Can AI fix its own energy problem?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Can AI Fix Its Own Energy Problem?

Podcast: Click Here (Recorded Future News)
Host: Dena Temple-Raston
Guest: Stuart Clark, IT Professional
Date: January 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the hidden environmental impact of our digital lives—specifically, the immense energy and emissions demanded by the internet and artificial intelligence. Host Dena Temple-Raston speaks with Stuart Clark, an IT professional who has shifted from hairdressing to coding and discovered firsthand how small changes in software can have enormous consequences for global energy consumption. The discussion dives into the invisible costs behind every search and stream, why tech’s energy appetite is skyrocketing, and how AI itself could lead the way to a greener digital future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Stuart Clark’s Unusual Path to IT

• Stuart Clark began his career as a hairdresser, spending nearly 20 years in salons before retraining as a tech professional around 2008.
  • Quote: “My hands were far too soft and gentle to be working on building sites.” (05:27, Stuart Clark)

The Internet’s “Invisible” Environmental Footprint

• Despite perceptions, the digital world is not “weightless.” All our online activities—searches, streaming, smart devices—demand huge amounts of energy.

• Stuart notes that if the internet were a country, it would rank as the fourth largest polluter globally, after China, the US, and India (00:50, 09:30).

  • Quote: “If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth.” (09:30, Stuart Clark)

Quantifying Digital Emissions

• Simple actions have shockingly large impacts:

  • One internet search: melts 0.2 grams of Arctic ice (08:26, Stuart Clark)
  • Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day—the cumulative effect is the equivalent of melting over 100 square miles of Arctic ice per year (08:36, Dena Temple-Raston).
  • TikTok’s annual carbon footprint in the US, UK, and France alone would require planting 26 million trees and growing them for 10 years to offset (08:36, Dena Temple-Raston).

• Transparency in tech:

  • Companies often obscure the true environmental cost—data centers are secretive, sometimes requiring armed guards and even not appearing on maps (07:42, Stuart Clark).
  • Quote: “One of Google’s data centers was called Lord Voldemort because it was like, he who shall not be named...” (07:42, Stuart Clark)

Realization: Code Matters—A Lot

• Stuart recounts a “bug” in his own code that made hundreds of redundant database requests instead of one, massively increasing server workload.
  • He likens it to walking to the library 500 times for each page of a book rather than checking out the whole book at once (14:44, Stuart Clark).
• The impact of this inefficiency:

  • One line of “lazy” code produced 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year—the equivalent energy usage of an entire American household for four months (15:49, 16:08, Dena Temple-Raston).

  • When Stuart optimized this code, server load was reduced by 99% (16:20, Stuart Clark).

  • Quote: “Just this one line, one single line of code was responsible for generating what I estimated to be 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Wow. Just because of one lazy algorithm.” (15:49, Stuart Clark)

The Road to Sustainable Software & AI’s Role

• Stuart coins the idea of “sustainable software”: simple, behind-the-scenes code optimizations can ripple out to billions, dramatically reducing emissions (16:25, Dena Temple-Raston).
• AI becomes part of the solution:
  • Programmers can now ask AI to optimize code for efficiency. Some companies are already using AI to cool data centers more effectively, cutting energy use in half—the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road (17:59, Dena Temple-Raston, 18:14, Stuart Clark).
  • Quote: “I can actually write within there to, say, use the most sustainable way possible to use as less CPUs...and AI will say, yeah, I can do that for you.” (17:43, Stuart Clark)

The Choice Ahead

• AI is not inherently bad—the outcome depends on how we use it.

• The episode concludes by emphasizing the power of small, intentional changes: updating code, optimizing with AI, and pushing for transparency can lighten our digital footprint at scale.

  • Quote: “Artificial intelligence necessarily isn’t bad. We just have to choose our path here and how to do this in a way that’s both healthy for us as humans and healthy for us as a planet.” (18:14, Stuart Clark)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (by Timestamp)

• 00:50, Stuart Clark: “If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth.”
• 08:26, Stuart Clark: “Every search that you make on that device will melt 0.2 grams of Arctic ice.”
• 14:44, Stuart Clark: “This is like going to the library to get a 500-page book. But instead of checking out the entire book, you're checking out one page at a time… 500 times.”
• 15:49, Stuart Clark: “Just this one line, one single line of code was responsible for generating what I estimated to be 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year.”
• 16:20, Stuart Clark: “The fix was to reduce the server load by 99%.”
• 17:43, Stuart Clark: “I can actually write within there to, say, use the most sustainable way possible... and AI will say, yeah, I can do that for you.”
• 18:14, Stuart Clark: “Artificial intelligence necessarily isn’t bad. We just have to choose our path here and how to do this in a way that’s both healthy for us as humans and healthy for us as a planet.”

