Episode 13 - AI & the Environment from a Legal Perspective

00:00:17:03 - 00:00:47:13
Jie Ren
Hi everyone. Welcome to my podcast, When Tech Meets Ed, this is Professor Jie Ren. This week is Climate Week in NYC and I'm very happy to put two episodes together for a very special topic on this theme, which is AI and the environment. And I have two guest speakers and today I'm very happy to have Doctor Adam Orford to join me, and he's an expert in the field of environmental law, and he's also a lawyer and also a Fordham professor in law.

00:00:47:18 - 00:00:49:21
Jie Ren
So, Adam, welcome to my podcast.

00:00:49:23 - 00:00:51:12
Adam Orford
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

00:00:51:17 - 00:00:54:03
Jie Ren
Okay. So, could you please introduce yourself?

00:00:54:05 - 00:01:23:02
Adam Orford
Sure. I'm a law professor here at Fordham University School of Law. Before that, I was a practicing lawyer. I worked on environmental litigation for the most part. And after that, I went to grad school and got a doctorate in energy and resources, which was sort of an interdisciplinary energy studies program. So overall, I have basically got a lot of letters after my name that mean that I should be a law professor, which is what I've been doing.

00:01:23:04 - 00:01:39:17
Jie Ren
I did look at your profile. It does have many titles. So okay, let's just rewind time a little bit to talk about, you know, your first motivation to become a lawyer or, you know, like even further to become an environmental lawyer and pursue this.

00:01:39:19 - 00:02:03:09
Adam Orford
Sure. And I'd love to be able to tell you that it was all planned out, and I knew what was going to happen, but that is not. No, no. I thought I— well, okay. I went to law school. After getting an undergraduate degree in Italian studies with a minor in music. So, when I finished college, I was able to speak Italian and play the flute, which was like, those are great skills to have, but not the most marketable skills.

00:02:03:14 - 00:02:24:05
Adam Orford
So, I had also taken the LSAT and done well and had gotten good grades in college. So, to me, law school was kind of a— and this is not uncommon. A lot of people go to law school this way, and I, I think it's okay to say it. [Jie Ren: Yeah.] I wanted to get some marketable skills and understand, you know, the world a little better and stay in school for a while until I figured out what I wanted to do.

00:02:24:10 - 00:02:42:15
Adam Orford
And so, I went to law school. From there I got interested in environmental studies, basically by exploring. Some people come to law school and they know exactly what I want they want to do. I was not like that. I took a broad range of classes. I thought I wanted to be a tax lawyer for a while. That was not true.

00:02:42:15 - 00:03:07:06
Adam Orford
I learned. I thought I wanted to do real estate. I got excited about environmental issues because they introduced me to this new world that I didn't know a lot about groundwater management. I never thought about it. Air pollution, water pollution, things like that. I learned I liked systems, I learned, I liked complex regulation. I learned that I really like things out in the world that I can look at on maps.

00:03:07:08 - 00:03:27:21
Adam Orford
That's that helped me a lot. And so, all of those things are part of environmental law. And it was a product of kind of finding it interesting and learning I was good at it. That set me off on that career. So, I got a job in New York City. I worked in law firms for quite a while, working on a variety of litigation, particularly some corporate work as well.

00:03:27:23 - 00:03:46:15
Adam Orford
Related to the environmental impact. So various government decisions, business activities, whatever it might have been until eventually I found that it was so interesting that, in fact, I didn't want to be a lawyer as much anymore as just go learn in grad school. Everything about it that I could, which is how I ended up in grad school again.

00:03:46:17 - 00:04:16:12
Jie Ren
Nice. You'll touched upon a really, really important and interesting topic, which is that environmental law or the any knowledge with it related to protecting environment seems not to be able to reach that same level of, you know, this popularity of other disciplines. Right? So, we will definitely get to like people's awareness of protecting the environment soon. So, before that, I want to ask you a question like, what courses are you teaching?

00:04:16:14 - 00:04:46:00
Adam Orford
Right now? I've got three courses that are in primary rotation, and then a couple that I will mix in from time to time. So, I actually teach climate change law, which is a seminar where students learn all about a whole bunch of different things and then write a paper. I teach renewable energy development law, so that's actually more about electricity regulation and then construction, because if you want to build a gigantic wind farm or solar panels or a nuclear power plant or whatever, it might be, clean energy development centers.

00:04:46:01 - 00:05:02:00
Adam Orford
[Jie Ren: Data centers.] And so, adding in data centers. Now to explain how that fits in, you actually have to know a lot of different stuff about the way it all works in order to figure out how it's regulated, in order to figure out how to work in the space. So, I teach that, I'm also teaching civil procedure because I'm a litigator.

00:05:02:00 - 00:05:27:08
Adam Orford
So, the first-year law students come in and they need to know how courts work. So, I teach them that I do teach environmental law. Currently it's not on my rotation, but that's, you know, where I started. And it's still something I teach. And I'm going to be adding an international environmental law class as well, saying just because the international context is so important for not only climate change, especially climate change, but also waste management, pollution, marine pollution, things like that.

00:05:27:12 - 00:05:54:02
Jie Ren
Yeah. Interestingly that you mentioned the fourth course that you are about to teach. Right. So, this is the addressing the environmental kind of domain. Right. So, we will have a few questions related to that as well because different countries address environments protection differently for sure. So overall for the many years of your teaching journey, what is the biggest message that you give to your students as a takeaway?

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Adam Orford
That's a great question. So, I'll tell you a couple, maybe that I, that I think.

00:06:00:04 - 00:06:00:20
Jie Ren
It can be more than one, of course.

00:06:00:22 - 00:06:22:00
Adam Orford
I'll talk about energy development because I think it's related. And that is the message that there's no such thing as a free source of energy with no impacts. They have to understand that there are good arguments for what we call clean energy development, but that doesn't mean that they are energy resources that have no impacts at all.

00:06:22:02 - 00:06:43:07
Adam Orford
And so, understanding why, even with those impacts, there might still be a reason to prefer them is an important part of educating and understanding what impacts really do exist and how to minimize those. So, there's no free lunch. That's an important message. In environmental protection, you know, right now there's so much partizan disagreement about what to do with environmental regulation.

00:06:43:07 - 00:07:12:23
Adam Orford
With environmental law, it can be a little demoralizing, especially for students who are very, very committed to environmental outcomes. And when I get a student who is a little discouraged by current events, I try to emphasize that they need to understand where things used to be. And if you learn about what the environment looked like in the United States at least 50 years ago as compared to today, there's been an enormous amount of progress [Jie Ren: That’s true] and there is still progress happening.

00:07:12:23 - 00:07:35:04
Adam Orford
And, you know, this this doesn't maybe resonate with them immediately, but I hope in the long term they understand. If people weren't still working on it every day, all the time, it would be worse. It would be worse. And so sometimes just, appreciating what we have and figuring out how to protect that and continue to make slow, grinding, incremental progress is a good outcome.

00:07:35:06 - 00:07:43:13
Adam Orford
And then sometimes they can be surprised because if enough people do that over a long term, they can see amazing change happen and be involved in it.

00:07:43:15 - 00:07:55:23
Jie Ren
Yeah. So, for sure, I fully agree with you. I mean, essentially, it's a struggle between two things. One is the economic gain, that can always— not always that often in terms of the short term.

00:07:56:00 - 00:07:57:17
Adam Orford
Yes. Sometimes intention. Yes.

00:07:57:18 - 00:08:18:13
Jie Ren
Some intention. And then the other part is environmental cost. Right. So that could be related to the impact that you said. Okay. So, let's. So, the theme of my podcast When Tech Meets Ed. Right. So, I focus so much on technology. So, let's talk about technology per se right. So, technology is a double-edged sword right.

00:08:18:14 - 00:08:44:12
Jie Ren
It's not only about affecting environment per se right. In terms of the pros and cons in many, many, many aspects. So, let's just focus on environmental impact related to using or developing technologies. Great. Could you please give some positive examples. Let's just go with positives. First, positive examples of developing those technologies surrounding the impact, the positive impact on the environment.

