Link to Publication

This entry offers a comprehensive approach to studying AI’s often contradictory environmental footprint. While AI is frequently touted as a panacea for climate change—optimizing smart grids, managing resources, and accelerating materials discovery—it is fundamentally extractive and consumptive.

To navigate this duality, the article organizes existing scholarship into a “Four Scopes” framework:

• Scope 1 (Direct Impacts): The local consequences of AI data centers, including energy use, water-intensive cooling, and localized pollution.

• Scope 2 (Indirect Impacts): The strain on energy infrastructure and the implications for carbon and water footprints from power generation.

• Scope 3 (Supply Chain Externalities): The “AI mineral stack,” spanning from rare-earth mining to the growing e-waste crisis and the communities impacted by these supply chains.

• Scope 4 (Afforded Impacts): The emerging area of “enabled” consequences, which includes both enabled mitigations—AI for climate mitigation—and enabled harms—AI used to accelerate fossil fuel extraction & Jevons Paradox.

Significance of this approach: While Scopes 1–3 are increasingly documented in scholarship, Scope 4 remains under-analyzed despite its potential to dominate AI’s long-term ecological consequences. Notably, Scope 4 is not recognized in the Greenhouse Gas protocol due to its dangerous potential for greenwashing. Yet, it is currently utilized in the business literature to highlight only one side of the story: enabled mitigations. This entry provides a corrective to this discourse, by highlighting the work of scholars and tech worker activists documenting how AI is used to accelerate extraction and environmental harm. 

In this new chapter for Planet Digital, I unpack the "Digital Sustainability Paradox” constructed by big tech companies. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google use flashy "pseudo-events"—like underwater data centers and wind farm christenings—to cover up the fact that their energy consumption still relies heavily on fossil fuels and harms local communities.

Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Readeris a vital new teaching resource exploring how streaming, platforms, and social media are remaking global culture—showing students that "the cloud" is actually a very physical, and often problematic, factory.

Link to Chapter

This chapter examines how retail platforms contribute to the global e-waste crisis through opaque practices and uneven responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with retailers in the United States and Zimbabwe, the authors find that in the U.S., platform retailers obscure recycling programs and defer responsibility to state systems with limited infrastructure, while in Zimbabwe, the absence of formal policies shifts the burden to consumers and informal networks. The analysis introduces "platform opacity" to describe how information about e-waste disposal is systematically withheld or made difficult to access, allowing retailers to evade accountability across both contexts. The chapter proposes a platform-retailer responsibility framework to address these information asymmetries.