Joel Tatlow, MBA Candidate at Smith School of Business, Queen’s University Canada, takes a deep dive beyond the environmental impact of AI carbon emissions to provide a blueprint to how it can essentially benefit long-term sustainability efforts for society and planet.

Looking Beyond the Energy Cost: The Green Future of AI by Joel Tatlow, Runner Up in the 2025 CoBS CSR Article Competition.

“Can you rewrite this email so that it sounds more professional?” you ask in the prompt box, as the cacophony of a chainsaw ripping through a lush giant sequoia tree fills your imagination. The feeling of environmental guilt is all too familiar for professionals, politicians, and citizens using generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work lives. Dramatic headlines like AI Is Pushing Us Toward an Energy Crisis and AI Is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change. abound across news publications.

A recent study shows that energy efficiency is among the top concerns of citizens when it comes to the governance of artificial intelligence (König et al 2023). In the political sphere, the potential adverse effect of AI on the global power grid was one of the principal subjects of this year’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit (International Energy Agency 2025).

But is the adverse environmental impact of these tools the whole sustainability story that AI has to tell? Is our focus on the high resource consumption of AI myopic? Can artificial intelligence generate a net benefit to environmental sustainability in the long-term? While AI does have an environmental cost, it also holds significant potential to create a more sustainable future—an opportunity that is often overlooked in public discourse. Instead of focusing solely on its energy consumption, we must also consider how AI can actively contribute to greener, more efficient systems in the long-run.

AI: A nebulous threat

The true environmental cost of artificial intelligence is difficult to quantify. Preliminary estimates from experts claim that using a large language model (a specific type of generative A.I.) for one day is equivalent to driving an average gas-powered car for 79 kilometers straight (Luccioni et al 2023). Other estimates pin the energy consumption of an AI query at four to five times that of a conventional web search (Crawford 2024). These resources are spent retrieving large amounts of data from memory and putting it into computation to solve a query (Bourzac 2024).

However, these calculations are obfuscated by a key challenge common to the study of information technologies: The underlying data are not known with precision. AI generation is a complex, multi-step process that involves several inter-dependent resource-consuming processes. The detailed information about each of these steps is often the confidential property of private companies in a highly-competitive industry. Any published energy expenditures of artificial intelligence models (including those referenced in this article) are based on tests run at one point in time, under certain conditions, in a lab setting-Hardly reflective or replicable to real world use. The uncertainty that these studies have generated, however, has not prevented public narratives from crystallizing around the notion of AI as an unequivocal environmental threat.

Reactionary Discourse: A growing media and political narrative

Despite these uncertainties, the idea that AI is wholly unsustainable has gained traction, influencing both public opinion and policy decisions. Helene Duchene, France’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, wrote in a recent op. ed. that AI was on an “untenable path in terms of energy use” (Singh 2024). Across the pond, the editorial board of the Scientific American suggested that our fate as a species may come to an end due to an “AI-enabled barbecue that chars the world” (2025).

In a presentation at the high-profile Websummit conference-attended by CEOs, Prime Ministers, and other consequential decision-makers-thought-leader Sage Lenier proclaimed that AI is “useless, unsustainable and has no benefit to society” (Browne 2024). This sentiment is not just rhetorical-it is influencing governance. Democracies around the world, including the United States, Canada, and the European Union, are all introducing early-stage legislation to limit the energy use of AI (United Nations Environment Programme 2024).

By focusing solely on AI’s energy footprint, policymakers and influencers risk overlooking artificial intelligence’s potential as a sustainability tool—one that could optimize energy grids, catalyze systems change, and drive efficiencies across varied industries. If reactionary regulation continues to dominate the discourse, we may hinder AI’s ability to contribute to long-term environmental solutions. Numerous examples from both public and private sectors demonstrate how AI can – and already does – serve as a powerful sustainability stimulus.

The Big Data Potential of AI: Sustainability applications in the public sphere

Artificial intelligence is an invaluable tool to accelerate sustainability endeavours because of its ability to make prognostications informed by colossal amounts of data. In contrast with its adverse effects, these predictions span both the academic and the practical. By expediting key decisions about resource allocation and the efficiency of entire systems, this capability to analyze big-data efficiently has wide-ranging, positive, practical implications for the planet.

