How Utility Companies Are Using AI to Raise Your Rates

Tech leaders justify today's fossil fuel expansion with faith in tomorrow's AI salvation

October 29, 2025 Singulugalos and the New Climate Denial TL;DR FWD There's a new kind of climate denial that's coming from an unlikely source – Silicon Valley – but it's being taken advantage of by the same old fossil fuel and utility companies that have been profiting off of destruction for years. Tech leaders, useful idiots, and woo-woo futurists are justifying increased fossil fuel use today by claiming Superintelligent AI will solve all our problems tomorrow. They're making the climate crisis worse based on faith in an impending technological rapture and/or apocalypse. The first real test of whether or not voters are buying this argument is happening right now in Georgia. What? FWD AI industry boosters and billionaire investors are framing today's pollution as a down payment on tomorrow's technological salvation. Utility companies like Georgia Power have found this logic useful to justify keeping coal and gas plants open, so they will be able to power AI data centers that don't yet (and might not ever) exist. While we wait for this future deliverance, fossil fuel and utility companies are raising rates, belching carbon and methane into the atmosphere, and raking in massive profits. They call it The Singularity, but it's more like The Circularity. And it sucks. A certain kind of Tech Bro believes that AI systems will soon improve themselves exponentially and, in a flash, become powerful enough to either solve humanity's problems or wipe us all out. For these Singularitans (Singulariteers? Singulugalos?), every current problem is subordinate to how and when we get to the Superintelligent tipping point. For a few billionaires, this is part of a bigger obsession with AGI, space colonization, and immortality, what Adam Becker calls "the ideology of technological salvation." And what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls "human extinction." Potato. Potato. For people who believe the coming Singularity will be a good thing, saving lives, even potentially millions of lives, now, is way less important than saving billions of lives in the future. The faster we get to The Singularity, the more lives we will ultimately save because AI-boosted problem solving ability will have exploded by a factor of wowza, making any present-day concerns about health, privacy, inequality, democracy, climate change, etc, the stuff of naive, small-minded dumb-dumbs. For those who think The Singularity will be a bad thing, climate change won't destroy humanity as quickly or efficiently as mis-aligned Superintelligence, so fossil fuel emissions go on the back burner, as it were. A shocking number of people in power now – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Marc Andreessen– believe the Singularity will be so significant for life on earth (and beyond!) that any diversion of resources – money, time, attention, political will – away from building out the infrastructure needed to speed up or safeguard the process is naive. Just wait until our lord and savior Singularity arrives. Then, all will be aces! For some! One of the most obvious ways this world view is manifesting itself now is in the tech community's sudden pivot away from climate change as a going concern. OpenAI's Sam Altman, for example, has claimed AI will deliver an "Intelligence Age" with "astounding triumphs" like "fixing the climate" and that AI's massive electricity consumption today doesn't matter since it will generate abundant clean power in the future. And just this week, Bill Gates became the latest billionaire to suggest maybe the climate crisis is not going to be so bad after all. These billionaires and their followers are so in thrall with AI's promise (to deliver, if not a better future tomorrow, moonshot profits today) that they've convinced many people in power that the best way to solve the climate crisis is to make it worse. This sounds, of course, like angels printing money to fossil fuel companies. So they and their minions are on board, too. So What? FWD This narrative — "AI will fix it later" — has spread from Silicon Valley to international economic summits to national policy circles to state regulatory commissions. It is shifting accountability away from political action while delaying the climate solutions we already have ready to go now. For progressives, it's a signal that faith in innovation is being weaponized to stall regulation and lock in more fossil fuel dependence. Of course, in the same way more or better technology won't help us eradicate measles in West Texas, more and better technology won't stop the climate crisis from getting worse, either. We don't need any new technology to stop the climate crisis from getting worse. We already have the technology to do this. What we don't have is representatives or leaders with the political will to put that technology into practice. Nonetheless! The "we will fix the problem by making it worse" logic, aka The Circularity, is winning in the halls of power. And in purple, bellwether Georgia, it's on the statewide ballot in the form of the Public Service Commission election, where two incumbents who back fossil fuel expansion are facing challengers calling for more clean energy and more oversight. Will voters buy what the tech bros and fossil fuel Goliaths are selling? A quick refresher for anyone not keeping up with this obscure off-year local commission election in the Southeast. It's a statewide race, meaning anyone in Georgia can vote, but the seats at stake are in two districts. In District 2, the Republican incumbent Tim Echols faces the Democrat Dr. Alicia Johnson, and in District 3, Republican Fitz "On The Fritz" Johnson faces the Democrat energy expert Peter Hubbard. The current PSC with Echols and On the Fritz has been a rubber stamp for the state's monopoly utility, Georgia Power. Georgia Power has used its position to raise rates on customers six times in the past two years and double, triple, and quadruple down on the over-budget fiasco that is the Vogtle nuclear power plant. While they had claimed that all this dirty energy stalling and build-out was necessary because solar was unreliable, now they're saying they have to keep it in place and build it out because . . . AI! Yeah! That's the ticket! We need to keep coal plants open and lock-in gas just in case we need it to power data centers for the coming AI explosion! Even though no actual new data centers have committed to building anything here! And the one that IS here is controversial, to say the least! But, according to Georgia Power, Tim Echols, and On the Fritz Johnson, this will all (eventually) serve the greater good, even if it most certainly does not right now. In fact, it is costing Georgia Power's customers $40 a month more on average than what they were paying just a few years ago, and, since these same customers will be on the hook for climate-fueled storm cleanup costs, it's going to keep costing them more and more every year until someone steps in and puts a stop to the charade. That's just one reason the PSC race has gotten a lot of attention recently. Hank Green's YouTube take has already gotten, as of this morning, over 800k views. Dave Roberts on the Volts podcast called it "the most important election of the year," and Politico says the election is a "bellwether" for 2026 midterms. Now What? FWD But it's also getting attention because around the world, utilities and fossil fuel companies are using the promise of AI to raise rates and lock in the centralized dirty energy that has made them richer and everyone else poorer. It's not If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, but it's still pretty bad. If you're in Georgia, there's early voting through Friday, and election day is Tuesday. If you're outside of Georgia, you can donate to Dr. Johnson here, Peter Hubbard here, sign up to phone bank here, and help spread the word by sharing this post, that post, or this one. And if you're in Marietta, Georgia, VOTE FOR SAM! Let's not let AI make final decisions about our future just yet. FWD SHARE Share Share *NB: Ignore all typos in this email since The Singularity is near-ish How can I make Instrumental better? Copyright (C) 2025 Instrumental Communications. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. 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