Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao are professors at the University of British Columbia and co-authors of the book “Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species.”
One of us (Jiaying) taught a course on environmental sustainability this year — and made a grave error: She told her students they could use artificial intelligence chatbots to help them learn.
The horrified students complained to the department head that their professor was encouraging them to engage in a behavior that carried a massive environmental cost. The students were wrong. In truth, asking a chatbot to explain a complex idea to you like you are 5, or to write a toast for your cousin’s wedding, uses hardly any electricity at all — the median query uses about as much as running a microwave for one second. Asking a bot 100 questions is roughly the equivalent of heating up a burrito.
But these students are not alone in wildly overestimating the environmental impact of chatbot use. In a 2025 survey, Americans said they were more concerned about the environmental costs of AI than those of air travel — even though in reality you would have to send your chatbot over 6 million messages to equal the greenhouse gas emissions of a round-trip economy flight from New York to London.
What about water use? It’s true that data centers need a lot of water to cool their servers, but many are rapidly shifting to closed-loop systems that circulate the water rather than use it up. In fact, you would have to ask your chatbot at least 700 questions to equal the amount of water roughly required to grow a single California almond.
Why are people more concerned about chatbots than almonds? Our best guess is that these concerns were triggered in part by an initial lack of transparency from tech companies about their energy use. This opacity may have led the public to fixate on offhand remarks from tech executives such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) On X, Altman joked that users who said “please” or “thank you” to ChatGPT were costing OpenAI tens of millions of dollars in electricity fees. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said casually that the amount of energy needed for AI was “probably 1,000 times more than we currently have.”
Perhaps more important, many people — and young adults in particular — report a general apprehension about AI, fearing it will do more harmthan good. The rise of gargantuan data centers has probably amplified this concern; more than 800 are under construction in the United States right now. And AI data centers do use an immense amount of electricity, straining some power grids and water systems. But messaging with chatbots, even according to a generous estimate, accounts for only about 2 percent of this consumption.
Of course, shaming everyday behaviors is not a new part of the environmental messaging kit, which is, well, a shame. When one of us (Elizabeth) moved to Vancouver, she lived with a climate activist who would scold her for leaving the lights on in their home. But because Vancouver uses clean energy, she could have left all the lights on for at least a decade, and the emissions would have been roughly the equivalent of producing a dozen burgers.
It turns out that even people who care about climate change often misunderstand which actions make a difference and which don’t. When more than 900 adults were given a “carbon quiz” asking them to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions of everyday actions, 99 percent of them bombed it. Individuals who reported caring about climate change didn’t do any better.
So what individual actions actually matter when it comes to tackling climate change? While many people focus on how they spend their money — by buying local or toting a reusable shopping bag — where you stash your money is more important. If you leave $1,000 in a typical American savings account for one year, your money will generate about the same emissions as a one-way flight from New York to Seattle. That’s because most major U.S. banks invest a portion of their deposits in the fossil fuel industry, as well as other carbon-intensive sectors. Simply moving your money to an environmentally friendly bank can make a big difference.
Another priority should be demanding that AI companies invest in clean energy sources, alleviating pressure on local grids. Governors from New York to Illinois are embracing what many environmental advocates call the BeYONCE principle: Bring Your Own New Clean Energy if you want to build data centers in our state. For example, if you cooled a house with air conditioning in the coal-reliant state of West Virginia for a week this summer, you would have generated more than 1,000 pounds of emissions — the weight of a stallion. But if you cooled that same house in Vermont, which has mostly clean energy, you would have generated only about five pounds of emissions, or the weight of a Chihuahua.
Harnessing this moment to upgrade the grid can make life better and more sustainable for everyone. Access to clean energy lowers individual emissions dramatically — without requiring personal sacrifice. So, instead of giving up your air conditioner, or your chatbot, ask for BeYONCE.
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