437 – The Great AI Climate Debate
Mark Rowland, co-founder of Adelaide Climate Action Week, walks Steve Davis through the nuance behind the Great AI Climate Debate — carbon gluttons versus silicon saviours, the time value of carbon and the Jevons paradox — while 23rd Street Distillery’s award-winning single malt takes out the South Australian Drink of the Week and a new original song, Higher Legacy, honours the parkland gardeners tending Adelaide’s civic inheritance. Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the “carbon glutton” and “silicon saviour” camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons