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Notable Segments & Context (Timestamps)

• 00:50 – 01:06: Internet as a massive, unchecked polluter.
• 06:32 – 07:08: Lack of consumer awareness about digital energy costs and transparency in the tech industry.
• 08:15 – 09:45: The shocking calculations—searches, streaming, TikTok, and the global scale of the problem.
• 14:07 – 16:25: The library metaphor, real-world bug fixing, and the leap to sustainable software.
• 17:43 – 18:34: The promise of AI-powered code optimization and reimagining the industry’s ecological responsibility.

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Final Thoughts

The conversation highlights that the digital world is not as “clean” or “invisible” as it feels—every online action has a material, environmental cost. Yet, solutions may be unexpectedly simple: optimizing software, leveraging AI for sustainability, and demanding transparency. While the challenges are substantial, the path forward can be shaped by millions of small, behind-the-scenes choices—one line of code at a time.

Transcript

[Dena Temple Raston]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. So I have a burning question I want to start with.

[Stuart Clark]

Sure.

[Dena Temple Raston]

How long did it take you to grow your beard?

[Stuart Clark]

So I've been growing my beard now for about 17 years. Okay.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And how long would you say it is? Is it 3ft long?

[Stuart Clark]

It's close onto 3ft. It will touch my sort of like, belt buckle area now. Yeah, it's that long. Yeah.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Today we're talking to Stuart Clark, an IT professional with a knack for cutting through the noise and a warning about the hidden environmental cost of our digital lives.

[Stuart Clark]

If the Internet were a country, it was. It will be the fourth largest polluter on earth. So that's going to be behind China, behind the US Behind India. And unlike those countries, the Internet, its growth really goes unchecked.

[Dena Temple Raston]

But there's good news, too. Stewart says there's a way out of this, a fix. And it comes from a place you'd never expect. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and you're listening to Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital world. Today we're wandering into the wild, into the places where nature and technology are learning to work together. And nowhere does that partnership feel more improbable or more revealing than with artificial intelligence. That's after the break. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Servolai. Your IT team wastes half their day on repetitive tickets. And the more your business grows, the more requests pile up. Password resets, access, onboarding, all pulling it away from meaningful work. With Serval AI, you can cut those requests by more than half. Your IT team just says what they need in plain English and Servl makes it happen in seconds. Just think about any new hire. It takes hours and involves slacks and emails and approvals that leave the employee waiting for days. With Servol, you ask to onboard a new hire and AI provides access to everything automatically with all the right approvals, it never even has to touch it. Servl saves time, money and lets it focus on actual problems. And they guarantee to cut 50% of help desk tickets by week four of your free pilot. Servl powers the fastest growing companies in the world, like Perplexity, Mercour, Verkada and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free [e-mail] clickhere. That's S-E-R-V-A L.com clickhere taking care of.

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[Dena Temple Raston]

Click here. I'm Dena Temple Rastin. AI can feel miraculous. Predicting hurricanes, translating whale songs, promising to shave hours off our weekdays. It's also ravenous. Every query, every model, every server farm is gobbling up power, not just driving up prices, but spewing emissions out into the atmosphere. And that invisible appetite is starting to show up in unexpected places like the national power grid and in your monthly electricity bill. Well, if your electric bill has gone up lately, you are not alone. Artificial intelligence data centers are predicted to drive demand to record highs in the coming years. Google announced this week it is well behind on a pledge to all but eliminate its net carbon emissions by 2030. Its emissions are actually up nearly 50% since 2019. One factor artificial intelligence and the energy required. And Google isn't alone. Across the industry, the promise of greener computing is colliding with the reality of AI's energy appetite. And there's another story here, one that starts not in a data center, but with a single coder. A man who stumbled on a surprisingly elegant way to shrink that footprint. By fighting fire with fire. These days, Stuart Clark works in it, but that's not where he began. His dad worked construction, and the expectation was that he he would, too. But Stuart wanted something different, a path that was his own. So he picked up a pair of scissors and became a hairdresser.

