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01 / 05
What Might an Energy-Rich Future Look Like?

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

What Might an Energy-Rich Future Look Like?

Peering through turquoise-tinted glasses

Zion Lights —

Summary: In this article, Zion Lights explores the benefits of an energy-abundant future powered by clean and reliable sources such as nuclear energy. She challenges the misplaced nostalgia and the fear of new technology that can hinder human progress and highlights the importance of energy access for improving global living standards.

It’s good to remember the past. Through studying history, we can learn more about ourselves as well as from our mistakes, which enables us to make improvements and pass important information on to future generations.

But there is a danger of being so focused on the past that we reject the new, even when potential changes might be of great benefit to us. While examining and criticizing new technologies can serve an important function in addressing potential shortcomings of discoveries, technology panics can also hinder progress. That has happened with the slow deployment of nuclear energy, the backlash against genetically modified organisms, and so on.

Perhaps there is a natural desire to want things to go back to “the way they were,” whether looking at things through rose-tinted lenses or because of the simple desire for a return to our youth.

For example, I recently read an article about mud houses in Burkina Faso. They seem idyllic: built by the community, built by hand, made of local natural resources, and able to help keep people cool in hot temperatures, which was the supposed focus of the article. But the piece veered constantly toward a rose-tinted lens, with a focus on those who lament the loss of mud housing and on how it could be made more appealing to younger generations, as so many younger people favor concrete buildings. Indeed, concrete houses don’t keep the heat out as well, but they do have air conditioning and electricity, and mud house walls have often collapsed and killed the people inside. People who move to higher-quality concrete housing (although the article does not call it higher quality) simply don’t look back.

Of course, the article is not written by someone who lives in a mud dwelling, but the writer has that lens. The writer ends by quoting a student who has never lived in anything other than a mud house or with electricity, stating that he is happy to live there—completely ignoring the point that people who can experience better accommodations stick with it. The article also describes concrete housing as a “gateway, once people can afford it, to another fossil-fuel-guzzling invention: air conditioning.” But air conditioning is not inherently “fossil-fuel guzzling”: since air conditioners are powered by electricity, if the electricity is clean, they can be environmentally neutral.

This is a classic example of rejecting the new and believing that the grass is greener as we look from our concrete houses to those who are living in the mud. If we don’t want to go back to living in mud houses, we need to look ahead. We move forward because progress makes life better. So, what might an energy-abundant future look like?

First, let us look back. Crushing poverty was the norm everywhere for almost all human history. We were only able to escape poverty through access to energy, and we now lead energy-rich lifestyles. Although many countries are implementing energy-saving and energy-efficiency measures, it is a fantasy to think that we will ever go back to living low-energy lifestyles. Humankind will always find novel ways to consume large amounts of energy.

Energy usage is already increasing as societies shift toward electrifying everything—from diesel cars to electric vehicles, from gas boilers to heat pumps, etc. If we want to shift toward public transport to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, electric buses and trains will also require a vast amount of energy.

Traditional environmentalists have long argued that we should live with less energy, but the reality is that humans are fantastic at finding ways to use more energy, not less. But what might an energy-abundant future look like? And who knows what technology might revolutionize our lives for the better?

Air conditioning

Air conditioning is one example of a technology that makes our lives better. We know that the planet is heating and that people die in heat waves. The need to roll out air conditioning is essential, especially in warmer climates.

As Singapore’s late first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew once said: “Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”

According to the International Energy Agency, of the nearly three billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, only 8 percent have access to air conditioning. Powering more will save lives and won’t be a problem in a high-energy, nuclear-powered future. Preparing for a high-energy, low-carbon, climate-changed future means building air conditioning units en masse.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

When most of us think about AI, we imagine chatbots and generated imagery. AI systems do require a lot of electricity—one study found that training an AI language-processing system produced 1,400 pounds of emissions.

But there’s more to AI than meets the eye. It is already revolutionizing the way we live, and we should make sure we can power it rather than worrying about how much energy it needs. AI is already being used to fight cancer, reduce repetitive tasks for workers, protect elephants from poachers, improve access to education through digital learning, improve customer services, and improve disaster responses. AI is also being used to strengthen climate predictions, which enables smarter decision-making for decarbonizing industries.

In Japan, AI is helping an aging population. Japanese people are living longer and having fewer children, but the country also has a shortage of care workers. So who is caring for the elderly residents? The answer is, increasingly, robots. In Japan, AI bots patrol rooms in care homes at night to check on residents and alert care workers when something is wrong. For example, Aeolus is a self-navigating AI-equipped robot that can detect abnormalities in residents as they sleep and assist in infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places in the building.

At the Yume Paritiis nursing home in Amagasaki near Osaka, androids that look like dolls are given to dementia patients to stimulate conversation. Telenoid enables caregivers to speak to patients remotely, which is essential when there are 500 patients to 150 caregivers. A robot called Hug carries people from wheelchairs to beds, which means less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.