00:08:44:13 - 00:09:13:14
Adam Orford
So yeah, I'll give you a couple I think that I'll actually start with maybe a small one, but an important one, which is the development of scrubber technology for power plants or anything that's emitting a lot of air pollution. There was a time when those power plants operated with no scrubbers, with no mitigation. We call it sort of like these, these limiting technologies that actually help continue operating a plant.

00:09:13:15 - 00:09:37:16
Adam Orford
They do cost money and they impose costs. So, this be what they actually do is internalize costs, right. These are these are pollutants that are being put out into the world. And we're saying no, your responsibility to clean them before they are released and then to deal with the waste. So, by law. Yeah. And that is an important element of these the development of these technologies is that they were developed because they were required.

00:09:37:19 - 00:10:03:22
Adam Orford
Now those requirements were put in place because people knew that it was possible to install these technologies. And it wasn't just driving forward saying, you must do this thing, and we have no idea how you're going to do it. The idea was more, we know that this is possible. This is an achievable goal. Yes, we know it's going to cost money in the short term, but it's a value judgment saying we want the clean environment and we're willing to bear the costs and say consumers electricity, right.

00:10:04:00 - 00:10:24:04
Adam Orford
Or manufacture goods that come with internalizing those costs. So that's one that's one example. Just pollution control technology is a really important example. More broadly I would focus on the development of clean energy technologies. And you know, I think, solar development is a great example.

00:10:24:10 - 00:10:26:09
Jie Ren
I was thinking about that as well. Yeah.

00:10:26:11 - 00:10:36:01
Adam Orford
We could make an argument for wind as well. But let's talk about solar. Or battery storage. Battery storage is a really key one. And it's pretty recent.

00:10:36:04 - 00:10:46:02
Jie Ren
It is quite recent. And then also is, gaining a lot of popularity because of the development of, like, electric cars. Yes. Please continue.

00:10:46:08 - 00:11:27:22
Adam Orford
In all of these cases. What is largely unappreciated is that the development of those industries and the technologies are basically commercialized into industrial sales. Right. That the scaling happened by policy design. The policy started through, through and desire to an understanding that these technologies could be helpful, but that they were not necessarily going to survive if we just let the market work it out, because there were already incumbent competitors in the fossil fuel space that had dominated the market.

00:11:28:00 - 00:12:05:00
Adam Orford
So, what do you do? You look at it as a process of technology diffusion and development, and think about everything from the basic research to the development of the model or the prototype to the demonstration that that thing can work out in the wild to the deployment of that technology across the market space. So, research, development, demonstration and deployment in all of those sectors in energy technologies, the US federal government has played a more important role than a lot of people know, both in funding basic research, in funding demonstration projects.

00:12:05:05 - 00:12:34:23
Adam Orford
A lot of this is through federal funding and the National Energy Laboratories, which are an underappreciated treasure of technology development that are scattered across the United States. The Berkeley lab is a famous one the Lawrence Berkeley lab, the Lawrence Livermore lab, also in California. There are there are just the this all essentially comes from the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weaponry and the nuclear energy in the 40s and 50s.

00:12:35:01 - 00:12:42:05
Adam Orford
Those have been turned into spaces for important research and development of energy technologies. And the federal government has been there the whole way.

00:12:42:07 - 00:13:06:18
Jie Ren
Okay. So, we definitely so what I want hear is like to hear, to, talk about the carrots and also the sticks, right? In terms of the how a government regulates anything and then here, regulate clean energy or like the clean energy field or a tech related environmental impact. So, I really appreciate that you mentioned funding.

00:13:06:20 - 00:13:35:10
Jie Ren
And then a lot of research. Right. We both are academics right. Which we know that the funding does matter because we need this as the input to the research when it comes to development of these clean technologies. Right. And then definitely that we need a lot of funding. Right. For sure. So, do you have any opinions in terms of like how government could continue to fund these facilities and research labs and, you know, the research institutions related to this?

00:13:35:12 - 00:14:17:06
Adam Orford
Yeah, it's kind of just continuing the model that has been developed here for quite a long time. In, I would say a fairly successful fashion. So, you start with congressional priority setting. And Congress has pretty consistently set a priority to develop new energy technologies, commercialize them and see them deployed. You tend to give the decision-making power about what are the best research projects, right, based on those goals to expert agencies, whether that's NIH in the medical research context, whether it's the Department of Energy in energy research, whatever it is.

00:14:17:08 - 00:14:47:03
Adam Orford
And typically, those grant programs that they develop are have been developed by technical experts, people with PhDs in the relevant fields looking at what really needs to be done. So, materials scientists who are creating calls for research proposals that are going to be sent out to universities, and then the materials engineering people will come together and say, here's how we think we can make a more efficient, different kind of lithium-ion battery or something like that.

00:14:47:05 - 00:15:19:04
Adam Orford
So then that entails sending out these proposals, selecting the best kinds of research proposals from the academic community and supporting those and getting results from them. That has worked for a long time. And I would say, unfortunately, right now we're seeing a major politicization of that process in a way that we've never seen before. You know, I'm not a big fan of that, but, my job as a lawyer and a law professor is to observe what has been happening, whether those changes are actually legal.

00:15:19:04 - 00:15:32:05
Adam Orford
Yeah, we definitely need more funding and sustained funding in this field, because protecting the environment is not only a short-term effort, but it’s a continuous, long-term process in order to see the effect of that long term. Right. So, without the immediate economic and some people could feel like less motivated to put the money in, but we as the people, as the community of human beings, we definitely like more funding for this type of effort.

00:15:32:07 - 00:16:05:10
Jie Ren
Yeah, we definitely need more funding and sustained funding in this field, because protecting the environment is not only a short term effort, but it's a continuous, long term process in order to see the effect of that long term. Right. So without the immediate economic and some people could feel like less motivated to put the money in, but we as the people, as the community of human beings, we definitely like more funding for this type of effort.

00:16:05:11 - 00:16:09:01
Jie Ren
Right? Okay. Anyway, so let's just.

00:16:09:03 - 00:16:37:10
Adam Orford
I wanted to also mention something that I think would be on the minds of a lot of people who know some stuff about this space, which is that one of the ways that we provide funding is, rather than through direct provision of money, through tax credits. So, the tax credits have been developing as the primary mode for incentivizing the construction of clean energy facilities, for example.

00:16:37:11 - 00:17:04:07
Adam Orford
That's pretty controversial. The idea has always been to get those facilities down to cost parity with alternative fuel that is fossil fuels, basically. So alternative energy resources and then, you know, right size the tax credits to ensure competitiveness, but to not over incentivize so that you're providing essentially a windfall to the renewable energy industry. What we've seen by doing that over time is that we get economies of scale.

00:17:04:08 - 00:17:30:23
Adam Orford
So, they sort of work down the cost curve, the learning curve. And now these technologies can stand on their own in a way that in the past they couldn't. That was a policy decision. Like we knew that upfront it would be more expensive to build a certain amount of solar panels or wind farms or whatever. But that then over time, market forces, once you got it over the kind of cost parity barrier would take over and consumer preference basically would drive the rest.

00:17:31:00 - 00:17:51:17
Adam Orford
So, it's an intervention into the markets, but it's doing that for a public policy purpose. It is doing that in order to solve these longer term. Yeah, maybe there isn't as much short-term profit in that. Or maybe the new player, the new technological player in the market can't figure out how to get competitive without that assistance.

00:17:51:18 - 00:18:17:11
Adam Orford
We've decided to help them, not because we're picking arbitrary winners and losers, but because we decided that clean energy is a priority and that that transition matters. So that's what we've been doing. What you said that reminded me of it is certainly one of the challenges with the tax credit program is that it has come and gone, and Congress has decided to extend it again and again inconsistently.

