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UK Government's AI Emissions Forecast Rises a Hundredfold
Britain's own revised numbers have made the climate cost of its AI ambitions undeniable — and the policy contradiction now has no exit.
When the Government's Own Numbers Become the Indictment
What shifted this week is not the scale of concern — it is the source. The UK government's Compute Roadmap revision, showing emissions that could reach 123 million metric tons of CO2 between 2025 and 2035, arrived as the government's own confession rather than an external challenge. That distinction matters institutionally: a government that disputes an NGO's projections can claim methodological disagreement; a government that quietly revises its own forecast upward by two orders of magnitude has eliminated that defence. The MPs and campaigners now pressing for answers are citing the government's revised analysis back at it — the Compute Roadmap has become the primary instrument of accountability rather than the policy statement it was intended to be. Datacentre developers already facing pressure to disclose net greenhouse gas impacts will find that disclosure environment considerably less hospitable now that the government's own upper-bound figure is public.