[Stuart Clark]

My hands were far too soft and gentle to be working on building sites. My, my, my wife says my hands are so soft, they're like ve. And so, yeah, it's a compliment. It is a compliment. Yeah.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Stuart cut hair in salons for almost 20 years. But by 2008, the Shine had kind of worn off. So he reinvented himself again.

[Stuart Clark]

I thought, what's next on the list? And so, yeah, I got into tech, and I was very fortunate. And my career really took off.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He taught himself to code and landed jobs with some of the biggest names in tech. And somewhere between Cisco and Amazon and Spotify, Stewart started noticing how much energy the Internet was consuming. Because suddenly, everything was getting wired up. Not just Computers. But toasters, cars, light fixtures, children's toys, Every smart device was adding to the demand, and most people didn't even realize it was happening.

[Stuart Clark]

We think about cars, think about plastic in the ocean, but we don't think about our digital footprint just yet. The digital world feels somewhat cleaner, if not weightless.

[Dena Temple Raston]

As someone helping build that digital world, though, Stuart understood better than most just how heavy it really is. So he set out to calculate the cost, to give it a label, something you could size up at a glance and maybe act on. The way we do when we shop for a car, checking the miles per gallon or when we buy a dishwasher with that energy saver sticker slapped right on the front, you know, we're making.

[Stuart Clark]

Choices there based on energy rating, like, you know, how many miles to a gallon of car does how much CO2 it uses. And it's kind of like, well, if I had that information to hand, I could make a conscious decision when I was using an app, for example. But some of this data is just incredibly hard to actually find. The industry is as transparent as it needs to be.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Consider the data center, one of the biggest drivers of all those rising emissions.

[Stuart Clark]

They're built in the most possible, indiscreet way. Many years ago, Google's data centers weren't even on any maps. One of Google's data centers was called Lord Voldemort because it was like, he who shall not be named, we do.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Not speak his name.

[Stuart Clark]

Voldemort. I've been to data centers which have got moats in front of them, and they've actually got armed guards around them. They have better security than most airports do.

[Dena Temple Raston]

But after some digging, he finally was able to put a number on it. And I have to say, even for someone like me, who already had a sense of the problem, the numbers were staggering.

[Stuart Clark]

If you go onto your Internet, you know the search that you've done. Every search that you make on that device will melt 0.2 grams of Arctic ice.

[Dena Temple Raston]

For context, Google alone handles about eight and a half billion searches every day. Over the course of a year. That would mean melting more than 100 square miles of Arctic ice. And that's just a Google search. In a year, the average person's YouTube streaming has a carbon footprint equal to driving a car. Almost a hundred. And TikTok, here's another crazy statistic. To offset its annual carbon footprint, you'd have to plant 26 million trees today and let them grow for 10 years. And that's just TikTok's usage in the US, UK and France. When you widen the lens and add up all the energy used by the infrastructure that keeps the Internet running, the searches, the streaming, every click and scroll and convert that into greenhouse gas emissions, the picture gets darker.

[Stuart Clark]

If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter on earth. So that's going to be behind China, behind the us, behind India. And unlike those countries, the Internet, its growth really goes unchecked.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So when Stewart saw those numbers, he felt a little crushed, even guilty. Maybe you do too. But then, right in the middle of tallying up all that damage, when he was buried in a coding project, Stewart stumbled onto something he hadn't expected. Not a full solution exactly, but a glimmer of hope. A surprising one. And that's when we come back. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Factor. You want to eat better, but you don't have the energy to make it happen. And it's not that you're failing at healthy eating. It's just that you don't have the three extra hours every night for meal planning and shopping. Not to mention prep, cooking and cleanup. What if you let Factor handle it all? Factor is designed by dietitians, ready, made by chefs and delivered to your door. Their meals are exactly what you would make if only you had the time Lean proteins, healthy fats, colorful vegetables and whole food ingredients. Personally, I'm most excited about the Thai Yellow Curry chicken with Ginger rice, but you can choose from 100 rotating meals made every week in categories like Calorie, Smart, Mediterranean and a new MusclePro collection for strength and recovery. Factor meals are always fresh, never frozen, and ready in two minutes. Just heat it and eat it. Head to FactorMeals.com clickhere50OFF and use the code clickhere50OFF to get 50% off your first factor box. Plus free breakfast for a year offer is only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor support for Click Here comes from Quince. Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that look polished and feel effortless at prices you can actually afford. From the stitching to the fit to the fabrics, the quality is clear so you'll be able to wear their styles season after season. My quince suede slip ons have become a staple for me. They're comfortable, attractive and I get compliments on them all the time. But Quince isn't just about shoes. They have everything Soft mongolian cashmere sweaters, 100% silk tops, perfectly cut denim And Italian wool coats. All premium materials produced in ethical, trusted factories and priced far below other luxury brands. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com clickhere for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com clickhere to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com clickhere.

