In 1894, The Times newspaper predicted: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of horse manure.”

Industrialised, rich cities were booming - and also drowning in horse poop.

Twenty years later, everyone had a motorcar, and the problem had vanished. The prediction was wrong.

As foresight strategists, we know better than to predict. We also know it helps to look back to look forward, and I cite this particular bit of history because I believe that today, we’re equally misdirected in collective panic about the high energy consumption of generative AI.

The genAI x energy consumption narrative

An audible subset of societies everywhere are lamenting their teenagers using ChatGPT etc willy nilly, like a search engine.

“But the environment, darling!” they sigh, while shrugging that young people don’t seem to know or care anymore.

They know that genAI uses a lot of energy, and that depends on great big power-slurping data centres, and they use a lot of water, and there’s global warming. Thus, they virtue signal.

Why I’m having a go at well-meaning middle-class parents, you ask?

Well, they don’t curb streaming BBC iPlayer or Netflix (which costs way more energy), quite a few of these people drive SUVs on the school run and buy food from brands that steal water off disenfranchised communities, deforest at scale and not unimportantly, fund war crimes.

That’s why.

You can tell people to only very sparingly use that that incredibly convenient thing, sure. But it’s stupid. People are going to use genAI all the time, cat out of bag, genie out of box.

It’s easy to blame something that’s unstoppable and out of your control and then lean back and be like “I told you so”. It’s hard to look at what the problem truly is, and looking at potentially challenging, but much better solutions.

Let’s look at the problem with energy use and AI.

It’s not really about energy consumption.

It’s about energy generation.

Fossil fuel is today’s horse manure: it’s a big, bad, smelly problem.

Instead of recognising that it is truly about to be replaced, we are held in its grip and can’t see what is coming in its stead.

Refocus: towards clean energy abundance

Disclaimer: to everyone who wants to return to nature, get rid of money and lightbulbs and mobile phones and AI – that’s totally cool, but this bit is not intended for you.

look back to look forward (again): Throughout human history, technological progress has always been widely adopted. Never has it been abandoned or reversed. This has nothing to do with policy or politics or opinion, it seems to be in our nature. AI is here to stay. Quantum computing is well underway.

Yes, fossil fuels are still a very real problem. Yes, our extractive attitude towards nature is hugely detrimental to planetary health. And: we need AI and quantum computing to get out of this mess. “Out” is a place of truly clean renewable energy abundance.

ABUNDANCE: by this I mean it’s so plentiful, there is no market for it. Supply and demand works on the basis of scarcity. Abundance trumps this mechanism, because it becomes cheaper to give it away.

The good news is that renewable energy abundance is entirely possible, even probable. The technologies that will get us to energy abundant are many, and already in development (find a selection of publications on emerging developments below). But even without solar panels in space, most of what’s holding it back is not the technology, but the boring stuff: policy, paperwork, the need for grid improvements, efficiency and storage. There is a currently drive from governments and industry across the world to tackle these constraints (even in some places in the US).

Let’s shift our attention away from AI chatbots, towards monopolies and vested interests of harmful industries

Where we all urgently need to become applied futurists, is in the implementation and rollout of large-scale renewable energy, and everything that it enables: much more and faster AI and quantum computing, much better robotics and a huge scale-up of industry in general. We need to decide what we want to see in development and create structures of shared and community-led ownership.

We need courage. We need determination. And we really don’t need the tech broligarchy controlling energy generation. Because it’s true that it’s hard to control an abundant resource, but the risk is manufactured scarcity in order to control populations, economies and political power. A very unpreferred future indeed.

In conclusion

To shame individuals for perceived energy overconsumption is ineffective gaslighting; the only thing it achieves is misplaced guilt. Rather than aiming futile blame at individuals, we must push for protective legislation of the natural world, banning fossil fuels for anything other than creating renewable energy structures, incentivising AI data efficiency, and strong privacy protections and anti-monopoly laws for big tech.

Imagine if instead of horse poop back then, people had foreseen that cars would make the roads dangerous, the air polluted and nature vulnerable to motorways... Right now, we can see how entrenched power structures could make technology control us all, instead of setting us free. Let this foresight empower us to create a world where clean energy and advanced technology belongs to us all.

Further reading

Wired - 2025: How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying

MIT report - 2025 - We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard

World Economic Forum (WEF) - Top 10 emerging technologies in 2025

Live Science - 2025 - China’s solar space project