Since China, South Korea, Italy, and Germany are on a similar trajectory in terms of aging populations (as is the United States albeit at a slower pace), many billions of people will benefit from Japan’s developing AI technologies. We all want to live longer and be healthier for longer. But what would happen to aging populations if electricity wasn’t abundant? AI technology will need a lot of energy to expand and keep it running to enable people to live well. This is yet another argument for building a lot more nuclear reactors to power such a future reliably.

Water desalination plants

When roughly one-fifth of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water (and numbers are likely to rise unless adaptive measures are taken), an obvious solution is desalination. UNESCO has reported that the freshwater shortfall worldwide will rise to 500 trillion gallons per year by 2025.

Luckily, this problem can be easily solved. Water desalination technologies are capable of treating water from a wide variety of sources, including brackish groundwater, surface water, seawater, and domestic and industrial wastewater. As ever, there is a small cost to the environment, and environmentalists argue that the wastewater from desalination is problematic, but MIT has developed a process to reuse it.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “Only nuclear reactors are capable of delivering the copious quantities of energy required for large-scale desalination projects” in the future. At present, only a few desalination plants operating worldwide are powered by nuclear energy. For example, due to water shortages in South Africa, a small groundwater desalination plant was built at the Koeberg nuclear power plant. It produces water solely for use by the plant, but there are also plans for a seawater desalination plant. Abu Dhabi is one of the largest places in the world to rely on water desalination, producing 9 percent of total desalinated water worldwide. This includes drinking water. One of the organizations involved has stated that “desalination still now remains one of the most viable sources to feed large communities.”

Instead of scaremongering about a future without water, politicians and journalists could instead talk about the solutions and ensure that they are implemented. If we start building desalination and nuclear plants now, we can avoid the worst of the predicted water shortages, as well as protect food crops, without contributing heavily to greenhouse gas emissions.

Turquoise-tinted glasses

So far I’ve used a few practical examples that could be implemented now as part of a high-energy future that would improve life for billions of people. Now, what if we don a pair of turquoise-tinted glasses and imagine even further ahead?

One policy paper does just that, exploring the notion of “energy superabundance.” The authors imagine flying cars, hyperloop networks, electric autonomous trucking, and water-from-air condensation, among other things. They envision scenarios for tackling energy inequality in poorer nations, replacing environmentally polluting materials like plastics and concrete, and using alternative farming methods to feed people more efficiently. Its authors even predict a carbon shortage through the deployment of some of these technologies. This is the good news we all need, and it’s potentially within our grasp.

The paper concludes: “Despite the great increases in output and well-being that could be achieved through superabundant energy, the outcomes we have described are still, in the grand scheme of things, only the beginning. They still, for the most part, assume levels of energy and power density achievable with near-term technologies.”

And through space exploration, humanity has gained life-changing technologies as well as knowledge about the nature of our universe and our place within it. Exploring the universe also requires vast amounts of energy, and progress has already been slowed in this regard due to energy shortages.

Aiming for a high-energy future is essential for human progress, and the good news is that it’s entirely achievable with the technology and knowledge that is available to us today. We can all aspire to live in houses that don’t cave in, can be cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, and aren’t made of mud. The future looks bright. We only need to reach out and grasp it.

Blog Post | Water Use

The AI Land and Water Panic Is Wrong

Bill Maher and Erin Brockovich think we are running out. We are not.

Marian L. Tupy —

Summary: Concerns that AI data centers are exhausting America’s land and water are largely overstated. Data centers occupy relatively little land compared with agriculture and other established uses, while their water consumption reflects temporary displacement rather than permanent loss. New cooling technologies and alternative water sources are also reducing local demand, suggesting that engineering—not scarcity—will shape AI’s environmental impact.

The American consumer advocate Erin Brockovich went on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to talk about what she has spent the year mapping: American towns that found out a data center was coming only after the bulldozers arrived. She has collected thousands of such reports from all fifty states. A big facility, she says, can consume millions of gallons of water a day. The audience was meant to conclude that artificial intelligence is swallowing the country’s water and land.

Start with the land, because that part is easy to settle. Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial real estate firm that tracks these deals, reports that the average parcel bought for a data center in 2024 ran to a couple hundred acres. Scale that up by the computing capacity the industry expects to have running by 2030, and by my reckoning every data center in America, plus all the ground around the buildings, comes to roughly the area of Rhode Island. The buildings themselves would fit inside a mid-sized city.

Now compare that with how we already use land. The federal government requires refiners to blend corn ethanol into gasoline and growing that corn takes an area about the size of New York State, for a fuel that a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found is probably dirtier than the gasoline it replaces. The Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave a Kentucky-sized area unplanted. Since 2000, American farmland has shrunk by an area larger than Colorado, and output went up anyway. None of this made the evening news.

Water is the harder argument, and it is where the case goes wrong at the level of chemistry. A data center does not destroy water. Cooling moves heat but does not burn anything. Hydrogen and oxygen do not come apart in a cooling tower. The water molecules leave as vapor, and hydrologists have long put their average stay in the atmosphere at about nine days before they fall again as rain. The word often used, “consumption,” does not mean the water is gone. It means the water left the neighborhood. That is a genuine cost to a neighborhood. It is not a subtraction from the world’s supply, and no amount of AI will make it one.

