The environmental impact of AI is becoming harder to ignore, from soaring energy use and water consumption to the rapid expansion of data centres and microchip production. What is being built in the name of innovation is also concentrating power, intensifying surveillance and deepening democratic risk.

The environmental impact of AI: energy, water and emissions

The AI boom is being sold as inevitable progress, but the real question is not whether artificial intelligence can do useful things in theory. It is who owns it, who profits from it, what it is mostly being used for, and who pays the environmental and political bill when the hype turns into microchip manufacturing plants, data centres, rising power demand, water stress, surveillance and attacks on democratic life. 

A Greenpeace Germany report released in 2025 warned that AI’s electricity demand, emissions, water use and raw material needs are all rising fast, and that AI data centre electricity demand could be 11 times higher in 2030 than in 2023 unless governments intervene. A February 2026 report backed by Beyond Fossil Fuels made the greenwashing problem even clearer, finding that 74% of industry claims about AI’s climate benefits were unproven and that it could not identify a single case where consumer generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot were delivering material, verifiable and substantial emissions cuts.

This matters because it punctures one of the sector’s favourite talking points, namely that energy-hungry generative AI can be excused by vague future climate benefits. In reality, the buildout itself is locking in more extraction, more infrastructure and more corporate power, while the largest firms try to present that expansion as climate leadership. 

That is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether AI might do good one day, because the system being built right now is already redistributing power upwards while pushing environmental costs and information risks outwards.

AI data centres and why communities are pushing back

Across different countries, people are fighting data centres not because they are anti-technology, but because they recognise the pattern: land grabbing, noise pollution, pressure on water systems, strain on local grids and the steady erosion of community control over land and infrastructure. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, city leaders removed data centres from a redevelopment plan after public backlash and restored a park requirement, while residents and campaigners explicitly raised concerns about environmental harm, energy consumption, water use and noise pollution. In San Marcos, Texas, the city council voted 5-2 to block a proposed data centre after an hours-long meeting and more than 100 public comments.

In September 2025, South Dublin County Council in Ireland passed a motion calling for a nationwide ban or moratorium on new data centres, or strict conditions including 100% renewables, amid concern that communities are being forced to absorb the economic and ecological costs of someone else’s digital expansion. In the UK, campaigners won permission for a legal challenge against a 90MW hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire after the government admitted it had made a “serious error” in approving the scheme.

South Africa shows the growing disconnect between the push for AI infrastructure and the ecological realities of water stress and climate disruption. Australia, meanwhile, shows how rapidly this model is being scaled up globally, with the world’s second-biggest data centre buildout after the United States.

These are not fringe skirmishes. They are early signs of a broader democratic backlash against a model of digital expansion that expects local communities to absorb the costs while distant corporations and billionaires bank the gains.

Resistance is also becoming cultural, not just local. The QuitGPT boycott has gained traction as a symbolic rejection of the idea that ChatGPT should become the default interface for work, knowledge and everyday life. The movement is explicitly a reaction to OpenAI’s deal with the US Department of Defense, and it took on added urgency as the US and Israel began bombing Iran almost immediately afterwards. Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman has helped amplify it by urging people to cancel their subscriptions, first pointing to more than 700,000 supporters, then more than one million. More than 2.5 million users are now boycotting ChatGPT. 

The opposition to OpenAI and ChatGPT is no longer confined to specialists but is reaching writers, organisers, educators and mainstream audiences who are starting to question what exactly they are being asked to normalise.

Big Tech, AI power and the threat to democracy

If you want to understand why campaigners are increasingly focusing on chips as well as chatbots, start with Nvidia, the American chipmaking giant, and its CEO, Jensen Huang. Nvidia announced a staggering annual revenue of US$ 215.9 billion, underscoring just how central the company has become to the global AI boom. Recent earnings show Nvidia’s business is now dominated by data centres and AI chips, not gaming, with roughly 80% to 90% of revenue coming from data centres while gaming has fallen below 10%. 

Huang has framed AI as “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history” and as foundational infrastructure for the modern world, which is precisely why Nvidia cannot be treated as a passive supplier standing outside the social and ecological consequences of the boom. Without Nvidia’s chips, much of the present generative AI race simply would not happen at its current scale.

Greenpeace East Asia’s October 2025 findings rank Nvidia last on AI supply-chain decarbonisation and argue that the company’s record revenues are being built on a “decarbonisation deficit” outsourced to suppliers in Taiwan and South Korea that still depend heavily on fossil power. 

