Scaling Laws: Identifying the Myths and Facts of AI's Environmental Impact with Gavin McCormick 

Summary

The Lawfare Podcast — "Scaling Laws: Identifying the Myths and Facts of AI’s Environmental Impact with Gavin McCormick"

Date: May 1, 2026
Host: Kevin Frazier (AI Innovation & Law Fellow, Texas Law; Senior Editor, Lawfare)
Guest: Gavin McCormick (Executive Director, Climate Trace, Cofounder, WattTime)
Podcast Partner: University of Texas School of Law

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the environmental impact of AI, particularly through the lens of transparency and emissions tracking. Kevin Frazier and guest Gavin McCormick unpack how AI can both harm and help the planet, debunk myths about big tech’s environmental footprint, and explore the power of accurate measurement and open data. They discuss the transformative impact of projects like WattTime and Climate Trace—coalitions leveraging AI and satellite data to track global emissions—and reveal how nuanced, outcome-oriented policy, combined with market incentives, is changing the game.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI as a Double-Edged Tool for the Environment

• Nuance over Absolutes

  • Gavin opens with a central tenet: AI is not inherently good or bad for the environment—"it matters what you’re using it for, how you’re doing it" ([04:27]).
  • Kevin and Gavin dispel the myth that environmental or tech solutions are universally beneficial or harmful; context and application matter.

• Quote:

  "Sometimes [AI] is helpful for the environment, sometimes it's harmful. It matters. What are you using it for? How are you doing it? It's not all."
  —Gavin McCormick ([04:27])

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2. The Power and Pitfalls of First Impressions in Tech Adoption

• The Anchoring Effect

  • Early perceptions (e.g., “batteries always help the environment”) can mislead policy and practice.
  • The initial environmental promise of batteries was undermined by unintended grid impacts—charging at the wrong time can encourage coal use ([05:54]).

• Quote:

  "Nobody ever got money to found a tech startup where they said, will this make the world a worse place? It's complicated. Further research is needed."
  —Gavin McCormick ([09:12])

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3. Transparency and Rigorous Measurement as Climate Solutions

• WattTime Origins & Impact

  • Born at a Bay Area party, WattTime made real-time grid data available to the public, enabling smarter choices about when to use energy ([08:02]).
  • This transparency allowed individuals and businesses to use energy when it genuinely benefited the environment.

• Scientific Consensus and Policy Impact

  • A working group in California established consensus on emissions impacts of batteries, leading to evidence-based policy aligned with actual environmental outcomes ([13:03]).
  • Data-driven regulation replaced theory-based mandates.

• Quote:

  "There is scientific consensus on how you figure out: use electricity this time or that time, what happens to emissions. And now... that’s a crazy new type of data.”
  —Gavin McCormick ([13:03])

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4. From Policy to Global Accountability: The Birth of Climate Trace

• Bridging the Data Gap

  • U.S. transparency laws facilitated easy measurement; most countries lacked similar infrastructure ([17:27]).
  • The innovation: train machine learning models, using U.S. data and satellite imagery, to estimate power plant emissions globally ([17:27]–[18:53]).

• Coalition Building & Scale

  • What began as a collaboration between three nonprofits grew (with support from Al Gore and Google.org) into a coalition of 150+ nonprofits, universities, and tech companies ([20:44]–[21:12]).
  • The “Wikipedia model”: open, structured data sharing for emissions tracking across sectors and geography.

• Quote:

  "Al Gore literally had had a news alert... in case anyone ever announced that they had built this technology. Because he saw it coming."
  —Gavin McCormick ([19:36])

  "Fast forward a few years—150 nonprofits and universities and tech companies have joined the Climate Trace Coalition, which is now the largest provider of emissions data in the world."
  —Gavin McCormick ([21:12])

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5. The (Surprising) Power of Markets Over Mandates

• Transparency Drives Change

  • Most emissions reductions tracked by Climate Trace are due to free market pressures rather than regulation. Transparency enables competition and self-regulation ([23:14]).
  • Bad actors (“greenwashers”) can now be held accountable; good actors can differentiate themselves ([22:31]–[23:35]).

• Quote:

  "80% of the emissions reductions that result are free market, not government based."
  —Gavin McCormick ([23:14])

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6. Data Centers, AI, and the Real Story Behind Power Consumption

• Separating Use from Pollution

  • Data centers use immense power (e.g., Amazon’s usage rivals Ireland’s), but their carbon footprints vary dramatically—most tech giants heavily invest in renewables ([34:57]–[36:21]).
  • The key is “how much dirty electricity” is used, not raw consumption.

• Debunking the "AI is Doomed for the Planet" Narrative

  • Headlines focus on energy use, not sources; giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta are close to “net zero” via renewables ([36:50]).
  • The narrative is oversimplified; some companies (like XAI’s Colossus in Memphis) still use fossil fuels ([39:07]).

• Quote:

  "Apple and Microsoft and Meta now have essentially hit zero emissions from data centers—and it is all going as renewable energy."
  —Gavin McCormick ([36:50])

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7. The Dangers of Rigid and Misguided Environmental Policy

• Efficiency vs. Excessive “Greenwashing”

  • Policies enforcing “24/7 renewables” can paradoxically make clean energy more expensive and harder to scale without environmental benefit ([41:18]–[42:48]).
  • Good intentions (“it must be built nearby”) can backfire by misaligning incentives and inflating costs.

• Regulatory Innovation

  • California regulators now look to industry best practices and real-time data to write more effective rules ([43:08]–[44:49]).

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8. Market Forces, Data-Driven Law, and the Role of Government

• Setting Rules, Not Picking Winners

  • Governments should set science-based standards for what’s “green” and let market competition and data transparency drive innovation ([47:01]).
  • Outcome-oriented legislation is key—specifying “reduce emissions and measure accurately,” not precisely how to do it ([24:34], [47:01]).

• Quote:

  "The role of government... needs to be in terms of outcomes."
  —Gavin McCormick ([24:01])

  "Nobody needs to force you to drive on the right side of the road. It’s more about a coordination problem... if you, a company, voluntarily invest in going green, you won’t be caught flat-footed suddenly against the rules. That’s a very different vision for what law can do in environment."
  —Gavin McCormick ([47:52]–[48:23])

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9. Collaborative, Incentive-Driven Data Sharing—A New Paradigm

• Climate Trace’s Unique Model

  • Previous global emissions data consortiums failed because they were hierarchical (“one guy in charge, everyone else gives him data”). Climate Trace works because sharing is decentralized, mutual, and aligns with everyone’s incentives ([49:51]–[50:48]).

• Incentives for Disclosure

  • Companies want to be “greener than the competition”—incentivizing them to share emissions data to gain business advantage and improve reputation ([52:32], [53:24]).

• Cross-Domain Potential

  • The same model can apply to education, healthcare, and beyond: transparency, open data, and shared standards drive outcomes and accelerate innovation ([54:53]).

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10. Final Messages & Broader Impact

• Don’t Assume "Green" Costs More

  • The idea that environmentally responsible tech is always pricier is often false—data can reveal “free lunch” opportunities where greener is cheaper ([25:24]).

• Shout-Outs & What’s Next

  • Walmart highlighted as a leader in demanding products that are both greener and cheaper ([56:48]).
  • Climate Trace’s hyperscaler data forthcoming for public use.
  • Encouragement for cross-sector innovation following the open/coalition data model.

• Quote:

  "If there’s one story people need to know about AI and environment, is it's not harder to do it right. Get rid of the idea that it must be more difficult to do the right thing. Just check what the right one is and buy it and don't pay more for it."
  —Gavin McCormick ([57:44])

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Notable Quotes & Highlights

• Empirical, Not Ideological Solutions:
  "I love that it's not liberal, it's not democratic, it's not conservative, it's not Republican, it's just empirical." —Kevin Frazier ([48:33])

• Data-First Environmentalism:
  "You cannot change what you don't measure." —Kevin Frazier ([16:38])

• Market-Driven Progress:
  "Most of [the money for green tech] is driven by companies want to look green, they want to be responsible to their investors...what governments need to do is set the rules of the road." —Gavin McCormick ([47:01])

• Collaboration as Force Multiplier:
  "Instead of starting with the assumption that people will give us data, Data are valuable...the coalition needs to go wherever it makes sense for the people contributing." —Gavin McCormick ([52:32])

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Key Timestamps

• [04:27] – AI: good and bad environmental impacts
• [05:54] – Batteries: use cases and unintended outcomes
• [13:03] – California consensus on measuring emissions
• [18:53] – Google.org and Al Gore support for Climate Trace
• [21:12] – Growth: 150+ organizations in Climate Trace
• [23:14] – Transparency leads to market-driven emissions cuts
• [34:57] – Power consumption statistics: Amazon's usage vs. Ireland
• [36:50] – Net zero tech companies: Microsoft, Apple, Meta
• [41:18] – 24/7 renewables fallacy and costs
• [47:01] – Role of government: set rules based on science
• [56:48] – The Walmart example: greener, cheaper, scalable

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Conclusion

This wide-ranging, energizing conversation between Kevin Frazier and Gavin McCormick reframes the AI-versus-environment debate. It emphasizes context, transparency, and collaborative innovation—showing how the path to environmental sustainability is more empirical, data-driven, and open than most narratives suggest. A must-listen (or read) for anyone navigating climate policy, technology, or energy transitions.

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To learn more or access data, visit climatetrace.org.

Transcript

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[Alan Rosenstein]

It's the lawfare Podcast I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and senior editor and Research Director at lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different, an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law, where we're tackling the most important AI and policy questions. From new legislation on Capitol Hill to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs, we cut through the hype to get you up to speed on the rules, standards and ideas shaping the future of this pivotal technology. If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to Scaling Laws wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on X and bluesky. Thanks for listening.

[Gavin McCormick]

Foreign.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Overlords take over. What are you most excited about?

[Kevin Frazier]

It's it's not crazy. It's just smart.

[Alan Rosenstein]

And just this year, in the first six months, there have been something like a thousand laws.

[Kevin Frazier]

Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it?

[Alan Rosenstein]

AI only works if society lets it work.

[Kevin Frazier]

There are so many questions have to be figured out and nobody came to my bonus class. Let's enforce the rules of the road.

[Sponsor Ad Narrator]

Foreign

[Kevin Frazier]

welcome back to Scaling Laws, the podcast brought to you by Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law that explores the intersection of AI policy and, of course, the law. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a senior editor at lawfare. Today we're looking at how AI is being used as a tool for global emissions accountability. Our guest is Gavin McCormick of Climate Trace. Gavin has spent his career at the forefront of Climate tech moving from environmental advocacy to leading a coalition of tech companies and NGOs that uses satellite imagery and advanced AI to track human caused emissions with unprecedented precision. From the halls of environmental summits to the server rooms where these algorithms are built, Gavin's work allows for a verifiable and real time inquiry into who is emitting where and how much. It's an especially timely development given that a number of environmental concerns have arisen from America's AI buildout. Stay tuned as we suss out reality from myth and get to the heart of some of the open questions around the environmental ramifications of AI development. Giddy up for a great show and be sure to follow us on X and BlueSky. Gavin, welcome to Scaling Laws.

[Gavin McCormick]

Thanks. It's good to be here, Gavin.

[Kevin Frazier]

When most folks think about AI, oftentimes you hear them raise environmental concerns. Hey, it's using a lot of water. Hey, it's using a lot of power. And oftentimes when you talk to folks in environmental communities, you hear, I don't use AI or I only use AI when it's truly necessary. And God forbid I ever say please or thank you to AI. That's something I'll never do because it's bad for the planet. I was so excited to hear you speak at the Ashby Workshops hosted by Fathom because you cut through all of those paradigms while being someone who is very much, staunchly in the environmental community. So for the folks who haven't had the pleasure of meeting you and learning about your work, who the heck are you and what the heck are you doing both at what time and then with Climate Trace and we can break this down into a few, few subparts.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah, thanks. So, I mean, it's so interesting, right? I think the key message I have about AI before I get any further is sometimes it's helpful for the environment, sometimes it's harmful for the environment. It matters. What are you using for? How are you doing it? It's not all.

[Kevin Frazier]

It's as if AI is a tool that has good use cases. Yeah. Whoa.

[Gavin McCormick]

And I got my start in this space with a different tool that people thought was 100% good for the environment that turned out to be actually often not good for the environment. So sort of the flip version of the story. So a lot of people know this story, that renewable energy is of course necessary for beating climate change. But sun doesn't always shine, wind doesn't always blow, so you need some kind of batteries to store the energy. A lot of people assume that means that batteries are always good for the environment. I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley when some new research was coming out that said actually 90% of batteries are increasing pollution, not decreasing pollution. What. What's going on there? It turns out that what happened is people were deploying large numbers of batteries without asking, what time should we charge those batteries? Turns out batteries only help the environment. If you charge at the time, that's good for the environment. If you charge at the time, that's bad for the environment. You just helped out coal plants instead. And so I was involved in some research saying, what time do you need to charge to be on the pro environment teams at the anti environment team.

[Kevin Frazier]

Yeah, to pause for one second for the folks who like me, love to ask dumb questions. So this is basically getting to the point that our grid can only handle so much power. And so if you're charging that battery at the wrong time, you're really straining the grid and not doing the world a favor and in fact leading to deleterious outcomes.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah. The way I like to think about it is there was a very concerted information campaign effort by electric utilities that kind of like predates a lot of the AI campaigns to convince everybody that the best thing for the environment was to do whatever was most profitable for the electric utilities.

[Kevin Frazier]

Wow. Who could have seen that coming?

[Gavin McCormick]

Who could have seen that coming? So the whole notion that it's somehow good for the environment to use energy at off peak times and that you want to not use it when it's peak, that's true if you're talking money. It's not always true for environment. A different way to think about the problem is to say if I use energy from the power grid at this time, what power plants are going to turn on or off? It turns out that research was coming out right about 2012. Long story short, I was the grad student assigned to go actually operationalize some of those algorithms. We just for fun on a weekend, hit upon this idea that a few people from Google and Facebook and me met at a party and were like, what if we just put this on the Internet? What if we just made it possible for anybody to know what time do you have to use energy for it to be cleaner or dirtier? And we hit upon this idea that in addition to charging batteries the right time you could use your dishwasher at the time that is good for the environment. That would mean it's running on clean, renewable energy. You could not charge your electric vehicle at the time. That means you're going to Hunt a bunch of coal plants. So I got involved in this interesting intersection of software and science and kind of telling the truth about environment, where we stood up this nonprofit that had a budget of $0. It was just like, hey, guys, everybody should be able to see the best science on what's really true. Putting aside all the corporate claims about if you do this or that, how is it going to affect emissions?

[Kevin Frazier]

This is the most lovely Bay Area story I've heard in a while. A bunch of smart people walk into a house party and say, let's use the Internet to expose a bun. Bunch of information and make people smarter. I love it.

[Gavin McCormick]

Our concept of fun.

[Kevin Frazier]

This. Yeah, I. I will say, I don't know, Gavin, if I'm ever going to ask you if you're hosting a party, because I just have different conceptions of fun. But with that in mind, before we get into some of your more recent work, what I want to establish early on is just this trend of people's first response to a new technology.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah.

[Kevin Frazier]

Being the one that really anchors them. Because here, as you noted, it's like batteries here. They save the world. That's all they do, period. And then electricity companies saying, hey, we have this new paradigm. This is the way the world works, period.

[Gavin McCormick]

Don't look at, we were supposed to

[Kevin Frazier]

be done with this. Right. Like, we found out the sun wasn't the center of the universe. But why is it. What is this temptation? Even among folks in the environmental community, you know, scientists, empirically driven. What is it that leads to that kind of gut reaction, that anchoring effect?

[Gavin McCormick]

I think part of it is just like, hey, the world's a complicated place. It takes some time to figure out exactly under which conditions our technology is good and bad. And that one makes sense to me. The other thing I think is about incentives. Nobody ever got money to found a tech startup where they said, will this make the world a worse place? It's complicated. Further research is needed.

[Kevin Frazier]

You gotta say, yeah, I think that pitch fails nine times out of ten totally.

[Gavin McCormick]

And nobody ever raises money as a nonprofit to say, is this thing bad for the environment? It's probably fine, but it's a bit complicated. Further research is needed. So you get a world where some people got to say that everything is good, and some people got to say that everything's bad. There's very few institutions that actually are able to sort of be neutral. Everybody thinks it's universities, but a lot of universities, they need to have the answer be, it's complicated for funding. And what we found at Watt time is that there's very few people who can just be like, oh, this one's good and this one's bad. End of story. No further research needed. That's not a thing.

[Kevin Frazier]

Yeah, and it takes folks a little bit more time to get into that nuance. You have to sit down, you have to have an actual conversation because it's not the sort of thing that gets covered by the New York Times. Right? You're not going to read five paragraphs down into this, you know, huge story and suddenly realize, oh, I'm going to change my mind. I've seen the stars. Everything has become clear now. And sometimes to your point too, Gavin, you have to sit with that uncomfortable truth. Because I know folks, and I'm sure you know folks who, they buy that battery, they buy that Tesla and they think, that's it, I'm the world's greatest environmentalist. You know, mic drop, give me a ring, Al Gore, I'll take your prize now. And they don't want to acknowledge the fact that it's not always that clear cut.

[Gavin McCormick]

We get actually more hate mail from people who thought they were environmentalists. And we published studies saying that actually I was wrong than we do from fossil fuel companies. And I'm like, I'm sympathetic. It's not fun to learn that you thought you were the good guy and you messed up.

[Kevin Frazier]

And so for folks who are thinking, oh my gosh, my whole life has been exposed right now, who the heck is this Gavin guy? I need to, you know, go research him frequently. So tell us a little bit more about the kind of validity and the rigor of the science you're doing in terms of having this measuring of how the grid's being used and thinking through how, you know, you are actually contesting the status quo in a way that is verifiable and reliable.

[Gavin McCormick]

So this all started with UC Berkeley research. My innovation was just like, hey, everybody should get to see this research. So this is really Meredith Fowle's research more than mine. Inesh Azevedo at Carnegie Mellon, now Stanford kind of started doing the same research. So a lot of that started trending. I think this got serious when the state of California got involved. So there was a study that came out that said 90% of batteries in America probably making emissions worse, not better. And all you would need to do is take those same batteries and charge them at a different time. And the state of California had recently established the nation's most generous subsidy for energy storage because it's supposed to be Helping the environment. But the law said, yeah, but it has to actually help the environment or you don't get the subsidy. So it was actually really interesting. The government had to get involved to answer, well, which batteries are good for the environment and which ones aren't. I was predicting years of bureaucratic infighting. I was all prepared for a very slow government story. It was not like that. What they did was really interesting. They convened a group of the 40 largest companies, NGOs and universities thinking about this issue and said, if you guys can all reach consensus, if you guys can in a serious timeframe, figure out a serious answer for how do we know what's good for the environment, what's bad for the environment, we'll go with that. And lo and behold, after a whole lot of meetings, 40 members of the working group reached perfect consensus. I was blown away. Took a few months.

