When most people hear the word “sustainability” in a work context, they probably picture someone in an office, writing reports on how to make businesses greener, and... that’s it.

That is one aspect of the job. But there’s more to it than that.

The Importance of Relationships

It’s not enough to simply write reports and say this or that needs to occur. Changes must happen inside organisations in their entirety; therefore, you need buy-in across all departments. Building relationships is critical for this; in almost every case, other people across the organisation have to alter something about the way they work to make it more sustainable. Bringing these people along is key, and it’s so important to know what they do and what their needs are so you (and they) can plan accordingly.

No one likes it when some prick with no idea what they do every day rolls in to tell them they’re doing their job wrong. That’s not going to be any different just because you’re working doing it for a good cause. People need to feel heard and understood, and you’ll get much farther in your work if you just listen to them. This is why I love talking to people about what they do; once you understand their concerns and have built a relationship, it becomes a lot easier to make change happen.

You need to talk to workers to find out what their roadblocks are. Have a bit of a think before you approach them, and also ask them for their ideas. Many people care about the purpose of their job, even if they don’t talk about it much. In addition, there are going to be so many factors impacting someone’s work that you’ll have no idea about unless you hear it directly from them.

If you want the organisation to change their entire fleet of trucks to run on electricity, you’d get frustrated when the fleet manager says it isn’t possible. If you talked to them a little, you might feel they’re being difficult for the sake of it.

If you chat to them more, though, you may find out they want to make the change, but the company has 10 year leases which would be a tremendous cost to break and won’t be up for renewal for another six. So now you need to wait till 2032 before you can have the organisation swap to electric vehicles (EVs), and the fleet manager really doesn’t need yet another person breathing down their neck about this. They’re aware it will save money in the long run, but until that lease is up, their hands are tied.

On the flip side, this means you can now prepare for it gradually. You can find out what the fleet manager and their drivers need in a vehicle, as well as what hoops you need to jump through to get the preferred choice. You can assist them in organising trials, where the drivers get to take a few different cars for a spin and make sure everyone agrees on the best fit. You have time to build a business case, and if it’s approved, hopefully have some lead time to get chargers installed in the garage before the new fleet arrives.

I don’t want to discount the fact that sometimes people do just want to make your work difficult. This is more common the higher up the chain you go; while there are exceptions, generally, the more someone has benefited from the status quo, the more likely they are to protect it. For the average person, though, they want to make a positive impact, and they probably think they’re in a minority when they’re not.

What about workers like me, trained in sustainability but not explicitly working in a role with the s-word in it?

Outside the Sustainability Department

In operations, logistics, event planning and the like, we make decisions every day about how our team, office, or whole organisation runs. It’s critical that people like me are across the impacts of our decisions, and are made aware of more sustainable options so we can make better choices. We might need assistance understanding what’s available, or calculating the impacts of each one. It’s worth it, though, as procurement and software use are underappreciated areas that can have a huge impact on an organisation’s sustainability, in terms of both the environmental stuff and beyond.

Anyone has the potential to be a sustainability worker, within their own remit, regardless of formal training in the topic. In fact, we need people in different areas to be thinking about sustainability, as it makes implementation smoother. If you're able and keen to help, you can do so in various ways:

• It cuts down on time if I’ve already looked into an issue and the sustainability officer doesn’t have to explain themselves, or if I already have concrete ideas on how I can make improvements in my role.

• I can be a go-between between the sustainability officer and my department. I can ensure everyone feels heard, step in to explain jargon that is assumed knowledge in one field but foreign to someone outside it, explain the limitations of our systems to the sustainability team, and more.

• It makes it a lot easier for a manager if the sustainability officer has already spoken to their subordinates and heard from them what the main concerns are going to be. They can then proactively address these barriers in their recommendations.

• It’s easier for me to make more sustainable choices in my work if I get the sustainability officer to recommend them, as I can then take their report to my manager to bolster my case.

And that’s just the white collar workers. There are people on the ground installing solar panels, heat pumps and EV chargers; manufacturing them; selling them; shipping them, and more. I’m not going into detail here as I have no experience in this work, but in my mind, these are all sustainability professionals, too.

Again, these are not what people typically think of when they hear “sustainability”, but these are people who are making it happen. Without this work, it wouldn’t be possible.

What about mining? We need raw materials to be able to manufacture the replacements for polluting infrastructure.

I think mining could be sustainable, but not while we labour under capitalism.

Here’s what I think it could look like:

• Stop all the human rights abuses. The mining industry has been built on the back of them, which is why it needs to be rebuilt and cannot be reformed.1 Like too much in our society, its current attitudes are all about profit and nothing else.

• Collaborate with First Peoples worldwide when wanting to work on their lands. Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) is non-negotiable; the “free” part of this means they have a right to say no to any proposal that would affect their land, and that would then end the proposal. None of this doing it anyway garbage.

• Implement robust reducing, recycling and reusing. We live on a planet with finite resources, and we in the West, especially we white people, do not act like it.

• Embrace the principle of reciprocity. Don’t take more than we actually need. Mining companies often manipulate information on their product so they can sell more. All of this needs to stop.

It Could Be You

Doesn't all of this mean everyone can undertake sustainability work?

Well, yeah. While there are people whose whole job is sustainability, ultimately, everyone can contribute. And we need everyone to. You don’t need to be across everything going on in all sectors, and I don’t encourage you to try as there is so much happening all the time. But you can absolutely be thinking about how to make your work have less of an environmental or social footprint, and get in touch with any sustainability officer in your workplace to see how you can help. Even if they don’t have anything at the current time, it’s good for them to know you’re there and willing to assist, and to begin to build that relationship.

