Toward environmental liberalism - Andy Masley

Andy Masley

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Politics<br>Toward environmental liberalism<br>The underlying normative claim of my environmental writing

Andy Masley<br>Jul 10, 2026

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The underlying idea of political liberalism is that free, reasonable people will come to drastically different conclusions about ethics and metaphysics: what counts as violence, how scarce resources should be distributed. This gives them lots of reasons to come into conflict, and even to turn violent, since each side sees its own retaliation as justified and the spiral escalates. Either we build complex societal structures that mediate these differences, or people sort into rival states and small bands that share one set of values, enforce it strictly, and keep their members unfree. Liberalism is about maintaining these mediating structures between rival value systems, so that we don’t slip into those situations of unfreedom. I have a longer post on how I think about liberalism here.<br>In a lot of my writing on the environment, I find myself implicitly standing up for political liberalism over what I see as attempts to use the environment as an illiberal cudgel against the writers’ identified enemies. Reading Vaclav Smil and David MacKay when I was young was incredibly useful for thinking about the current AI data center debate, but I think actually less useful than reading Rawls, and Joseph Heath’s summaries of Rawls. That’s because most of my disagreements with public commentary on AI and the environment are not actually factual disagreements (I often completely agree with the same underlying facts about the numbers involved as everyone else). They’re normative disagreements about what the facts imply we should do. For example, I agree with all the factual claims in this UN University report on AI and the environment, but I think its framing of those facts is completely off the wall. Here are six especially strange framings from the report:<br>GPT-4’s training carbon footprint of 25,000 tonnes of CO₂e would require the sequestration capacity of 420,000 tree seedlings grown for 10 years, or about equal to the number of trees in 105 Hyde Parks in London.

The land footprints of training GPT-4 and GPT-5 are estimated at roughly 0.9 km² (126 football fields) and 1.5 km² (210 football fields), respectively.

A typical ChatGPT-style text query is about 200 times more energy-intensive than text classification (such as spam filtering).

Video generation represents the most energy-intensive frontier with high-resolution long clips on large models drawing more than 415 Wh per clip, drawing as much electricity as 200,000 spam classifications.

The water footprint associated with training GPT-4 was about 600 million liters, enough to meet the minimum annual domestic water needs of 81,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or to fill 237 Olympic-sized pools.

The land footprint of 2025 data centers’ electricity demand was 6,900 km², nearly 4.5 times the size of Greater London.

My complaint is that each of these leaves the reader less capable of comparing AI to other parts of their everyday life. None of these leaves someone with any way of understanding how AI compares to other industries, how it fits into the environmental picture it actually operates in. Each number is selected to be maximally alarming, and no industry would look acceptable if the authors applied the same comparisons. I don’t know why it would ever be useful to compare a chatbot to a spam filter. If my friend drove a few miles to film a video, I wouldn’t say “You know, for the energy you used to drive over to film that video, you could have filtered 1.5 million spam emails.” They’d give me a funny look. Household water use is a small fraction of anyone’s total water footprint, so any industry that uses meaningful amounts of water will always use as much as tens of thousands of households do, whether those households are in Sub-Saharan Africa or anywhere else. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the water we use irrigating Christmas trees in America matches the household water use of 1.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Does this tell us anything about Christmas trees? Does it give us any useful normative information at all? The whole intro to the report is full of comparisons like this, I’d recommend reading it yourself.<br>Underlying wild comparisons like these is a philosophy I think is fundamentally illiberal and increasingly mainstream in environmental thinking. At the extreme end, some environmentalists argue explicitly that political liberalism is itself responsible for the climate crisis, a claim that usually relies on heterodox economic theories. I don’t want to get into that right now. I’ll instead assume that whether you’re a capitalist or a socialist, you’re sympathetic to the broad liberal goal of building societal structures that let people with radically different values and religions live and prosper together. It’s this...