What did Donald Trump do today?
He got confused about how computers work.
Trump announced today that he was naming Chris Wright as his choice for Secretary of Energy. A climate denier, Wright is an oil industry executive who will now be in a position to add to a net worth in the hundreds of millions.
By Trump standards, Wright is a relatively uncontroversial choice. In the statement announcing the choice, Trump once again insisted that there was a connection between unrestrained oil drilling and… virtually everything, but in particular "winning the AI race with China."
Even for a 78-year-old, Trump is notoriously mystified by computers, and seems to get most of his ideas about them from popular culture. He said in 2017 that sensitive documents should be given to bike messengers rather than sent electronically, but also that his then-10-year-old son could probably handle cybersecurity.
He's also fallen under the sway—and in political debt to—tech investors like Elon Musk, who are gambling that new kinds of software models will eventually produce something commercially useful, or at least increase the value of their cryptocurrency bets.
There is a connection to energy: the computer farms that are required to "mine" the strings of numbers used for cryptocurrency, and to simulate summaries of information in products like ChatGPT, are enormous energy hogs. They use electricity on the scale of medium-sized countries, and are pushing carbon emissions through the roof. They're also a huge physical and economic strain on local power grids and water supplies, and they're noisy, which accounts for their low popularity in the communities where they're located.
Of course, there are legitimate potential applications for new kinds of computer models—but research on them doesn't require enormous amounts of energy.
Why does this matter?
- American energy policy should serve the interests of the American people, not just a few tech industry speculators and oil executives.
- Presidents don't have to be experts on everything, but it's bad if they believe anything their donors tell them.