The tech industry and many of these obscenely rich people who are sort of pushing it are deeply concerned that things like climate change will lead to people asking them for larger social and economic changes.

And that is going to affect them adversely.

So I think for them trying to pretend that there has to be a technological solution is part of

trying to preserve their wealth and their position in society. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is M.V. Ramada. Ramana is a professor in

Simon's chair in Disarmament, Global, and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He's also the author of Nuclear is Not the Solution,

the Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change. It won't be news to many listeners

of this show that there has been a lot of talk about nuclear power recently in the tech

industry by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Open AI, and others that

are looking for new energy sources to power their data centers and all of the energy that

they're demanding for the generative AI boom that we've been seeing over the past couple of

years. As the energy demands that these companies have been increasing, there have been

questions as to whether this goes against the pledges that they have been making for many years to make us believe

that they care about climate change and that they're reducing their emissions. Meanwhile, what we've

seen in the past few years is their emissions steadily increasing, not to mention their energy

demand and their water use as well. One of their solutions to that has been to say that they are investing in other forms

of energy that will be less emitting in order to mitigate the impact of this massive energy

demand that their data centers and other operations are creating.

But naturally, that leads me to wonder whether they're really serious about this or

whether this is another distraction that we need to wonder whether they're really serious about this or whether

this is another distraction that we need to be paying attention to to understand the real

impact of what's happening here.

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