Caroline Lucas

speaker

487 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Caroline Lucas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Rest Is Politics · Will Climate Action Go Backwards Under Burnham? · 13 Aug 2026 podcast

this infantilisation of the public where we don't trust them with the real truth of what's happening. matched

Well, this is probably where we're going to come to blows. matched

I mean, I think the framing of the question is important, you know, because if you ask in very general terms, how does AI compare to other industries when it comes to energy use and and water use, then probably it wouldn't necessarily look that scary. matched

I think the point about AI data centers is that they tend to be clustered in areas that are already at at risk. matched

So for example, we matched

That the government is planning another hundred data centers by the early 2030s, and 84% are going to be sited in areas that are projected to be water stressed by 2040. matched

So I think whenever you look at this question in a kind of averaged out way, a nationwide way or a or a global way, then the true impact of those data centers isn't really realised because you're not looking at the concentration of them, which has matched

tends to happen in areas like the southeast of of of England, where the demand is greatest for the for the benefits of the of the data centers, and therefore you're putting them in already very water stressed areas. matched

And I think that that is a a major problem. matched

And at a time when you've got Water UK, which is the trade body that represents water companies, they themselves are saying that the government's own water forecasts are fatally flawed. matched

Not least because they explicitly exclude data centers. matched

You've got data centers now given this special protection. matched

So they're given this critical national infrastructure protection, which means that even in times of drought, the water companies cannot legally disconnect them because they are given that extra priority, over and above households and other kinds of uses. matched

So I think we've got the balance wrong, and I think we need far more information. matched

From the data centers and from the water companies about how much energy they're going to be using, how much water they're going to be using, what they're going to be used for. matched

One of the things that I thought came out really well from Ollie in the episode was that talking about AI is a bit like talking about transport in the sense that it covers everything from walking and cycling through to private jets. matched

AI is a lot of different things, and there's a world of difference between, you know, needing an AI data center to, for example, come matched

up with new health um solutions and when it's just to kind of help us get a very quick response to a, you know, a grok type question. matched

So I I think it's a more complex answer and a more complex question perhaps than it sounds. matched

So matched

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