00:18:17:14 - 00:18:48:08
Adam Orford
And so, one thing that, you know, any financial expert in, you know, trying to trying to finance the construction project knows is that it's really helpful to have certainty about what the future environment of your financials. So, so that has really disrupted development, that uncertainty. We see that happening again today to an extreme degree with changes in the kind of incentive and regulatory space for clean energy development in the United States.

00:18:48:10 - 00:19:11:12
Jie Ren
Yeah. That's a really good point. So, it truly, it's up to many stakeholders, but regulators and policymakers need to take a really bigger role in this one. Right. And then, okay, so then let's shift the conversation a little bit to talk about the negative impact on the environment technologies. [Adam Orford: Yeah.] Let's start with that.

00:19:11:12 - 00:19:15:03
Jie Ren
To continue to motivate these policymakers to have good policies.

00:19:15:04 - 00:19:40:08
Adam Orford
Sure. And, you know, unfortunately, there is a lot to talk about. Well, most environmental pollution problems of the modern day are the byproduct of technology in some effect. Yeah, the industrial Revolution, industrial production has pollution externalities. And, you know, I know you'll talk to Mark Conte as well and he'll tell you all about externality. Yeah, I'll save that for him.

00:19:40:10 - 00:19:41:08
Jie Ren
The next episode.

00:19:41:09 - 00:19:52:03
Adam Orford
The next episode. So, I'll simply say that they have these impacts. So, we develop plastic. Right. That's a new technology and immediately have plastic pollution problems over time.

00:19:52:08 - 00:19:54:00
Jie Ren
All over the place, the ocean too.

00:19:54:01 - 00:20:14:17
Adam Orford
Especially in the ocean. And so that is a negative byproduct of technology development. One that's on everybody's minds right now is the development of new applications of existing computing technologies. So, we could talk about artificial intelligence, which I don't think is the right term for it, large language models, whatever.

00:20:14:17 - 00:20:16:03
Jie Ren
It is for today's conversation.

00:20:16:04 - 00:20:44:04
Adam Orford
Yes. But the foundation of all of that are data centers, which are just a piece of tech right there, an industrial scale tech. So maybe we'll get into it later. The environmental impacts of the resource usage of running those things. Yeah. So yeah, in the past we have had intensive resource intensive manufacturing facilities, right, that are putting— smelting aluminum or making iron or whatever it is.

00:20:44:04 - 00:21:07:02
Adam Orford
And they had the— we've focused a lot on the pollution elements of that. That is like the smog, the smoke, the things. But they're also associated energy impacts. Right. So, a smelter that is using a lot of electricity has an impact on the electricity market and the electric power system in different ways than a data center.

00:21:07:02 - 00:21:28:12
Adam Orford
But it's not like this is exactly a new problem. The challenge with these data centers is the scale and the speed of it. So, this is something that is happening in a way that no one has ever really seen before, a spike in the energy demand in a way that is totally disrupting the way that the electric power system is planned and built and operates.

00:21:28:12 - 00:21:34:12
Adam Orford
And a lot of that then results in higher costs, which is what everybody is worrying by right now.

00:21:34:17 - 00:21:38:10
Jie Ren
The pricing, right, pricing will increase that significantly.

00:21:38:11 - 00:21:52:00
Adam Orford
Plus, the environmental impact of all of the resources that are being consumed by these things. For what is a fairly unclear total future social and financial benefit.

00:21:52:02 - 00:22:15:09
Jie Ren
Okay. So, I want to talk about public awareness of those. Right. So many aspects of what you have mentioned are quite obvious to many people, right? Including people that are working in companies. Right. Or the decision makers of major companies. In your opinion, what do you think that are the obstacles for them to not fully be living in this and then taking actions?

00:22:15:11 - 00:22:18:02
Jie Ren
Is this the immediate economic governance?

00:22:18:04 - 00:22:22:21
Adam Orford
So, what are the what are the folks who are running like AI—?

00:22:22:23 - 00:22:46:08
Jie Ren
Not necessarily AI or like any companies that could have these pollutions whatever as the by a byproduct or individuals. Right. Like you and me. Like when we are, you know, like using the water, for example, running water and everything. [Adam Orford: Sure, sure.] Right. So, we know that the consequences of what we are doing, that could hurt the environment if we consume a lot of work unnecessarily.

00:22:46:09 - 00:22:52:18
Jie Ren
[Adam Orford: Right.] But like, in your opinion, just yet, generally speaking, let's talk about philosophy maybe a little bit.

00:22:52:19 - 00:22:53:00
Adam Orford
Yeah.

00:22:53:01 - 00:23:06:16
Jie Ren
Great. Right. So, like, what do you think? Like, even though we have this very immediate, very obvious, like immediate negative impact of this, we can think of immediately. And the right people choose not to protect environment for activity.

00:23:06:17 - 00:23:34:04
Adam Orford
So, there's a lot to unpack there. And I love environmental philosophy. So, I think we have to get into that a little bit. What you're describing in part is dissociation between or distance between individual activity and the systems that we're interacting with that are actually where the impacts are happening. What do I mean by that? I mean, I'm you are we are all surrounded by stuff in the modern world.

00:23:34:05 - 00:23:50:23
Adam Orford
I don't know where this jacket was made. And I don't mean just like, what country, I mean what factory by what person. I don't know if that person had health insurance or if their kids have a toothbrush. Like, I don't know anything about where anything comes from. I don't know what this is made of. I don't know how any of.

00:23:51:00 - 00:24:13:12
Adam Orford
Right. And so, we live in a world where we are surrounded by the products of market forces and technological development that disassociate us from the workers and the inputs and the minds and the all the stuff. We don't see it. If we don't see it, it's not there. Most people have never visited a water.

00:24:13:14 - 00:24:14:04
Jie Ren
Logically.

00:24:14:07 - 00:24:36:16
Adam Orford
Sure. Yeah. And very naturally. Right. And the systems are designed to be convenient, which is great. Like we all enjoy having clean running water and we should, but we don't all get to visit the water treatment plant and see what an enormous industrial process it is to create clean water and how fragile it can be, how expensive it is.

00:24:36:16 - 00:25:04:17
Adam Orford
All of that stuff is disappears from our view. And so, to the extent that I use a large language model, AI, I'll call it AI, I don't want it to, but I will. So, if I'm interacting with some commercial, you know, consumer AI chatbot, I don't see where that's coming from. I just see on a screen I'm dissociated from the, the production process, that supply chain, everything that created this consumer product I'm using in the same way.

00:25:04:19 - 00:25:32:16
Adam Orford
And so, getting people connected to the impacts of what they're doing is part of it. But I want to also press pause, because getting people connected to the impacts of their own activities is also implicitly messaging to us that it's our responsibility as individuals to minimize the impacts of our activities. And in fact, that's typically impossible in a real sense.

00:25:32:18 - 00:25:52:10
Adam Orford
I can't function in an American city with a low environmental impact and lower my environmental impact to any real degree I can. I can do my best. I can transform my life and try. But like, it's much more convenient for me to buy stuff at the bodega and throws the wrapper away to turn on the lights when I need them and not worry about where the electricity comes from.

00:25:52:10 - 00:26:22:16
Adam Orford
All of that, and so where people can make a real difference, are in the interventions, in the hidden systems that are there and are regulated. That's why I'm a lawyer and then interact with the regulatory processes and understand what the decision makers building the systems are thinking about, and then talk to that. So, if I'm a, you know, a tech person who has a financial interest in getting folks to invest in construction and data centers, I might know, first of all, be aware of all of those systems.

00:26:22:16 - 00:26:45:02
Adam Orford
And I think that the tech industry right now is really running headfirst into the electricity regulatory system that has been there for a century that they didn't know existed, and finding out that it's actually a lot harder to get things built than they knew. But I also think that they benefit from other folks not knowing how those systems work and where the levers of power are.

