Here’s What I’m Seeing

Making sense of our lives in the world

OpportunityOtto Scharmer on working in chaos

Theory U leader Otto Scharmer just published a twelve-point meditation diagnosing societal fracture and sketching a third path between AI-driven hyperextraction and reactive protest. The part I’ve been thinking about all week is not the framework, it’s the story he tells about working as an emergency medic. This is a fair metaphor for our circumstances and what’s needed:

“The moment you enter the scene, there is chaos, noise, pain, and all voices get at you simultaneously. I learned to focus my attention 100% on just my role... Focused attention on what was mine to do, and open awareness of the whole: these two modes allowed me to act instead of freeze.”

Read more: “Back from Indonesia: A 12-Point Meditation on Our Moment and Calling Now,” Presencing Institute Blog

What is AI good for?

OpportunityTen years after Move 37, AI surprise is the opportunity

It’s been ten years since Move 37, the shocking, seemingly non-sensical AlphaGo move that no human Go player would have played but that turned out to be a brilliant game-changer against the human world champ.

Ben Cohen at the Wall Street Journal writes about how mathematicians are now witnessing similar “Move 37 style” breakthroughs where AI proposes moves a person wouldn’t have come up with.

Picture this in science, in strategy. This is the promising vision I want to hold onto: shocking ideas from a system trained on massive quantities of simulation, brought into science and strategy. That’s a Move 37, and it’s a genuinely inspiring thing to imagine. Try asking your favorite LLM for a Move 37 suggestion in any chat you’re having. It will know what you mean.

Special treat: want a one-click “Move 37” button for your favorite AI? Check out this simple free tool I made.

Read more: “Move 37: The AI Moment That Changed Everything,” Wall Street Journal

Present plans are a problem

RiskFinancial Times: 60 planned US data centers would add 7% to power sector emissions

If your industry’s plans could increase the US power sector’s emissions by 7%, you have, you are, a serious problem. We are supposed to be going the other direction!

The 60 of the largest planned US data centers reportedly could together produce 101.5 million tons of CO2 per year, or roughly 7% of 2025 US power sector emissions.

Remember the promise of AI, like Move 37 and so much more? Let’s achieve it without subjecting the world to all the more climate catastrophe.

Read more: “FT analysis finds 60 largest planned US data centres could emit 101.5M tons of CO2,” Financial Times

Oh it gets much worse

Serious riskPeer-reviewed study: AI’s help to Big Oil could produce up to 13x more emissions than powering AI itself

If the data center emissions numbers are bad, the enabled-emissions numbers are worse. Emily Atkin (Heated) reports on “a new peer reviewed study published in the journal npj Climate Action” which finds that “Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.”

“In 2019, Microsoft and ExxonMobil announced an AI partnership they said could help Exxon increase production by as much as 50,000 barrels a day.” At scale, the article says, “On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s... On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s, the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.”

Across 64 modeled scenarios “the only research scenarios in which global emissions actually fell were the ones where tech companies stopped helping fossil fuel companies create custom AI tools to increase production altogether.”

Study co-authors Holly and Will Alpine “resigned from high-level positions at Microsoft” in 2024 to draw attention to this.

Read more: “AI’s climate problem is worse than we thought,” Heated

Amazon climate bomb

Serious riskA new Amazon AI data center is projected to become the largest single CO2 source in the US

CleanTechnica reports on a planned Amazon AI data center in Pecos County, Texas whose on-site gas plant will make it the country’s single largest pollution source.

“The power plant’s 35 gas turbines are expected to emit 33 million tons of CO2 a year.”

As for the Climate Pledge that Amazon co-founded, multiple articles quote Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan saying: “[the] world looks different now than when we co-founded The Climate Pledge.” Unacceptable.

Read more: “The Single Largest Pollution Source In The USA Going To Be An Amazon AI Data Center,” CleanTechnica

Better data center design

Big opportunityIt doesn’t have to be like this: check out these “mud lobster data centers” designed like natural systems

Is your new data center built like a mud lobster would do it? If not, why not? Former Microsoft leader JoAnn Garbin argues the conventional design for data centers is absurd and unnecessary: “Data centers... remove the ecosystem, scraping the earth flat is the first step. Then the ground is sealed in concrete so that a 30-year structure can be built to house equipment that changes over every 3 to 5 years.”

