World leaders in New York to grapple with climate. Fuel prices, AI and disasters complicate things

NEW YORK (AP) — World and business leaders gathering this week in New York are being forced to grapple with the increasingly urgent costs of climate change, soaring energy prices and the human toll from this summer’s oppressive heat waves, prolific wildfires and catastrophic Nepal flood. Every year as top government officials come to the United Nations General Assembly and business executives flock to New York City Climate Week sessions, global warming generates lots of talk but little action. This time two new forces — the rise of energy-hungry artificial intelligence and data centers and higher fossil fuel prices from wars in Iran and Ukraine — should change the discussion, experts and activists said.

That’s on top of the usual climate-driven disasters that reached new levels of destruction, with more than 1,300 killed in sudden flooding caused by a collapsing glacier on the Nepal-China border. “We’ve gone from seeing the fingerprints of climate change in individual events to seeing the handprint of climate change on the whole world,” said scientist Bill Hare, CEO of the organization Climate Analytics. The effects of rising prices Climate change is “driving up food prices and wider inflation,” U.N.

climate chief Simon Stiell said Monday in prepared remarks. “Billions of people around the world are realizing that fossil fuel dependence is hitting them hard at the fuel pump.” Protests about high prices have sparked worldwide. In the U.S., consumer confidence is plunging while gas prices have reached record highs.

Stiell said energy shortages due to the Iran war have cost American consumers more than $100 billion in higher fuel prices. Mohamed Adow, director of Powershift Africa and a veteran climate negotiations analyst, said there are two climate stories happening at the same time: “One is extremely hopeful. Renewable energy is booming, technology is improving and the economics of clean energy increasingly make sense without anyone having to make a moral argument for it.” “The other is terrifying.

Climate impacts are accelerating faster than our political and financial systems are responding,” Adow said. “New York needs to bring those two stories together.” A spotlight on AI The environmental footprint of artificial intelligence and data centers looms large this week. That’s because of the fear that the data center boom will mean a surge in coal, oil and g…