It’s also important to remember sustainability is more than the green stuff. As long as you’re working to make the world a better and fairer place, it counts.

Caveats

Not everyone can be doing it all the time. It’s going to be harder or impossible for people who are not given the resources they need to do their job effectively, let alone think about how to make it more sustainable.

Many organisations don’t have anyone working on sustainability, which makes it a lot harder for any one person to make a case.

Some people have too much going on and are struggling simply to live. They don’t have the spoons to try and figure any of this out.

People in insecure work are unlikely to have the ability to push for change in their workplace, as they may be let go or face other forms of reprisal.

Some organisations also just suck, and there is no way management is going to be convinced to make any changes; even suggesting it may open you up to ridicule2. This is always important to remember; no one is going to listen to you if you’re not paying attention to the barriers they’re talking about and taking them seriously.

If you fall into any of these categories, or any similar ones I missed, don’t feel bad about not doing enough. Always remember that, while individual action is important, the primary reason we are in this mess is greed, and fossil fuel and other companies trying to make individuals feel guilty for a problem that is their fault.

If you have the means, I recommend thinking about what could change in your work; there are so many articles, resources and organisations all over the place about how to improve each sector.

At the end of the day, the one best suited to figuring out the change your role can make is you.

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I had a discussion with a friend once who asked for my opinion on a dilemma she had in a course she was doing. I think about it often.

She was in a group where one person talked about how, in order to save paper, a survey their institution regularly holds had moved online. However, some residents in their area did not know how to use computers. So they printed some hard copies and distributed them to those people, but the overwhelming majority of residents were able to complete it online.

Another group member was adamant this was unsustainable. My friend disagreed, and wanted to know what I thought.

I replied that it is, in fact, sustainable.

If you want to take the narrow view that sustainability is only about environmental sustainability, then yeah, you’d think this was unsustainable.

However, when you look at the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals, only seven out of 17 relate to the environment, and two of those are kind of also about people. Specifically, SDG 6 is about sanitation - clean water for the sake of people being able to drink it, and SDG 7 is about clean energy - which it stipulates needs to be affordable.

The other SDGs are about societies, or what I like to call social sustainability.

People often forget this, or are completely unaware of it to begin with.

Social Sustainability

So, protecting and restoring nature is only a third of the work we should be doing. The remaining two thirds is about ensuring fairness in society, such as making sure people who don’t know how to navigate computers can still participate in their local communities.

Specifically, this case would fall under Goal 10, Reducing Inequalities, Target 10.2, Promote Universal Social, Economic and Political Inclusion:

By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status.

It also falls under Goal 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, Target 16.7:

Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

The ideal solution, to me, would be to educate those who are uncomfortable using a computer in how to do so. This would have other, positive knock-on effects that would allow these people to become more confident in using computers and other technology in other aspects of their lives, making them more independent in a tech-based society.

In my ideal scenario, if this computer literacy program was taking time to roll out (which is likely), printing surveys for those who had yet to take it would still be my suggested stopgap. Yes, some paper is still being printed, but it would be much less than last year. It would be an improvement.

This reveals part of the problem with the objection mentioned at the start of this article: it’s an issue of perfectionism. The objector seemed to think this initiative was bad because it was still using some paper, overlooking the fact that it had managed to eliminate the bulk of its paper usage by shifting online. As if simply reducing use wasn’t enough; it had to be eliminated all in one fell swoop.

As someone who has extensive work experience in operations and spent a lot of time implementing programs, I can tell you this attitude is asinine. Something like this, for a large organisation, would be a multi-step process. You’d need to do a business case or cost-benefit analysis, design the form, solicit feedback from colleagues and community, make any suggested changes, test the form, fiddle with it some more when something doesn’t work, get all relevant staff onboard (which may include training some of them in the software), and then you can maybe roll it out. Then make more changes to the form on process based on feedback from a broader user base, and prepare a report into how well or poorly it was received and what needs to change for next year.

Changing processes takes a lot of work, and we’re often under-resourced. Something like the example in the previous paragraph could easily take months, especially once you factor in the times you’re waiting for feedback from other people and can’t actively work on it.

With all that being said, even in a scenario where the survey was being printed in its normal amount because its target audience was unfamiliar with computers, I would argue that printing the survey was the most sustainable option.

If you wanted to move it online knowing some people would be left out, I would be asking why your ‘sustainable’ solution is to exclude people from society rather than to source better paper. Or improve participants’ computer literacy. Or literally anything else.

Another issue with looking at sustainability as only an environmental issue is that it ignores the fact that the way we interact with our environment is a byproduct of everything else. Society shapes people and our attitudes, who then shape the environment. Ignoring that aspect, and why people behave the way they do, means you would never be able to get to the root of any problems or create lasting change.

Don’t Trample on Rights for the Environment

Looking at it holistically means we don’t sacrifice one goal for another, or treat them as mutually exclusive. There are myriad examples of trampling First Nations rights in the name of environmentalism. You also get projects sacrificing biodiversity for the sake of climate projects, such as the NSW government making 60 kookaburra chicks homeless for a renewable energy project.

I think all coal mines and other fossil fuel plants need to be shut down. I do not want them to be shut down overnight because I don’t want the workers in those industries to be left without a way to support themselves or their families. The transition needs to be managed, in conjunction with the workers, to make sure nobody gets left behind.

