South Wind

The artificial intelligence that has now been unleashed on the world appears to be everything you might have imagined – at once terrifying and exquisite, a monster that can hasten our doom and a tool to help humanity, greater than any tool our species has ever made.

In other words, as a philosopher wrote in a book a couple of years ago, AI is a mirror. And what do we see when we look in a mirror?

AI’s possibilities and contradictions were on full display in the Vatican a few weeks ago when Pope Leo launched his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, flanked by a distinguished array of Catholic thinkers – and the Canadian co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, Christopher Olah.

Then last week the environmental costs of AI’s mind-boggling demands were spelt out in a new UN University research paper. They include energy to run data centres, water to cool them, land to accommodate them and critical minerals for their computing infrastructure – demands that are now threatening to overwhelm available resources.

Just days after the paper was published, news emerged that through its Australian subsidiary Airtrunk, the New York asset management company Blackstone is planning a $5 billion data centre, among the world’s biggest, on a 50-hectare site in western Sydney – powered at least in part by diesel generators.

The paper’s lead author, Kaveh Madani, was the cautious optimist: “We have a narrow window to ensure that the backbone of the technological revolution of our era develops within planetary limits.”

A bulletin from the Australian Science Media Centre reflected an intriguing divergence of views among scientists here. Those directly involved with AI development thought the resources threat was overblown. “AI is not the largest environmental threat,” said Niusha Shafiabady of the Australian Catholic University. “The far greater risks come from fossil fuel emissions, land degradation, industrial agriculture and global supply chains.”

But AI expansion over the next few years is going to increase those risks, driven by the world’s strongest economies and determined by the companies and individuals driving the revolution. With their political enablers, they will capture an increasing proportion of global resources – including land use, meaning that renewable energy powering AI isn’t quite the saviour it’s said to be.

Geoff Webb, Laureate Fellow in Monash University’s data science and AI department, welcomed the UNU report while pointing out that Australian tax incentives to use AI automation contrasted with the many costs of employing people. Without action on “these profound issues”, the world faces “extraordinary environmental degradation, social disruption and cultural decline,” he said.

Cue Pope Leo’s thoughts on what AI means for us. Humanity, he said in his first encyclical since becoming Pope, “is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

AI is not the enemy, he said, but nor is it a solution to humanity’s problems. “In practice… technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” And those controllers are the issue: “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

Building on that theme, Chris Olah said AI models had grown out of “an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech” based on a structure roughly modelled after the brain. He warned that the computer scientists who created AI, including himself, were not the right people to control it.

“What has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. [AI models] are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words – and… remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.”

In a fascinating conversation with US television journalist Chris Hayes last week, Australian philosopher David Chalmers, a leader of the thinking behind AI, described how it had arisen out of insights in the 1980s into the workings of the human mind – specifically, neural networks.

That discussion brought home to me this truth: humans are innately curious, and no-one – neither the Tech Bros running the companies nor leaders including Donald Trump and Xi Jinping – can stand against that, even if they wanted to. Not Pope Leo either, but unlike them he’s put in the effort to understand implications for humanity.

Like Hayes, as an undergraduate philosophy student (one year only) I revelled in the excitement of exploring the essence of thought, and like him I see the truth of Chalmers’ message. Artificial intelligence is all too human – to be feared, yes, but also to be admired.

To connect or not to connect; that is the question. As Hamlet might have asked, in the face of political and social upheaval, is it wise to remain part of the wider world, warts and all, or should we raise the drawbridge?

The reality is that we’re an island community, defined in large part by the 250 km of water that separates us from the island-continent to our north. Long ago we opted to be part of that much bigger community, but that didn’t alter our physical separation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the continuing saga of the $5 billion Marinus project, the interconnector aiming to complete the integration of Tasmania’s power grid into the Australian energy market. Tasmania will contribute $103.5 million to the project.

The first stage of Marinus, now underway and due to be completed in the 2029-30 financial year, involves laying a 750 MW cable, under both the ground and the seabed, across 350 km between Heybridge near Burnie and Hazelwood in Victoria, crossing the Victorian coast just west of Wilsons Promontory.

In addition, TasNetworks is building 120 km of new dual-circuit transmission lines from Palmerston substation, near Poatina, to Heybridge via Sheffield, along with new lines from Stowport to Heybridge and line upgrades between Burnie, East Cam and Hampshire Hills.

Marinus Stage 2, currently scheduled to start in 2029, will involve a second Bass Strait cable and new transmission lines from Sheffield to Burnie along an inland route.

The technical complexity of Marinus is multiplied by the involvement of three jurisdictions and numerous state agencies, not to mention negotiations with local governments and landowners to secure deals over use of large tracts of Tasmanian and Victorian land.

Beyond all that is what Marinus means for this state’s future, economic and otherwise – how it might affect, for better or worse, our ability to manage our lives, our communities and everything else in this Southern Ocean outpost.

To energy and renewables minister Nick Duigan this is a no-brainer. Over recent months, after criticism from Upper House MP Ruth Forrest, he has repeatedly defended its benefits. In January he argued that it was “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness our existing assets and leverage our natural advantages to create jobs, industries and grow our economy.”

A month ago he said Marinus would make Tasmania “a clean energy powerhouse” delivering lower power prices and greater energy security while unlocking “billions” in economic returns. He accused Forrest of misrepresenting Marinus, saying her criticisms were inaccurate and “fundamentally misunderstand how the market operates.”

He said Forrest’s description of future revenue claims of Marinus proponents as “speculative” was “demonstrably false”, and that her expressed concerns about Tasmania’s energy security were “misrepresentation”.

Forrest, who chairs parliament’s energy joint select committee, claims that the minister’s defence of Marinus amounts to wishful thinking and that the Australian Energy Market Operator supported Marinus “because it is least‑cost for the mainland, not because Tasmania needs it for energy security.”

“We have not done the work to identify the lowest‑cost way to get it,” she said. “No Tasmanian analysis has compared Marinus to local storage, local firming, incremental upgrades, or demand‑side solutions. Instead, Marinus has been treated as the default answer to every question.”

She said minister Duigan’s later claims misrepresented what she wrote and failed to address the substance of her arguments. She has also described the Marinus deal as “flying blind into Tasmania’s energy future”.

After all the blunders in Tasmania’s other Bass Strait project, the ferry service, Duigan is right to be nervous. The Commonwealth and Victorian stake in Marinus should prevent such calamities happening here, but these days nothing is certain.

In negotiating this minefield I’ve been greatly helped by discussing with a friend in the North-West the outcome of an “Island of Ideas” forum in Burnie in mid-May, led by UTAS policy academic Richard Eccleston, director of the Tasmanian Policy Exchange.

One message from that event was that emerging new technologies might offer better solutions than a new Bass Strait link, but given where Marinus is now at and adding in the urgent need to compensate for the end of coal, it makes sense to continue with it.

The forum heard that a lack of surplus hydro energy means Marinus link cannot realistically aspire to become the “Battery of the Nation”, but it can add smaller amounts of power at critical times to help stabilise the national grid as renewable rollout continues across all states.

All that said, Forrest must be commended for applying a forensic lens to a complex project that’s going to shape the state’s energy and economic resources for many decades.

The body language said it all. In a fortnight of one-on-one meetings with the two strongmen at the head of what we’ve long considered global superpowers, China’s President Xi Jinping emerged as the man of the moment, leading a nation preparing to dominate the world.

Xi’s rivals are in a bind. In 2022 Vladimir Putin took Russia into a war he expected to win in a few days, only to see Ukraine expose weaknesses in his much-touted military. Then Donald Trump – elected president for a second time despite his attempted coup and clear contempt for the rule of law – landed his country in a disastrous war in the Middle East.

The dominant visual message from those twin Beijing summits was that one country stands head and shoulders above the rest. Xi commanded the stage, oozing assurance and authority, while Trump and Putin came across as support acts.

Trump seemed to concede that Taiwan’s independence was not a US concern. Putin failed to nail a big pipeline deal sending gas from western Russia to China. All in all, the twin summits went badly for Xi’s guests, but for him they were a clear diplomatic triumph.

Oblivious to all that, Trump left Beijing just as another meeting was winding up. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in the historic Caribbean city of Santa Marta, Colombia, its title said it all: the “Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels”.

The governments headed by Xi, Trump and Putin were not invited to Santa Marta, and the latter two are openly disdainful of its aims. But China did have a notable representative – the director of its Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and its former chief economist, Ma Jun.

While his presence at the meeting was clearly approved, Ma was also there in his own right as the institute’s celebrated founder and author of China’s Water Crisis, a 1999 book about China’s environmental challenges. And Santa Marta delegates hung on his every word as he explained how the Xi government encouraged banks to support low-carbon ventures.

The Colombia meeting resulted from widespread dissatisfaction at the 2025 Belem climate summit (COP30) over the UN failure to nail fossil fuels as the chief culprit in the climate crisis. Fifty-seven countries attended, among them a dozen Pacific nations including New Zealand, the Philippines, Canada, Chile and Mexico.

And Australia. Energy minister Chris Bowen, co-convener of COP31 in Turkiye, stayed away, but we were represented by departmental officers. Their instructions were to avoid taking binding sides on any near-term actions.

This is no surprise. The Albanese government’s position in the wake of the Hormuz Strait blockage is to “safeguard energy security”, which means using Australian gas exports to seal deals. That will benefit Australia in the short term, but does nothing for the overarching cause of reversing global warming.

As reported by Financial Times writer Pilita Clark, Australia had another presence in Santa Marta. Anchored in the city’s harbour was “Green Pioneer”, a former offshore gas supply ship converted to run on ammonia, a carbon-free fuel produced using green hydrogen. The vessel is owned by Fortescue Metals CEO Andrew Forrest.

Forrest lined up on the side of stronger climate action years ago while studying for a marine science PhD. Leading a charge for “real-zero” green energy, he argues that net-zero targets are a copout and opposes Australia’s richest miners being given diesel fuel tax credits. Needless to say he’s an outlier among his peers.

The willingness of massive fossil fuel corporations to pursue damages claims and their ability to influence election outcomes makes them a daunting prospect for anyone, even a major national government, wanting to end their privileges.

Even aside from managing fuel supplies, Chris Bowen is a busy man. While planning the next COP he’ll also have to keep an eye on our own region. In 2027 the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, with its own existential climate crisis in the form of rising seas, is co-hosting with Ireland a second conference to end the fossil fuel era once and for all.

They’re up against it. Besides the fossil fuel giants driving the global economy, they must deal with the strongman leaders who by and large have stood by oil, gas and coal. That unholy alliance is especially true for Trump and Putin, each beset by national crises of their own making.

Xi too is a strongman leader with territorial ambitions. But not yet stuck with a war he has room to play a longer game, and like any resident of water-challenged Beijing knows that the environment is not to be taken lightly. Hold that thought, President Xi.