I refuse to let Silicon Valley steal Big Oil's hard-earned apocalypse

“A.I. Could Possibly End Humanity,” the headlines screamed this morning, asking in a panicked, breathless tone how humans are supposed to process such a cosmic fear. I read this over my locally sourced oat milk cortado and, I must admit, I nearly choked on my compostable agave straw. The audacity. The sheer, unadulterated Silicon Valley arrogance of it all.

For the better part of a century, the industrialized world has been painstakingly engineering a flawless, artisanal apocalypse through the meticulous extraction, refinement, and combustion of fossil fuels. We have put in the hours. We have done the math. And now, a bunch of twenty-something founders in fleece vests want to sweep in and take credit for the end of the world with a glorified autocomplete engine? I am sorry, but absolutely not. You do not get to cut the line.

I was discussing this very phenomenon on a panel at COP28 last year—sandwiched between a remarkably brave British Petroleum executive and a minor European royal whose private jet runs on a blend of kerosene and pure intentions—and the consensus was clear. We are working on a very specific timeline here.

We have internationally recognized targets for our doom. We have meticulously negotiated treaties outlining exactly how many degrees of warming we are allowed to pretend we can avoid before the global south is entirely underwater. We have spent billions on PR campaigns to ensure the public feels personally responsible for systemic industrial collapse. To have the tech industry suddenly announce that humanity might be wiped out by an algorithm next Tuesday is profoundly disrespectful to the process.

It makes an absolute mockery of the transition.

Let us consider the sheer amount of institutional labor that goes into a proper, climate-driven extinction event. You need generations of lobbying. You need decades of suppressed internal scientific memos. You need massive, geopolitical proxy wars over crude oil reserves, and you need a compliant media apparatus willing to debate the chemistry of the atmosphere as if it were a matter of personal opinion.

You do not just hit “compile” on a large language model and call it a day. That is the apocalyptic equivalent of microwaving a frozen dinner and calling yourself a Michelin-starred chef.

Just last week, I had an off-the-record lunch with a prominent ESG director at a major oil conglomerate. We were dining at a zero-waste pop-up in Manhattan, and she was visibly distraught, pushing a piece of sustainably line-caught sea bass around her plate with a fork made of compressed hemp. She had tears in her eyes.

She is entirely right. The fossil fuel industry has worked tirelessly to build up an impressive, globally diversified portfolio of stranded assets and ecological catastrophes. They earned their villainy the hard way. They bought senators. They funded think tanks. They built offshore rigs in hurricane zones.

And yet, the general public is so easily distracted by shiny new toys. Oh, ChatGPT can pass the bar exam? Who cares. Can it melt the Thwaites Glacier? Can it acidify the Pacific Ocean to the point where the entire marine food web collapses? Can it displace three hundred million climate refugees by 2050? I did not think so.

I have seen the tech industry’s attempts to contribute to the end times, and frankly, I find them derivative and pathetic. Yes, they are building massive server farms that consume the energy equivalent of a medium-sized European nation. Yes, their carbon footprint is expanding at an exponential, terrifying rate.

But it lacks artistry. It is just brute-forcing carbon emissions to power a machine that generates six-fingered hands and writes rhyming corporate emails. It is a cheap, knock-off apocalypse, completely devoid of the rich, cultural heritage of the internal combustion engine.

I brought this up with a venture capitalist recently at a retreat in Aspen. I explained to him that AI is simply riding the coattails of the groundwork laid by ExxonMobil. He became quite defensive, assuring me that Silicon Valley takes its existential threats very seriously.

How comforting. A net-zero armageddon. It is exactly this kind of sterile, sanitized thinking that is ruining the vibe of the modern era.

The real victims here, as always, are the institutional climate scolds like myself, who have built lucrative, fulfilling careers telling you that you are bad people for flying commercial. If an artificial intelligence simply wakes up and vaporizes us instantly, how am I supposed to secure a lucrative book deal about the deep moral failings of your gas stove?

How do I monetize my intellectual despair if the world ends before we even reach the 1.5-degree threshold?

You ordinary people are largely to blame for this shift in narrative, of course. You are always looking for an easy out. You would much rather worry about a hyper-intelligent computer turning you into a paperclip than face the hard, uncomfortable truth that you should have purchased a ninety-thousand-dollar electric vehicle back in 2014.

A digital extinction feels clean. It feels out of your hands. It feels like something you can blame on Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk while you sit back and watch Netflix.

But a climate extinction? That requires you to feel a low-grade, simmering guilt about your plastic grocery bags right up until the day the coastal flooding takes the roof of your home. And you owe it to the planet to feel that guilt. You owe it to the brave executives who pledged sustainability goals for 2050 knowing full well they would be dead by the time the bill came due.

We are currently hurtling toward an irreversible tipping point, one that we earned through generations of unbridled consumption and legislative cowardice. Let that sink in. We did this. We built this disaster with our own two hands, our own supply chains, and our own profound greed.

I, for one, will not let some tech bro in Palo Alto steal our thunder with a buggy neural network. We are going to boil this planet the old-fashioned way, precisely as the shareholders intended.