On: AI Could Help Fossil Fuel Companies Create More Emissions
The headline should not have surprised me. Not because the fact is new - it is only new to those who still believe in the neutrality of technology - but because the admission itself is an admission of defeat. The fossil fuel industry does not need to be dragged into the future; it is already there, and AI is its obedient engineer, not its master. The machines do not act; they are acted upon. The cui bono is clear: the shareholders, the executives, the politicians who still believe in a future where oil and gas are not just energy but civilization itself.
What is being sold as efficiency is a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic - except the Titanic is still moving, and the orchestra is playing a waltz composed by the same engineers who once promised us clean coal. The 5 percent increase is not an accident; it is the logical endpoint of a system that treats nature as a variable to be optimized rather than a limit to be respected. The irony is delicious only to those who do not understand that irony is a luxury of the powerless. The powerful do not need irony; they need compliance, and AI delivers it in real time.
The real scandal is not the emissions. It is the way this news is framed as a revelation, as if anyone who has spent a decade watching the slow-motion coup of Silicon Valley technocrats did not already know that every tool they build is first and foremost a tool for capital accumulation. The fossil fuel industry does not resist AI; it adopts it eagerly because AI does not threaten its existence - it perfects it. The transition is not from fossil fuels to renewables; it is from fossil fuels to fossil fuels 2.0, where the drills are smarter, the pipelines leak less, and the shareholders sleep easier.
The consent for this was manufactured long ago. The idea that technology is neutral is the most effective lie of our time, because it allows the ruling class to present their interests as the interests of progress itself. The organic intellectuals of Silicon Valley do not wear top hats and monocles; they wear hoodies and quote Nietzsche. But their function is the same: to make the unacceptable feel inevitable. The war of position is already won. The battlefield is not the street; it is the algorithm, the dashboard, the dashboard of the self-driving car that will one day decide who lives and who dies in the name of efficiency. The old is dying, yes - but the new is not a revolution. It is a refinement.