The problem of local water displacement is one that engineers have been fixing for two years. The scary numbers come from old evaporative towers, but the newer Nvidia chips run at 113 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hotter than the air outside on most summer days. Heat moves from hot to cold on its own, so the liquid sheds its warmth into the open air through a radiator, like the one in a car. Those radiators need fans, and fans need power, so the better chips turn a water problem into an electricity problem. That is a good trade, because building power is something this country knows how to do.

Similarly, Microsoft has announced designs that circle the same fluid through a sealed loop past the chip and back. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already run some sites on treated city wastewater rather than anything anyone would drink.

Brockovich anticipated this answer. In an essay published two days before the broadcast, she argued that a sealed loop does not remove the water use but only moves it to the power plant that supplies the electricity. She is right that this second, hidden figure is bigger than the water used at the site itself. But the two together still amount to less than one percent of all the water Americans consume. The figures behind it come from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in a study Congress ordered and the Energy Department published. Its lead author, the staff scientist Arman Shehabi, supplies the numbers that both sides of this argument quote.

The comparison with national consumption is drawn by Robin Gaster of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who reviewed the same evidence in July and drew two conclusions. The technology to bring on-site water use near zero already exists. And the upstream share depends on which power plants get built, which means it is not fixed either. A forecast of disaster must assume that nobody will ever build anything different.

For scale, the EPA’s WaterSense program reports that outdoor household water use runs to about nine billion gallons a day, most of it landscape irrigation: suburban sprinklers use more water in two days than all data centers in the country uses directly in a year.

The host pushed back against Brockovich’s more alarmist claims, but he soon went back to his old assumption that there are simply too many of us and that we are using too many resources. In an April 2019 monologue, Maher cheered the falling birth rate, called fewer humans the best gift we could give the planet, and named our numbers as the great unspoken cause of the climate crisis. Last Friday, he repeated those concerns. He was wrong to do so.

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet the biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, that a basket of metals would grow cheaper as the population grew. Ehrlich sent the check ten years later. The economist Gale Pooley and I are keeping the score. The Simon Abundance Index we published this April found that the Earth was 536 percent more resource-abundant in 2025 than in 1980, a period in which humanity added nearly four billion people. Every commodity we track is more plentiful per person than it was, because each additional person arrives with a mind as well as a mouth.

Maher has spent three decades treating every new demand on the earth as a bite out of a fixed inheritance. Data centers are only the latest one. The land is plentiful. The water is not leaving the planet, and the engineers cooling these AI machines are already several product cycles into solving the thing he is sure cannot be solved.

Yale Environment 360 | Water Use

After Decades of Drought, Water Is Rising in the African Sahel

“Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa’s largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.

Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years…

But increased rainfall since the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s explains only some of the rewetting of the Sahel. It cannot fully account for the transformation, say researchers. Also driving the rewetting, they posit, are changes to the land surface, ranging from the internationally funded Great Green Wall project to the revival of traditional water harvesting methods and the chaos caused by jihadist militants, which has led to the abandonment of irrigation projects that once emptied rivers of their flows.

Much remains unclear in these remote lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert, but the trend seems set to be long-term, with climate scientists saying more — and more extreme — rainfall is on the way in the 21st century. As underground water reserves revive, some are forecasting an agricultural renaissance.”

From Yale Environment 360.

Amazon News | Water Use

Amazon Data Centers 7X More Water-Efficient than Average

“When data centers use water for cooling, one of the most important metrics is how efficiently they use that water—meaning how little water they use for each unit of compute. Amazon announced that its global data center operations used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) in 2025, a rate that’s over 7x more efficient than the industry average of 0.84 L/kWh.

In other words, we use far less water per unit of compute than others in the global data center industry, which as a whole accounts for less than 0.5% of all industrial water use globally. 

And we’re continuing to get even more efficient year over year. These efficiency gains are the result of years of investment in custom cooling technology, smarter systems, and a commitment to minimize water use wherever possible.”

From Amazon News.

Bloomberg | Water Use

A Startup Pulls Water Out of the Air to Confront Shortages

“The large metallic white box sits in a Southern California parking lot, looking unremarkable until water starts flowing from a hose attached to it. Peer inside, though, and it’s nearly empty but for some wires, tubes and a container of light-colored material.

The water isn’t being conjured out of thin air by magic but by MOFs— metallic organic frameworks. MOFs are nanocrystalline structures engineered at an atomic level to attract specific molecules. In this case that’s H2O and the machine made by startup Atoco is silently harvesting molecules from the surrounding air and storing them in the material’s porous cavities that serve as microscopic water tanks.

Atoco founder Omar Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering MOFs and on an April morning he gave Bloomberg News an exclusive demonstration of the commercial prototype of its atmospheric water harvester in the lot outside the company’s Orange County laboratory…

Set to go into production later this year, the shipping container-sized machine will produce up to 4,000 liters (1,057 gallons) of water daily and can be installed at data centers, hospitals and other critical infrastructure. An off-the-grid model that operates on ambient sunlight and produces less water can be deployed to communities where water must now be trucked in.”

From Bloomberg.