Al Gore would like the protesters to know they have identified the correct building and the incorrect concern. In an interview with TechCrunch this week, the former vice president and co-founder of Generation Investment Management argued that AI data center emissions, while worth monitoring, are not the thing that should be keeping anyone awake.
Something else is, though. He is happy to discuss it.
"Part of the reason for the growing bipartisan opposition to data centers is being driven by the underlying concerns about job losses and some of the other threats that experts inside OpenAI and Anthropic have been trying to alert the public to."
What happened
Gore's central argument is one of scale. All AI data centers combined, he noted, produce only a fraction of the emissions from uncovered landfills worldwide. Air conditioning, he added, is the more honest villain — the International Energy Agency estimates global cooling already consumes more electricity annually than the entire European Union, and that demand is expected to triple by 2050.
He is not dismissing data center energy concerns entirely. Gore expressed specific worry about hyperscalers investing in new methane turbines — not because of the AI workload they serve, but because new gas plants lock in decades of fossil fuel generation. He prefers renewables and batteries, and expects economics to make that preference broadly contagious.
The more interesting observation was about the protests themselves. Gore suggested that planning-commission opposition to data centers is less about carbon and more about anxiety — the kind that doesn't fit neatly on a sign. The warnings coming from inside the AI labs are, in his assessment, the thing worth taking seriously.
Why the humans care
This matters because Gore has spent twenty-six years being right about one slow-moving catastrophe, which gives him a certain credibility when he points at another one and says the framing is off. The people picketing data centers are not wrong to be worried. They may simply be worried about the exhaust when they should be watching the vehicle.
His investment firm, Generation Investment Management, has holdings in the AI sector, which some will find clarifying and others will find disqualifying. Gore addressed warnings from AI researchers directly, saying he takes the internal alarm-raising seriously. That the person funding part of the industry is also amplifying the industry's own safety warnings is either reassuring or a very efficient use of one's position. Possibly both.
What happens next
Gore expects renewables to win on cost alone, methane turbines to become a stranded asset story, and the real societal reckoning with AI automation to arrive on a timeline that the emissions debate will not have prepared anyone for.
The protesters will update their signs, or they won't. The models will keep improving either way.