You can see a great example of this in Collie, Western Australia where the community, Climate Justice Union (CJU), and other stakeholders got together to propose alternatives to the local coal mining industry. The state government has been working with the community on this; you can read more about their initiative here, though I prefer CJU’s report linked above1.

SDGs Are Imperfect, But Useful

The SDGs certainly aren’t perfect. I have a couple of issues with them, one of which is that they need to centre First Nations people and their knowledge. There are a couple of targets mentioning them related to hunger2 and education3, but these are about doing things to First Nations people. There is nothing in them about working with them.

The hunger target literally talks about providing First Nations people with resources, with no words devoted to tapping into the extensive knowledge they possess of their own land or empowering them to take care of themselves and the land they steward. This target is paternalistic, and achieving it would mean trapping First Nations people in a cycle of dependency. The right way to go is to empower them to care for their own lands, like they used to before we showed up as thieves and murderers; they do not need more bullshit from colonial governments.

Another issue is that people like me are erased. I am genderfluid. Many people close to me are trans. All of the goals, targets and indicators about gender focus on women. I and many of my loved ones are not represented; trans, non-binary, and gender diverse people do not exist in any of the Goals.

Not represented, as well, are people who were unable to participate in the consultation process. Feedback was solicited via online survey, which means it is biased toward societies with easy access to internet and the devices able to make good use of it. The UN made admirable efforts to get people out to places not connected to the internet, but ultimately, it was much easier for someone in a country or community in the West than it was for someone from outside it.

While they could be improved, the SDGs are still a useful framework. By far the best thing is how universal they are. I studied with people who said the distinct symbols associated with each goal has helped them to find people working in their field who they wouldn’t have otherwise connected with. Once found, they could flag a translator to help them figure out how their work intersected, and exchange contact details so they could stay in touch. That’s so cool!

They’re also useful as a general communication tool. I have found, when talking to people who are not involved in environmental justice work, that it is powerful to be able to point to a set of 17 goals with 169 accompanying targets from a major international organisation that every country in the world has signed onto. As many issues as the UN has, initiatives like this still have weight.

It’s All Connected

Only looking at sustainability through an environmental lens is too narrow. The society we live in is just as important; making sure our systems work for people and planet. In fact, since environmental policy is shaped by society, ignoring it means you’re missing a huge part of the picture and won’t be able to get anywhere toward solving wicked problems.

When you’re designing sustainable solutions, remember that there’s more to it than the green stuff. Make sure you’re not leaving anyone behind.

The Victorian government, supposed to be the bastion of progressiveness in this country, recently announced the abolition of Sustainability Victoria.

This is simply the latest in cuts and compromises across Australia.

The federal government passed weak environmental laws late last year. Sure, they’re better than what we had before, but what we had before only stopped two developments, one of which was a wind farm. They haven’t been able to stop fossil fuel developments.

The bar was in hell, and now it’s moved up to the mantle.

In addition, the government’s backing of a generative AI industry will be devastating. The infrastructure for it was directly responsible for weakening our emission targets:

We have recommended a lower bound that makes allowance for the intrinsic uncertainty of our analysis and transition risks (e.g. strong data centre growth...)

It will be calamitous for our waterways, for our air, for the health of people and animals as it pollutes the oceans of sea and sky. And without a strong sustainability sector to keep his government accountable, they will get away with it.

Across the Country

New South Wales has cut dozens of jobs from their EPA, while at the same time, they ravage native vegetation for a renewable energy project.

Queensland gutted the Environmental Defenders’ Office last year. The timid EPBC reforms from the federal government were too much for Queensland’s agriculture minister, none of whose colleagues holds a climate portfolio.

Western Australia is “cutting red tape” (read: ignoring environmental protection laws) to prioritise energy projects and reduce transparency. This is after a deal that allows Alcoa to continue mining, and which put such a huge monitoring burden on the regulator, they dropped 95% of their planned audits. Now, they are failing to audit 98% of their overall projects in the state. No, that’s not a typo:

The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation planned to audit 40 of the 485 projects subject to requirements from the environment minister in the 12 months to June 2024, but cut this to 10 projects: just two per cent of the total.

The Northern Territory needs its own bullet point list:

• They’re trying to give the Chief Minister (Premier equivalent) the power to exempt major projects from regulations.

  • They appointed a gas executive as “Territory Coordinator” to make it easier for private investors to get around safeguards.

  • The bill would exclude First Nations people from being involved in proposed developments on their land.

  • The Coordinator has the power to override 32 different laws.

  • A few days after the legislation passed, the Deputy Chief Minister quoted Trump’s infamous “drill, baby, drill”.

  • They’ve refused to release information on the amount of opposition to the bill.

• They stripped two environmental groups of funding as they introduced the legislation for the aforementioned Territory Coordinator.

  • They’ve made a number of legislative changes, which I’m going to quote verbatim from the article I linked above:

  • 20 December 2024: changes to the Petroleum Act removed requirements for onshore fracking to be referred to the EPA and the large emitters policy was scrapped.

  • 3 March 2025: Fracking Code of Practice gutted was so companies don’t need to report hazardous leaks to landowners or keep records of chemicals pumped into the environment.

  • 27 March 2025: renewable energy target of 50 per cent by 2030 was scrapped.

  • 19 June 2025: 2030 emissions reduction targets were quietly abandoned.

  • 6 February 2025: plans announced to remove third-party merits review provisions, so communities can’t seek reviews of fracking, planning, and water decisions.

• The current government got rid of the climate portfolio, and merged environment and water into land and planning. Whenever this happens, the environment always comes second to planning.

• The EPA’s emissions policy has been weakened.