Greenpeace East Asia’s reporting also highlighted a 4.5-fold increase in emissions from AI chip manufacturing in a single year, showing how quickly the environmental cost of this infrastructure race is escalating. This is not a side effect of the boom. It is part of the industrial model that underpins OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and the wider rush to scale generative AI as fast as possible.

Amazon tells a similar story. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon made more than US$ 77 billion in profits in 2025 while cutting around 30,000 workers as it ramped up AI spending. This is what “innovation” looks like when it is steered by monopoly power: record profits, job cuts, rising capital expenditure and a false promise that more automation will somehow trickle down into public good.

AI, war and manipulation

The political economy of the AI boom should worry anyone who cares about democracy and civil liberties. Tech leaders and companies spent heavily to curry favour with Donald Trump after his reelection, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s US$ 1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, while reporting also tied OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to a US$ 102 million Trump war chest drive. 

Palantir and Alex Karp have gone further into the architecture of state power. ICE agreed to pay Palantir $30m to build its “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform, while Karp defended the company’s work with ICE and later said critics of ICE should be protesting for “more Palantir”, not less. That tells you a great deal about what counts as “progress” when AI, border violence, data extraction and executive power converge.

The debate over AI and war has become sharper too. Anthropic reportedly sought explicit contractual prohibitions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, and has been in conflict with the Pentagon over refusing to broaden those terms, while OpenAI struck a Pentagon deal for classified systems and revised it only after backlash, adding stronger restrictions against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight. That does not make Anthropic harmless, but it does show that even inside this industry there are real fault lines over how far companies are willing to go in militarisation and state surveillance.

Amnesty International has called for bans on AI-based practices including public facial recognition, predictive policing, biometric categorisation, emotion recognition and migrant profiling, while Forbidden Stories has investigated firms pitching AI-enabled surveillance tools that can target journalists, dissidents and activists.

Culture and information are being reshaped at speed as well. Deezer says it is now receiving more than 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, roughly 39% of all music delivered to the platform daily. Six of Spotify’s top 50 trending songs in the US in late January were fully AI-generated. Suno was generating 7 million songs a day. Suno chief executive Mikey Shulman gave the game away when he said: “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice”, reducing musical craft to a friction problem for software to remove. Sam Altman’s remark that it takes “20 years of life and all of the food you eat” to “train a human” landed for the same reason, because it exposed a worldview in which human creativity and ecological limits are treated less as values than as inefficiencies.

The biggest AI companies have not just disrupted creative industries, they have been repeatedly accused in court of building their products on unlicensed human work, with lawsuits from authors and visual artists, from major news organisations including The New York Times, and from Hollywood studios such as Disney and Universal alleging large-scale copyright infringement. Whether every case succeeds or not, the pattern is clear: companies that present themselves as engines of innovation have been credibly accused of treating books, journalism, music and art as raw material to be scraped, absorbed and monetised without consent, compensation or democratic accountability.

The same systems are also corroding the information environment. Research from Proof News found that leading AI tools gave inaccurate, harmful or incomplete answers to basic election questions more than half the time, while a separate GroundTruthAI analysis reported by NBC found that popular chatbots answered election queries incorrectly 27% of the time. 

Grok on X has already shown how this can play out in practice. Election officials traced false claims about ballot deadlines and candidate eligibility back to Grok during the 2024 US race, and later warned that such errors could mislead or confuse voters at scale. With more high-stakes elections approaching, that is not a marginal bug. It is a democratic risk amplified by billionaire-owned platforms, automated recommendation systems and synthetic content designed for maximum engagement rather than truth.

Technology for the common good: democratic control, privacy and renewable energy

A different future is possible.

Technology for the common good would mean a society where digital tools are built first to meet real social and ecological needs, not to deepen billionaire control or chase speculative profit, and where AI is not treated as an automatic solution but used only when it is appropriate, justified and not more resource-intensive than simpler alternatives.

It would run on 100% additional renewable energy, disclose its full energy, water and supply-chain footprint, and be designed so communities are not left paying the price through higher bills, water stress or pollution.

Ownership and governance would be far more democratic, with strong public rules, limits on monopoly power, meaningful community consent, and institutions able to steer technology towards climate resilience, public services, biodiversity protection and other shared needs. It would also mean building forms of sovereign AI, where data and models are not simply extracted into distant corporate clouds but remain subject to local democratic control, clear auditability, strict privacy safeguards and public-interest rules. Access would be broad, affordable and accessible by design, and the freedoms it protects would include privacy, freedom of expression, the right to dissent, and protection from surveillance, manipulation and exclusion, so that technology expands people’s power instead of shrinking it.

