Digital Economy and the Environment
Digital technologies and digitalization hold great potential to benefit or damage the environment. They are seen both as a major threat — responsible for significant and growing emissions because of their energy use — and as a critical enabler of emissions reductions across the economy. The lecture series examines these dual dimensions of the digital economy, exploring environmental impacts of the digital economy, how the methods of industrial ecology can contribute to the assessment of the likely impacts, and how digital technologies can enhance industrial ecology research.
This lecture series is supported by the Joel Omura Kurihara Fund, an endowment created in memory of Joel Kurihara, YSE ‘92 .
Lectures are open to the public and the Yale Community and most are virtual via Zoom. To sign up for announcements of future lectures, send an email to: gentry.higgins@yale.edu.
Jon Koomey
Is Data Center/AI Electricity Use Driving Up U.S. Electricity Demand?
October 25
Electricity demand from increasing in development and sue of AI and various forms of digitization has become a focus of public concern and debate. Jon Koomey (researcher, author, lecturer and entrepreneurer) will bring empirical data to bear on the question of whether widely cited increases in data center demand, particularly for artificial intelligence/machine learning applications, has been driving up electricity demand in the US. He will review the evidence for demand growth at the state and national levels and discuss the factors that are likely to shape that demand in the future.
Slides are available to view here. Recording is available here.
Franco Donati
A Perspective on Data and Digital Systems Integration for Circular Integration for Circular Economy Assessment
November 14
Franco Donati, a leader in the application of artificial intelligence to life cycle assessment, will speak to circular economy interventions for assessment and monitoring of data and the integration of digital technologies across numerous fields. Donati will present a perspective on potential methods and digital infrastructure integrations from fieldwork to artificial intelligence, and their relationship with core industrial ecology methods. The aim is to stimulate dialogue on how to further promote assessment and monitoring of resource use through digital technologies as we work toward an environmentally friendly circular economy.
Lorenz Hilty
On Not Re-inventing the Wheel: An Overview of Research on the Relationship Between Digital Technologies and the Environment
January 24
While analysis of the opportunities and risks of digital technologies for the environment may seem novel to some, this topic has been researched and assessed for decades, under labels such as ‘ICT for Sustainability’, ‘Environmental Informatics’, ‘Green IT/ICT’, in the context of Technology Assessment (TA) studies, and, more recently, the “digital economy and the environment.” In this talk, Lorenz Hilty, a leader in this field, will provide an overview of the development of this application-oriented research and structure it along the main research questions.
Slides are available to view here. References from the talk are available here.
Angel Hsu
Red Flags in Green Promises: Can LLMs detect Greenwashing in Corporate Climate Claims?
February 7
The surge in net-zero commitments among businesses since the Paris Agreement’s adoption in 2015 has been met by growing skepticism about the integrity and credibility of these corporate climate actions. By September 2024, over 1,145 of the largest publicly-listed companies had established their own voluntary net-zero targets. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have become pivotal in information discovery and provision, raising significant concerns about their ability to deliver accurate and unbiased information. In this presentation, Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Environment at the UNC Chapel Hill Angel Hsu will explore the development of climate-specific LLMs and assess their effectiveness in providing reliable information on the climate actions of corporations and other entities. Given the potential for LLMs to propagate greenwashing due to their indiscriminate data sourcing, Angel Hsu will introduce a tailored framework designed to specifically assess the integrity of corporate net-zero commitments. This framework scrutinizes potential greenwashing indicators such as the specificity of target definitions, the strategic use of carbon offsets, lobbying activities, and actual emissions reduction performance. The ongoing research aims to integrate this framework into an LLM to enhance the evaluation of greenwashing risks associated with both corporate and governmental climate claims.
Angel Hsu is Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Environment at the UNC Chapel Hill and Yale PhD ‘13. Her work explores the intersection of science and policy and the use of data-driven approaches to understand environmental sustainability.