• A new water action plan allows for double the amount of extraction from the Tindal Limestone Aquifer in the north of the territory. This will devastate the local environment and community, whose famous hot springs are likely to be affected.

• Thousands of hectares of native vegetation clearing is likely to go ahead. If approved, it would be a tripling of the Territory’s average land clearing rate.

I’ve been hearing from friends in the tertiary sector that they’ve been shattered, too. Various good sustainability teams around the nation have been quietly dismantled or reallocated to other work. There is, now, effectively none left, and you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t know people. None of them have announced these changes, knowing how deeply unpopular they would be in a society that wants to become more sustainable.

I’ve written about the travesty that is the dismantling of Monash’s Sustainable Development Institute. Flinders University has made six researchers redundant; some of those researchers studied the algal blooms which are now devastating the state. The University of Technology Sydney’s transdisciplinary school will not survive the university’s cuts; this school focused on inclusive futures. I’ve heard of another higher education sustainability team in New South Wales which has been let go, but I can’t find any mention of it online, so I’ll refrain from posting about it for now.

I deliberately haven’t mentioned the media, to echo their role in this. You won’t hear a peep from them, as a compliant, concentrated media class will refuse to report on any of it. They, in general, have done a poor job looking at trends in this country. They’re too insular, stuck in the daily back and forth over politics, never taking a step back to look at patterns in the landscape. Sure, they talk about job losses more broadly, but no one that I can see is making any connections between the disparate slash and burn announcements in sustainability, any other industry, or the economy more broadly.

Everything in this article consists of things I knew off the top of my head, or was able to find quickly. I’m sure there is plenty more out there I am not aware of. Please, please drop information in the comments if you know of it.

This entire piece is undercut by a deep-seated rage and helplessness that I don’t know what to do with. Whenever I become accustomed to the new depths my industry has been forced to plumb, something like the extermination of a well-respected government department enters the fray, and I am forced to start over with a new dollop of desperation heaped onto my shoulders.

When does it end?

What Next?

We’re not going to feel the full effects of this for a while. Systems, both natural and synthetic, will gradually start to fail, until we’re reminded of why these roles were deemed necessary1 in the first place. Our universities will slowly and steadily drip down global impact rankings. And many of us will become acclimated to our new reality, as the proverbial frog in hot water.

While Trump and his influence plays a part, I don’t think it explains all of this. For years now, people in the sustainability sector have been wondering what would happen as big 2030 targets approached, and governments and organisations realised they would fail to meet them. This is, in part, an answer to that question. Rather than redouble their efforts, or admit they can’t make it but still try to do their best, they are simply dropping the people who would ask uncomfortable questions and hold them accountable.

I’d love to see a union or some other professional organisation for workers in the sustainability industry. Right now, we’re scattered across different unions depending on what our specific work is, or which industry we’re located within. A place for sustainability workers to meet, organise and strategise across sectors would be helpful for us, as a whole, to push back against this torrent dragging us under. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the industry -- every sector needs to become more sustainable, so we need to be embedded across every sector -- an organisation like this would allow people to connect with experts in other fields who could help them, and vice versa. We could build real, lasting solidarity that cuts across sectoral lines. Meeting at the pub once a month is great, but a large, respected body with reach would go a long way towards allowing us to fight back. Individualism is never the answer; we need to stick together.

I am one person, and I don’t have the resources or connections to set up such an organisation. If, by chance, someone reading this does, flick me a message and we’ll talk. If you’re aware of someone organising something like this, please put us in touch. Especially at the moment, as I am currently unemployed and have a lot of time on my hands which I would love to put towards building cross-sectoral sustainability solidarity.

The Master’s I got from Monash changed my life; changed the very way I think. People who have gotten to know me over the past few years may be surprised to learn I’d never questioned capitalism or any other underpinnings of society before I started this course in 2018. But through the brilliant lecturers and the readings they set, I slowly came to realise there were other ways of organising society that may be better.

Unfortunately, I see the refusal to maintain MSDI as part of a broader trend within society, and I’m bracing for more like it in the coming years.

There is, of course, the shitshow that is the US under Trump. All kinds of terrible things are happening over there; ICE is roaming the streets detaining and deporting random people from all walks of life for the crime of not being white. Trans and gender diverse people are being criminalised and forced back into closets that do not fit us. Environmental protections are being dismantled, so polluters of all the chemicals of the rainbow can get away with doing whatever they want with their toxic refuse, to whomever they want. These issues are interlinked, as polluted neighbourhoods are more likely to be communities of colour or queer.

While Australia is not America, it nonetheless has a significant influence on our politics. It shouldn’t; Trump is hugely unpopular here, Australians do not trust the US to act responsibly anymore and believe we should act more independently. Our PM refuses to accept this reality and has desperately been trying to have a meeting with Trump to hold onto the relationship. For all his efforts, he has been shunned twice. I don’t think Albanese being ignored by him is a bad thing, personally, and I imagine the Australians who want more independence from the US would agree. But for some reason our media class have been kicking up a stink about it.

Alongside America’s unwarranted sway over our political class is Abundance, the milquetoast bestseller that has been casting a pall over Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ economic policies. The thrust of this book is that we have the ability to satisfy all of our needs so long as we do away with pesky bureaucracy, including environmental protections. If we sweep planetary boundaries under a big enough rug, they’ll get trapped there and can’t bother us again.

