The Invisible Trillion · The Other Ledger

The Environment (Yes, Really)

Here is the item that surprises people.

The biggest single reason we know climate change is happening is that we have been monitoring the Earth, continuously and in detail, from satellites, for fifty years. The satellites have chips in them. The data comes back to ground stations that have chips in them. The data is processed in data centers that have chips in them. The climate models that interpret the data run in data centers on GPUs.

Every major climate insight of the last fifty years — the rising global temperature, the melting Arctic ice, the accelerating sea level rise, the Amazon deforestation rates, the ocean circulation changes — came out of this infrastructure. The scientific case for climate change, which is what led to every policy response and every activist movement about it, exists because the computational infrastructure exists to gather and process the data.

If you are a 14-year-old who is worried about climate change, you are worried about it in significant part because chips and data centers are telling us, moment by moment, what the atmosphere and the oceans and the forests are doing. Take those chips away and you don’t have a calmer, cleaner planet. You have the same planet, doing the same bad things, and almost no one knows.

This is worth sitting with, because a lot of environmental discourse has a weird implicit assumption that if we could somehow roll back industrial technology, we would be fine. We would not be fine. We would just be in the same trouble with less information about it.

There is more. The integration of wind and solar into the electrical grid — which is the actual mechanism by which the world’s electricity is getting cleaner — is only possible because of chip-dependent grid management. Wind and solar are variable. A grid running on wind and solar has to balance supply and demand, second by second, across hundreds of different sources, billions of different loads, and thousands of miles of transmission lines. This is impossible by hand. It requires continuous computation. Every renewable-heavy grid in the world — Denmark, the UK, California, Texas — runs on chip-based grid management software that didn’t exist thirty years ago.

Precision agriculture, which reduces fertilizer and water use in farming by a significant fraction, depends on chips (in soil sensors, GPS systems, automated irrigation controllers). Satellite monitoring of illegal deforestation and overfishing, which is one of the only ways we enforce environmental law across borders, depends on chips. Modeling the climate impact of different policy choices — which is how we figure out what to do — depends on enormous data-center simulations running on GPUs.

The infrastructure the book has been criticizing is, at the same time, the infrastructure making environmental policy possible. This is genuinely the case. It deserves to be stated clearly, even in a book that takes the environmental costs seriously.

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