00:26:45:04 - 00:27:07:12
Adam Orford
And so, there's, you know, there's a constant political fight happening over whether to build these facilities. And one of the things that I think is good and the other people met will definitely have different views on. I think it's good that we're having these fights that these local scale disagreements are happening. Someone proposes to build a data center, and the community around it says, we don't want that.

00:27:07:14 - 00:27:38:10
Adam Orford
You know, in the US, in some places at least, that can result in that data center not getting built. And you know, that is annoying, right? That might undercut the bottom line of a company that wants to build something. And at the same time, there are— It might be worth pressing pause and thinking about why the communities don't like those things and what the company might be able to do in order to minimize the impacts if they can, or put it somewhere else.

00:27:38:12 - 00:27:39:12
Adam Orford
I don't have a problem with that.

00:27:39:12 - 00:27:51:10
Jie Ren
Yeah, I agree with you. We definitely need to raise the public awareness of these more and more, maybe through like reporting these events more in the in media or having like more interesting documentaries on this on Netflix.

00:27:51:10 - 00:27:54:03
Adam Orford
I think it's happening. I mean, what do you think? It seems to me I agree.

00:27:54:04 - 00:28:07:06
Jie Ren
Yeah, it's more and more right over the years for sure. And also, not only in the US but internationally now necessarily related to data centers. Right. But protecting the environment and also related to the climate change, for example, right.

00:28:07:08 - 00:28:19:18
Adam Orford
So, pollinators, the collapse of like food systems, and things like that. There's a whole world of problems. And the more people who understand that and are encouraged to try to do something to help it, the better.

00:28:19:19 - 00:28:41:02
Jie Ren
Yeah. So, we talk about we kind of talk about the, the carrots and sticks in a way where we talk about the funding, we talk about the tax credit. And then we now we talk about negative impact of technologies. Right. Possible negative impact of technologies on the environment. And then let's talk about the current legal frameworks and then regulations.

00:28:41:02 - 00:28:54:06
Jie Ren
Were any regulatory proposals that stand out to you related to protecting the environment in the US. Let's start with the repeal that first. [Adam Orford: Well,] that's a big, big topic.

00:28:54:11 - 00:29:25:08
Adam Orford
Currently there are no big proposals because the current presidential administration is absolutely opposed to increasing environmental regulation. So, what we're actually tracking more is the legality and the efforts to roll back those existing regulatory programs. And that includes spending. So, it includes carrots and sticks, and it includes carrots and sticks for fossil fuel development and for clean energy development in the in the clean energy space.

00:29:25:10 - 00:29:52:06
Adam Orford
That is, you can achieve different the same outcomes by, say, making gasoline more expensive or cleaner, electricity cheaper or electric vehicles cheaper or whatever. And so, what we're seeing right now are on the clean energy side, the taking away of the carrots and the creation of additional hurdles, maybe even sort of sticks. For, say, offshore wind development. Right.

00:29:52:08 - 00:30:19:12
Adam Orford
Making it impossible to build offshore wind farms or more expensive or difficult to build onshore wind or solar or whatever. And some support for, say, nuclear energy development. I don't want to say it's an analogy very clear. It's there are trends, but there are also ways that, you know, some other technologies are getting preferred treatment. On the fossil fuel side, I think that it's pretty clear that the sticks are getting less sticky.

00:30:19:13 - 00:30:45:15
Adam Orford
They are trying to make it easier to support the at least continuation, if not expansion of coal power, oil and gas in the United States. Production, refineries, the usage, whatever it is. To some degree, against global market forces. You know, we our economy is still built on whale and gas. I don't deny that.

00:30:45:16 - 00:31:29:18
Adam Orford
But there is a sort of inevitable shift happening. At least a certain segment of that market is getting replaced by cleaner alternatives. And the slower that that happens, I think the happier the Trump administration would be. So the interesting proposals are more along the lines of what, say, a state is doing, what systems are in place in, you know, it might be California, might be Georgia, it might be places you don't expect to still keep an eye on the energy transition to decide whether or not they want to go all in on investing in, like a natural gas system that is exposed to extreme price volatility and kind of global market forces that are

00:31:29:20 - 00:31:53:04
Adam Orford
subject to this or that war happening, things like that. So, I'm not sure I'm entirely answering your question. It's more along the lines of, this is a very complicated time. There's a transition that is both happening and being helped and impeded in different ways, and the government plays a huge role in that and also not the only role.

00:31:53:06 - 00:31:54:21
Adam Orford
Yeah, I know if that answers your question.

00:31:54:21 - 00:32:17:04
Jie Ren
It did, it did. Yeah. So, we definitely see, you know, this ups and downs right in the, in this field recently for sure. And then also it's not only to the United States though like globally I would say right. There are some levels of ups and downs in terms of promoting or not so much promoting clean energy.

00:32:17:06 - 00:32:28:22
Jie Ren
Right. So, let's look at the global domain a little bit. Any countries or any regions or any legal frameworks or proposed regulations that stick out to you.

00:32:28:23 - 00:32:53:15
Adam Orford
Yeah. Well, regulation is probably the wrong word. And I'm going to I'm going to be purposefully provocative because I think that the most important comparator you have to look at is China in this space. And I think I have to just say it immediately, like under no circumstances would I trade the messy, imperfect, and slow American legal system for the Chinese legal system.

00:32:53:16 - 00:33:22:23
Adam Orford
Right? I wouldn't want to, because it is predicated on different forms of government and decision-making authority entirely. And that said, the unilateral decision making in the Chinese state has resulted in a certain very remarkable outcome. They've built in China more solar power last year than the United States had.

00:33:23:01 - 00:33:24:08
Jie Ren
Is it efficient, though?

00:33:24:11 - 00:33:50:23
Adam Orford
It's efficient and it with who knows what human impacts, who knows what environmental impacts. Who knows who is displaced or whether that impacts an endangered species. Like there are just many, many fewer checks on. So, the decision was made and this thing happened. Whether that's a good outcome like is debatable. On top of, right, the Chinese economy is as well as the US economy built on fossil fuels.

00:33:51:00 - 00:34:19:10
Adam Orford
And so, we have seen a peaking of the greenhouse gas emissions in China for the first time, but they've been increasing for the last 20 years, and China is now the number one national amateur nous gases annually. United States still has the lead historically. Right. So, but we're seeing the emissions profile of the country sort of level off and possibly start to fall, depending on where they go with their energy development.

00:34:19:12 - 00:34:47:09
Adam Orford
The outcome is fascinating. The regulations and policies that resulted in that are not replicable in any political structure that is, other than basically works the way that China works. So, what kinds of things are happening in other parts of the world that are interesting? I mean, you look at the European Union, another common comparator. They have a longer tradition of being a much, much more highly regulated.

00:34:47:10 - 00:34:48:21
Adam Orford
I mean, we all pointed them in last.

00:34:48:22 - 00:34:49:18
Jie Ren
Yeah. That's right.

00:34:49:20 - 00:35:18:10
Adam Orford
Yeah. They have these strict regulations and they all complain about Brussels and you know. Right. Rightfully so. It's a very complicated and bureaucratic system that has resulted in slow but sure development and deployment of clean energy resources to some degree. Also, for the longest time, like fiercely reliant on Russian natural gas imports for, you know, the Scandinavian countries.

00:35:18:12 - 00:35:42:20
Adam Orford
I mean, Norway is a gigantic oil producer. Finland is digging as much ancient peat out of the ground as they can in order to heat, to burn, for heating. So, it's not a, like a simple situation. And what they're doing is, among other things, is trying to deal with that same energy transition and some of the creative things that they're doing, which are highly controversial as well.

00:35:43:01 - 00:35:49:10
Adam Orford
Are there they're starting to try to account for, for example, the embedded carbon in the goods that they're consuming.

00:35:49:12 - 00:35:50:02
Jie Ren
Really?

00:35:50:03 - 00:36:00:09
Adam Orford
Yeah. So transnational or transboundary carbon taxes are a thing, called the carbon border adjustment mechanism or CBAM is like a hot topic.