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Unseen images from Greenpeace’s ship tour are available here showing at-risk sharks being caught, illustrating the need for stronger protection – as ‘RMFOs’ make a power grab on the Global Ocean Treaty

New York, USA, 2 April 2026 – Fishing industry representatives make up to a third of national delegations to key fishing management meetings, with one almost reaching 45% in 2021, a new Greenpeace International investigation reveals. This comes as the future of ocean protection came under attack from a power-grab by fishing industry vested interests at key UN ocean talks.

This news raises concerns of a “rigged system” where the vested interests of industrial fishing trump ocean protection measures, but this cannot be allowed to bleed into the application of the Ocean Treaty which came into force in January, campaigners say.

Lukas Meus, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe ocean campaigner, said: “It’s outrageous to see just how deeply the fishing industry is embedded within the very organisations that are meant to regulate and manage fishing. At present, the foxes are guarding the henhouse – the system is rigged against ocean protection. 

“The fishing industry has been allowed to set the rules of the game for decades. Governments must now stop caving in to industry pressure and stop allowing vested interests to win out over ocean conservation. 

“We now have the historic opportunity with the Global Ocean Treaty to cordon off big areas of the ocean to allow it to recover – we can’t let the effects of decades of lobbying interfere with this. That’s why we’re calling for a time limit on the organisations that manage fishing to input to sanctuary proposals, this would prevent vested interests stalling ocean protection and tying it up in delays.”

Greenpeace is calling for urgent measures to be put in place ahead of the first Ocean COP in January 2027 to ensure it isn’t tainted by industry lobbying:

• Impose a maximum 120 day time limit for the review of sanctuary proposals to prevent Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) and fishing industry interests, from stalling the process. RMFOs have always protected the interests of the fishing industry, overseen the decimation of biodiversity and destruction of entire ecosystems, and must not be allowed to tie up ocean protection in delays. 
• Rigorous monitoring of participation, with specific focus on national delegation composition and associated scientific advisory processes. This is necessary to identify and mitigate the “embedding” of commercial actors.
• Implement mandatory disclosure of all delegation affiliations, including a clear register of “technical advisors”. Transparency must extend to all observer participation and advisory committee roles to ensure that scientific recommendations remain independent from corporate influence.

Governments have committed to protecting 30% of the ocean in the next four years, a target that scientists say is the absolute minimum required for the ocean to bounce back from decades of destruction. Making sure that the process of creating sanctuaries isn’t tied up in delays will be vital to this progress.

ENDS

Notes to editors

[1] Link to report: Corporate Influence on High Seas Fisheries Management

[2] Greenpeace International press release: Governments must curb corporate interference in the Global Ocean Treaty at key talks 

[3] Recent unseen images from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise can be found in the Greenpeace Media Library here. Greenpeace crew witnessed what the result of years of poor RFMO management looks like in the Convergence Zone, an area hotly tipped to be among the first MPA proposals under the Treaty. There are not sufficient safeguards that protect endangered sharks under current rules.  

• The report focused on eight major organisations governing high seas fisheries and their meetings over the last 5 years: The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT), the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). 
• Fishing industry representatives include delegates whose primary affiliation is with fleet operators, vessel owner groups, distant-water fishing corporations, seafood processors, tuna companies, national fishing associations, producer organisations, trade bodies, or gear suppliers. 
• The shadowy organisations that govern fishing on the high seas, called Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs), are mainly made up of government representatives with vested interests in commercial fishing. The research focused on eight of these organisations’ key global meetings over the last five years and found that industry makes up on average 28–29% of total delegations. While some commissions cluster around 23–27% and others reach up to 30–35%, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission even hit 44.2% in 2021.
• By participating inside governments’ delegation structures and technical committees, RMFOs have unbridled access to negotiations and processes that actively shape conservation outcomes. Industry-aligned delegations regularly deploy tactics to delay and narrow conservation measures that could restrict the agenda of the fishing industry. It is in the best interest of the fishing industry that RFMOs retain their power over the high seas’ RMFOs routinely push narratives to undermine the need for high seas sanctuaries that would cordon off areas of the ocean from the fishing industry’s destructive activity.
• The report highlights a particularly egregious example with the EU at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT): 35–39% of the EU delegation consisted of fishing industry representatives each year. The EU consistently had the highest number of industry representatives of any participant at these meetings, and in all five years assessed, the number of industry representatives exceeded the entire delegation size of any individual non-EU country, meaning that industry outweighed any government representatives. 
• Across the dataset, the delegations embedding the highest numbers of industry-affiliated delegates are consistently major fishing powers. The EU most frequently contributes the largest number of industry representatives across multiple RFMOs, particularly ICCAT, IOTC and NAFO.
  
