Irish Examiner view: Our planet has already run out of road
Hurricane Melissa bearing down on Jamaica on October 28 — the latest in a long line of devastating weather events caused or exacerbated by climate change. Picture: Matias Delacroix/AP
The difference between millions and billions is sometimes difficult for the mind to comprehend. A million seconds is 11.6 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. That would put us back in 1993, when the European single market was created and Bill Clinton was inaugurated as US president. It seems like a lifetime ago, and in effect, it’s an entire generation.
A generation ago, we were warned about climate change and holes in the ozone layer, though back then — possibly in more innocent times — it was thought of as something that would happen in the long run.
Except we have run out of road already. The devastating hurricane that hit Jamaica with 200kmh winds recently is being touted as “the new reality”. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in the Caribbean, while the damage to Jamaica has been put at about $6bn.
Again, a figure that’s hard to visualise. But it’s the equivalent of about one third of the country’s GDP, the total economic activity in the country. And that’s still somewhat amorphous. So let’s do a crude comparison: Industry — including our desperately vital pharma sector — accounts for about one third of Irish GDP.
This doesn’t mean necessarily that an army of businesses has been wiped out in Jamaica (although some have), or that they can’t recover. The point is more that an economic gut punch like that from Melissa can take a long time to recover from; money can replace much, but not the time lost rebuilding shattered companies, homes, or families.
And that’s just one hurricane in one year. Analysis shows that climate change increased Melissa’s maximum wind speeds by 7% and extreme rainfall by 16%, with weather events like that hurricane now twice as likely.
How many times can a country take a hit like that? How many times could Ireland take a sustained hit to its whole industrial sector — how long could we even afford for it to be out of action once?
The sad, even depressing thing is that each year some new storm or heatwave is described as “the new reality”. And yet, while climate adaptation grants for example are available and flood defences are under construction in various parts of the country, there is still the inescapable feeling that we are behind the curve — globally as well as nationally.
Perhaps that is coloured by the anti-environmentalism, anti-science, pro-resource exploitation administration in the US and its codified view that climate change is a hoax. It’s easy to forget that China, for example, produces vast quantities of renewable energy, even generally increases in renewable energy are met with increases in demand for power to supply manufacturing and data centres.
Given that we as a species have effectively blown past the 1.5C temperature target, one wonders where we’re all going to end up.
As it is, new shipping routes have been plotted from China over the Arctic, because of a decline in sea ice — such routes would be much faster than going across the Pacific, through the Suez Canal, and across the Atlantic.
There is nothing wrong with getting goods from one destination to another as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it is worth a moment’s pause that these changes may only become a reality because of uncontrolled human consumption of, well, everything.
We have had generations to say ‘stop’, collectively. One imagines we are getting to a point where the planet may say ‘stop’, on our behalf instead.
With the explosion in data centres only exacerbating climate change, the mask seemed to slip last week when Sarah Friar, chief financial officer of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, suggested it might look for government guarantees for its debts.
That prompted a flurry of damage control by the company and attempts to explain the comments — made during an event chaired by a Wall Street Journal journalist — as a misstatement. Friar herself claimed her use of the word “backstop” had been taken out of context.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman says the company will not seek federal funding, but figures in the US administration had already come out to say it wasn’t going to happen — saying, indeed, that there were other AI companies and if one failed, the others would pick up the slack.
A sort of digital dog eat dog, as it were.
But the fact remains that the company has taken in — and blown — so much venture capital funding without significant revenue to back it that it may be running out of options.
And its debts are colossal. As it is, OpenAI has agreements to build a mind-melting €1.4trn on data centres (in seconds, 1.4trn is something like 44,364 years, which is before Neanderthals went extinct) despite only having $20bn in revenue.
Even if it hits its goal of “hundreds of billions by 2030” it still won’t bridge the gap between infrastructure investment and profit. As it is, based on Microsoft accounts (Microsoft having been a major investor), OpenAI seems to have lost over $11bn in just the first quarter of this year.
What investor would look at those figures and think: “Yes, absolutely, this is all so solid we definitely need to put more money into it?” If a mortgage applicant showed up with an income and loss like that, their application would be dismissed out of hand.
There isn’t a personal insolvency practitioner in the country who would be able to get them out of that hole (or, in commercial terms, an administrator or liquidator).
OpenAI is just one of the AI companies. Are the rest of them — and, indeed, the Big Tech firms desperately building AI infrastructure — committing similar finances, with similarly poor payback (relatively speaking)?
If that tech bubble bursts, and it seems unlikely to ever earn back the investment, what will be left standing?
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