00:36:00:12 - 00:36:03:00
Jie Ren
So, making everything quantifiable and more transparent.

00:36:03:00 - 00:36:26:17
Adam Orford
Yes. So, if I buy a car in an EU country and I know all of the energy inputs and I know the sources of the energy that, you know were involved in creating that car, then I can get a number like this much carbon associated with that car. And then if I know all of the same information for a car manufacturer in other country, if I import that car and try to buy it in EU, I can—

00:36:26:18 - 00:36:53:05
Adam Orford
If there's a higher greenhouse gas content tax, that higher greenhouse gas content and essentially say, sure, you can buy that car, but because the European car was manufactured in a way that, you know, undertook the costs of avoiding these climate impacts, we're going to require the car that didn't to pay a tax. Now, is that an illegal barrier on international trade?

00:36:53:07 - 00:36:58:19
Adam Orford
I mean, because, you know, in a way that is going to preference the domestic manufacturer.

00:36:58:20 - 00:36:59:21
Jie Ren
Yeah, exactly.

00:36:59:23 - 00:37:24:05
Adam Orford
Fairly active area of international disagreement. And you know, like not a I'm not a trade law expert except to the degree that it relates to some of this stuff. You know, and the trade law system has had to digest some of these arguments, as had the international climate law treaty negotiations. Once again, China has brought up again and again like, hey, we're really worried about you doing these things.

00:37:24:07 - 00:37:53:09
Adam Orford
But is it an interesting approach? Yeah. The EU's approach to, greenhouse gas corporate disclosure is really interesting. That's something that the United States sort of tried and has crashed and burned on. But it might not matter because, you know, maybe California requires those disclosures or maybe the Netherlands does or something. And so, like, if you're an international company, oil company, say you're going to have to disclose that information if you want to do business in a smaller jurisdiction.

00:37:53:09 - 00:38:19:20
Adam Orford
So, it doesn't necessarily need the US to do it. There are some things that are happening and ultimately what I am keeping an eye out for over the next ten years are legal initiatives to shut down, to take over and shut down oral and gas industries. This is like to like—, where's the cutting edge?

00:38:19:22 - 00:38:41:08
Adam Orford
Not arguing that that is the right solution for any given place, but the transition away from fossil fuels at some point cannot happen on its own. It's not really like a fully market manageable problem. So, if you decide, look, we need to stop using coal. At some point you might have to just say no more coal.

00:38:41:13 - 00:38:59:19
Adam Orford
And that might require a very aggressive governmental interventions to the extent that that happens. And keep an eye out for it, because it is the logical next step. If the kind of international commitments to climate change are actually follow through on.

00:38:59:21 - 00:39:24:09
Jie Ren
I agree with you. It's a very an aggressive government intervention. Right. Because globally, as you mentioned as well, many aspects of the economy are based upon the fuel industry. Yes. So yeah. So, it goes back to our initial discussion in terms of the struggle between two things. One is economy again, and the other one is like long term, really long term.

00:39:24:13 - 00:39:50:21
Jie Ren
Right. So, the positive environmental impact of having good policies in this. All right. So, let's so we have set the stage already right. Then let's move to the centerpiece of today's discussion, AI, artificial intelligence and then especially data centers. Right. And then also you mentioned that as well. Right. So many people don't recognize this or kind of, you know, register this in mind.

00:39:50:22 - 00:40:13:19
Jie Ren
Kind of like when you are using running water, you don't know where it comes from. You don't know how it is possessed. You don't know how much environmental cost it is having. Kind of like when we are having when we are interacting with ChatGPT. Yeah, right. And when we are running any calculations using, you know, all of these are models, it is actually being processed and delivered by data centers, right.

00:40:13:22 - 00:40:38:22
Jie Ren
So, you can imagine well, it is actually happening, as you say, the speed. Right. And then it's like high speed is a surging number of data centers that are being built all over the place. Right. And then, definitely could affect the environment in many ways for first of all, electricity, right? For sure. And also, you would need to use water to cool down the system, not to mention to take the space.

00:40:39:00 - 00:41:05:20
Jie Ren
Right. Maybe out of human beings, maybe out of about life. Right? Yeah. And then yes. Could you please talk about, you know, the any regulations. Right. Or proposed. So, I kept using proposed because I really hope that good policies could be in place right now, but not yet at least. We are thinking in that direction. So, any proposed regulations that are in place or being talked about related to this.

00:41:05:20 - 00:41:26:11
Adam Orford
Sure. And before I get to that, I think I want to set the stage a little bit about how these data centers and I'll focus on electricity, I think, and sort of just say upfront that water is analogous in a lot of ways to what I'm about to say about electricity. But electricity is where a lot of the action really is.

00:41:26:12 - 00:41:53:07
Adam Orford
Water is not that important, but electricity is less soluble. Okay. So traditionally we build in the United States, we build our electric grid. We have to we have to meet demand at all times. So, supply has to exactly match demand on the grid at all times. That's just part of the way electricity works. To know that means we need to know in advance how much is going to be needed.

00:41:53:09 - 00:42:14:19
Adam Orford
[Jie Ren: With certainty] With— within a range of certainty. The more certainty the better. But honestly, accepting that it's a prediction about the future. But we're talking about planning 30 years in the future and in ten years in the future, and five years and two years, like, there's this constant planning process happening. And the grid that we have today was built based on the assumptions of a long time ago.

00:42:14:19 - 00:42:35:20
Adam Orford
And the grid that we will have tomorrow is based on the assumptions we have today. And there are risks to overbuilding and under building. If we overbuilt, we've impacted the environment in a thousand different ways. We spend all this money unnecessarily, and we have all of these resources that we're not going to use. If we under build, the lights go out or electricity prices go through the roof either way.

00:42:35:21 - 00:43:12:00
Adam Orford
Right. Because then people are deciding whether or not to, you know, fighting over the electricity that we have. So, it's a certain amount of electricity being produced and we're all using it. It is to minimize or optimize for low cost, always available electricity. That's the system and is really complicated and needs a lot of reform. And we can spend a whole semester figuring out how it works, what has not traditionally happened in the past is the very, very fast addition of lots and lots of new demand are localized.

00:43:12:02 - 00:43:32:01
Adam Orford
We call it load or demand, like the demand for electricity. So just think about it this way. Like population grows, you know, people buy computers, they install more lights or more efficient light bulbs and whatnot. And that all impacts how much electricity overall is going to be needed at any given time or year or whatever. But part of that is just where there are cities.

00:43:32:01 - 00:44:00:08
Adam Orford
We know where there are cities. Part of that is, you know, how many people are going to be in different places where new towns. So, so like there are these slow processes of change. The data center is like a city of 100,000 people just operating at full tilt all the time from an electricity perspective, and you can just drop it down on the grid overnight, relatively overnight, and you build something in six months, and then all of a sudden you have a new city of 100,000 people where there was just a wilderness before.

00:44:00:09 - 00:44:22:18
Adam Orford
Or, you know, even if it's in a city already, suddenly you have a population growth that big on the electricity side, and you want to do that again, again and again, everywhere, all at once, with no plan from 20 years ago for how to provide that electricity. And you want to do it in a market environment where it's not clear which of these are actually going to get filled.

00:44:22:22 - 00:44:52:01
Adam Orford
And so, to the extent we are trying to plan, there's a high degree of uncertainty about where these new demand bonds, these just like exciting new we need electricity here right now. Right. Solutions are happening. So, we don't know how to plant. It's totally disrupted the planning processes that actually maintain the relatively inexpensive electricity that we get, and the totally reliable electric grid that we sort of take for granted all the time.

00:44:52:03 - 00:45:15:03
Adam Orford
And so, these facilities are coming up with a lot of different solutions for that. You can island them. That means you just sort of keep them off the grid and then produce power on site. So, you don't have to deal with all of these regulatory processes. How are they doing that by, you know, burning. Maybe we're going to turn on a new coal fired, an old coal fired power plant and keep it running longer.

00:45:15:05 - 00:45:15:16
Adam Orford
Maybe we're—

00:45:15:16 - 00:45:17:19
Jie Ren
Going to by [inaudible].

00:45:17:20 - 00:45:40:19
Adam Orford
There are all these new deals happening to try to figure out how to get electricity to these facilities in ways that don't run into this long-term planning problem. That could go, so there's a lot of like corporate side structure, deal structure, side stuff that's happening to avoid the regulatory thicket. But a lot of these, maybe it's built a whole bunch of renewable energy and power solely with that.

00:45:40:22 - 00:46:02:13
Adam Orford
But because renewable energy is not always going to be operating when the sun shines or doesn't, when the wind blows or doesn't you usually going to connect to those to the grid anyway? And you can only there's only so many places we can build when farms and solar panels. So, you're adding all this demand and yes, you're building solar panels to meet it, but that means you can't turn off the dirtier power that you were planning to turn off ten years ago.

00:46:02:15 - 00:46:28:13
Adam Orford
So, you connect it to the grid, and that means that it can't disrupt the grid. That means that it needs to have power lines connecting it to the grid. That means that it has to get interconnected. We call it okay. So, if you have to interconnect, you have to deal with all the regulatory processes. Maybe you get an exclusive deal with a big power plant to provide that energy.

00:46:28:13 - 00:46:58:12
Adam Orford
So, you're assuring everyone, hey, we're not going to be making you all spend money to provide us with electricity. Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant, is being recommissioned through a deal with, I want to say, Microsoft in order to power data centers. So, they're turning on as much electricity capacity as they can find. They're finding creative ways to produce the electricity that is meeting, and there's nowhere near enough all the same.

00:46:58:14 - 00:47:18:15
Adam Orford
And so, the concern has been, if you are continuing to build and you're trying to build fast and you're saying we have to build these right now because we're in an arms race with another country or because of the market demands that or something like that. The rush, the rush, the rush has left the electricity system planning.

00:47:18:15 - 00:47:38:16
Adam Orford
People sort of like, what are we going to do? We're trying to accommodate this demand, but we don't know how to do it. And so, in the United States, regulation happens mostly at the state level. There's federal as well. But the states are largely responsible for these decisions. A lot of states have just said we're hitting the pause button.

00:47:38:19 - 00:47:53:20
Adam Orford
So, you hear about moratoriums, say, look, no data centers right now. We and what I've just described is why it's not because they hate data centers. There are people who just don't want them in their neighborhood as well. And that's a whole other part of it. But from even from a planning perspective, they're just like, this is happening too fast.

00:47:53:20 - 00:48:14:14
Adam Orford
We have not planned for this, so we can't deal with this. We need to figure out what to do instead. Some states are saying we're going to develop. They're called large load tariffs. What that means is the facility is going to pay for everything that it causes to happen. If we need a new power line, the facility pays for it.

00:48:14:14 - 00:48:40:21
Adam Orford
If we need new electricity, the facility pays for it. The problem is that those are complicated to design, and we're worried about everybody else who pays their electric bills actually subsidizing those facilities. So, the design of large, low tariffs are there. I know we're getting really into the weeds, but like this is where this all happens. Some places, you know, siting is becoming a huge concern because they don't want to build them in places where there's local opposition, which they're often is for variety of social reasons.

00:48:40:21 - 00:49:00:14
Adam Orford
People are pretty upset about the prospect of having a data center in their backyard. I don't know why, honestly, like some folks are worried about the noise. I think some folks are worried about AI displacing jobs. They just don't like the industry. That's fine. So, you're seeing them put out farther away from people. Well, what's hard about farther away from people is that that means you don't have the infrastructure.

00:49:00:17 - 00:49:07:15
Adam Orford
Yeah, don't have the power lines. And so how are we paying for all this? Where are we putting everything? Never mind water. The water. Is all this for water?

00:49:07:17 - 00:49:08:20
Jie Ren
Yeah, exactly.

00:49:08:22 - 00:49:35:08
Adam Orford
This is why the prospect of shooting a data center into space is so exciting to Elon Musk. Don't get me started on the engineering nonsense of that idea. But you know, when you look at this from a from a technical perspective and then from a regulatory perspective, it's just really challenging. Right? And I think big picture right now, we asked, what are the exciting new prospect like proposals probably the most exciting.

00:49:35:09 - 00:50:00:21
Adam Orford
This sounds very boring, but like the most exciting thing I've seen is this proposal from a couple of environmental and energy law professor colleagues of mine, Julissa and Heather Paine have got this draft paper that I got to read. It's literally about just forcing the release of information about data centers that are being proposed, because right now, all of that is this proprietary information.

00:50:00:22 - 00:50:04:13
Adam Orford
The companies are very close mouth about what it is that there is.

00:50:04:16 - 00:50:05:10
Jie Ren
Yeah.

00:50:05:12 - 00:50:29:17
Adam Orford
And the entire energy plant system planning system is built on disclosure so that we can plan. And if you don't want to play that game, if you don't want to let everybody know what you're trying to do, if you're trying to gain some competitive advantage, I see this is maybe too strong, but I'll say it. I see the, the data center construction industry right now is somewhat parasitical.

00:50:29:17 - 00:50:54:12
Adam Orford
It is trying to take advantage of a system that was built much more with the public benefit in mind, and capture private benefit for itself, without any kind of concern for the actual public social impact of what they're doing. And I have problem with that because I am, I you know, I want the system to work better than it did and does, but this isn't helping at all.

00:50:54:16 - 00:50:57:06
Adam Orford
Yeah. So long answer.

00:50:57:06 - 00:51:19:05
Jie Ren
But no, no, no, I really love your answer for sure, because, yes, it's very true. Like some large data centers could consume as much energy as a small city. Correct. It's very much like within a city. And you are like, all of a sudden, you're placing multiple small cities within a city. And how do you plan ahead the energy load, as you said.

00:51:19:06 - 00:51:44:13
Jie Ren
Right. And then, it's difficult. And then also it's affecting everybody. It's not only affecting the companies that are trying to make good innovations to make the world better, hopefully. But it's affecting everybody. We definitely need more transparency in this. I really love the final point that you mentioned. Just disclosing everything, right? So that, you know, so that everyone knows and then everyone can negotiate about it.

00:51:44:17 - 00:51:59:10
Jie Ren
Maybe the local residents, they can have like more money, right? They will say like, okay, just give me the money. Then I can deal with it, right, so I can. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, transparency definitely. That's the first step for good negotiation.

00:51:59:10 - 00:52:22:13
Adam Orford
But if I'm going to put on my corporate lawyer hat, let's say I can get myself into that headspace. Yeah. I don't want to disclose the details of the, the highly, possibly profitable, but also extremely competitive. Right. Like energy. Commitment that I got in order to get this thing built. I don't even want to disclose the efficiency rates.

00:52:22:14 - 00:52:37:03
Adam Orford
Like, for the technology I'm using, I don't want to disclose what technology I'm using because I don't want to lock myself into it or, you know, lose some competitive advantage to find, you know, anthropic. I don't want to tell OpenAI what I'm doing. I get it, I get it.

00:52:37:03 - 00:52:40:23
Jie Ren
But depending what interest you represent, though, that's the you are the corporate.

00:52:41:00 - 00:53:04:23
Adam Orford
That's my corporate lawyer hat. That is a very different hat from my— You need to play in the world and society and honestly, my government hat. Right. So that is the interests of society are unfortunately just not represented by the private decision making that we're looking at right now. And that's why we have government and that's why government regulates.

00:53:04:23 - 00:53:20:02
Adam Orford
It's not to give everybody a hard time. It's because we are many, many hundreds of millions of people all trying to get along and balance all of our competing interests. And that doesn't work if the only thing that matters is the bottom line of SpaceX.