  Contacts:

Florri Burton, Global Media Lead, Oceans Are Life, Greenpeace Nordic +447896523839, florri.burton@greenpeace.org Greenpeace International Press Desk: +31 (0)20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org

We analysed 37 government responses introduced since 28 February 2026 to the Iran war oil shock. Many risk deepening the fossil fuel dependence that caused the crisis in the first place.

The war on Iran oil shock is exposing fossil fuel vulnerability

This is not just another spike in prices. It is a warning about how vulnerable a fossil fuel-driven economy really is. The International Energy Agency said this war is “creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”, and that is precisely what happens when countries depend on oil and gas. When so much of the global economy depends on a centralised and combustible resource moved through strategic chokepoints, war quickly turns into rising food prices, energy bills, transport costs and wider economic instability.

This is why the crisis is not only about carbon emissions or climate targets. It is about resilience, security and survival. The war has highlighted the inherent vulnerability of fossil fuel-based energy systems, because any disruption to shipping routes or supply chains can ripple across daily life in a matter of days. Governments and policymakers around the world are reacting to the shock, but many of their responses risk reinforcing the very system that made this crisis so damaging in the first place.

What governments should do in an oil price crisis

The most effective response is not to double down on oil and gas. It is to reduce dependence on them. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung put it clearly: “I think this would be a good opportunity to swiftly and extensively transition to renewable energy.”

Countries that generate more of their own energy from wind and solar are less exposed to oil price shocks, disrupted shipping lanes and geopolitical blackmail. The more your government invests in renewable energy, the more secure your country and your pocket will be. That is why renewable energy should be understood not only as a climate solution, but also as a security strategy and a shield against the cost of living crisis.

A good crisis response should do two things at once. It should protect people from immediate hardship, and it should speed up the shift to resilient, renewable-centred energy systems. That means demand reduction, efficiency, support for vulnerable households and faster deployment of clean, decentralised power, rather than new subsidies, tax breaks or infrastructure that prolong fossil fuel dependence.

How governments are responding to the war on Iran energy shock

Since the war began on 28 February 2026, Greenpeace has identified and analysed 37 policies introduced around the world in response to the shock. Some help reduce short-term pain without locking countries further into fossil fuels, some deepen fossil fuel dependence, and others send mixed signals.

A few governments are taking measures that point in a better direction. In the Philippines, public offices moved to a four-day workweek, computers were ordered off during lunch breaks and air conditioning was limited to 24°C, with the stated goal of cutting government energy use by one fifth. Pakistan combined school closures and work-from-home orders with an existing solar boom linked to an estimated US$ 6.3 billion in avoided fossil fuel imports in 2026 at current prices. Vietnam also leaned on work-from-home measures, while its existing solar buildout is estimated to save hundreds of millions of dollars in avoided coal and gas imports this year. In Egypt, the government says it is fast-tracking renewable projects, including the Abydos 2 solar plant and 2.5 GW of new grid-integrated renewable capacity, to reduce costly energy imports and bring down the state’s fuel bill.

Other governments focused on conservation rather than more fossil supply. The IEA is currently tracking these measures globally. Thailand told civil servants to use stairs instead of elevators, reduce air conditioning and wear short-sleeved shirts instead of suits. Denmark’s energy minister urged people to cut back energy use and drive less. At the political level, European Council President António Costa framed the crisis as an argument for accelerating home-grown energy production and the energy transition. In the UK, Business Secretary Peter Kyle said offshore wind and solar should be accelerated to reduce reliance on oil and gas from politically unstable regions.

Why fossil fuel lock-in makes the crisis worse

Too many governments are still responding with policies that keep the fossil fuel system alive. These measures may offer short-term political relief, but they deepen long-term vulnerability.

South Korea imposed a fuel price cap, while also lifting the national cap on coal-fired power generation and considered restarting Russian crude and naphtha imports. Japan capped pump prices and released crude from stockpiles, while Malaysia increased petrol subsidy spending to about US$ 510 million to hold down fuel prices. Brazil cut the federal diesel tax to zero.

This is the contradiction at the heart of many current responses. Governments say they want to shield people from the energy shock, but many are choosing policies that prolong the dependence that caused the shock in the first place.

