Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

His main thing was to say this is not like the large language models, LLMs. I did not disagree with anything he said but I do not think he was making the general case that is being made that somehow AI is going to help us to deal with climate change. If we roll out the argument that a combination of AI and a stable demand for energy is going to promote investment in renewables, and load management and so on will happen at a better scale, I really think it is magical thinking. I do not think we are going to find climate scientists to make that case. Instead, what we heard from Jennie Stephens was that AI is preventing the phase-out of fossil fuels. The rapid deployment of AI has led to a dramatic increase in fossil fuel exploration, extraction and burning. The thing that struck me is that AI is being used to make fossil fuel exploration and extraction more efficient in a sense. Professor Stephens also said, "Tech companies are also collaborating with the fossil fuel industry to develop AI tools used to accelerate fossil fuel exploration and allow fossil fuels to be extracted more quickly and cheaply". She argued "AI promotes climate obstruction" and denial, delay and distraction. I thought this point was very strong: "Tech companies are now deploying many of the same strategies that the fossil fuel industry has used to squash public concern and block climate policy", strategically squashing research, discussion and awareness about the environmental impacts of AI.
We also heard from Professor Hannah Daly about the reality many of us have been pointing out for a long time, which is that all the extra renewables we are adding to the grid are just being sucked up by the data centres over an extended period. For me, it did crystallise something and I felt our guests today were trapped in this a bit. Often, there is just the illusion that somehow adding more renewable capacity, in and of itself, is in some way dealing with climate change but it is not. We can add all the renewables that we want but as long as we keep expanding usage we are not getting any closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The climate does not really care if we have a whole load of renewables happening over here but we are still increasing or sustaining the same level of greenhouse gas burning. The amendment is good because it says that this should be central and that the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act has to apply here. We have had it disapplied on a number of occasions this evening. That is what we are generally doing this evening, but AI has to be consistent with our supposedly legally binding climate targets.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-30