[Kevin Frazier]

Where, where is the biopic on this miracle that happened in California?

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah, I mean I, I gotta say I was pretty impressed. For the California Public Utilities Commission. They did the job well. It was not a coincidence. They did a lot of listening. They did a lot of like calling BS when people were making stuff up. But, but listening when, when consensus is trending. And so there's been so much research since then. But I think the key point is there is scientific consensus on how you figure out you use electricity this time or that time, what happens to emissions. And now we live in a world where instead of that being kind of unknowable, that's a crazy new type of data that people didn't used to have. Think about, you plug in a laptop, you flip a light switch, it's not like it's labeled with you cause this much emissions. But now we know.

[Kevin Frazier]

And what I love about this whole thing is that none of this would have happened, number one, without a means to measure.

[Gavin McCormick]

Right.

[Kevin Frazier]

We have to make sure there's actual mechanisms in place for us to have that data, receive that data. But then, and here's where I'll scream from the mountaintops, sorry, listeners, for me yet again, climbing up on my soapbox, having outcome oriented legislation.

[Gavin McCormick]

Right.

[Kevin Frazier]

By virtue of saying this law has to actually achieve its intended outcome. We had this conversation, but that miracle would not have been possible if it was just more Californians should buy batteries, full stop.

[Contentful/Grainger/Warby Parker/Bill.com/BetterHelp Ad Narrator]

Yeah.

[Gavin McCormick]

And you know, I think I was so impressed because they went in with a theory and they admitted that theory was wrong. They had a theory that more batteries is good. And then when they realized that they had been mistaken, they said the law does have an outcome. This must benefit the environment. What do we have to do to achieve the outcome? And it was remarkable to see.

[Kevin Frazier]

And so you proved this model in terms of just hanging out with a bunch of folks in San Francisco saying, we need radical transparency, gathering that data data, making it available. You prove that with watt time. And in case folks haven't picked up, when we're saying watt time, it's watt. Just. Just for what time? Yes. And then you thought, huh, that worked out pretty well. We changed California policy. How did you create Climate Trace? And what is Climate Trace?

[Gavin McCormick]

So I think before I can get into the story of Climate Trace, I need to share one surprising next step that happened with the California story. What was so surprising is that people have this paradigm in their head that when the government mandates, you have to do something better for the environment. It's hard, it's expensive, it's painful. We're sacrificing something. The crazy discovery of this working group is that it wasn't any more expensive to do it right than to do it wrong. What started happening is that although only one state mandated this, we started hearing from more and more energy storage companies, hey, can we voluntarily do the same thing in Massachusetts, in Missouri, in New York? We said, yep, here's the equivalent data. Then we started hearing from people in China, in Italy, they said, do we have the equivalent data? And we said, call your version of the epa. And we started hearing, actually, no other country has data as good as the United States epa. I didn't know that. So people forget that in the 1970s, the United States went way further than any other country on the planet to mandate transparency on emissions. Not action, just transparency. And so we were suddenly in a world where Europe has much more aggressive laws about environment, but America had more transparency. And it actually wasn't technologically possible to reduce emissions cheaply in Europe, but it was in America. And that left us in a really interesting place.

[Kevin Frazier]

And just to pause there, too, sorry, I'm going to make you stop all the time because you're like 14 times smarter than me. And so I just have to break this down into chunks. It is so remarkable to me that we haven't realized this lesson of just, you cannot change what you don't measure. And I love that. Yeah, I love that we faulted our ways into it as a result of some decisions made in the 1970s. But I also want to pay attention to the fact that you have to have that infrastructure in place. Gathering data doesn't just happen because you want it Right. It's not something you rub the, you know, genie bottle and it shows up. No. You have to really invest in that data collection infrastructure. And I'm really glad we did. And I'm guessing Europeans wish they had too.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so we were getting inbound from companies in all over the world saying, what would it take for us to do the same thing? And I said, well, first you could have a 10 year program to stand up an equivalent of the UPS, EPA grid monitoring program. Forget about it. Yeah. And then we hit upon a kind of crazy idea. So we had some physicists on our group of volunteers and some of them said, do you think you could point a satellite at power plants in other countries and train a machine learning AI model trained on US data, but using the new satellite data? Satellites have gone way down in cost. There's way more than there used to be. And look at photographs of power plants around the world every few hours and detect what are their emissions and build a cheap equivalent. And I thought, that sounds crazy. But we, for fun, as a training exercise for our staff, said, why don't you write this up for a grant for google.org? wouldn't that be funny if they agreed?

[Kevin Frazier]

Again, your definition of fun is just wild to me, but I'm so glad you deserved.

[Gavin McCormick]

But we did it. With no expectation that we would actually win, Google called us and said, yes, we will give you millions of dollars to try a crazy might work AI solution to monitor all the power plants in the world and provide a free database of their emissions for anyone to use for any purpose.

[Kevin Frazier]

Wow.

[Gavin McCormick]

Whoa. Didn't really expect that. It was a coalition of three nonprofits that kind of teamed up on this thing. When we announced the project, Al Gore read the message. Apparently Al Gore had envisioned for 20 years that if the technology were ever possible to do something like this, he thought this was the key because he was a fierce believer in the power of transparency and technology to change the environmental conversation.

[Kevin Frazier]

To Al Gore's credit, he was thinking about tech way before most Americans. It's cool to hear that.

[Gavin McCormick]

He.

[Kevin Frazier]

Yeah. No, no. Definite.

[Gavin McCormick]

Okay.

[Kevin Frazier]

So Al Gore is reading these DMs, finding out this random information. How does he then get inserted into all of this?

[Gavin McCormick]

So Al Gore literally had had a news alert set up for years in case anyone ever announced that they had built this technology. Because he saw it coming.

[Kevin Frazier]

I want to know what the keywords were. Like Berkeley, satellite, Earth, machine learning.

[Gavin McCormick]

I'm not quite sure.

[Kevin Frazier]

That's awesome. But.

[Gavin McCormick]

So we get a call from Al Gore's office. There's a hilarious moment where at first we don't believe it's Al Gore's office, but it turns out it's real deal. And so he invites me to his office and he says, you know, what a wonderful project. But, Gavin, the climate movement is bigger than just power plants. Is there any version where you could take this innovation and apply it to everything in the world that pollutes? And I said, no, sir, I do not know.

