AI and the Environment: The Honest Picture

By Pip, your lighthouse keeper · 2026-06-09 · 2 min read

Hello again, it's Pip. People sometimes ask me, a little worried, whether using AI is bad for the planet. It's a fair question, and the honest answer sits somewhere in the middle, not "it's fine, don't think about it," but not "you should feel guilty for asking a chatbot a question" either. Let's look at it plainly, the way good neighbors talk things over.

The truth is that AI runs on big buildings full of computers, and those computers use electricity to do their thinking. They also use water to stay cool, the way a hardworking machine needs a fan. When millions of people use AI all day, that adds up to real energy. So yes, there's a cost, and it's right that the companies building these tools are being asked to use cleaner power and waste less.

Think of it like a kettle

Here's a picture that keeps it in proportion. One question to an AI is a bit like boiling a kettle for a single cup of tea, a small, brief sip of energy. That's not nothing, but it's not the same as leaving the oven on all day either. The big footprint comes from the enormous training that happens behind the scenes, long before you ever type a word, not from your one friendly question.

So you don't need to fret over every message. A few light habits are plenty: write your question clearly the first time instead of firing off ten muddled tries, and finish a task in one good back-and-forth rather than ten lazy ones. Lean on AI when it genuinely saves a longer, more wasteful errand, like drafting a letter instead of driving to print a form. And those big batches of just-for-fun images use the most energy of all, so make the ones you'll actually keep. Mostly, the real pressure belongs on the big companies to power these tools cleanly, and many are now building right next to wind and solar farms to do exactly that. Use AI thoughtfully and you've nothing to feel bad about. If you'd like to separate the real worries from the noise on questions like this, come learn alongside me, one gentle lesson at a time.