That exposes a deeper injustice in fossil fuel-dominated systems: billionaires and big corporations profit while people pay the price with their lives, with more extreme weather and with higher bills. Every cent spent on war and fossil fuels is a cent stolen from a fair and green future, and public money should build a liveable planet rather than bankroll destruction. 

Renewable energy is the real solution

Some countries may feel they cannot afford renewable energy in the midst of the current crisis. But that is precisely why clean energy is the solution: it involves lower upfront costs, fewer massive infrastructure investments, and can be deployed much faster.

The alternative is already growing fast. According to IRENA’s Renewable Capacity Statistics 2025, renewables accounted for 92.5% of all new global power additions in 2024, with 585 GW added in a single year. Solar alone added a record 452 GW. In other words, renewables are already the bulk of new power capacity being installed worldwide.

That matters because renewable energy offers more than lower emissions. Decentralised systems based on wind and solar are harder to sabotage, less vulnerable to blockades and shipping disruptions, and better able to keep homes, schools and hospitals running during crises. Real security does not come from pouring more money into militarisation and fossil dependence, but from investing in systems that actually protect people, including clean energy, healthcare and public services.

We need policies that cut fossil fuel dependence and expand renewable-centred energy systems, because that is how communities become more resilient, economies become more stable and the risks of future conflicts are reduced. The best cost-of-living policy for people and the planet is a safe, stable, cost-effective and clean energy system.

Camilo Sánchez is Communications Manager at Greenpeace International, based in Germany. John Noël is Senior Portfolio Manager at Greenpeace International, based in the United States.

Auckland, New Zealand – The world’s largest dairy exporter, New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra has admitted that the packaging on its flagship Anchor-brand butter breached fair trade laws in order to settle a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace Aotearoa in 2024.

The lawsuit alleged that Fonterra misled customers by prominently featuring on its packaging the claim that Anchor butter is ‘100% New Zealand grass-fed’. In reality, Fonterra  allows its cows to eat palm kernel expeller, an imported supplementary feed which has potential links to the destruction of rainforests in Southeast Asia. 

New Zealand is the largest importer of palm kernel expeller, a product of the oil palm industry. The feed has notoriously murky supply chains, and in early 2025, Greenpeace Aotearoa used research from Rainforest Action Network and Nusantara Atlas to link companies selling palm kernel into New Zealand to illegal deforestation in Indonesia’s Rawa Singkil Wildlife reserve. 

Greenpeace Aotearoa Agriculture campaigner Sinéad Deighton-O’Flynn said: “An admission of guilt from New Zealand’s biggest company is a massive win against corporate greenwash everywhere. It’s simple, companies shouldn’t be allowed to mislead customers in order to sell products. 

“Fonterra has admitted that its packaging was likely to mislead consumers. The truth is that its supposed ‘100% New Zealand Grass-Fed’ butter could be linked to the destruction of paradise rainforests in Southeast Asia.

“Fonterra is just the latest in a chain of meat and dairy corporations who have been held to account for their  greenwashing. It’s clear that the writing is on the wall and people are fed up with corporate greed and manipulation.

“If our governments won’t hold these polluters accountable, people will take to the courts and the streets to do so instead.”

ENDS

Notes:

Fonterra is set to finalise the sale of its consumer brands – including Anchor Butter – to French dairy giant Lactalis later this year.

This admission from Fonterra builds on a growing wave of legal accountability for the meat and dairy industry.

In March 2024, the Danish High Court ruled against Danish Crown – Europe’s largest pork producer – in a landmark greenwashing case, finding that its ‘climate-controlled pork’ labels were misleading and lacked independent verification. 

In 2025, Greenpeace Denmark and Sweden filed formal complaints against Arla, Europe’s largest dairy producer, for systematically overstating its climate progress. The complaints, submitted to regulatory bodies in both Denmark and Sweden, allege that Arla misled the public by claiming a 13% reduction in supply chain emissions since 2015.

Documentation suggests nearly half of this reduction resulted from a 2016 change in calculation methodology rather than actual carbon savings. These complaints are currently under formal review by the relevant authorities in both Denmark and Sweden.

Contacts:

Rhiannon Mackie, Press Officer at Greenpeace Aotearoa, +64 27 244 6729, rhiannon.mackie@greenpeace.org 

Joe Evans, Agriculture Global Comms Lead, Greenpeace UK, +44 7890 595387, joe.evans@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace International Press Desk, +31 (0)20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org