00:53:20:04 - 00:53:29:07
Jie Ren
Yeah. Yes. Now like recently, like the hype. Right. Like SpaceX IPs is all over the place.

00:53:29:08 - 00:53:36:15
Adam Orford
I don't want I don't even want to predict where that's going to be when this with, when this airs. I have my own predictions but I'm not going to say them publicly that way.

00:53:36:17 - 00:53:50:01
Jie Ren
Okay, we can talk. We can chat offline about it. [Adam Orford: Sounds good.] So, I heard someone saying, you telling me you're a lawyer, right? So, law is the lowest level of being ethical.

00:53:50:04 - 00:53:51:00
Adam Orford

00:53:51:02 - 00:54:17:03
Jie Ren
Do you agree? Meaning, like you have to make sure. Like this is meeting everybody's interests, protecting the well-being of the majority of the society, or hopefully everyone in the society. But if you are a super ethical person, right, you can choose, not like— every day to carefully calculate how much water that you need, right? Right. And then not to waste one drop of the water.

00:54:17:06 - 00:54:34:05
Jie Ren
Right. But that is not required by law. What I'm saying. So, there are two different things. One is the having the good policy or law in place. The other one is that to truly raise the public awareness of this right, let people's ethics to make the decision right.

00:54:34:07 - 00:55:00:01
Adam Orford
So maybe I would maybe I would say the law reflects, for better and worse, the sort of shared ethics of the society. So, there are many immoral aspects to law as it is written and as it is implemented. And, you know, if and I say immoral from a personal perspective, I guess my morals are probably different than a lot of other people's.

00:55:00:01 - 00:55:18:05
Adam Orford
And maybe there are some things we can all agree on and many things we don't. But I think everyone can agree or find and think of an example of a law or a product of the legal system that is immoral, and that is a reflection of decisions that we've made as a society about what should be in law.

00:55:18:05 - 00:55:37:10
Adam Orford
And it might be that those decisions are themselves made in a process, in a fashion that is more or less reflective of like a consensus or not. Right? Like maybe all the laws decided and made by one person. That's one way to do it. Maybe it's made by everyone, but if it's made by everyone, then what happens when people disagree?

00:55:37:11 - 00:56:06:10
Adam Orford
Only half of the people are going to get what they want. In which case law has to protect minority interests and it has to give life to majority interests. But those, you know, the how does that work? Right. And so, we can talk about the sort of—think of law and politics as, as kind of the social reflection of an ongoing argument about what is or isn't moral structured in a way that is more or less moral as well.

00:56:06:12 - 00:56:25:14
Adam Orford
That's a really complicated interconnection of things. And so, you know, how to be a moral person within those systems is its own very challenging question. That's how I try to think about it. And I'm lucky as a law professor because I just get to like, ask my students these hard questions, and then I don't necessarily come up with the answers myself.

00:56:25:16 - 00:56:27:01
Jie Ren
So, what are the answers?

00:56:27:04 - 00:57:07:12
Adam Orford
Yeah, I don't overall, you know, okay. Well, I find, personally very, I find it very meaningful to be working in a space where in a lot of respects, I am aware that I am losing. What I mean by that is, you know, every day I am aware of the environmental impact of human action on our natural resources, but also our ecological resources, animal populations, human populations, everything like there are negative impacts to a lot of things that we do.

00:57:07:12 - 00:57:31:04
Adam Orford
And my conception of winning, so to speak, would be to have that not happen as much. But I accept completely that this is not something that is possible to achieve perfectly. So, I need to find value. And I talk about this with my students as well, in doing what I think is the right thing, regardless of the outcome.

00:57:31:06 - 00:57:55:23
Adam Orford
Is it a waste of my time? Is it a life not well lived to fight for a thing I believe in, and to go down swinging even if I lose? To have done my best in pursuing the ends that I have decided are important to pursue. You know, I think that's the question that people should ask themselves. It's like, if I value something and I know I'm not going to get it, what do I do?

00:57:56:01 - 00:58:17:19
Adam Orford
Do I stop trying? My answer is no. I say try even harder and appreciate the, you know, the value of the effort. This is this comes from like Canada. And, you know, we can talk about, absurdism or, you know, the fight that, like, ultimately, for me, I don't see how to live life any other way.

00:58:17:21 - 00:58:40:20
Adam Orford
You know, see what you believe then and then fight for it. And you might be surprised at the outcome. But if you decide in advance, well, it's not worth the fight, then you've given up without any effort. So, you know, I also understand that my students have a lot of other things on their minds. It's very easy to be idealistic when you don't have to pay off your school loans or look for a job or things like that.

00:58:40:22 - 00:59:16:07
Adam Orford
And so, I also, you know, highly support trying to figure out how to influence organizations from the inside. Right. Go get involved in a big organization and then, you know, don't minimize the value of yourself, even as a junior person, you know, cognitive machine, so to speak. Yeah. Okay. Well, speak up. Right. Let your opinion, you know, even if you if you maybe ultimately decide that this job is not consistent with those values, you've left a mark as you go left it in and maybe a little better shape than when you started. Then you can go and find the next thing.

00:59:16:08 - 00:59:30:08
Adam Orford
So, learning from every interaction you have, every job you get, every deal you're involved in, whatever it is, and eventually you'll have the agency to do it as whatever it is that you think is the best thing.

00:59:30:10 - 00:59:31:02
Jie Ren
Beautiful answer.

00:59:31:03 - 00:59:33:10
Adam Orford
Thank you.

00:59:33:12 - 01:00:03:12
Jie Ren
You know, it's always through those moments, like the moment that we just had here, that remind me of the meaning of being an educator, right? Yes. We can, hopefully positively influence our students. Right. In this very context of protecting environment. Right. Even though we don't see the positive impact right away because it takes years, right?

01:00:03:14 - 01:00:31:19
Jie Ren
At least some time to see the positive in impact. But still, we need to be truthful to ourselves. Be a good person to be a moral person. Think about the possible negative consequences of, for example, overly using the running water. Right. Yeah. So yeah. So, this definitely would be a good answer. Let's continue our discussion in terms of the regulation in the domain of AI.

01:00:31:21 - 01:00:42:16
Jie Ren
Right. And then you also brought in the international perspective. Yeah. Could you please also touch upon this, you know, this particular topic from international perspective.

01:00:42:18 - 01:00:44:00
Adam Orford
Like as in how is.

01:00:44:05 - 01:00:46:00
Jie Ren
That different countries address these different.

01:00:46:04 - 01:01:10:07
Adam Orford
So, you know, I actually don't know enough about this other than to say that, looking at maps of where data centers are being proposed and actually built, the map looks kind of similar to what we've just talked about with electricity, which is that you see a lot of effort in the EU and in China. And in both of those places, the answers are also kind of similar.

01:01:10:08 - 01:01:38:02
Adam Orford
Like you have a highly regulated environment in you and you have a sort of a more competitive command and control approach in China. And they're making decisions within their own political systems about what it is that they can and want to develop. I think actually that like the different state approaches currently in the United States is a sort of more fruitful investigation of different options and approaches right now.

01:01:38:04 - 01:02:01:08
Adam Orford
But that's partly just because there's also just a lot more proposed development in the United States right now. That's not to say that there's not like a lot of data centers getting built all around the world and in places I haven't mentioned. Right. It's just that each country is sort of being tasked with deciding how much of the energy resource that they can produce.

01:02:01:08 - 01:02:26:08
Adam Orford
They want to ply to this new industry for this somewhat risky financial outcome, I think. And I think I think fundamentally it does actually come back to that maybe, maybe two things. Like one thing is these different countries in the world are trying to decide what strategic importance it is to have a well-developed AI industry, so to speak.

01:02:26:10 - 01:02:55:00
Adam Orford
There are military applications, but there are also cultural applications, like, does this language model really reflect the answers that I want as a government, my sort of consumers to be exposed to? Okay. But there's also just the question of like, is this a consumer technology that can fund itself long term? You know, are enough people going to be willing to pay the fees that actually cover the costs of building these data centers and operating them full time, because they have to run all the time in order to work.

01:02:55:02 - 01:03:20:19
Adam Orford
And all of those energy costs and water costs and infrastructure costs, all of that is has to be paid for eventually to make this a self-sustaining thing. And so, I see countries kind of going at different rates of, of with different rates of enthusiasm for that speculative potential future financial profitability, in the same way that market investors are thinking about it.

01:03:20:19 - 01:03:46:05
Adam Orford
Right. So, some folks are going to be like, I don't think I need to get involved in that. And some folks are saying, no, this is absolutely the next step in the evolution of the human species, and we need to be there for it. And so, you know, to the extent that you can take a look at how many things are getting built, how many data centers say, how much of that is being paid for by a government versus by market investors?

01:03:46:08 - 01:04:09:06
Adam Orford
How much of what is being sort of compute is being applied to commercial applications, consumer applications, government defense, those sorts of things. I think that's the kind of information you need in order to start understanding what the different national policies are for this. I think in the United States, it's like developing as a.

01:04:09:08 - 01:04:29:06
Adam Orford
It's more venture capital oriented. Like short term profitability is there and there's like there's hope for the future. But I don't think that the like, long term consumer liability of the industry has been established yet. Maybe it will be. Don't know. Maybe there are enterprise uses or defense uses or something that will end up paying for this.

01:04:29:08 - 01:04:37:00
Adam Orford
Right now, I'm worried about this just being a thing that's getting a lot of public investment for no real public return. Sorry if that's not.

01:04:37:02 - 01:04:51:15
Jie Ren
No, no, I totally agree with you. Yeah. So, AI is. Well, I know it's one of the centerpieces for competitive advantage among countries. So, I'm not talking about the corporate level. We are talking about the country.

01:04:51:17 - 01:04:52:10
Adam Orford
The national.

01:04:52:11 - 01:05:22:00
Jie Ren
The national state level. So, part of the regulations could be very much related to protecting environment or like, giving more incentives to the companies in order to bring up the economy, etc. Part of that is like, let's be competitive in this domain as a regulator, right? So yeah, so then you will see different levels of government involvement in different countries in order to fund this this right.

01:05:22:04 - 01:05:32:01
Adam Orford
What is the state getting out of that interaction. Are they getting services or are they getting access to technology? Are they getting a competitive edge? In what way for what.

01:05:32:06 - 01:05:33:02
Jie Ren
Could be economic.

01:05:33:02 - 01:05:34:11
Adam Orford
Growth could be economically right.

01:05:34:12 - 01:05:50:06
Jie Ren
So that would be the primary reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, we see the different levels of government involvement, I want to say in intervention but involvement, involvement right in in this. Right.

01:05:50:07 - 01:05:54:12
Adam Orford
This is like industrial policy as much as it is sort of environmental regulatory law.

01:05:54:13 - 01:06:00:08
Jie Ren
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of like deviate a little bit from environmental law. Yeah. Right. So, like overall.

01:06:00:08 - 01:06:04:05
Adam Orford
That's the fun part about my job is I do that I just constantly move around in different spaces.

01:06:04:06 - 01:06:19:04
Jie Ren
Yeah. So, I really like the flavor that you said about the discussion, which is interdisciplinary. Yeah. It's not only about like law per say or environmental studies, right. It also could involve economic studies where political studies. Right, right. 100 Percent.

01:06:19:06 - 01:06:40:12
Adam Orford
I think the difference between me and a lot of economists is that economists always want to look at it from an economic lens, and a lot of lawyers’ kind of pick and choose whatever might be useful at the time in order to make a point that they're trying to make different approaches. But, you know, we work together very well because I think we're, we're compatible and, and self-sort of mutually reinforcing perspectives.

01:06:40:14 - 01:07:07:23
Jie Ren
Oh, thank you for putting it that way. Because like tomorrow I'm going to interview Mark Conti for this. All right. So, one final question for you. For every single episode, I purposely keep at least one question related to students, right. So, any suggestions to students who are kind of study studying in the intersection of AI and environmental law?

01:07:08:01 - 01:07:10:00
Jie Ren
Well trying to pursue a career in that direction.

01:07:10:01 - 01:07:14:09
Adam Orford
Yeah, yeah. Well, other than take my classes.

01:07:14:11 - 01:07:17:02
Jie Ren
Yes. First of all—

01:07:17:04 - 01:07:42:05
Adam Orford
Sure. Learning how electricity works is really important because it's such. It's like the input that is necessary. And that's a— it's a marketable skill because so few people actually really do understand it. That sector needs a lot more. So just sort of brain power. Be ready for the world to look completely different ten years from now than it does right now.

01:07:42:09 - 01:08:07:08
Adam Orford
And just I think this is something that is sort of intuitively understood by a lot of the current generation of students, right? Like the world is going to continue changing quickly. But that means that you have to learn how to learn, right? It doesn't matter exactly what you know. It's that you figured out in a very quick amount of time the basics of what is happening, and you can understand it and understand where it's going.

01:08:07:10 - 01:08:23:12
Adam Orford
So, think about trying to identify the things that don't change while things are changing. If that makes sense. The basic structures of the world a little bit. Read a lot of books now. Like just like really educate yourself.

01:08:23:14 - 01:08:24:19
Jie Ren
Read the news as well.

01:08:24:22 - 01:08:46:03
Adam Orford
Read the news. Oh my gosh. This is this is every class that I teach, especially in the energy sector. I start with headlines; the first slide of every day is this is literally what has happened since the last time we met. And it's always relevant to what I'm teaching. And I try to explain to them, like, this is a tiny fraction of the news items that I have read today.

01:08:46:05 - 01:09:00:19
Adam Orford
And you need to start swimming in the sea, right? Like there's this enormous flow of information that I talk I think about myself a little bit like a, like a sea anemone or a filter feeder, like it's flowing past. And I grabbed the little bits of it.

01:09:00:21 - 01:09:03:04
Jie Ren
Also be aware of media bias as well.

01:09:03:05 - 01:09:39:07
Adam Orford
Of course. Yeah. Become an educated consumer of news. I read multiple, you know, whatever you need to do. Yeah. So, to do that, right, to, to be engaged, maybe fundamentally it is like, and this is I don't know if this is trite. It's like, get curious. Right. Maintain an interest because the more, literally intellectual joy that you bring to your work, like the easier it is going to be to spend the days and weeks and years and just like learning and working.

01:09:39:09 - 01:10:04:17
Adam Orford
Because a career, right, or whatever it is built on expertise requires putting in the time. And so, if you can't, if you burn out, like don't burn out. Right. Okay. So, get enough sleep to drink enough water, all that. If it's if it's fun, if it's interesting, if you find joy in it and are doing things that, you know, feel like they're helping you learn and take the next step, it's much easier, right?

01:10:04:18 - 01:10:32:18
Adam Orford
It's never going to be a I've solved the whole problem right away. You're always going to have a sort of a small contribution to a small piece of the problem. So, find joy in that, right? Find a way to learn and then build on that for the next thing you work on. And I have found, and I think this is true for a lot of folks like that process of building slowly is what a career and what sort of a life well spent on anything is, is ultimately built on.

01:10:32:20 - 01:10:35:19
Jie Ren
Yeah. So essentially to trust the process.

01:10:35:21 - 01:10:36:22
Adam Orford
Trust the process, that's a good way to put it.

01:10:36:22 - 01:10:38:20
Jie Ren
And also, be a moral person.

01:10:38:22 - 01:10:40:04
Adam Orford
Do the right thing.

01:10:40:06 - 01:10:43:02
Jie Ren
Thank you so much, Adam. I truly learned a lot from our conversation.

01:10:43:04 - 01:10:45:17
Adam Orford
My pleasure. Thanks so much for the invitation. Thank you.