IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 42

as much energy as all the tea kettles
in the U.K. use over 11 years [8]. This
will only increase.
This issue has traditionally gone
unaddressed in the AI community;
the energy required to power cutting-edge AI has been on a steep
upward curve for some time. OpenAI has shown that the computing power required for DeepMind's
Go-playing program AlphaZero,
has doubled every three months,
increasing 300 000 times between
2012 to 2018 [9]. This is faster than
the rate at which computing power
has historically increased [10].
As these technologies grow faster - with all their positive transformative capabilities - so too does
the risk of their becoming a significant environmental problem [11].
We are warned by history: in creating unprecedented human welfare
over the past century, we have also
been left with a planet that scientists warn is under unprecedented
environmental strain. The article
from Luccionni et al. in this issue,
"Estimating Carbon Emissions of
Artificial Intelligence," explores this
issue with clarity.
From the U.K., the government
is embarking on a push to acknowledge the scale of the environmental
challenge ahead of us. This year has
been hailed as a Year of Climate
Action by the Prime Minister [12],
and there are a whole host of positive contributions AI and emerging
technologies can and are making
to tackle the climate crisis. But we
must not lose sight of the whole
system. The intersection between
the AI and climate worlds has not
been adequately addressed. If we
do not act to change that now, it is
our present society, not just future
generations, that will experience
the impact of rapid digital transformation - positive and negative - alongside the impact of
climate change.

assessed as the leading G20 country to decarbonize since the year
2000 [16].
As we now reach the mid-point
between 1990 and 2050, we have
reason to take stock and reflect on
how the U.K. was able to drive the
decarbonization push among the
25 major economies in the world.
Low-carbon innovation and rapid
growth in renewables, particularly
offshore wind, helped to set the trajectory. Thanks to a rich geographic position and the U.K.'s subsidy
schemes encouraging renewables
[17], offshore wind capacity has
surged more than seven-fold from
when the Climate Change Act was
introduced [18]. The year 2019 was
the cleanest year on record for Britain as the amount of zero carbon
power outstripped fossil fuel power
for a full twelve months for the first
time ever [19].
In response to this, the Queen's
Speech in December 2019 called for
40 GW of offshore wind by 2050 [20].
To put that scale of investment in
context, the total electricity demand
of the U.K. is currently at around
50 GW. Recent analysis suggests
that offshore wind prices are now so
low that the wind farms could generate electricity more cheaply than
existing gas-fired power stations as
early as 2023 [21].
In concert with the rise of renewables is a sharp fall in coal power.
The year 2013 saw Britain as the
first EU country to announce a carbon price support of £18 per ton
of carbon dioxide [22], paid for by
fossil fuel companies. In 2015 the
U.K. announced it would stamp out
coal power entirely within a decade
[23]; this ambition was recently
ratcheted up by the Prime Minister to 2024. The effect has been a
radical transformation of the energy
mix: whereas in 1990 coal made up
75% of the grid, it constituted only
2% of 2019's energy output [19] and

If balanced correctly, this intersection promises a wealth of solutions that can help tackle our most
pressing challenges - from decarbonizing energy and transport, to
predicting forest fires, to more
accurate and local climate monitoring solutions. This calibration
also needs to be approached with
a sober sense of the scale required
to achieve these goals [13]. Just as
the U.K. works to decouple carbon
emissions and economic growth on
the path to net zero emissions -
so-called "clean growth" - we must
also meaningfully deliver sustainable, inclusive growth with emerging technologies.

U.K.'s Place in Decarbonization
and Digitization
Climate change is one of the most
urgent and pressing challenges we
face today, and one where more
action is desperately needed. We
must recognize and welcome pressure for action to cut emissions, and
push to build consensus around
change so that communities across
the U.K. - and across the world -
are secure, optimistic, and involved
in our shifts to decarbonize the
entire economy.
In the U.K., it has been twelve
years since Parliament passed the
seminal Climate Change Act, which
introduced legally binding long-term
emissions reduction targets. Last
year the U.K. went even further and
became the first major economy
in the world to pass laws to end its
contribution to global warming by
2050 [14]. It was an effective way of
ensuring climate action survives the
political cycle, moving away from
climate advocacy and into climate
action. In doing so, the U.K. has
taken action without impacting quality of life: since 1990, emissions in
the U.K. have been cut by 42% while
the economy has grown by 72% [15].
The U.K. has been independently
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JUNE 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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