L’économiste britannique Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) est passé à la postérité pour la découverte d’un paradoxe spectaculaire. Il a constaté que, plus on inventait des machines économes en charbon, plus sa consommation globale augmentait. Un constat qui désespère encore aujourd’hui les écologistes et renforce leur méfiance envers le progrès technique comme solution au problème du réchauffement climatique.

Le dernier rapport de l’Agence internationale de l’énergie (AIE) apporte une nouvelle illustration du phénomène. Pour la première fois depuis cinquante ans, le pétrole n’a représenté, en 2024, que 30 % de la consommation mondiale d’énergie. A l’inverse, les énergies renouvelables et le nucléaire dépassent désormais les 40 % du total. Pour autant, ni la consommation de pétrole ou de charbon, ni les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, + 0,8 % toutes les deux, ne diminuent.

Jezz Bezos and Elon Musk emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average human does in their entire life. That’s according to a new report from Oxfam International, a British NGO that fights poverty.

The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.

This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.

While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday's keynote presentation.

For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.