State Power, Corporate Power Or ‘Little Powers’?
As I write, New Zealand is also facing the biggest sucker of electrical energy ever created – digital data storage and delivery. This was bad enough when it was being sent directly to electricity-powered digital ‘appliances’ (phones, personal and commercial computers, screens of all kinds),9) but in 2023 a new and extremely energy-intensive function was introduced – machine learning, commonly known as AI. It is extremely difficult to get accurate data on the contribution of different industries to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as each one has an obvious interest in disguising how big their contribution is.