Code, Carbon, and Calculation

We are sleepwalking into 2026. The panic of the early 2020s has been replaced not by action, but by a dangerous, collective shrug. Why? Because the conversation about sustainability was hijacked, polarized, and ultimately sold out. It matters that we care—now more than ever—because while we were busy arguing about plastic straws, the technological infrastructure we are building started eating the planet alive.

The Theater of Climate Change: How We Lost the Plot

For the last decade, the public was trapped in a crossfire of hysteria and skepticism. On one side, we had what many now view as “performative activism.” Figures like Greta Thunberg and Leonardo DiCaprio became the faces of a movement that often felt more like a PR campaign than a policy roadmap. Their catastrophic messaging, while well-intentioned, alienated the working class and turned climate science into a culture war. It became a brand, a gala theme, a status symbol for the elite who flew private jets to climate summits. Elitism with environmentalism was the trojan. This theater destroyed the campaign. It made it easy to dismiss the underlying reality. On the other side, we had the “skeptics”—scientists and thinkers like Matt Ridley, Patrick Moore, Richard Lindzen, Willie Soon, Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, and Patrick Michaels. For years, these voices were labeled solely as “deniers,” often dismissed without engagement. Yet, the sheer volume of conflicting information—the “Exxon knew” narratives versus the “solar cycle” theories—created a fog of war.

To be honest, at one point, I too believed that climate change was a hoax. When the noise becomes too loud, and the messengers too hypocritical, the natural human response is to tune it out. I gave no attention to it. I am sure many of you feel the same. We didn’t stop caring because we wanted the world to burn; we stopped caring because we didn’t know who to trust. But while we were distracted by the debate, the physics of our planet continued to change, indifferent to our politics.

2025, The year of human driven natural disaster.

In India, 2025 was a year of relentless climate extremes, with disasters recorded on 331 out of 334 days between January and November The country faced its warmest winter in 124 years, with heatwaves striking as early as February in states like Goa and Maharashtra. The monsoon season was particularly devastating, bringing daily extreme weather events across 35 states and Union Territories, resulting in over 2,700 flood-related deaths and damaging millions of hectares of crops. Himachal Pradesh was the worst hit, experiencing extreme weather on nearly 80% of days, while Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh reported the highest fatalities. The financial toll of the monsoon in India and Pakistan was estimated at $5.6 billion, making it one of the costliest climate disasters of the year globally. These events, driven by rising minimum temperatures and warming oceans, signaled a collapse of seasonal boundaries and a dangerous new normal for the subcontinent.

In January, the Los Angeles wildfires became the costliest in U.S. history, causing over $60 billion in damages and claiming dozens of lives, fueled by intense Santa Ana winds and climate-driven fire weather conditions. By March, South Korea faced its deadliest wildfires on record, scorching over 43,000 acres in a disaster made twice as likely by climate change. The summer brought lethal flooding to the U.S., with a July 4th storm dumping 20 inches of rain on Texas Hill Country, killing at least 138 people in one of the deadliest inland floods in American history. Later in the year, Hurricane Melissa tied the record for the strongest Atlantic hurricane, devastating Jamaica and Cuba as a Category 5 storm intensified by exceptionally warm ocean waters. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia suffered a tragedy in November when two overlapping tropical cyclones, Ditwah and Senyar, struck Indonesia and Malaysia simultaneously, killing over 1,800 people in a “supercharged” event driven by warming oceans. These disasters, costing over $120 billion globally, underscored a year where the theoretical risks of climate change became a brutal, expensive, and deadly reality.

The Carbon Footprint of “The Cloud”

While we argued about cars, a new beast emerged. We are witnessing an explosion in energy requirements driven by blind consumption and the rise of Artificial Intelligence.

The “Cloud” is not a fluffy white thing in the sky; it is acres of servers burning fossil fuels.

• The Cost of a Post: Every time you scroll, like, or post, you are burning carbon. A single generative AI image uses as much energy as fully charging your smartphone. Generating 1,000 images creates carbon emissions comparable to driving a gas car for 4.1 miles.
• The AI Energy Crisis: In 2024, AI-specific servers in US data centers alone consumed an estimated 53-76 TWh of electricity. By 2028, this is projected to skyrocket to 165-326 TWh.
• Water Thirst: It’s not just power; it’s water. AI demand for water cooling is expected to reach 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027—more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark. We are burning the planet to generate memes and chat with bots.