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[Dena Temple Raston]

After crunching the numbers, Stuart was stunned by how much energy the Internet was eating up. But something seemed off. So he went back to his code.

[Stuart Clark]

How this started for me was is that I was reviewing some code that I was working on and then one day I just found this bug.

[Dena Temple Raston]

A bug, a mistake in his code.

[Stuart Clark]

And if anybody's ever seen my code, you'll know that it's actually quite heavy in bugs. I don't claim to be the greatest, I claim to be the greatest coder. I was pretty much self taught on coding.

[Dena Temple Raston]

This particular line of buggy code was supposed to request information from a database all at once. But instead it asks for the data one tiny bit at a time. Literally hundreds of separate requests instead of just one.

[Stuart Clark]

This is like going to the library to get a 500 page book. But instead of checking out this entire book, the whole book, you're checking out one page at a time. Yeah, you're reading it and then you're walking back. You check out page two 500 times, you know, so if you can hear.

[Dena Temple Raston]

That kind of inefficiency is invisible to users, but not to the data servers doing all the heavy lifting. Think of it this way. Imagine you're the one walking to and from the library for each individual page of that 500 page book.

[Stuart Clark]

After like the 20th trip, you could, you know, you might feel sort of like quite physically exhausted. You know, I think even the fittest person would be like starting to sweat a little bit. So you Know, you can imagine a server doing exactly that same sort of process. It's just getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

[Dena Temple Raston]

His one line of code did just that. It made the servers work harder, which made them run hotter, which set the cooling systems into overdrive too. Energy demand spiked.

[Stuart Clark]

So I actually did the math on this as well. Just this one line, one single line of code was responsible for generating what I estimated to be 2.3 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Wow. Just because of one lazy algorithm.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Every time that one line of code got used, it consumed as much energy as an entire American household using in four months. And when Stuart tweaked that line of.

[Stuart Clark]

Code, the fix was to reduce the server load by 99%.

[Dena Temple Raston]

A 99% reduction from a single line of code. Suddenly, servers ran cooler, Power use fell. The carbon footprint shrank dramatically. His mistake had become a solution. And that solution turned into an epiphany. He thought, maybe we can't convince billions of people to scroll less, but we could write code that's better for the planet. If big tech companies made these tiny code tweets behind the scenes, if they built in tiny efficiencies, the impact could ripple out to billions of users all at once. Like, instead of going door to door asking every family to recycle, just asking Amazon to switch to environmentally friendly packaging. A few subtle shifts to the code itself, and the Internet could start treading a little lighter on the planet. Stewart started calling it sustainable software. And here's the twist. The very technology driving energy demand to record heights right now could also be the tool to fix it. Because Stewart says, AI can practically automate sustainable coding.

[Stuart Clark]

I'm using AI to write my code. I can actually write within there to, say, use the most sustainable way possible to use as less CPUs. We can just put that in there and AI will say, yeah, I can do that for you. I can do that.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Some companies are already experimenting with this, cooling data centers more efficiently and cutting energy use nearly in half. And Stuart says that's the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road.

[Stuart Clark]

Artificial intelligence necessarily isn't bad. We just have to choose our path here and how to do this in a way that's both healthy for us as humans and unhealthy for us as a planet.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Because, as Stewart likes to say, the Internet isn't weightless. Every search, every stream, every line of code leaves a trace. And if we pay attention, those traces don't just point to the problem, they point to the way out of it. Click here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, and Zach Hirsch. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Lou Olkowski and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Jesse Niswonger and Jake Cook are our sound designers and engineers. Find us on X or Facebook at Click Here. Show or leave us a voice message at 6615CHTalk. Sometimes we'll turn those moments into reporting, sometimes into a conversation, and sometimes into a future story you'll hear on this show. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend. Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what matters?

[Recorded Future Announcer]

Act first looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here? Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.