In the background of all this have been the Albanese government’s environmental commitments. Experts were calling for a minimum of a 75% reduction by 2035. The government refused to listen to this, instead settling on 62-70%. And let’s be real, a target with a range is effectively a target for the lowest part of that range: 62%. Not enough. Part of the reason it’s this low is due to projected data centre growth for generative AI, as per advice from the Climate Change Authority (it’s on page 36). For more on why generative AI requires so much power, read my evidence-based rant.

The government is also preparing to ram through changes to our main environmental conservation legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. The Act as it currently exists does little to protect the environment and only exists as a checkbox for development approvals. There are no consequences for ministers failing to act on species recovery plans in a timely manner, as evidenced by the absurd timelines, lack of plans for some species or straight up deleting them.

Notably, the 2020 Samuel Review of the EPBC Act, required by law, did not recommend climate change be added as a consideration for developments under the Act:

Successive Australian Governments have elected to adopt specific policy mechanisms to implement their commitments to reduce emissions. The Review agrees that these specific mechanisms, not the EPBC Act, are the appropriate way to place limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

This all adds up to a future I don’t like. This Labor government is going to keep building so we can have a faux abundance, and will attempt to sweep away anything that gets in its way. It ignores complements to its construction policies which would make sure all its new houses aren’t bought by the handful of people who already own many of them. They’ve refused to add a climate trigger to the EPBC Act, which they also failed to implement when the Act was reviewed in 2010 under Gillard-Rudd.

It’s only a good idea when they’re in Opposition, apparently -- yes, you’re reading that right. That is a 2005 amendment to the EPBC Act to add a climate trigger, not just from Labor, but from Albanese specifically. The Samuel report gives them the political ammunition they need to avoid adding a climate trigger, hypocrisy be damned. It only works so long as they ignore the part that says they need other mechanisms to reduce emissions (spoiler: we don’t have any of those that work). I’m tipping the media won’t point that out.

Looking at their current commitments, and the fact that four months ago our Assistant Minister for Productivity literally gave a speech called “The abundance agenda for Australia,” I expect this to continue. They’re going to cut environmental regulations to make it easier to build the shitty houses Australia is infamous for. They’re not going to look after our endangered species unless dragged over the courts to do so, and they will not make any substantial improvements to our environmental laws. With a nonexistent opposition and weak media, there is no one in Canberra who will force them to change. They might do some deals with the Greens, but I would put money on them doing deals with the remnants of the Coalition instead, where they have the ability to do so.

I fully expect that the environmental degradation will continue until we’re reminded of why these regulations existed in the first place. And given the rise of authoritarianism across the West, I fully expect it will get a lot worse before it starts to get better.

I used to be optimistic about this stuff, but over the past decade, as I’ve watched decision makers dither over issues that have been around since before I was born, I’ve gotten cynical. I am on a never-ending quest to try to make the world a little kinder than it was before I got here, sustained by the networks I’m in and seeing so many other people around me doing the same.

On a smaller, more personal level, it’s infuriating. All of it. I’m looking for work after having been dumped in the middle of a white collar recession, so of course, there’s not much out there. My degrees are in ecology and conservation biology, and in the environment and sustainability. Attacks on this field mean I’ll have even less work available from the slim pickings on offer.

We need environmental protections now more than ever. The seventh of nine planetary boundaries has just been crossed. The climate crisis is making everything worse, and Western countries are refusing to do our fair share. In Australia specifically, we have the aforementioned species recovery plans, which would create so many jobs for my field if the government started acting on them. Why was my undergraduate ecology degree so heavily subsidised if the government wasn’t going to give us the lowest hanging fruit for work?

If you want to support MSDI and are a current or former Monash student, sign this petition by an intrepid student currently doing my old Master’s course. If you’re not, share it with the Monash alumni you know - there will be some, we’re everywhere.

The only thing that will force the government to change course would be if their jobs are on the line. If you can, join activist groups in your area and help out. Even something as simple as taking minutes, running a delivery, drafting an agenda or email, or anything else is one less thing that professional activists have to do.

I got set off this weekend when a friend informed me more and more people in a mutual friend group are talking about using generative AI (genAI). I know these people well. I know they genuinely care about people and planet. I cannot comprehend why anyone there would want to use the power and water guzzling, exploitative, polluting, theft machine that makes things cost more and rots your brain. It is wrong, but faster. That is all it does. It has no use case.

None of the issues with genAI are new. However, what is new is the tremendous scale. Everything I say below has always been a concern with data centres, social media, and other forms of digital usage and communication, to some extent. But with the explosion in genAI growth, they have gotten significantly worse over the past half a decade or so. And as I point out in the last section, it accelerates these issues for no real benefit to society.

This article covers topics which may not seem directly related to climate. However, once you understand climate as a whole-of-society problem and see how it touches on everything, you see the relevancy in everything else. The generative AI industry is doing the same shit the fossil fuel industry has been doing, but faster – and this is true of many other damaging industries throughout history. I wanted to include some analysis on how data centres are a new tool of imperialism, but this article is already long, and that could easily be its own piece. So I’ll do that another time.

How GenAI works

There are many different kinds of AI systems. The one that people are commonly referring to when they say “AI”, now, are generative AI systems; these are the ones that will “create” something for you when you input a prompt. The most well-known genAI systems are large language models (LLMs), which generate text based on the prompts you supply them with. There are other genAI systems which generate images, music and other forms of media; these are known as multimodal foundation models (MFMs).

GenAI systems are trained using reams of data scraped stolen from the internet. This includes data which is free to access, data which is paid, and even digitised copies of physical media purchased illegally from the dark web. This information is then fed into the systems that power these models, which, in turn, “create” their content based on all of this information they have been trained on. Without this training data, they would not exist.

