I’m very skeptical that China has played a meaningful role in the US data center backlash
The evidence we have is pretty weak
Andy Masley
Blog posts and essays
Latest posts
Toward liberal environmentalism
The underlying normative claim of my environmental writing
AI art as curation
Asking whether AI art involves real creativity mostly misses what’s interesting about it
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
A plug for a tool I made to show how little most current AI chatbots add to your emissions and water use, with citations
Take this and share it, you don’t need to mention me
A simple trick to fix the data center debate
Remove the status quo bias by asking “would we spend this much in tax revenue to avoid the externalities of the data center?”
Why I think panic about local impacts of data centers is just a panic
A request for counterexamples
A history of the data center panic - part 1
The creation of common wisdom pre-ChatGPT
A crash course on US air pollution
Data centers and air pollution - part 1
Let’s not compare data center heat exhaust to nuclear bombs
Why dropping hundreds of nuclear bombs on Washington DC every day is pretty normal
Data center land use issues are fake
We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland
To be clear, I do understand how sound works
Replying to a criticism of my last post
Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake
One of the most popular videos ever made about data centers is a complete moment-by-moment disaster
Training AI models doesn’t emit that much
If we just make reasonable comparisons instead of crazy ones
What’s blocking Waymo in DC and how can we fix it?
The very late DDOT report is only part of the story
Data centers’ heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around where they’re built
A terrible paper and even worse interpretation is threatening to become common wisdom
A call for more specific and numerate climate communication
There’s too much low-hanging fruit going unpicked, and it’s relatively easy to pick
AI can obviously create new knowledge
But maybe not new concepts
A Playbook for New EA Groups
A note from Naomi Nederlof, Community Building Grants Program Manager: I asked Andy, the lead organizer of EA DC, to write this playbook based on the approaches that have made his group one of the most successful city groups in our program. We initiated this project because we think many new organizers can benefit from concrete and experience-based guidance. I would be excited about more city and…
Empire of AI is wildly misleading about AI water use
And the media environment that didn’t catch this is getting this issue wrong
A short summary of my argument that using ChatGPT isn’t bad for the environment
To share with anyone still worried
The lump of cognition fallacy
The extended mind as the advance of civilization
A list of other catastrophes that are probably fake
Adding to this over time
It’s much easier to hold computers accountable than it is to hold humans accountable
Computers live in a totalitarian surveillance state
Data centers and low social trust
Why I was so compelled to post a lot about data centers
An armchair diagnosis of the chatbot moral panic
It’s... status!
Always mask at airports
This might occasionally save you thousands of dollars
A lot of arguments for legalizing autonomous vehicles in your city
Compare them to any other vehicle
AI and Folk Cartesianism - Part 2: Problems for Cartesianism
The theater is empty, the screen is in another room
AI and Folk Cartesianism - Part 1: Defining the Problem
Why I’m scared of linear algebra
Requests for journalists covering AI and the environment
Always aim to give your reader a full picture of the environmental issues a community and the world is facing
The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy
Don’t update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
A few meta points on my posts on AI and the environment
Some quick notes on what I’m doing
Slop implies capability
If the current paradigm can produce convincing, satisfying slop, it can also be useful
The AI water issue is fake
On the national, local, and personal level
Data centers & electricity - part 1: as of 2025 they haven’t raised national prices
Yet, anyway, but they raised local costs in specific places like NOVA
What a data center is
A building-sized computer, and the most efficient type of building we’ve ever created
More Perfect Union videos are wildly deceptive on data center water use
They’re misinforming their huge audience and making the data center debate much worse
For the climate, little things don’t add up
We need to think seriously about collective action
What’s the full “hidden” climate cost of a ChatGPT prompt?
It’s so tiny, and if we include “all the hidden costs” it might actually be a negative number
Do data centers only seem bad for the climate because we can see them?
Most of your climate impacts are invisible
Jevons’ Paradox is good sometimes
It might be good news for AI and the climate
Mapping the AI & environment debate
And clarifying what I believe
The core simple reason I think AI is valuable
Why I don’t think every Watt-hour or liter we spend on AI is wasted
An example of what I consider a misleading article about AI and the environment
Just show the numbers!
When making cuts for the climate, always consider the value you’re getting per unit energy, not just the total energy used
This needs to be a basic part of our climate ethics
A ton of AI images I’ve made that I’ve liked
I think people with my aesthetic taste have been underrepresented in presentations of AI art. Here I try to change that
Contra the UK government, please don’t delete your old photos and emails to save water
You’d need to delete hundreds of billions of emails to save as much water as fixing your toilet
Egalitarianism requires quantification
Adding up the number of lives saved respects dignity more than focusing on the particular vibes of the people involved
My can of soup example of bad climate communication
Would you condemn my vegan chili?