Nowhere in their RFP do they place restrictions on what kinds of energy capacity they want built. They are asking for a 4% increase in U.S. energy capacity—this is a serious amount of additional CO2 emissions if that capacity isn’t built renewably. But that’s just what they’re asking for now; if they’re serious about building & scaling AGI, they would be asking for much bigger increases, without a strong precedent of carbon-neutrality to back it up. That seems really bad?
Also to pre-empt—the energy capacity has to come before you build an AI powerful enough to ‘solve climate change’. So if they fail to do that, the downside is that they make the problem significantly worse. I think the environmental downsides of attempting to build AGI should be a meaningful part of one’s calculus.
Here's my summary of the recommendations: