Because I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”

I understand the ugliness of overall conference message/purpose, but those comments could be interpreted as polite.

Still, next election, as DNC alternative, there needs to be a Humanist America organization. Purpose is to provide UBI to Americans, but to also gain the political power to do so. All weapons, climate terrorist energy, and those who humanize Bergum, including at this conference must have 99%+ of their corporate shares nationalized. Zionist loyalty oaths by policy relevant people invalidate citizenship, and zionist agenda political funding get all wealth confiscated.

Only commensurate recusatory massive donations to Humanist America can prevent the nationalization seizure. Anyone opposing the nationalization as inappropriate, also zeroed out.

The idea that corporations must provide polite loyalty to climate terrorist fascist regime as a calculated politeness, must be significantly recalculated.

I’ve listened to Ruth Porat speak before and nothing about this article matches that. It feels fake or taken wildly out of context. As a general rule she doesn’t say much that isn’t already publicly released, and this doesn’t match any of the statements google’s released recently.

For the uninitiated, she’s the kind of person who would say “you bring up a great point” before then explaining why you’re wrong. So it feels disingenuous to not include the full sentence in the quote, and then to also not link to the source video is sus.

There's a techbro (sis in this instance) idea that the faster we use AI, the faster AI will find a solution for climate change. The stupidity in that is that we already know the solution. We just have to execute on it.

This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There's room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.

The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.

But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI "finds" the solution to climate change, people will finally listen

How exactly do they "own" it?

They won't. Nuclear has long been thrown in as a "maybe we'll do this". The economics have long run against it.

AI can already "find" the solution. They're not listening to it because they're looking for a magic pill that solves it without needing to change anything. We're fucked.

I agree with you and I think she was taken somewhat out of context, though it's not exactly fake or making things up either. My interpretation is that she is agreeing with specific parts of Sec. Burgum's statements. The headline of the article (calls Trump admin's climate denialism "fantastic") is sensationalization. They do link to the source video though and to Google's whitepaper.

Her remarks are at around 9hr 5m. She says "fantastic" and then talks specifically about nuclear, grid permitting & modernization. She focuses on the "AI arms race" and the need to act quickly on energy policy. She does not make any statement on Burgum's climate denialism.

Most of what she is saying is in line with what's in the whitepaper (of which she is an author). And in my view, the whitepaper outlines an energy policy that both achievable in the current administration and reduces emissions. It is certainly not perfect, and I wish the conversation was different, but there's some good stuff in there.

I have been a volunteer advocating for climate policies at the federal level for the past few years, and we have had a lot of conversations around nuclear, geothermal, clean energy tax credits, permitting reform (NEPA exemptions, transmission). I was happy to see mention of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 in Google's whitepaper -- we lobbied pretty hard for that. It definitely would have reduced emissions.

I don't personally like that Google is advocating for natural gas, even if they talk about carbon sequestration and satellite based emissions monitoring in the same breath. Natural gas is definitely part of the current state of climate / energy policy conversation, and we'd rather have natural gas than coal. In my advocacy work, I don't demonize natural gas, but I try to shift towards talking more about geothermal and nuclear to cover base load power needs.

Burgum's comments are around 47m and there is definitely a lot of denialism in there. But he also talks about decarbonization, sequestration, cleaner sources of base load power (hydro). A few years ago, Republicans were not using any of this sort of language, and we've been part of helping to change that. Our strategy has included a strong focus on common ground around energy, and side-stepping the climate change debate entirely.

If the end result is a reduction in emissions then personally I don't really care as much about ideological purity. The article to me seems more focused on purity and less on the full context.

I can barely pay the electricity bill to be shocked.

The video for those who are interested is on YouTube.

Also the 9h15m mark.

Don't be evil

If I had a cloning machine, I'd make many Luigis.