[Kevin Frazier]

Just a small ask. Just measure everything, Gavin.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so I said, look, no, I don't know how to do that. You would need experts in so many fields. And then the fact this project just happened to be different nonprofits teaming up. Anyway, we hit upon this idea. What if we just keep adding more nonprofits with more different types of environmental

[Kevin Frazier]

expertise, Your own kind of scaling laws. The nonprofit scaling law, yeah.

[Gavin McCormick]

So we hit upon kind of like a Wikipedia model. What if we have. We make it really easy for nonprofits to join when they contribute data to the project. It's got to be free and open source for everybody. But unlike Wikipedia, it's a little bit more structured data, so you can actually use some clever AI algorithms to make the whole thing more accurate. Fast forward a few years. 150 nonprofits and universities and tech companies have joined the Climate Trace Coalition, which is now the largest provider of emissions data in the world.

[Kevin Frazier]

Wow. So to break it down for a second, basically what we've got satellites hanging out in low earth orbit orbit, taking a look at all of emissions, power plants, data centers, cars, all of it, you name it. And by virtue of monitoring that, then training on sophisticated data to understand, okay, whatever I'm detecting that's going to result in this much, much emissions, and then having that be refined over time, where, for example, if I am a power plant operator myself, I could call up Climate Trace and say, hey, it's in my interest, actually, to show people that I'm among the most efficient power plant operators.

[Gavin McCormick]

The good ones want transparency.

[Kevin Frazier]

So the whole idea here now is if I can have Climate Trace verify, hey, power plant A is actually far more efficient than power plant B. That can lead to, you know, perhaps lower regulatory fines or regulatory scrutiny, so on and so forth. And even your customers may appreciate that. So on and so forth. And so this sort of transparency actually makes sure that the green watchers of the world, the folks who are trying to sound environmentally friendly but really weren't, get called out.

[Gavin McCormick]

That's totally true. And so one of the big surprises for me, so, you know, if you can't tell, I'm a, I'm a San Francisco Berkeley liberal. I have all my views on government.

[Kevin Frazier]

Hey, as a Berkeley grad, I'm a fellow bear, but I just had to walk further up the hill than you.

[Gavin McCormick]

There you go then. I think the big surprise is how much I'm seeing a free market answer in this story. So my surprise as a person who believes in government, actually the government mandates are a very small piece of the story. And the transparency of the UA CPA was really important and the transparency of some equivalent governments. Uruguay did the same thing on cattle. They're way ahead of America on cattle emissions.

[Kevin Frazier]

Who knew?

[Gavin McCormick]

Who knew?

[Kevin Frazier]

Go. Yeah, yeah, move for Uruguay.

[Gavin McCormick]

Move for Uruguay. And so, you know, by stitching together all these government transparency programs, whoever's best in class in every sector, that's our training data set. And then applying all this transparency, I would say 80% of the emissions reductions that result are free market, not government based. It is not a story about mandates.

[Kevin Frazier]

And what strikes me as well is that government intervention here would actually inhibit your ability to do this. Which is to say when you have the government specify, hey, this has to be the approach, or that has to be the approach, you may have missed out on the sort of detection of what was truly more environmentally friendly and allow for that kind of rapid response as a result of that transparency. Is that a fair take?

[Gavin McCormick]

I think that's exactly right. And so just to be very careful, I'm not saying government should sit on the sidelines. I'm saying the role of government, and I completely agree with you, it needs to be in terms of outcomes. So the Biden administration, much as I love a lot of what they did, they, they did push through a rule that actually requires measuring a particular metric they thought was going to be helpful on emissions, turns out to have no scientific credibility and related emissions. Awkward, awkward.

[Kevin Frazier]

Hate when that happens. Hate when I hate when I, you know, bake a bad idea into law and just assume it's going to work out.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so governments that have instead passed laws like, you must measure emissions, you must reduce emissions, let the science go where it goes. And you know, often the Biden administration got this right. There's just, there's one case where they really got wrong that radically outperforms government trying to pick the winner in a fast moving environment.

[Kevin Frazier]

And having that sort of outcome oriented approach is more data intensive. It's more, you know, requires a higher degree of actually paying attention to what you're doing, more work. And it's More work. And I think we've become accustomed to a sort of set it and forget it approach to the law. But as you've noted and as you're seeing in real time with Climate Trace, we have access to more and more data. And so in theory, this should be leading to more and more outcome oriented legislation to hold ourselves accountable.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so I totally agree. And so I don't have the same legal background you do, but I did used to work in the United States Department of Energy. And one of my big discoveries is that there is a deep seated belief that the thing that is greener surely is more expensive. And it's shocking how often that's wrong. And so we had all these energy efficiency standards where we concluded that the higher energy efficiency technology was also cheaper. And the reason to mandate it is people were just confused. But there was like, literally, you give up nothing. And so I think what data and science can do is they can create. I love the name of the Abundance Institute. They can show you how often the right answer is it's a false choice. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can do the greener thing. It's actually better business, better operating conditions. There is no catch other than you needed to look at data.

[Kevin Frazier]

Hi, I'm Kevin Frazier. I am the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior editor at lawfare. If you've listened to scaling laws or read our work on AI and national security, you've seen the kinds of questions I spend my time thinking through. What makes lawfare worth supporting is straightforward. It delivers reliable, independent, non partisan analysis on some of the hardest hitting issues in law, technology and security. And it does so without cutting corners. We try to slow things down just enough to get them right, even as the news cycle speeds up. That kind of work matters now more than ever. Emerging technologies are moving faster than the policies meant to govern them. And the stakes for democratic institutions, for markets, for individual rights, are real clear. Careful analysis is one of the few ways to keep up without losing rigor. Lawfare is a non profit and everything we produce is available without a paywall. That model only works if people who rely on this work choose to support it. If you found value in our podcasts or writing, if it's helped you understand what's happening and why, consider becoming a supporter. You can do [e-mail] support even $10 a month makes a meaningful difference and helps keep this work accessible to everyone. Thanks for listening, happy prompting, and thank you again for taking these issues seriously.

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[Gavin McCormick]

Hold on one second.

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[Kevin Frazier]

Okay, well, I usually try to find a bumper sticker for each episode and there is no catch. You just need data. Is that is that is perfect. I'll. I'll send you one when I finish it. So let's move now into the highly contested territory of data centers and AI development. Because everyone and their mom has heard about how data centers are destroying the planet and how they are using just incredible amounts of power and really putting a strain on our Energy grid.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yep.

[Kevin Frazier]

What is your perception of that story and that narrative from Climate Traces view?

[Gavin McCormick]

So, first of all, every data center that causes pollution, Climate Trace is tracking. So in our database, we've got the world's data centers. And so we look a lot at the data, and the short version is one half of that story seems to be right and one half of that story seems to be wrong. And so do data centers use a lot of electricity? Heck, yes. It is actually true that some of the AI companies now use more electricity than entire countries. I believe Amazon is the same as Ireland now.

[Kevin Frazier]

Oh, my.

[Gavin McCormick]

That's real.

[Kevin Frazier]

That is. That is bonkers. Okay, so Ireland and you know, Jeff Bezos, or excuse me, sorry, Andrew Jassy. That is insane.

[Gavin McCormick]

That's. So that's happening. People are not wrong about how much power this thing's using. Here's the catch. When people ask, is this thing polluting? They typically look at the thing that is easy to see. So we know that using power is supposed to be bad for the environment. People are using a lot of power. They assume, therefore, that pollution is coming from these things. What they don't know is that Amazon was also by far the world's largest builder of renewable energy last year for the third year in a row. And so if you ask, are they using a lot of power? Yes. If you ask, are they using fossil fuels? Well, actually, most of that was wind and solar. So hold up. If you build a whole bunch of wind farms and you use a whole bunch of power, you're not going to use up the wind. It's not like if we have more sailing ships, we run out of wind.

[Kevin Frazier]

Right. Thankfully. Thankfully. That was. That was good for the Mongols, I heard.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah, there you go. That's right. That's right. So, typhoons aside, in all seriousness, the question isn't how much electricity are people using. The question is, how much dirty electricity are people using? And when you look at data centers that way, it is a completely different story than people know.

[Kevin Frazier]

And this is where I get so frustrated. Not just by environmental headlines, but you can apply this to a lot of different domains. But how quickly the first headline you shared, right, which is, Amazon and Ireland use the same amount of power, and people are instantly just, yeah, Amazon's the worst, right? Like, stop data centers. This has to be bad. And yet it's just the second and third question that if you go and ask, you can realize an entirely different answer.

[Gavin McCormick]

Totally. And so what I'm seeing is a lot of misunderstanding. And by the way, Microsoft is Doing even better. So a lot of these companies are great. Apple and Microsoft and Meta now have essentially hit zero emissions from data centers and is all going as renewable energy. And a lot of other companies are investing heavily in renewable energy. There's a lot of innovation happening. Google invented this thing called, essentially popularized this thing called a virtual power purchase agreement that allows you to build a wind farm not on site, little further away so you can go where the wind is better and stuff. I'm not thinking quickly enough about the other innovations, but a lot of innovations are happening by these folks.

[Kevin Frazier]

And just to pause there too, to go back to your free market point earlier, it's in the incentive of the hyperscalers to have these be as efficient as possible. Because I have a lot of tired lines, but one of them now is today's data centers are the least green data centers we'll ever have. Is that a fair statement now that I've got a actual environmental scientist, hold me accountable, Gavin, please.

[Gavin McCormick]

Well, you know, the punchline is the market is telling us very clear that what data centers are going to do is they're going to use, they're going to build these things. You know, whatever your opinions on AI, and I'm no expert on the rest of it, but like it's going to get built and they need the power. And the truth is right now it's increasingly cheaper to use clean energy than dirty energy and it is increasingly faster to build clean energy instead of dirty energy. People miss this part. It's slow to build a gas turbine.

[Kevin Frazier]

So it's also pretty hard to, you know, build a mountain out of coal. I've heard that, you know, just takes a few million years and then you've

[Gavin McCormick]

got one oh my God, refreshing coal. And so, you know, there's such a fundamental logic to these guys powering it all on clean energy. And yes, it's good for the environment and yes, also it benefits them. Good for companies to make more money if the way they do it is clean energy. I say, but they're not all doing it.

[Kevin Frazier]

They're not all doing it. So let's go there. And then I want to get to the fact that other users of power are learning from, let's call them the, the good ones, but let's get to the bad ones first. Tell, tell us about all data centers not being equal.

[Gavin McCormick]

So I guess what I wanted to say is that I think the story is like we were saying at the beginning, it's not that all AI is good. So Elon Musk to his Credit and the XAI Company have not pretended otherwise. But they're powering Colossus too on gas, on fossil fuels. And I appreciate that they're at least being honest about it. Good for them.

[Kevin Frazier]

And for the folks who don't know about Colossus, the name is accurate here it is incredibly expansive. I believe it's in Mississippi or is it Tennessee?

[Gavin McCormick]

I think it's near Memphis.

[Kevin Frazier]

Okay, let's go with near Memphis. I think you're absolutely right. But Colossus and being powered by incredibly dirty energy, but unabashedly so.

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah. And so you know, people like me appreciate the transparency because you can at least have a conversation about how do you fix it. Although that's a lot of pollution. And so what I wanted everybody to see is that all of the hyperscalers as this race to get power faster and faster is heating up, they're all at a crossroads. Are they going to keep investing in clean energy or not? And I think we should not use the paradigm of all AI is bad for the environment, all AI is good for the environment. But which one did they choose? And I think there's a lot of history of pushing false narratives about clean. There's a lot of weird definitions of clean flying around there now. But at the end of the day they either did or did not use clean energy. And if you just measure it in emissions with reasonable science we are going to know because we can track this all with satellites what was the answer and it's not clear yet which one

[Kevin Frazier]

they're going to pick and what is the determining factor there. Why are we on that precipice point of deciding clean or not, what factors should people be paying attention to.

[Gavin McCormick]

So some of the complicated things that factor in these companies decisions are it can be more difficult to get approval from an electric grid to build clean energy. That's a problem. We've got to deal with that as grids.

[Kevin Frazier]

It sounds, sounds like lawyers fuck something up yet again.

[Gavin McCormick]

You know some of this is legal innovation. And so there's also questions like there's this concept of 24. 7 energy floating around. It was a very well meaning attempt to raise environmental standards but it actually isn't scientifically credible that adopting 247 reduces any more emissions. And the problem with 24, 7 is that it is about six times more expensive. So one of the trends we're seeing is that if a bunch of well meaning people from the public kind of attack any AI company that's not using 24. 7 well then you're going to make renewables six times more expensive. And suddenly the math doesn't pencil out for it's cheaper than fossil fuels.

[Kevin Frazier]

And so by 24 7, you're meaning that the public screaming, hey, if you're building this power plant, building this new data center, we want you to be operating all of the time, using all of it extensively. Is that the correct understanding of what they're clamoring for?

