Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast,

humans insatiable need for increasing amounts of energy,

and our tendency to want to at least have the option to wipe entire populations

off the map has led to a renewed age of risks related to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and nuclear fallout.

Sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today includes Vox,

CNBC, our changing climate, includes Vox, CnB.C. Our Changing Climate, One Thing from CNN, Democracy Now, and this is not a drill.

Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections.

Section A, Energy, Section B, Climate, and Section C, Risk. Data centers are massive, often windowless warehouses that house thousands of servers that run virtually non-stop.

Some of the bigger data centers are as big as four

football fields and use as much electricity at any given time as 80,000 households.

There are more than 8,000 data centers around the world, and the US has more than any other country.

In 2022, data centers, artificial intelligence, and cryptocuracies made up about 2% of total global electricity demand.

But by 2026, that number is expected to double, which is like adding the amount

of electricity used by the entire country of Sweden.

That big jump from 2022 to 2026 is thanks to rising cloud storage and cryptocurrency electricity

demands, but it's also because of the AI boom.

We know AI requires a ton of computational power, but it turns out that the amount of electricity

it uses is a really difficult question to answer.

AI is a huge umbrella term that includes everything from basic statistical models that detect patterns

and data to generative AI that creates text and images and videos.

That's the most computationally intensive kind.

The thing is, the handful of private tech companies

...