshi, however, is suggesting that AI firms and research from groups that support their plans, like the IEA, aren't just wrong, but may be intentionally greenwashing the problem. Joshi's report was published this week and funded by groups including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Climate Action Against Disinformation, and Friends of the Earth U.S. He reached two central conclusions after looking at 154 claims of AI climate benefits arising from eight sources (including the IEA, climate researchers, Microsoft, Google, and others). First off, there's a serious problem with the conflation of traditional AI, like predictive models and computer vision, with generative AI tools that chat, create images, and make music. "This analysis found that the overwhelming majority of AI climate benefit claims relate to 'traditional' forms of AI rather than generative AI," Joshi wrote in the report. Across the eight sources and 154 claims examined as part of the research, only four of them in any way related to generative AI systems and their potential to help the environment. In the other 150 cases, the language used in the data pointed to the deployment of traditional AI models as a potential source of climate solutions. "At no point did this search or analysis uncover examples where consumer generative systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot led to a verifiable and substantial level of emissions reductions," Joshi wrote. "However, much of the projected energy consumption of AI will stem specifically from 'generative AI,' rather than more traditional forms of machine learning." By generalizing their use of AI, companies claiming their systems would benefit the world they're polluting are pulling the wool over people's eyes, the report concludes, citing the coupling of traditional and generative AI in this context to be "illogical" and "false." "The benefits and harms exist in discrete technological domains; rendering the core 'net climate benefit' defence of AI growth utterly implausible," the report concluded. Along with conflating the potential climate benefits of using traditional AI with the far more energy-intensive and frequent deployments of generative AI datacenters, the report concludes that most of the evidence that even traditional AI would help with the climate crisis lacks support. Of the 154 climate benefit claims that were examined in the study, only 26 percent cited published academic papers, and 36 percent lacked any citations for their claims at all. The remaining papers that included citations largely relied on corporate publications (29 percent), while the rest cited media reports, NGOs, institutions, and unpublished research papers. Unsurprisingly, those corporate sources mostly "did not include any primary assessable evidence or peer-reviewed and published academic work to support their claims," Joshi found. All the while, the sources reviewed for the report (all of which are linked in the report for those curious) paint a picture of a future in which AI will solve the climate problems it is exacerbating. "Even the narrower, older forms of AI may be seeing an exaggeration and overstatement of their climate benefits, considering the lack of strong, peer-reviewed and verifiable evidence of their deployment in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the real world," Joshi noted. "The narrative of a gigatonne-scale shift in global emissions that 'offsets' the harm of generative AI is not supported by the results of this analysis." If it's not claims that AI datacenters are going to be powered by next-gen nuclear followed immediately by admissions that all that current buildout is simply being powered by fossil fuels, it's just another form of greenwashing from the AI industry, it seems. Joshi told The Register in an email that he was motivated to undertake this research after hearing Google persistently claim that its AI deployments would reduce emissions by 5 to 10 percent based on what he characterized as "mind-bogglingly weak evidence" that he considers "one of the worst greenwashing claims I've seen in a while." As to what could be done to combat such widespread misinformation about the climate effects/benefits of AI, Joshi suggested those fighting to force honesty on the AI industry need to play the waiting game, to a degree. "The entire software class is leveraged on hype rather than effectiveness or usefulness and is arguably doomed either way," Joshi told us, echoing claims that AI is a bubble likely to burst at any time. "There is widespread public skepticism for what all of this is actually for, skepticism of the tech industry and bipartisan hostility towards destructive data centre developments," Joshi added. "I would not underestimate how much public opinion is stacked on the side of us climate advocates and analysts." Joshi said that the job of climate advocates in the current moment is to ensure that there's as little fossil fuel infrastructure built, and locked in to produce years of emissions, as possible. He's not advocating action out of far left field, either: A growing number of US states are trying to pass moratoriums on new datacenter projects as activist demands pile up at the state and federal level. Elon Musk's xAI, which has earned public ire and a lawsuit over gas turbines being used to power a massive AI datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee, is now being looked at by state regulators unhappy with the situation. In short, even with the AI industry claiming it's helping to solve a climate crisis of its own exacerbation, public opinion may be starting to turn. We reached out to the IEA, Microsoft, and Google for comment on this story given how heavily they were featured in the report. The IEA didn't respond, Microsoft had no comment, and Google stood by its claims. "We stand by our methodology, which is grounded in the best available science. And we are transparent in sharing the principles and methodology that guide it," The Chocolate Factory told us. ®

Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing

Industry using 'diversionary' tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing". He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." Most of the claims that were scrutinised came from an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, which was reviewed by leading tech companies, and corporate reports from Google and Microsoft. The IEA report - which devoted two chapters to the potential climate benefits of traditional AI - had a roughly even split between claims that rested on academic publications, corporate websites and those that had no evidence, according to the analysis. For Google and Microsoft, most claims lacked evidence. The analysis, released during the AI Impact Summit in Delhi this week, argues the tech industry has misleadingly presented climate solutions and carbon pollution as a package deal by "muddling" types of AI. Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform and community, who was not involved in the report, said it added nuance to a debate that often lumped very different applications together. "When we talk about AI that's relatively bad for the planet, it's mostly generative AI and large language models," said Luccioni, who has pushed the industry to be more transparent about its carbon footprint. "When we talk about AI that's 'good' for the planet, it's often predictive models, extractive models, or old-school AI models." Green claims even for traditional AI tended to rely on weak forms of evidence that had not been independently verified, the analysis found. Only 26% of the green claims that were studied cited published academic research, while 36% did not cite evidence at all. One of the earliest examples identified in the report was a widespread claim that AI could help mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The figure, which Google repeated as recently as April last year, came from a report it commissioned from BCG, a consulting firm, which cited a blogpost it wrote in 2021 that attributed the figure to its "experience with clients". Datacentres consume just 1% of the world's electricity but their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. The IEA predicts they will account for at least 20% of the rich world's growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade. While the energy consumption of a simple text query to a large language model such as ChatGPT may be as little as running a lightbulb for a minute, partial industry disclosures suggest, it rises considerably for complex functions such as video generation and deep research, and has troubled some energy researchers with the speed and scale of its growth. A spokesperson for Google said: "Our estimated emissions reductions are based on a robust substantiation process grounded in the best available science, and we have transparently shared the principles and methodology that guide it." Microsoft declined to comment, while the IEA did not respond to requests for comment. Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality". "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacentre expansion," he said.

AI greenwashing: Big Tech's AI climate promises fall flat, study finds

Only 26 percent of climate-related AI claims cite any academic papers, while 36 percent didn't cite any evidence at all, according to German non-profit Beyond Fossil Fuels. A new report is casting serious doubt over claims from some artificial intelligence (AI) companies that their products can meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. Estimates of AI's climate impact vary widely. A January study published in the journal Patterns found that data centres alone may have emitted between 32.6 million and 79.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025, which is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of a small European country. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has suggested that AI could reduce global emissions by up to 5 per cent by 2035 by speeding up energy sector innovations, potentially offsetting the emissions generated by data centres. For example, the IEA said AI could help scientists test materials and battery chemistries to support new solar power technology. Beyond Fossil Fuels, a German non-profit, examined over 150 climate-related claims from the world's biggest AI companies and organisations like the IEA to see what type of evidence supports the claims that AI could cut emissions. Only 26 percent of their sample cited published academic papers to support their claim, and another 36 percent did not cite any evidence. The remainder leaned on corporate reports, media articles, NGO publications or unpublished academic work. The analysis notes that corporate sources rarely include peer-reviewed evidence or primary data to substantiate their claims. "The evidence for massive climate benefits of AI is weak, whilst the evidence of substantial harm is strong," the report notes. For example, Google claimed AI could cut 5 to 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 if the technology scales. Researchers traced this claim to a 2021 blog post from consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which extrapolated that figure from their experience with clients. The analysis describes the Google claim as "extrapolation of massive global climate benefits ... on seemingly anecdotal evidence". Many AI companies argue that smaller, narrowly trained models, such as those trained on a single high-quality database, are better for the environment. Yet, the researchers caution that the claims about narrow AI models could be overstated because there is a lack of peer-reviewed evidence that shows that these models can meaningfully reduce emissions. The analysis also did not find a single example where generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot led to a "material, verifiable and substantial level of emissions reductions." "Even if these benefits are real, they are unrelated to - and dwarfed by - the massive expansion of energy use from the generative AI industry," the press release added. The authors note that the results do not mean AI technologies do not have any climate benefits, but say there is little evidence that AI reduces emissions enough to offset the energy it will take to run these systems. Euronews Next contacted OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the IEA for statements on how they cite climate-related estimates.

Big Tech companies say AI will help solve climate change. Environmental groups call that 'greenwashing'

As Big Tech faces criticism for the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, companies have said the technology will actually help solve climate change. But those claims often lack scientific evidence, a new report finds. And when touting the climate benefits of AI, tech companies conflate "traditional AI" with the more environmentally harmful generative AI, a form of "bait-and-switch" that amounts to greenwashing. The report, commissioned by a group of environmental organizations including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, and Stand.earth, analyzed 154 statements from tech companies, including those from Google and Microsoft, which purported that AI will have a "net climate benefit." Most of those comments relate to "traditional" AI, the analysis found, which has a smaller environmental footprint than the generative AI tools that are spurring a boom in data centers.