Her team spent a wet Pacific Northwest winter running servers in a tent, “Nothing failed,” and adopted a design rule: “We adopted the design principle of ‘no dumb walls.’ Every wall had to earn its place.”

The resulting Regenerative Data Center is site-native: “The walls are compacted earth from the site. The roof is prefab timber, arched, with soil and planting laid over it, so from the community side the shelter reads as land.”

The economics are different too: “The modules arrive on flatbed trucks. Delivered and installed in days, eliminating on-going construction, matching capital allocation to demand.”

She says Meta is already partway there, “Meta is now running GPU clusters under fabric structures on aluminum frames, up in about two months,” and the modular ecosystem now includes “30+ companies”.

So, again: why isn’t yours built like this? Amazon?

Read more: “The Mud Lobster Data Center,” Innovating Out Loud

What “good” looks like

Big opportunityThese ten countries are scaling renewable energy fastest in the world

What else does “good” look like? Let’s identify the leaders, study their strategies, and pull the whole field forward with their lessons learned.

This piece from the World Resources Institute does exactly that. They explain that solar and wind together “need to make up 57% to 78% of the global electricity mix by 2030 for the world to be on track for a net-zero emissions future”. We are at 17.4% now, so the gap is enormous. But some countries are showing how it can be done.

• Uruguay went from 1% wind to 32% in five years, “the fastest any country has ever achieved in that short a time frame.”
• Denmark took fossil fuels from 97% of its electricity mix in 1990 to under 10% today.
• Namibia went from essentially zero solar to over a third of domestic generation in a decade.

WRI writes about the three different strategies they took to get there.

Read more: “These 10 Countries Are Scaling Up Renewable Energy the Fastest,” World Resources Institute

Ritual renewal

OpportunityA new study argues religious ritual can sustain care for the commons

Are people selfish and disinterested in caring for the earth? Not if you do the right religious and cultural rituals, they aren’t!

A new study of hundreds of Catholic conservation efforts, titled “Theotic Governance and the Ecumenical Administration of the Commons”, proposes an alternative to isolated, self-interested homo economicus: “a companion figure, homo theoticus, a person whose actions are shaped not only by calculation but by communion, service, and a willingness to hold back for the sake of others.”

“Communion showed up in how decisions were made: through shared discernment, meetings, and collective deliberation rather than top-down instruction.” This lines up with Elinor Ostrom’s classic finding that “many [cultures] managed their shared resources sustainably for generations, without privatization and without a distant authority forcing them to.” The paper’s conclusion: “in religious communities, this habitus is powerfully shaped by spiritual conviction, and that this, in turn, supports the very cooperation that sound resource management requires.”

Read more: “Caring for Creation Together: When Stewardship Becomes a Spiritual Practice,” Francesco Economy

Community media

OpportunityChicago Public Media is launching a neighborhood social network on the AT Protocol (like Bluesky)

Could neighborhood social networks help rebuild trust in media and society? Media tech leader Ben Werdmuller writes that Chicago Public Media, which owns WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, is launching a network of neighborhood social communities at chicago.com.

“The Newsmast Foundation has been building community spaces for newsrooms that are backed by the Fediverse; its first major launch was British newspaper the Bristol Cable last year.” Werdmuller says: “I strongly believe that this sort of community engagement is how news turns around its precipitous decline in trust from the public.”

Core to the assumption here is that these social networks are not optimized for rage-bait or someone else’s algorithms, but are being tended like a responsible part of a cohesive society. That’s not authoritarian, it’s the foundation of a functional world.

Read more: “Chicago’s social network is a huge bet for news. I think it’s the future,” Werd.io

More regeneration examples

OpportunityThe Living Systems Alliance picks 12 bioregional partnerships for new Community of Practice

Want to see some more inspiring examples? The Living Systems Alliance just announced its inaugural Community of Practice: twelve bioregional partnerships across five continents, designing and deciding in partnership with nature rather than around it.

I’ve started tracking all twelve for this newsletter.

The Biomimicry Institute announcement says the twelve were “selected from more than 130 applications” and that “these partnerships represent a rich diversity of ecosystems, cultures, governance approaches, and regenerative initiatives.”

