On: Why AI’s environmental footprint won’t disappear into orbit

July 18, 2026.

The notion of launching our computational engines into the void, as if to exile the physical consequences of our own ingenuity, strikes me as the perfect, pathetic emblem of our age. We have built a new kind of dynamo, one that consumes not coal, but attention, data, and the very stability of the climate it was born into. And now, finding its earthly footprint too inconvenient, we propose to shoot its furnaces into orbit. It is a solution conceived for a problem of physics by a mind trained entirely in metaphor - the metaphor of limitless space, of an escape velocity that applies to moral and material accounting alike.

The hidden costs, of course, are not merely those of rocket fuel and radiation shielding. They are the costs of a persistent, wilful blindness. Every institution of governance, every framework of environmental stewardship, was calibrated for an industrial tempo of smokestacks and tailings ponds. They move in legislative sessions and regulatory cycles. The AI dynamo accelerates on a curve that renders those cycles geological in their slowness. The gap is not a technical oversight; it is the defining chasm of our time. We are attempting to govern a thermonuclear reaction with the bylaws of a village water board.

So we look to the heavens. It is the same impulse that built the cathedrals - an aspiration to transcend earthly limitation. But the Virgin offered a unity of purpose; her spire pointed toward a collective ideal. This silicon spire points only toward a dispersal of responsibility, a literal outsourcing of entropy. They will call it progress. I call it the most expensive confession of failure yet devised: that our creations have grown too potent for their cradle, and we would rather fling them into the dark than learn to live with them here.