Sounds Behind the Climate Silence
Forget what you don’t hear. The impact of climate chaos is being felt everywhere, from energy demand to Trump’s foreign policy.
AI is driving huge increases in energy demand everywhere, while climate change is being ignored by everybody. Or that’s how it feels some days. But that’s not how it actually is out in the big, wide world — or even in Trump’s America.
Behind the surface silence, an increasingly chaotic climate is not only driving the transition to renewables and electrification that we all know about. Heat and other extreme weather are, ironically, the largest factor behind recent growth in energy use — bigger than artificial intelligence (AI) and regular data-processing centers combined. And the climate’s ongoing remake of global land- and seascapes is an underlying assumption behind many of President Donald Trump’s most radical foreign policy goals, including making Canada a US state and Greenland a US territory.
The impacts of climate chaos may be perverse in some ways, but they are enormous.
Heat Effects
Electricity consumption grew at an unexpectedly brisk 2.2% clip last year, but the increase wasn’t needed to power huge banks of supercomputers running large-language models, as AI enthusiasts often claim. The biggest single factor behind that rise was greater reliance on air conditioning in the face of yet-another year of record-breaking heat and other “extreme weather.”
“Global energy demand was impacted by extreme temperatures in 2024 — the warmest year recorded,” the Paris-based agency reports in its , which despite the name is an analysis of 2024 data and developments. Global cooling degree days were 6% higher in 2024 than in 2023, and 20% higher than the long-term average between 2000 and 2020, the IEA found. “Degree days” is a widely used method of calculating how much heating or cooling is needed. China, India, and the United States were particularly affected by what would once have been abnormally hot weather.
“In all, we estimate that weather effects contributed about 15% of the overall increase in global energy demand,” the agency added. “We estimate that temperature effects contributed around 20% to the increase in electricity and natural gas demand and drove the entire increase in coal demand. For CO2 emissions, weather effects contributed around half of the 2024 increase.”
Storm Damage
Intense storms and radical swings between drought and flood-threatening downpours are among the “weather effects” other than straight heat that alter fuel use. Although precipitation impacts are mainly limited to specific fuels, and don’t change overall energy demand much, the shift in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be big. Looking back to 2023 and earlier, the biggest effects from precipitation swings have been on the level of hydropower output and were due mainly to drought, but also occasionally to flooding.
In early 2023, Asia, Europe and North America were all hit with big drops in hydropower output. Natural gas- or coal-fired power plants were used more heavily to generate electricity to compensate. In market terms, the biggest result was to stretch out the massive runup in natural gas prices in Europe and Asia that started just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and was most evident in liquefied natural gas (LNG), where the US is a big seller. So the US benefited. Europe was the main loser. You could think of it as price gouging, but that’s how capitalism works.
Asia was especially hard-hit by hydropower losses. China’s hydro production fell by more than 7% in the first quarter of 2023. At one point it was reported to be down by more than 20%. Since hydropower is typically listed as a carbon-free renewable, this obscured the decarbonizing effects of the country’s rapid buildout of solar and wind energy. Policymakers in the US and Europe only sat up and took notice in 2024 of just how rapidly China was installing solar, wind, and storage capacity.
But neither China nor other Asian nations were hurt financially by the sustained inflation in natgas prices. They turned to coal to avoid the exorbitant rates US LNG exporters charged. Chinese buyers even turned around some of the LNG cargoes they had agreed to buy and resold them to Europe at enormous profits. That’s how capitalism works even for self-styled Communists.
The other big loser from the hydro shortage was the factor the caused the low water levels in the first place: the climate. This is yet another source of reinforcement for the feedback loop that is keeping GHG emissions on the rise and ensuring even more disruptive climate shifts in the future.
AI Exaggerations
But what about all the talk of huge jumps in energy needs to run AI processing centers? AI was the darling of the stock market last year, and it may yet turn out to be important to the functioning of the economy of the future. But as recent for the likes of Nvidia and Alphabet (Google) suggest, the technology and its energy needs are still in a state of extreme flux.
The conflicting assumptions driving the “AI frenzy” among the big US and European oil, gas, and electricity companies are that AI will spread with lightning speed and that it will remain as energy voracious — and therefore expensive — as it is at this early stage of development.
That never made economic sense, and the emergence early this year from China of the highly efficient DeepSeek chatbot provided a timely reminder of the huge potential for greater efficiency in AI’s computing and energy needs. By early March, that OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta were all turning to the “distillation” process used in DeepSeek’s open-source products to create their own more efficient and cheaper AI models. As the trade war builds, DeepSeek and other Chinese AI developers are reportedly turning to Chinese chips instead of continuing to rely on Nvidia — Chinese chips that are likely to be more energy efficient than the Western version.
Meanwhile, evidence of double, triple-, and even quadruple-counting of US datacenter projects is turning up in the energy trade press, with one senior US natural gas executive quoted as estimating that only 10% of announced UA data-center projects will actually be built. The “cloud” capacity purveyors that are building such general and specifically AI-oriented data-centers as do go up rarely elect to build big units in Europe or Canada because of their tougher data-protection laws. So it’s not much of an energy issue outside the US and, to a lesser degree, China.
Geopolitical Aberrations
Geopolitics are no more immune to the impacts of climate instability and warming than energy markets are. You can call Donald Trump many things, most of them bad. But climate denier is no longer one of them. He has no interest in mitigating climate change, but he knows full well it’s there.
Like recent joint Russian and Chinese military exercises in the Asian Arctic, Trump’s drive to dominate the northern reaches of North America and adjacent Atlantic territory makes sense only in the context of rapidly melting ice covers. Less ice opens the prospect of year-round Arctic Ocean commercial transport, easier access to mineral and other manufacturing-related resources in these northern climes, and a crucial front in the developing “Great Game” with Russia and China, which has been declared a “near-Arctic” power.
Icebreakers to keep northern shipping routes open for even longer, even sooner in the global warming process, reportedly top Trump’s wishlist from the new shipyards he wants to build in the US. Greenland and Canada between them could supply many of the rare Earth and more plentiful minerals the US would need to meet Trump’s core goal of reindustrialization — without the immigration issues raised by closer US economic integration with Latin American countries.
“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world,” a recent gathering of oil and gas executives in Houston, adding that “responses to climate change would bring their own set of tradeoffs.” The tradeoffs Wright enumerates are between the “endless sacrifices” imposed by ” quasi-religious” climate policies and the huge amounts of fossil fuel and other energy required to allow the 7 billion people who don’t have “fancy clothes,” motorized transport, and the ability to “fly across the world to attend conferences” to live as the top 1 billion people do.
Try to push aside concerns over the disruptive and even deadly effects of drought, floods, storms, and wildfires today. Over sinking cities. Over the potential for worse tomorrow. If you do that, another case could be made by US officials for encouraging increased rather than declining fossil fuel production in the US: China, along with South and Southeast Asia, are at a competitive disadvantage, in that they are more dependent economically and in every other way on the ice that covers the upper Himalayas than the US is on climate-endangered features of the American landscape. And as climate change worsens, they won’t get a new Northwest Passage.
One thing is clear amid all the craziness: Whether they talk about it much or not, nobody in business, government, or the general public can afford to ignore the climate crisis, as they confront the multiple crises that define our age. Silence on the subject shouldn’t be mistaken for ignorance or denial.