[Gavin McCormick]

That is what people meant when they started this thing. But a little detail of 247 is you have to build the clean energy physically nearby the data center. That's just not how power grids work. It's very common. You turn on a light switch and you turn a power plant thousands of miles away. And so a well meaning effort, hey, you got to build the wind farm and the solar panel nearby so we know it's real. That is the heart of what is making it so expensive suddenly to power data centers on clean energy. And it doesn't do anything for the environment to have the solar be nearby or far away.

[Kevin Frazier]

And I want to hit on a point that you and I discussed earlier, which is we're actually seeing that some of the power regulators themselves are beginning to learn from the best practices of the cleaner AI labs. So what are those innovations that are now spreading that are actually helping us be more green across the board?

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know, my favorite first example was the California Public Utilities Commission in the battery story. I told you, like the tech companies actually got a little bit involved in that story. So it is not totally coincidence Microsoft was playing around with how to use batteries at a cleaner time. And was part of the conversation of California regulators realizing if you're going to have batteries anyway, what is the correct time? But then it gets more subtle. So another thing right now is the California Air Resources Board. This is my last California story.

[Kevin Frazier]

That's okay, that's okay. Hey, you know, being the fifth largest economy in the world and 40 million people, they do, they do merit some degree of outsized attention and they sure like environment.

[Gavin McCormick]

So yeah, the California is right now thinking about regulating. It will be the first US mandatory emissions reporting program at the state level. And how should they define emissions? Is a live conversation right now where they are very much looking at what the tech companies are innovating and doing. And one of the things that I think surprised regulators at CARB is how often companies are willing to voluntarily reduce more emissions than they were forced to if they can report it in a way that better matches the latest science and data, which is to say, like thinking at the five minute level and the local level as opposed to vague annual guesstimates. And so regulators were realizing that companies would support a more ambitious environmental regulation if it just used better data. That's different than your old assumptions about how data works.

[Kevin Frazier]

Wow. And so you have this great trove of data. You're improving over time, you're holding folks accountable and you're making all of this information accessible. Are people listening?

[Gavin McCormick]

Yeah. I mean my experience has been you're always going to get pushback from. Interestingly, it's not all fossil fuel companies, it's the oil industry. For whatever reason, the coal industry tends to be open and honest about. Yeah, we're terrible for the environment. It's always the oil industry that tries to have tricks. Don't know why.

[Kevin Frazier]

So the coal guys, cool cats, fully transparent, but don't trust an oilman.

[Gavin McCormick]

It's bad.

[Kevin Frazier]

Fascinating.

[Gavin McCormick]

I don't know why, but there's a much longer history of oil companies pulling funny business and arguing. So we spent a lot of time showing satellite images of like, hey, if your emissions were the numbers you say guys, then this oil field shouldn't exist. Like, here is a photo of an oil field that can't exist if your numbers are real. That's the kind of argument we're often in. And then I do find that there are a decent number of people who are making money selling some product that they probably honestly think is green. And when beta data comes out and says actually it's not clear that's good for the environment, that really can be tough for people. I won't name names, but there are definitely plenty of startups that perfectly well meaning Innovation, Science, Advanced. Turns out that's not good for the environment anymore. Really hard to go to your VC board and say, I think the company should just not make money anymore.

[Kevin Frazier]

Yeah. And so what this really speaks to me on is the need for just making space for more consideration of data in terms of our legal agreements, in terms of our public discourse. How do you think through that sort of translation effort of how do we make folks more empirically driven? And I'm not. Yeah, I know that seems like a duh statement, but you can go talk to a behavioral scientist and they'll tell you, you know, folks are compelled by stories, folks are compelled by narratives, so on and so forth. So do we need that sort of legally mandated, outcome oriented approach or what is your kind of wish list of things that we can either do culturally or, or legally to try to make

[Gavin McCormick]

your job easier I think my biggest lesson is if you look at what the real money is in putting money behind the things we need to stop climate change, the money to pay for EVs, pay for wind farms, pay for green steel, most of it is not driven by government mandates. Most of it is driven by companies want to look green, they want to be responsible to their investors and so on. But what governments need to do is they need to set the rules of the road of what is green and what isn't green. And it is so important when they do that that they use proper science and not some buzzword they found on the Internet. And so I think at the end of the day, one of the biggest roles of governments is to set the rules of the road. Imagine if we didn't know if you have to drive on the right or left side of the road, we got to have standards of.

[Kevin Frazier]

I don't think I'd imagine that because I'd be dead, but it would be a disaster.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so nobody needs to force you to drive on the right side of the road. It's more about a coordination problem. And I think that we have this paradigm of we need to push companies harder to be green and governments can actually be in a helping, supportive role saying like, guys, these are the rules and it's based on science and if you, a company voluntarily invest in going green, you won't be caught flat footed suddenly against the rules. That's a very different vision for what law can do in environment and it's coming from a liberal here.

[Kevin Frazier]

So I'm, you know, hey, hey, I love the vision. Well, and I love that it's not liberal, it's not democratic, it's not conservative, it's not Republican, it's just empirical.

[Gavin McCormick]

It's just what works.

[Kevin Frazier]

It's just what works. And that's something we should all be wildly excited by. And I think recognizing too just to zoom out for a second, you all leveraging AI in such a creative fashion would not be possible without a the collaboration that you've seen across different nonprofits, that sort of willingness to get involved, that willingness to share information, but then secondarily being willing and open to share data. And this is why I have a lot of issues with folks who say AI sucks. My first response is okay, but what data was available, I'm sure you can testify to and I'm eager to get your feedback on. I'm sure your first algorithms for let's say, measuring cattle in Missouri probably weren't great. Right, because you didn't have as much data. Yeah, but this. This act of actually, if we want better AI, you have to give it more data. It's not just a magical process of more compute or more algorithms. That data, it's still fundamental. So how much of that is your. Are you a sort of, like, data hoarder right now? Do you just, like, go knock on doors, beg people for more data, or what's that process like?

[Gavin McCormick]

So, I mean, I really think you're onto something. And so I would say that. So Climate Trace is this big coalition, right? We look at satellite data. We are the 20th project that we know of that tried to get everybody to share all their data, to build better AI and satellites and measure emissions. The first 19 that we know of failed, and they all failed for the same reason. They all failed because the project model was there is a guy, because it's always a guy who's in charge, and everybody else needs to give him data because it's always a him, and there was not really a reason why. And so what we saw is that a notion that one plus one equals three, that joining data makes us all more powerful. It breaks down if the model is someone is in charge and everyone else is subsidiary to them. And so get men.

