This week, The Washington Post launched a new AI tool called “Climate Answers,” which the venerable newspaper describes as leveraging “artificial intelligence to help our users discover and explore The Post’s authoritative climate reporting.” Oddly, though, the AI chatbot is strikingly reticent to answer questions about how AI is impacting the environment — even though WaPo has reported deeply and very specifically about AI’s aggressive energy consumption and climate impact. The reality is that AI’s massive environmental footprint has been one of the biggest climate and energy stories of the past year. As WaPo noted in June, the International Energy Agency estimates that generating one ChatGPT response consumes the power equivalent to that of about ten Google searches, and the pressure to keep ChatGPT and similar generative AI models running has put incredible stress on the data centers powering them, as well as spurring the construction of huge new facilities. Those same data centers also require massive amounts of water to ensure their AI-supporting servers don’t overheat and break down. Major companies like Google are even missing important climate goals as a direct result of their AI efforts, and as WaPo’s journalists wrote in that same June story, the “voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.” Fossil fuels, of course, being the central driver of global climate change. But in spite of that excellent WaPo reporting, the AI-powered “Climate Answers” tool mostly draws a blank on questions…Washington Post Launches AI to Answer Climate Questions, But It Won't Say Whether AI Is Bad for the Climate