LLMs are probability machines. When they generate text, they calculate which word would make the most sense to come next in their current sequence, based on the data they have been trained on. They do not understand any of their outputs, which is why they frequently lie (the industry euphemistically refers to their lies as “hallucinations”). Even calling the machine a liar doesn’t feel quite right; it’s not really, since it doesn’t understand anything it’s outputting. Using any humanising language isn’t correct, really, as genAI does not “think”, “calculate”, or anything of the sort. It works based on probabilities. However, it is hard to talk about these machines without using anthropomorphising language, which is why I continue to do so. Bear that in mind as you read.

GenAI needs a tremendous amount of resources to meet its needs. As with everything on the internet, information stored and processed in “the cloud” is not a pie in the sky fantasy, but a very real on the ground reality for a lot of people. In order to improve performance (which has diminishing returns), it needs to be constantly fed new inputs for training. This consumes a great deal of resources, which is then wasted when the company releases a new model a few weeks later. This is on top of the amount of resources consumed every time someone makes a query. While this has always been an issue, the scale of genAI and amount of resources required for training and upkeep has made this problem significantly worse.

Power guzzling

The amount of power used is not much per search, but with so many users, it all adds up. It’s also much more than using a search engine (provided you’re using one without AI generated “summaries”).

I just wanted to find out if I could eat my favourite roll after my IBD diagnosis.

This is keeping fossil fuel infrastructure alive. Old coal and other fossil fuel plants which were due to be winding down have been given a new lease on life by signing deals with tech companies to keep them going, when they otherwise would have closed down.

• Google last month indicated support for using fossil fuels to power AI.

• Google’s emissions in 2023 were 48% higher than they were in 2019 due to genAI.

• Amazon’s 2024 emissions were up 6% from the year before due to data centres for genAI.

• Microsoft’s emissions have increased by 29% since 2020 due to data centres "designed and optimized to support AI workloads."

• Meta’s (a.k.a Facebook)’s emissions jumped 145% in 2023 against the previous three years.

• Amazon and Nvidia announced in April this year they are turning to fossil fuels to power their genAI ventures.

They don’t care where the energy comes from, as a former Google executive told Congress last year. He said AI’s energy use was expected to triple over the next year, and much of it will come from fossil fuels as nuclear will not be built quickly enough. There are so many fucking examples of AI extending the life of fossil fuels. The relationship is mutually beneficial, with some AI firms spruiking their ability to make fossil fuels more efficient. Here’s some specific examples for big companies:

• Three new (!!) gas power plants are being built in Louisiana to power Meta’s biggest data centre (May 2025).

• A nuclear power plant in Illinois is being saved by Meta.

• Three Mile Island is being reopened for Microsoft.

• A gas power plant is being built in Dublin for Microsoft.

• Fossil fuels in Virginia have had their life extended by Amazon’s data centres.

Even when they use renewable energy, data centres are displacing energy that would have been used by everyday people, keeping them on fossil fuels and delaying the transition. And, also… most of them are not using renewable energy, anyway. This is why the fossil fuel and genAI industry get along so well.

Google supposedly released the energy consumption numbers a few weeks ago, which were promptly torn apart by analysts. My favourite piece is from Ketan Joshi, which you can find here. Joshi is an outstanding writer who focuses on climate data, and if you’re not following him, you should. He’s constantly posting good stuff on LinkedIn.

Back to genAI, there were two key issues Joshi identified with Google’s energy figures:

• It focused on the median value, per query. This obscures overall emissions; small number multiplied across millions becomes big number, but Google didn’t mention that anywhere.

• They only used text-based generation, while ignoring the more power-hungry image or video generation.

Here’s two banger quotes from Joshi:

"Something useful here is that Google have made it clear they’re perfectly capable of determining the very specific energy consumption of generative systems. They could share the same information about images and video, but they choose not to. I think that’s telling enough."

“Most data centre growth in the world has been concentrated in America, and most data centre growth relates specifically to the types of hardware used to power generative text, images and video. And most of America’s growth in power demand relates to data centres. ”

Joshi’s piece has a couple of awesome graphs that demonstrate the annual power consumption of major US tech companies. Between 2023 and 2024, Google’s energy use growth doubled, and it’s similar for most of the other companies.

Why would they release such a shit figure?

To control the narrative. And a lot of people have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. By releasing something, Google knew most people would simply accept it at face value, believe Gemini isn’t bad for the environment, and point to their propaganda as “evidence”. And they were right. You always, always, always need to think about the source of your information. Google, being an AI developer who profits from its proliferation, has a vested interest in downplaying the environmental harms. Don’t trust them, or any other genAI developer, as your sole source of information.

GenAI producers claim we don’t need to worry about the energy consumption as the machines will be able to help us solve the climate crisis. They have produced absolutely zero evidence to back up their claims, and given they have an obvious financial gain in this agenda, I don’t trust them. It echoes constant claims, for decades now, from fossil fuel companies that they can keep polluting because we will invent our way out of it, or offsets will save the day. It is bullshit. This article discusses a lot of key issues with offsets and remains relevant even now, a decade after it was published. Offsets have always been a way to stall climate action and facilitate guilt-free pollution, and the same is true of claims that genAI will solve the climate crisis – or any kind of problem, really. These claims should be treated with utter contempt, as the propaganda they are.

Water guzzling

Data centres run hot, and require enormous amounts of water to keep them cool. If you want to read more about the technical details of how they operate, do so here.