Shaolei Ren
Health-Informed AI: Quantifying and Minimizing the Public Health Impact of Artificial Intelligence
February 21
The rapid growth of AI has spurred an expansion of energy-intensive data centers, contributing to environmental challenges such as rising carbon emissions and water consumption. While the environmental footprint of AI has garnered significant attention, the public health impact has remained hidden and largely unaddressed. Specifically, the maintenance of diesel backup generators and reliance on power grids to operate AI data centers lead to air quality degradation.
In this talk, Prof. Shaolei Ren, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, will introduce a methodology to model pollutant emissions across the AI lifecycle and quantify their public health impacts. Findings indicate that the total public health cost of U.S. AI data centers in 2028 is projected to surpass $20 billion, rivaling that of California’s on-road emissions. He will present Health-Informed AI, a framework that explicitly incorporates the public health impact as a critical metric in the design and deployment of AI to promote cleaner air and healthier communities.
Tamar Makov
When Consumption Goes Digital
March 27
Digitalization is transforming the way we consume, creating new opportunities for “green” shifts, including green nudges, buying 2nd hand, or participating in the sharing economy. At the same time, concerns are mounting that greater convenience, cost savings, and near-instant availability may actually fuel overall consumption exacerbating environmental burdens. In this talk, Prof. Tamar Makov will present an overview of current research on the environmental implications of digitally mediated consumption. Drawing on recent work on the sharing economy and eCommerce returns, Prof. Makov will emphasize the importance of data-driven evidence and the critical need to study the environmental impacts of the massive digital consumption shift at the system rather than single unit level.
Prof. Tamar Makov is the head of the Circular Economy lab and a faculty member at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change at Ben Gurion University.
Lauren Bridges
Digital Prospecting: Land Use Politics and the Expansion of Digital Infrastructures
March 28
This talk will examine the local politics of digital infrastructure expansion and the growing entanglement between land prospecting and digital growth speculation. Drawing from fieldwork in Northern Virginia and Southern California, Prof. Lauren Bridges will explore how digital industrialists like Amazon exploit local land use policies to facilitate rapid development of warehouses and data centers. These facilities, essential for Amazon’s data-intensive operations, have profound impacts on local communities, reshaping land, labor, and environmental dynamics. Through in-depth case studies in Southern Inland California and Northern Virginia—regions where Amazon’s aggressive expansion has transformed landscapes—Prof. Bridges will illustrate how digital prospecting operates through local land use decisions. As the world’s largest cloud provider and online retailer, Amazon serves as a pivotal example to investigate how industrial data infrastructures mediate spatial, social, and environmental relations. By examining the political, ecological, and social consequences of these developments, this talk will shed light on the hidden costs of digital growth and the contested politics of land in the digital economy.
Costa Samaras
Projecting Energy Use and Climate Impacts from Artificial Intelligence
April 10
The use of artificial intelligence enables both opportunities and risks for the energy system and for broader climate mitigation and climate resilience efforts. The rapid evolution of AI capabilities and the corresponding growth in electricity demand, requires robust public policy to ensure electricity for communities is clean, affordable, reliable, and equitable. In addition, a systems understanding of how AI and emerging technologies affect broader energy use and greenhouse gas emissions across society is essential for decision-makers to be able to protect the public, advance innovation, maximize the benefits, and minimize the risks.
Using empirically collected power data from H100 DGX server nodes during AI model training, Prof. Costa Samaras presented a statistical model that predicts AI energy use in data centers. He described policy options for reinvestment in the power sector—a Grid New Deal—to ensure AI energy use and electrification is good for communities. He outlined the pathways for AI energy use and climate impacts beyond data centers and discussed policy pathways that enable climate safe futures under deep uncertainty.
Dr. Samaras is the Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, and the Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He analyzes how technologies and policies affect energy and emissions pathways, security, climate resilience, and economic and equity outcomes. From 2021-2024, he served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Principal Assistant Director for Energy, OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy, and then OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition.