Hi friend,
This is the one we’ve been waiting for. The cool arctic breeze to our hot climate change summer. He’s smiling while I’m raging. We spoke to this person over 18 months ago and he did something our team hasn’t stopped buzzing about since: he gave us hope. It made us so uncomfortable, in the best possible way.
Returning champion Gavin McCormick, co-founder of WattTime and Climate TRACE, told us last year that we’re going to beat climate change. For sure. Definitely. Already underway.
Now, the world has changed a lot since January 2025 so we brought him back to answer the question:
Still, Gavin?
Are we still gonna beat climate change?
WHAT ABOUT DATA CENTERS??
And damn if he didn’t do it again. He gave us another injection of hope juice.
I’ll be honest with you: this conversation is long. Gavin is a hard man to stop talking to. But we’re choosing not to edit the interview because you should hear it all. If it’s easier to listen in podcast form, here’s that:
Here are my 4 biggest takeaways from this conversation (and it’s HARD to narrow down, truly, he drops gold every 3 minutes).
Gavin predicted 2024 would be the peak of global emissions… forever. Then we’d start going down. And he was ALMOST right. Emissions in 2025 were just about flat instead of lower for one single reason: Donald J. Trump. If you’re feeling like one person can’t change the world or elections don’t matter, this conversation is proof you’re wrong (and that’s a good thing).
The old sustainability pitch was moral: pay more to do the right thing. Gavin flips it to an economic one: renewables are now frequently the cheaper option to build. In fact, it’s increasingly cheaper to build new renewables than to maintain existing fossil fuel plants, which is why the shift is unstoppable. Already 95% of all power plants built worldwide are renewables. Bad actors can delay it with disinformation, but they’re gonna lose on the fundamentals. They now have to choose to pay more to use dirty energy, and most people won’t tolerate that forever.
Data centers are now actually using very little water. I know. This goes against every talking point and social media post we’ve seen, but those closed loop cooling systems work. The companies are not lying about that (just their taxes, community consent, and ultimate goals). But the power plants required to serve their massive electricity needs don’t use that tech. Yet. The indirect water usage (from the plants powering them) is worth more focus than on-site at data centers themselves.
Greenwashing / carbon washing is the “media literacy” of the AI era. A UN research team found that the choice that looks greenest on carbon turns out worse for water or land. So what measure is a company actually using? Is the water being consumed, or just recycled? Is there real science behind claims like 24/7 hourly matching? (There isn’t.) Do we actually see emissions rising where data centers are? (Sometimes we don’t!) The specifics matter more than the label.
That last one brings me to something I didn’t cover in the interview but want to say directly to you: the rage we feel is about more than facts and data.
Opposition to data centers is one of the few ways that people can express their opposition to fascism, to corporate takeovers of everything: economy, politics, food, tech.
And specific to tech, you have a group of folks who barrelled forward with something that we didn’t ask for, came out guns blazing, told us to our faces, “We’re here to take your jobs.” And we haven’t deported a single one of them. (But at least we’re still hunting Mexicans and putting tracking devices on Haitians, right?)
We feel one big F U from a system that isn’t responding to the people, and this is one of the only places where we can clearly see how to stand up and say, “No! Not in my backyard dammit!”
Gavin is one of the most credible people on Earth to speak on climate. He loves this planet way more than most of us, and he’s so much better at math. The man is so qualified that even when he sneaked in a very limited compliment for Elon, I didn’t cut his mic, because: integrity. Argh it’s so annoying!!!
He’s here to offer data, facts, nuance, and hope. And I want to acknowledge: he’s offering it to people who are anchored in justified rage and rejectionism.
My hope is that even folks on the far side of AI rejection can still hear this and use it to sharpen the resistance to where it really counts. It is understandable and even defensible to stay in the “never AI, never data center” world. But not maximally helpful. That is ceding our power.
I strongly encourage you to listen to or watch the full discussion above, notice how it affects you (where it offers relief and where it’s uncomfortable), and use what you gain from it to “yell at them for the right things,” as Gavin puts it.
Thanks for being in the larger conversation with me. Hit me with your thoughts below:
Stay free.
- Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