Read more: “Building Resilient Futures by Designing and Deciding in Partnership with Nature,” Biomimicry Institute

Data centers making water

OpportunityData centers could produce water as a byproduct

A company called Arbor Energy, an oxy-combustion turbine startup, writes: “Microsoft has committed to this approach across its new datacenter designs, with zero-water pilots underway in Arizona and Wisconsin.” Arbor’s machines: “Each turbine generates 25 megawatts, and they’re built to stack, so a 100-megawatt installation could yield roughly 100 million gallons of water a year.”

Combustion of what is a key question here. See this Axios coverage from last year that says the company makes a lot of claims, counts Stripe as a customer, but appears to burn “biomass” which sometimes (as I understand it) incentivizes deforestation.

Still, their framing echoes something JoAnn Garbin (mud lobster data centers, above) says: “Engineers design within constraints. So if you tell them ecological considerations are a core constraint, they design within them.” Or as Arbor Energy says: “The developers who solve for it in the design, not in the press release, will be the ones still building five years from now.”

Read more: “Data centers don’t have to drink the town dry,” Latitude Media

Watch out for accounting tricks

RiskFood & Water Watch: ‘Bring Your Own Power’ is cost-shifting, not demand reduction

Food & Water Watch is doing some incredible leadership in the data center debate. In this post, they argue that data centers consume massive amounts of electricity whether from the grid or from off-grid generators, and that consumption itself drives real-world consequences. Off-grid “behind-the-meter” generation is increasingly popular but typically uses gas-fired generators, which pushes up natural gas demand across the regional and national market.

Even a data center that doesn’t touch the local grid still bids up prices in competitive energy markets, and its water depletion and air pollution don’t disappear just because the label says “off-grid.”

The industry frames off-grid power as a solution; Food & Water Watch reframes it as cost-shifting without demand reduction. That reframe seems right to me.

Read more: “False Promises, Deceitful Accounting of Data Centers’ ‘Bring Your Own Power’ Pledges,” Food & Water Watch

Yes, but only if

OpportunityAn Australian state offers 75-day data center approvals in exchange for bringing own energy, grid and water

Renew Economy reports that an Australian state is offering a fast track, an approval verdict within 75 days, for data center projects that meet their own energy, grid and water requirements. The state says data centers “need to pay their own way,” including bringing additional electricity and water.

The government is not saying no, it is saying the developer covers the externalities. That’s the kind of thing that JoAnn Garbin (mud lobster data centers) calls a “yes, but only if” approach to data centers coming into communities.

But don’t forget the Food & Water Watch critique above. The question of whether “bring your own power” is a real solution or an accounting move is going to keep coming up.

Read more: “Data centres to get faster nod if they meet energy, grid and water needs,” Renew Economy

Solar powered AI

OpportunitySunrun will supply Voltus with distributed capacity for AI hyperscaler agreements

Sunrun (residential solar-plus-storage) will supply a company called Voltus (a distributed energy platform) with capacity earmarked for AI hyperscaler deals.

CleanTechnica: “Last year, Voltus announced its Bring Your Own Capacity (BYOC) program, a first-of-its-kind solution that enables large loads like hyperscalers to bring firm, flexible capacity to the table to facilitate data center interconnection and support the grid.”

The article also notes a separate initiative, “the recent and separate initiative by Sunrun, Renew Home and Tesla focused on unlocking more than 16.8 gigawatts of flexible capacity from home batteries, solar, smart thermostats, and EVs.” This is what “bring your own power” looks like when the answer is distributed clean resources, not on-site gas. More of this please!

Read more: “Sunrun to Supply Voltus with Energy Capacity for AI Hyperscaler Agreements,” CleanTechnica

What a time to grow demand

Utility Dive: interconnection timelines are now a hard constraint on regional competitiveness

Here’s the structural departure worth naming: interconnection timelines now function as hard constraints on regional economic competitiveness, not just as technical gatekeeping. Historically, interconnection was a utility compliance process; investment decisions flowed from land, labor, and capital availability.

This Utility Dive piece from Siemens positions grid access as a decision-making bottleneck that directly determines whether hyperscale projects land in a region at all. That inverts the priority hierarchy: utilities now compete on infrastructure readiness rather than simply managing requests.

And it couldn’t have happened at a more challenging time: at the same time that the world is shifting toward electrification, renewable energy, modernization, distributed energy, and more. A huge spike in demand? Why not??

Read more: “Why AI is arriving at the most difficult moment for North America’s grid,” Utility Dive