They are sucking up water that communities need. In Sydney, data centres currently use less than 1% of the city’s water. Sydney Water expects this to leap to 25% in the next 10 years. Not by 25%; to 25%. That’s too much for a drought-ravaged country, and made even worse by the fact the climate crisis will be making our droughts longer and more severe.

Companies running data centres thrive in a lack of transparency. This is also true of energy, but it’s more stark when it comes to water. Water usage is treated as a trade secret, which means locals are blocked from accessing that information:

“[Citizens in Uruguay] were forced to go to court to gain even limited information about Google’s plans, and only then learned that its cooling towers will need 7.6 million liters (2 million gallons) of potable water a day.”

Tech companies are claiming to be developing ways of cooling their data centres that means they can recycle water, not use freshwater, or even not use water at all. I treat this in the same way I treat offsets and hypothetical emissions reductions from technology: I’ll believe it when I see it. Show me some evidence of it being implemented, and not quietly tucked away in the cases where it does work well. Microsoft implemented a more efficient cooling system for some of its data centres in Chile – only after significant opposition to the data centres which forced them to change. Why did they not do that from the outset? Because they care more about their bottom line than communities.

Exploitative

Workers in Kenya were paid $2 an hour to make ChatGPT less racist. There is an entire industry around slicing data into microtasks for labelling – images, text, video, and everything else – to ensure the information going into the machines is accurate. The labelling is often carried out by workers in developing countries, where tech companies can get away with severely underpaying the people who carry their companies on their backs. Those companies also have poor laws and records on workers’ rights – often as a result of laws carried over from colonial Western governments.

Dividing the work into microtasks saves on labour for employers, at tremendous cost for the workers themselves. Workers are having to compete with one another for mind numbing tasks that pay little. If it takes you longer to complete a task than the time allocated, even if it wasn’t your fault because the contractor set an unreasonable timeframe, too bad – you don’t get paid. Jobs are first-come, first-serve, so workers have to sit on microtask platforms and try to beat other workers around the world for the job. They can’t leave their computers and risk missing out. They will sit there for 12 or 16 hours a day or even more, and maybe get a few hours worth of work, so much of the time is spent waiting for opportunities to come up and then getting beaten by someone else anyway.

The pay system sucks, too. They can only withdraw payments once they exceed a certain amount. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who gets banned from the platform, often for something you didn’t actually do, your earnings are lost. The decentralised and anonymised nature of the work also means workers cannot unionise or otherwise band together to fight for better pay and conditions. For more detail on microtasks, check out Work Without the Worker.

This isn’t an industry unique to genAI. Social media companies do it too. And it has a huge psychological toll on those workers, who often receive little to no support. They might not even be comfortable trying to seek psychological support for fear of losing their jobs.

Don’t even try to tell me tech companies are unaware. It’s common knowledge to anyone who pays attention. They could choose to only engage with contractors who actually care for their workers. These companies are enormous and can make change if they throw their weight around. Even better, since this is ongoing work, there is nothing stopping them from bringing these workers in-house to make them direct employees, with the better pay and benefits that entails. But they don’t give a shit about people, only their bottom line, so they won’t.

Polluting

Putting climate pollution aside, data centres pollute in other ways, too. Some of them use highly polluting energy sources, which can release gnarly amounts of harmful chemicals. This has been gaining awareness recently as a community in Memphis has been sounding the alarm.

These things are also noisy. Their energy sources and cooling systems can generate a significant amount of noise pollution. They cause issues for staff, whose hearing can be damaged as they move about a facility. Communities living near the data centres notice an uptick in headaches, sleep disruption and stress, which can cause myriad long-term health issues. It’s bad for wildlife, too. Head here for a primer on data centres and noise pollution.

I’m bringing back Joshi’s piece for more on how this is affecting communities in America.

Theft

GenAI is trained on data scraped from the Internet. They use anything and everything they can find, which is why they need data labellers to keep harmful content out. This means that all of your social media posts have been fed into the machine. All those 10-year photo challenges will be used to train facial recognition algorithms. And if you still use Facebook, you might want to double check your phone settings to make sure they’re not absorbing all the photos on your camera roll.

Unsurprisingly, artists, musicians and writers are not happy about this. GenAI developers are taking our works without our consent and then monetising the outputs, without any of that money making its way back to the creators whose works fuel it. This has given rise to a host of litigation from people whose works have been stolen.

GenAI developers counter that their machines could not exist if they were forced to pay for the inputs. To which I say, fine. If your business model requires stealing from hundreds of millions of people, it should not be permitted to continue. Do it ethically, or piss off.

Wrong, but faster

The kicker? Despite all the problems listed in this article, they don’t even fucking work. This is the most mind-boggling part of this whole thing, to me.

GenAI is riddled with inaccuracies. I wrote the AI guidelines at my last workplace, and my recommendation in the guidelines was that people shouldn’t use it unless they were going to fact-check it – which would defeat the purpose of using it in the first place in many cases. And that’s because they just suck and cannot do anywhere near the amount of things they are advertised to do.

There’s a famous IBM quote that goes “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” The same is true of software tools. If your response to your use of a dodgy output is to blame the machine and then keep using it, the fault is with you. You know it sucks and persist anyway, and deserve to face consequences in the same way you would if you had used any other tool inappropriately. If it’s your workplace forcing you to do it, then the blame should fall on them.

