Sermon: AI and the Earth: Ecological and Human Costs
This sermon, by Sheri, is the second in our Back to the Basics series called “Living with Courage and Clarity in the face of AI.”
Romans 8:19-23
When we talk about the ecological cost of AI, I am guessing many of us think of our own personal use first. We wonder, perhaps guiltily, how much energy and water we use whenever we ask a chatbot a question. I wondered the same so, of course, I asked Claude. 🙂 The answer, which tracks with what a real human tech reporter has said, is: not much. According to the AI companies themselves, a simple answer takes about as much energy as running an oven for one second or watching TV for nine. Google says it uses about five drops of water, but that counts only the water used to cool the computers, not the water used to make the electricity they run on. Extrapolating from a recent UN report, it might be closer to a teaspoon.
Just so you know: Other than the above, I did not use Claude or other AI frontier labs as a source for this sermon. Instead, I used the most science-based information I could find.
By that same UN measure, if you use AI to generate an image, you use about two tablespoons of water and enough electricity to run a small LED bulb for 17 minutes. A high-quality AI-generated video uses over four liters of water, almost two days’ worth of drinking water for one person, and the energy equivalent of running that same light bulb for 42 hours. The general rule of thumb is that the more work you ask AI to do (longer answers, “thinking” modes, images, video), the more energy and water it consumes.
A simple AI text prompt is trivial compared to more energy-intensive things we engage in regularly like a hot shower, a load of laundry or an hour of video streaming. But, the real issue here isn’t one person typing in a prompt, it’s the scale of a billion people doing that every day. And that’s just the AI that is visible to us. Artificial intelligence is embedded (and increasingly being embedded) in almost everything with which we interact — recommendation engines used by Spotify and Netflix, traffic prediction used by Google Maps, face ID and other phone unlock systems, email spam filters, credit card fraud detection, public transit systems. I respect anyone who decides they are not going to use Claude or ChatGPT, but that doesn’t mean they’re not using AI. We are all using AI, and it is largely invisible to us.
Perhaps one of the reasons data centers have become such a flashpoint is that they show us the sheer scale of this AI project and its impact. A single data center can use as much power as the city of Philadelphia. And how many data centers are there? It’s hard to get an accurate count, but there are roughly 2,000 data centers operating in the U.S. today, with several thousand more announced or under construction. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”
Electricity use by data centers is projected to double by 2030, four years from now. Six states now have data centers eating more than 10% of their electricity supply; in Virginia, it’s 25%. (Figures from here.) And you wonder why your electricity bills are going up? The power running these data centers is not, on the whole, coming from renewable energy. A recent analysis of 99 data centers planned for the U.S. found that they are turning to natural gas for their electricity, and these gas-run plants will increase carbon emissions from U.S. electricity generation by 20%.
But wait a second, you Luddite, woke, anti-progress pastor! Won’t AI help us build out renewable energy infrastructure better and more efficiently? A study published this year found out that AI is making the fossil fuel industry more profitable and productive than renewables. AI makes it easier and cheaper to extract oil and gas, and these efficiency gains outweigh AI’s gains in producing renewable energy more efficiently by four or five times.
And what about water? Tech companies will tell you data centers use less water nationally than golf courses do, and that’s true. By one widely cited estimate, golf courses use about four times more. But golf course water use has held flat or even declined for years, while data center water use is projected to double or even triple within the next few years, and to keep climbing long after that.
You’ll also hear that the water for data centers gets recycled. Some of it does — a portion of data centers use closed-loop systems that recirculate water and use very little. But many data centers still use evaporative cooling, where water absorbs heat and evaporates into the air to carry it away. That water isn’t recycled. About 80% of what’s withdrawn never comes back to the river or the aquifer it came from. And even a data center with a perfect closed-loop system has a water footprint, because power plants use water too. According to the International Energy Agency, about two-thirds of data centers’ water consumption comes from generating the electricity they use to run themselves.
Nationally, this is still a small slice of water usage. But saying this is no comfort if you happen to live in an area where water is scarce. In Texas, a state already fighting drought, data centers used about 25 billion gallons of water in 2025. That number could increase more than six-fold, to as much as 161 billion gallons, by 2030. At the state level, that’s still under 3% of Texas’s water. But it’s concentrated in particular regions and watersheds, many of which are already under stress. The people arguing “water usage is basically nothing” and the people arguing “it’s a crisis” are often looking at the same numbers from two different zip codes.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.