In the scholarly world, a recent analysis of 67 countries found that “AI significantly reduces ecological footprints and carbon emissions while promoting energy transitions” (Wang et al. 2024). One of the ways that this is happening in practice is the World Environment Situation Room (WESR). This United Nations’ “mission control centre for planet earth” uses AI to curate, aggregate, and visualize the best available earth observation data from around the world.

Decision and policy-makers have leveraged the insights from this tool to create multilateral environmental agreements, inform domestic environmental policies, and support more robust responses to climate emergencies (International Institute for Sustainable development, 2022). The information available on the tool runs the full gamut of climate change information, from metrics on regional CO2 emissions, to visualizations of sea ice cover, to tracking the global supply of fresh water. WESR has also become a critical tool for building climate response capacity in developing countries, and monitoring their progress on key Sustainable Development Goals. These are outcomes that will have positive global environmental implications for decades.

Artificial intelligence is also being leveraged for environmental benefit in more tangible ways, with a recent surge of applications in both the non-profit and private sectors. Some of these technologies have the potential to contribute significantly to the systems change needed to meaningfully address climate change. For example, optimizing the efficiency of energy grids is often cited as a “must-do” for developed nations to ultimately become carbon neutral.

Starting in 2019, the Midwest Independent System Operator, which moves electricity over parts of the American midwest and Canada, leveraged artificial intelligence technologies to predict energy demand and the most effective way to meet it across its network. This forecasting involves millions of mathematical calculations which can be done twelve times more efficiently by AI (Kim 2023) – a giant leap towards an optimal grid.

The Big Data Potential of AI: Private efforts for the planet

In the private sector, a plethora of startups aim to significantly reduce carbon emissions from commercial operations by leveraging AI. A London-based startup called Mortar IO quickly generates carbon-reduction plans for commercial buildings using artificial intelligence (MapMortar 2024). The heavily-polluting oil and gas production industries can leverage a platform from Euginie.ai to monitor data from satellites and their machines and processes to “ track, trace, and reduce emissions by 20-30%” (Elman 2023).

In the agricultural space, Israeli startup AgroScout analyzes millions of crop images to allow farmers to detect diseases and pests early. This allows for the expeditious application of precise treatments that can reduce agro-chemical use by up to 85% (AgroScout 2022).

Without the help of artificial intelligence, all of the big data analyses in these examples would be nearly impossible. The associated datasets, from macro earth observations to farm pictures, are too large for human-performed synthesis. In an apt analogy at the launch event for the WESR program, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme remarked that artificial intelligence was key to “tickling out drops of information from oceans of data” (International Institute for Sustainable Development 2021).

These projects are a mere preview of the transformative power that artificial intelligence can have to accelerate global sustainability in a tangible, significant way. While the current narrative surrounding AI’s environmental impact revolves around its monstrous appetite for energy, these examples reveal that it can become a mentor to our human pursuit of harmony-with-planet. A sage guide with the data-backed wisdom to help us take the right actions to mend our environment.

It’s time to reassess our perceptions, shift our focus beyond immediate concerns, and thoughtfully harness AI’s power with a long-term view that can actively drive us toward a greener, more sustainable world-if we let it.

Expediting our Greener Future with Artificial Intelligence

Going forward, policymakers, industry leaders, and innovators have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to foster an environment where artificial intelligence is leveraged purposefully, sustainably, and ethically. To start, policy makers should embrace a balanced regulatory framework for AI, which incentivizes both the creation of energy-efficient systems and the deployment of innovative sustainability solutions.

In the commercial sphere, firms must actively pursue the implementation of advancements in green technology and infrastructure while being transparent about their potential environmental impact. A positive first step for firms involved in the development of AI technologies? Publishing hard data about the resource consumption of each step in the generative process.

Finally, it is incumbent on thought-leaders, researchers, and members of the consumer media to deepen public discourse beyond simplistic headlines about the world coming to an end because of the latest technology. Educational and informational initiatives that clearly articulate AI’s positive environmental potential are essential to fostering informed, balanced public understanding.

By collectively embracing these actions, we can ensure that humanity sees the forest through the trees when it comes to artificial intelligence. Focusing on the potential of AI will ensure that it becomes a tool in our attempts to build a more sustainable, efficient and resilient future—and not the chainsaw in our environmental nightmare.

Useful links:

• Link up with Joel Tatlow on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: AgTech and Sustainability – Robots in the Vineyard: A new tool for Ontario growers 
• Download this and other articles in the special issue Global Voice magazine #32
• Discover Smith Business Insight and a host of free articles
• Apply for an MBA at Smith School of Business.

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