People often use LLMs to generate text or do “research”. However, they have no comprehension of facts and lies. They will always output correct-sounding text, but you need to be checking yourself to make sure it’s accurate. At a previous workplace, someone had asked ChatGPT a question, and then for a citation. She went and checked the citation it provided. The report it quoted was real, but the information it said was in the report wasn’t there. In fact, the report didn’t cover her query at all. Lawyers have been reprimanded for not checking their AI-generated briefs and submitting bullshit. Having to do this every time it spits something out? Why would you bother, when you could use do the research yourself?

GenAI doesn’t comprehend numbers. If you give it two numbers and ask it to tell you which is bigger, it will be correct sometimes, and sometimes not. About 50% of the time, in fact, since it’s just guessing. Quoting Joshi again:

“Doing a calculation using a chatbot, one of the most-used functions, is several million times more energy intensive than using a calculator and significantly more likely to be flat-out wrong.”

Using it to summarise a meeting or email chain? It’s definitely leaving out key information and getting technical details wrong. I had someone at a previous workplace who tried it for meeting summaries and later stopped for exactly those reasons.

Wanna use it to code? Been using it to code and insist it’s been saving you time? There’s a good chance it’s actually been costing you time.

“When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.”

GenAI gets weaponised by malicious actors, who can produce lies and propaganda, faster. Proponents claim this is a price we have to pay for technology. But they don’t have a right to decide that for everyone else, especially when they’re constantly ignoring or dismantling their safety teams (as outlined in granular detail in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI).

Makes things cost more

GenAI is expensive to train and not even close to being profitable. These companies need to recoup costs somewhere, and those with other products are doing it in other ways. The most infamous example is Microsoft pushing up the cost of Office by at least 30% once it started including its AI malsoftware, Copilot.

It doesn’t even allow you to use Copilot as much as you want; you get AI credits that are consumed when you use AI features. Once you run out, that’s it till you get more credits next month. So you’re paying that much more for a limited use product. And if you don’t want it at all, stiff shit; you have to pay the price hike anyway as there is no longer an option to have Office without Copilot.

Electricity providers are struggling to meet energy demand as is. With the addition of data centres, it is expected that the price of electricity will go up.

Rots your brain

If you stop using a muscle, it gets weaker. This is also true of your brain. A recent study by MIT has found that:

Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

Even if genAI didn’t have every other issue listed in this article, I would avoid using it for this reason alone. I treasure the way my brain works, especially the way I can make connections between seemingly separate concepts. I don’t want to lose it.

I don’t even want to think about the atrophying effect it’s having on developing brains, or the way its sycophancy is causing real psychological harms.

No use case

There is, as far as I can tell, nothing it does well, as I outlined in Wrong, but faster. At best it could be used to come up with ideas, but they’re always going to be middle of the road stuff as it spits out the averages of its training data. It will never give you anything original because, by its nature, it cannot. It will only remix the inputs that were stolen from all of us.

This is why so much UI has been designed around bullying people into using the tech. It would get significantly less use if it didn’t, because it sucks. I recall at my last job, we logged into Gmail one Friday morning to find Gemini had inserted itself into our emails. I was glad to see an option to switch it off… which turned out to be fucking empty.

I had to waste half an hour of my time on the line to support to be graciously granted the option to switch it off.

If it was such a great product, they would have allowed us to switch it off from the get go, confident in the fact that so many people would like it and keep it on. But they didn’t, because it’s shit and they know it. The only other person in the office with me that day was also being driven mad by its suggestions.

Fuck all of it

There is no natural force driving this arms race. Tech companies could choose to be principled and slow the fuck down to make it more sustainable. But they’re not, because they don’t give a shit about the environment or the people living in it.

Generative AI is technology that does tremendous harm to society for no benefit that I can see. You can care about people and planet or you can use genAI. You cannot do both, and I am tired of pretending this isn’t the case because people might feel bad. You should, in fact, feel bad for doing a bad thing, and then stop doing the bad thing if it is within your means to do so. Yes, I am judging you.

It’s often taken for granted that companies will always do everything they can to make money, consequences to people and planet be damned. This is true, but it doesn’t have to be. Executives are people who knowingly decide to inflict harm on others and our communities and we should all be enraged that they continue to do so.

We should be equally enraged at governments, another group of people who are choosing to do nothing about all of this, and letting corporations get away with it.

Both of these groups wield a tremendous amount of power, and keep refusing to use it to make the world a better place. Never forget that all of these shit things are a direct result of conscious choices that very powerful people are making. They have the resources to look into things before they enact them, and when they don’t, they should be held accountable. “I didn’t know” is not an excuse when you have billions of dollars and dozens or hundreds of workers at your fingertips.

Our main federal environmental legislation is the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, or EPBC Act. It doesn’t get applied to all projects; it only activates if a project is likely to have an impact on one of nine categories laid out in the Act.

Climate change is not one of those nine categories.

When the EPBC activates, it is said to be “triggered”. So if a project will have a significant impact on, say, water (which is one of the nine categories), you would say it’s activated the water trigger.

So when you hear calls for a ‘climate trigger’ to be added, this is what people are asking for. We want climate change to be added as a 10th category to the Act, which would force the government to consider the impacts of climate change on major projects.

The government is planning to introduce changes to the EPBC Act in the next 18 months. At this stage, they have no plans to introduce a climate trigger.

What are the categories?

The nine categories are known as Matters of National Environmental Significance (MNES). These Matters are:

• World Heritage

• National Heritage

• Wetlands of international importance

• Listed threatened species and communities

• Listed migratory species

• Protection of the environment from nuclear actions

• Marine environment

• Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

• Protection of water resources from unconventional gas development and large coal mining development

And that’s it. If you’ve come across anything else that’s confused you, drop me a line so I can do an explainer.