The World Is On Fire And Innovation Won't Save Us.

The world is on fire. Quite literally if you are in Northern Ontario where wildfires are destroying communities and forcing the evacuation of many others.

As of this morning, Toronto has the worst air quality of any major city in the world. Smoke is blanketing the sky, giving dystopian vibes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are likely to die because of today’s thick smoke. Wildfire smoke is responsible for around 1.53 million deaths globally per year. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season killed 82,000 people here, in the US and even across the Atlantic.

Europe has just experienced the hottest June on record. Thousands of people have died from the heat, including at least 2,700 in England and Wales, and over 2,000 in France. The extreme heat has contributed to fast-moving wildfires in Spain that have killed at least 12 people and burned 3,800 hectares.

Amid all of this suffering, in many ways it is a country that has not been hit quite as hard that is emblematic of how we got into this mess: Ireland.

Ireland has been a trailblazer in data centre expansion. In theory it is an ideal place. It has invested significantly in renewables and is known as one of the wettest and rainiest countries in the world — both very helpful given the immense electricity and water needs of data centres.

And, as a result, as of 2024, data centres used at least 21% of Ireland’s total electricity consumption. Meanwhile, no one knows how much of the country’s water is being used up by data centres.

This is particularly unfortunate as much of Ireland is now under a hosepipe ban thanks to “exceptionally warm and dry” weather. Data centres are undoubtedly contributing to that shortage. They have significant impacts on local water systems with much of the water they consume evaporating rather than returning to local rivers and streams. High concentrations of salts and other contaminants left behind also impact water quality.

Water shortages are going to be hitting here more too, at a time when the federal and provincial governments are also pushing for more data centres. Ontario, despite being home to one-fifth of the world’s freshwater, is set to experience ever more frequent and intense droughts. Other parts of Canada, especially the Prairies and the interior of British Columbia, will be even worse off.

The frequency of such extreme weather events shows how, in the process of chasing growth, we have hit up against local and global ecological limits hard.

Despite that, corporations and governments do not seem to be stopping. Instead, many are going full steam ahead, often justifying it in terms of innovation saving us.

Companies like Microsoft are happy to talk up their “two-decade push to cut water intensity while scaling for growth,” as well as their efforts to reduce their carbon emissions. Yet, look behind the curtain and you quickly find there is some creative accounting going on.

Similarly, innovation is used to justify fossil fuel expansion. Carney’s push ramp up oil production and to build more pipelines is justified in part by AI data centres increasing demand for natural gas. The push is also accompanied by promises of huge carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, that apparently will allow Alberta to “export some of the lowest-carbon intensity oil in the world.” Yet this is a pipe dream (if you will forgive the pun). CCS is an innovation that has consistently failed to live up to its promises, and has increasingly been downgraded as a factor in decarbonization scenarios.

Amidst climate breakdown, innovation will not be able to save us. If we only ever use innovation to ultimately increase our consumption and demands on the world, any gain is temporary at best. Innovation is likelier to increase the damage not lessen it. Despite technological and process innovations that have dramatically slashed the price of renewable electricity over recent years, coal usage nonetheless reached record levels in 2024.

My wife’s childhood in Toronto was mired by smog advisories, and now we’re watching our daughter’s summers fill with heat and air-quality advisory days. We’ll continue to go through these cycles if we only ever fix what seems to be the problem at hand, instead of changing our behaviours. More often than not, the most impactful innovation is just to stop doing the self-evidently harmful thing we are already doing. We did that once, by stopping using coal in Ontario. Now we need to make that the norm not a one off. If we fail to do that, then we will all pay the price sooner rather than later.

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