Paul is writing to the church in Rome groaning because of the Fall, which has “subjected creation to futility.” Remember the story of the Fall, which was about humans overreaching their limits because they wanted to have more knowledge so that they could be like God — makes you think, right. Because of the Fall, says Paul, nature no longer functions the way it was designed to; it experiences decay, disasters, and death. Thus, creation groans the way a woman groans as she is giving birth. Paul obviously didn’t have server farms in mind as he was writing this passage. But maybe he understood something that we have to be reminded of: The created world bears the cost of human choices. Creation is groaning under the weight of our technologies.
The real ecological cost of AI, for me, has to be set within the wider framework of planetary boundaries, which many of you have heard me talk about before. In the late 2000s, an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists gathered in Stockholm to define the “safe operating space” for humanity. Since the start of the Holocene era 12,000 years ago, human civilizations have operated within a delicately balanced earth system that maintains our atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems. The scientists’ 2009 report detailed nine key processes that threaten the stability of this earth system: climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, biodiversity integrity, ocean acidification, depletion of the ozone layer, atmospheric aerosol pollution, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, freshwater use, land-system change, and environmental pollutants— things like forever chemicals and plastics.
The 2009 report found that we had already overshot the safe operating space for three of those nine boundaries. As of 2026, less than two decades later, we have now overshot seven of those planetary boundaries — all of them except for ozone depletion and aerosol pollution. The head of this study said, “This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies.” This isn’t abstract. In 2025, scientists confirmed that the world’s coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine species and food security for nearly a billion people, have passed the point of reversible recovery.
AI is only accelerating and worsening ecological the overstepping of these key planetary boundaries. There is much hope and hype that AI will solve our most intractable problems, including climate change, but even if it did, it would not pull us back from continuing to shoot past some of these planetary boundaries because AI is an incredibly resource-intensive industrial process. It demands a lot from the earth: water, yes, and copper, lithium, rare earth elements, silicon, cobalt, nickel — and underneath all of it, land. Land for the data centers, land for the mines, land for the power plants and for the thousands of miles of transmission line needed to connect them.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.
And then there’s the people of the land, who are also groaning. I recently read an article entitled, “The real cost of AI is being paid in places far from Silicon Valley.” That cost disproportionally falls on Indigenous and other vulnerable people. The article details the life of an Indigenous woman, Sonia Ramos, born into a mining family in northern Chile. Chile supplies the world with a quarter of its supply of copper — the copper in every server, every data center, every device on which these AI systems run — and a lot of the lithium.
Sonia’s town is slowly being buried under mounds of displaced rock, and mining has drained the region of water. There’s arsenic in the air and water, causing cancer. Because the land has been so depleted by this mining, the Indigenous groups who share that region can no longer sustain themselves by growing their own crops or raising their own livestock. They are being plunged into deeper poverty, with the crime and depression and lack of health care and education that comes along with that.
In a wealth of sad details, there was one that got me the most: The salt flats in that area have been destroyed by mining, and these salt flats were once home to flocks of pink flamingos, which the Indigenous people there consider their spiritual siblings. The flamingos are now gone. The daughter of one Indigenous leader has only the stories and a stuffed flamingo by which to remember them.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.
I’m aware this is a heavy dose of painful reality. But, you know me. I am not a person without hope or at least without fire.
The passage from Romans says that all around us, creation is groaning — the empty salt flats where the flamingos used to be, the people made more poor by the cost of all this “progress.” That groaning is within us as well, when we feel anger that this is happening, when we feel grief or despair, and certainly when we refuse to accept that this is simply how it has to be. I think Paul would call those groans birth pangs, not a death wail. That anger, that despair, that grief, that refusal is the Spirit alive in us, Paul would say, interceding in us with groans too deep for words.
Don’t let anyone tell you your desire for something different — for restraint and regulations, for justice for the most vulnerable, for a flamingo to return to a salt flat — is naive or pointless. The world has never been changed by people who first made sure their hope was reasonable. It’s changed by people who keep longing for and acting toward something that doesn’t yet exist and that seems impossible most of the time. `
Johan Rockström, the scientist who led the report on our planetary boundaries, said something after delivering his team’s grim seven-out-of-nine diagnosis that a preacher could have said (and so I will!): “This is not an inevitable outcome…Even if the diagnosis is dire, the window of cure is still open. Failure is not inevitable; failure is a choice.”
He reminded us that we have done this before — turned a planetary boundary back toward the safe zone. The ozone layer is healing because people around the globe decided, together, that it would and signed the Montreal Protocol into existence in 19875. And aerosol pollution has stayed within safe bounds due to a stringent regulations and adaptations made by corporations..
We can make the same decision about water, the flamingos, the people of the land, about all of us, who are groaning. Labor pains, Paul says, are not the sound of something dying. They are the sound of something insisting on being born. Amen.