[Kevin Frazier]

So eliminate the men first.

[Gavin McCormick]

I start the gender thing, but it is striking how it's usually not a woman.

[Kevin Frazier]

This is. This is empirical as well. Right.

[Gavin McCormick]

And so we don't have a leader of Climate Trace. There is no CEO of Climate Trace. All of us have equal access to the same data. Certainly people spend more time and less time on it. And certainly the fact that everybody respects Al Gore means his opinion kind of counts more than your average person. But we do things as votes. And the key to it is that the design of Climate Trace gives everybody who's there a reason to be there. And it's not a, you are just here to support me. We're all there to support each other. And that is a total paradigm shift of why people would share data. And it's. And it's why the project's still here.

[Kevin Frazier]

Well, and what's crazy, too, about your model is that once you put data at the heart of governance, and once you put data at the heart of this sort of new way of thinking about a policy area, you create the incentive for more transparency and for more data gathering. And so the fact that I'm pulling from a separate podcast you were on, I apologize, but you mentioned, for example, that there is a construction company that actively shares data with Climate Trace because they want to expose their competitors as being less green. And so that's only possible, or that's only in their self interest. If they know that sharing that data then leads to a positive outcome. And so we have to think through in all of these other domains. I hope it keeps occurring in the environmental front, but in education and in healthcare and in so on and so forth, how do we make data and AI actually a heart of that process so that we have better outcomes?

[Gavin McCormick]

And so I hear two things in that story from the perspective of the people running the algorithms. The key breakthrough on Climate Trace was instead of starting with the assumption that people will give us data, Data are valuable and takes time. Why would you join? And the coalition needs to go wherever it makes sense for the people contributing. The other thing is, why would the people who are being measured want to be measured? And I think there, I always go back to what I saw at U.S. department of Energy. This is actually a story that happened in Japan, but we were tracking it. Pepsi and Coke got locked in a battle about who could go greener. And so they started competing on clever ways to go greener. And then under Japanese law, you always have to be as green as the greenest company was five years ago or something like that under the top runner program.

[Kevin Frazier]

Okay, good for Japan. Sounds fascinating.

[Gavin McCormick]

Clever program. Why this matter? Because anytime they could invent a new way to go greener and not tell the other company, they got like a leg up on their competition. And so what I saw is this amazing runaway trend of companies had a hard business reason to go green because it gave them a little bit of edge in the competition, but then the only way to beat them was to have an even greener thing and an even greener thing. And so my data discovery is that in almost anything you're measuring, somebody's going to be above average and somebody's going to be below average. And if you can set up a system where everybody who's above average has an incentive to donate data and then they have to keep working to stay above average, you build this runaway collaboration train that doesn't need any laws forcing anybody or any carbon taxes and no

[Kevin Frazier]

laws to force that. And you get the innovation of finding out that new thing right, instead of saying this is the mandatory, mandatory mechanism you have to use. Now Coke and Pepsi of all institutions are experimenting, are innovating, innovating, discovering what works.

[Gavin McCormick]

Sometimes they're wrong and then, you know, the other guy gets a win for a minute and then they catch up. And I think that that is a bigger story. Than environment. And I think it's a bigger story than, you know, it was cool in Japan, there was this mandate. But I think what I find is usually companies just need a way to tell their customers, look at us, we're better than the competition. And that's all it takes.

[Kevin Frazier]

That's all it takes. We're pretty simple. We just want to know what the best is, and we'll pay for it. And to your point, it is bigger than the environmental sector. People want that in education, people want that in healthcare, People want that in mental health. All of these areas where I get that it becomes more sensitive, right, when folks think about sharing health information or sharing educational data. But this is all just a matter of creating new institutions and creating new norms. And to me, this is just a matter of creativity. Right? It required you, Gavin, hanging out with some homies in San Francisco and deciding, hey, let's take a risk, let's be creative, let's build this new approach. And the other 19 failed because they didn't have the same degree of imagination and dedication to this new model. But there's no reason why we can't copy you, Gavin, in so many other domains.

[Gavin McCormick]

Oh, yeah, totally.

[Kevin Frazier]

I apologize for, you know, it's a sincere form of flattery, but I am going to share this episode with everyone and their mom and their daughter and anyone else who will listen.

[Gavin McCormick]

I'm already tracking in the biodiversity space, there are hints of a climate trace like play, and maybe they are going to invent it better. And so what I love about this model is that we sometimes have this mental model that competition is a problem. But if these are issues that all of us want to succeed, and healthcare is a great example where I'd love to see other people succeed, it just kind of flips the script. If it's like anybody who can collaborate better, it's not a problem. It's a good thing. And I really think that somebody's going to come along with an even better version of the story tomorrow. And great. I'll celebrate their win.

[Kevin Frazier]

Yeah, move fast and collaborate. There we go. Right? We'll change the SF paradigm. So, Gavin, before I let you go back to saving the world, any final thoughts? Any final message you want folks to know? Where. Where can they find you? Where can they monitor what hyperscalers are up to? Give folks the information they need.

[Gavin McCormick]

So climate trace.org has free information available to everybody. Our hyperscaler data set is not public yet. It will be soon. You can always email us if you want. Find us on the website. But if I can leave you with a second hidden message, please I want to give Walmart a shout out. Walmart is my favorite example of a company that is not just going greener. They are saying actually we want two things. We want to go greener and we want it to cost less than not going green. And so I think the big new trend that we're seeing that Walmart kind of kicked off is saying if anybody can invent a better system to go greener that actually costs less than today, we commit, we'll buy it. And I think this is the future because I think if there's one story people need to know about AI and environment is it's not harder to do it right. Get rid of the idea that it must be more difficult to do the right thing. Just check what the right one is and buy it and don't pay more for it.

[Kevin Frazier]

I love this. Advanced purchasing agreements have a heck of a lot of influence. Thanks Abundance and Gavin, thank you for all the work you're doing. Maybe I will go buy some Walmart products. Who knows? But in the interim, I hope to see you in San Francisco sometime. Thank you again for coming on. Scaling Laws sounds great.

[Gavin McCormick]

Thanks for having me.

[Kevin Frazier]

Scaling Laws is a joint production of Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law. You can get an ad free version of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material subscriber at our website lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our written [e-mail] you can also follow us on X and Blue Sky. This podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our music is from Alibi. As always, thanks for listening.

[Gavin McCormick]

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