Sustainability Community

Do we need to think about imposing Carbon Taxes on Digital Services?
First there was Bitcoin Mining and now there is AI and the digital economy all built on power hungry compute capacity. The incentive for business to find cost saving loop holes is timeless. It seems despite the effort of some high profile companies, notably those with a more consumer facing and reputation sensitive profile, to polish their "green credentials this article highlights the challenge the always on and dheer size of demand challenge digital services present.
Carbon taxes ETS, Cap and trade and CBAM target local carbon emissions or the exploitation by specific industries of locations where there is no carbon tax. Just as historic exploitation of cheap labor and lax environmental protection has always been too tempting to ignore. Be that obvious exploitation or layered in a complex supply chain.
There must now be a strong case to address the risk that digital products that are able to exploit emission pricing geographic loop holes before the carbon footprint and maybe the water footprint starts to undermine the already challenging transition to a sustainable global economy.
The FT article has a map of where the US gas fired generation boom is taking place. I suspect it is a reverse pattern of where states are taxing fossil fuel power generation.

Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green?

I'm going to barely go out on a limb to answer your question and say 'Yes'. Though to 'think about' it feels like giving companies fifteen years to discuss it in bad faith.