In AZ and likely Texas, they could be powered by clean energy. They’re not, but they could. AZ can produce an insane amount of solar, and sun farms are continuing to grow. Texas can produce a hell of a lot of wind power if they could quit arguing against themselves. AZ also has some hydro from Hoover, and a nuclear plant.

There’s just a hell of a lot more effective steps we could be doing before trying to get to these capture systems. And even if the capture works and completely offsets the carbon used to build the systems and the power used to run them and 100x more, it’ll just be used as further excuse to continue to do nothing.

How can it slow down? To get investment, every company has to at least claim to use AI. My company measures and ranks people based on their use of Gemini. It hasn’t made it into our performance reviews yet, but there is shaming for not using it. “Come on, we’re paying for it, make use of it”. I haven’t even figured out how to make good use of it in my normal routine. Which is legitimately 75% meetings. Maybe I need to send bots to meetings.