“Climate itself has ebbed away from public discourse… I don't think that communities are out there protesting data centers because they're worried about the heating of the atmosphere as a consequence of data centers, or at least not indirectly through global warming.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Context
Roberts asked how Joshi became a big-tech critic. Joshi says local anger at data centers rarely mentions climate, which is why he focuses narrowly on their emissions.
Transcript
Hey, mate. Thank you for having me on. Very happy to be here.
…you become the guy doing this? Why aren't there more of you? And then, secondly, you know, we're going to get into the details, but just secondly, maybe sum up what you've come to think of as the case against data centers. Give us the one to two minute elevator pitch, and then we'll get into it.
…center growth. And I don't mean that, you know, just from like mass media, right? Like, you look at the concerns of a community that you mentioned before, like that level of public hate in America for data centers. I reckon if you went out and asked those people, is climate even in the top 10 reasons why you're worried about this? I don't think you'd get very much of a big response, right? Like, I don't think that communities are out there protesting data centers because they're worried about the heating of the atmosphere as a consequence of data centers, or at least not indirectly through global warming. And so, that is the other reason as to why I was like, okay, I think I really want to focus narrowly on this. People have derisively sort of called it carbon tunnel vision, but when no one else is really doing it, I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to have the tunnel vision because I don't think anyone else is doing it.
Right. Somebody's going to do it.
And to answer the other part of your question on, I guess, the overall, you know, short elevator pitch version of the case against data centers, it's really, really straightforward. I think you can split it into two simple categories. The first is that we're seeing a lot of data center growth being…
All right. So let's talk a little bit of numbers then. Let's try to give people a sense of kind of what data centers are doing to power sector emissions right now. Maybe like what they're doing to power sector emissions currently. And then this kind of like bewildering array of projections that…
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