Join the Pacific Council on Wednesday, October 15, at 8 am PT, to explore the impact of increasing global dependence on AI and the loosening of climate regulatory policy in the U.S. with the passage of the Big, Beautiful Bill. The audience will hear from Samantha Gross, Director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative and a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution; Allan T. Marks, Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and Law Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA; and Dr. Rachit Dubey, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UCLA.

The rapid deployment of AI, powered by energy-intensive data centers, is a cause of environmental harm, with data centers relying on massive amounts of electricity to operate. The BBB undercuts renewable incentives and increases fossil fuel expansion through carbon capture loopholes, giving less incentive for data centers to operate using clean energy, while also decreasing the availability of safety nets for people whose jobs may be impacted by AI. By not investing in sustainable pathways to support AI technology, the U.S. risks falling behind globally in terms of technological adaptation and advancement. 

Why it’s important:

• If state regulations are to be lifted on the usage of AI in the U.S., the electricity use in data centers for AI purposes will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.
• If clean energy becomes an uneconomical investment, there is concern that AI firms will turn to the use of fossil fuels, which significantly slows the building process for data centers. There is a huge shortage of natural gas turbines in the U.S. right now, with waiting times doubling in the past year.
• With the passage of the BBB, the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at about $34.8 billion a year.
• Some predict that the result of slower data center builds in the U.S. will put the country at a disadvantage in terms of innovation against countries like China, who invest in solar and wind energy, and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which invest heavily in the creation of data centers. 

Please send questions in advance to events@pacificcouncil.org.

To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page.

Guest Speaker

Samantha Gross is the Director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Her work is focused on the intersection of energy, environment, and policy.

Prior to Brookings, Ms. Gross was the Director of the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy at the US Department of Energy and Director of Integrated Research at IHS CERA. She has been a Brookings Robert Bosch Foundation Transatlantic Fellow in Berlin and a Visiting Fellow at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh.

Ms. Gross holds a BS in Chemical Engineering, an MS in Environmental Engineering, and an MBA.

Guest Speaker

Allan Marks is a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a joint center of Columbia University’s Law and Climate schools. He teaches law and finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and at UCLA, where he is Affiliated Faculty at the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He is also a Distinguished Scholar in Energy Law & Sustainability and Professorial Lecturer in Law at The George Washington University Law School.

Allan is a retired partner at Milbank LLP, where he was a member of the firm’s Global Project, Energy & Infrastructure Finance group and the Private Equity, Renewable Energy, Latin America, and Global Risk & National Security practices. A lawyer for over 30 years, he has handled complex transactions in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Europe with an aggregate value of over $100 billion. Focused on energy and infrastructure project finance and development, his practice encompassed international and cross-border transactions, private equity, mergers & acquisitions, capital markets and private placements, joint ventures, restructurings, construction, banking, insurance and regulatory matters, and a range of commercial transactions.

He is a Senior Advisor at SidePorch and a contributor to Forbes. He speaks and publishes on geopolitics, sustainability, energy markets, infrastructure investment, cross-border transactions, climate change, and regulatory policy. He was a delegate to the COP27 UN Climate Change Conference, served as a USAID consultant in India, and was the founding co-chair of the State Bar of California's Subsection on Public-Private Infrastructure.

Allan earned a BA in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and studied in Austria and Germany.

Moderator

Dr. Rachit Dubey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UCLA. His research combines cognitive science, machine learning, and policy to understand why climate change often fails to feel urgent and how AI can help design more human-centered and broadly supported climate policies.

His work has been published in PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Sustainability, and was recognized with the 2024 Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity Dissertation Award. His research has also been featured in media outlets including The Guardian, BBC, The Washington Post, and Vox.

Prior to joining UCLA, he received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University, an MS in Education from UC Berkeley, and a BS in Computer Science from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

 

To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page.