Geopolitics: The Hypocrisy of the West

Sustainability has become a weapon of the developed world. Nations that built their wealth on two centuries of unrestricted coal and oil burning are now imposing strict “green guidelines” on developing nations in Africa and Asia. It is a form of eco-colonialism: “Do as we say, not as we did.” Furthermore, war is the ultimate pollutant. The carbon footprint of the conflict in Ukraine and the devastation in Gaza is immense, yet often excluded from global carbon accounting. We lecture developing nations on emissions while the military-industrial complex pumps millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the name of “security.” Blind in power, whatever little was goin on with Paris agreement, the democratized bully dictator stopped with other major welfare schemes running across the globe. And some nations that were victim once are still playing the victim card, they want to be number 1 at everything and to some extent are but won’t recognize themseleves as developed nations because of the perks other developing nations gets.

The False Prophets: Why Solar and EV Won’t Save Us

We have been sold a lie that technology alone will fix this. We are told to buy Electric Vehicles (EVs) and install solar panels, but these are not consequence-free solutions.

• The Mining Crisis: EVs and solar storage rely on lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals. The extraction of these minerals involves massive open-pit mines, child labor in places like the DRC, and toxic groundwater contamination.
• The Hydrogen Mirage: Hydrogen fuel is touted as the future, but currently, most hydrogen is produced using natural gas (Blue Hydrogen), which leaks methane—a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2.
• Waste: We have no viable plan for the millions of tons of solar panel and battery waste that will hit us in the 2030s. We are simply trading one form of pollution for another.

Abandoning Earth: The Capitalist Science

There was a time when science was the pursuit of curious individuals. Then, it became the domain of nations. Now, it is the Playground of oligarchs. As capitalism concentrated wealth into fewer hands, the direction of human research shifted. We invest trillions into AI—$1.5 trillion projected by 2025—chasing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) simply to gain unlimited economic and surveillance power. Meanwhile, institutions like CERN, which seek to understand the fundamental fabric of our universe, operate on a fraction of that budget (approx. $1.5 billion annually). We are starving the science of understanding to feed the science of domination. This culminates in the most dangerous narrative of all: the idea that we can leave. Powerful figures like Elon Musk direct massive resources toward Mars colonization. This is a fatal distraction. The “Rare Earth” hypothesis suggests that complex life is exceptionally rare in the universe. There is no Planet B. Mars is a dead, radioactive desert. Earth is the only home we have, yet the richest men alive are spending their fortunes building lifeboats for themselves rather than fixing the ship we are all on.

The State of Sustainable Software (2025)

As technology becomes more pervasive, we must hold it accountable for its environmental impact. The software industry is beginning to acknowledge its significant carbon footprint, which extends from the code we write to the social media platforms we use daily. It is now essential to prioritize sustainable design and integrate frameworks that calculate emissions, enabling us to take meaningful steps toward reduction. One provocative solution for social media would be to display the carbon cost of every post, potentially charging users a fee based on that footprint unless it is offset by the revenue the content generates. To achieve a greener digital future, several key frameworks and tools have become industry standards as of 2025.

• SCI (Software Carbon Intensity): This is a metric developed by the Green Software Foundation. Unlike traditional carbon accounting, SCI measures the rate of carbon emissions for a software system, encouraging developers to run code when the grid is cleaner (carbon-aware computing).
• Green Data Centers: Projects are shifting workloads to regions where energy is renewable.
• Open Source Tools:
  • Cloud Carbon Footprint: An open-source tool to measure and analyze cloud carbon emissions.
  • Scaphandre: A tool to track power consumption of host machines and processes.
  • Carbon Aware SDK: Helps developers build software that does more when the electricity is clean and less when it’s dirty. We need to stop trusting the “green” marketing and start looking at the code.

References

1. MIT Technology Review (2023). Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. Link
2. Year of extremes: India hit by disasters on 331 of 334 days in 2025, up from 295 in 2024 and 292 in 2022. Link
3. 2025 marked by rising night-time temperatures and extreme rainfall across seasons in India.Link
4. India experienced extreme weather events on 99 per cent of the days in the first nine months of 2025, says CSE and Down To Earth’s Climate India 2025 report, an annual assessment of extreme weather events.Link
5. Southwest monsoon in India and Pakistan responsible for highest number of fatalities among 2025’s major climate disasters: Christian Aid report.Link
6. Five Things to Know About Climate Change in 2025Link
7. AIMultiple Research (2026). AI Energy Consumption: Statistics from Key Sources. Link
8. UNRIC (2025). Artificial Intelligence’s Resource Consumption. Link
9. CERN Press Office (2025). Private donors pledge 860 million euros for CERN. Link
10. Green Software Foundation. Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification. Link

Note: The blog post has been structured using AI.