sustainability – Shiel Yule

How to Survive WW3 and Corporate Incompetence by Sliding into a Better Reality

Here’s the setup: World War 3 isn’t coming. It’s already here, operating on a low-grade, background-noise subscription model.

It’s not thermonuclear Armageddon with dramatic sirens and mushroom clouds—that’s too clean. Instead, it’s a series of messy, permanent “on-off” proxy skirmishes. A geopolitical game of whack-a-mole financed by sovereign wealth funds, fought by automated drones, and live-streamed in 4K with a betting app integration. You turn on the news, see a medium-sized European city getting shelled, turn off the news, order a flat white, and wonder why your heating bill just doubled.

Which brings us neatly to the second horseman of our modern apocalypse: Big Energy.

If you’ve tried to interact with an energy conglomerate lately, you’ll know they are currently being run by people whose primary qualification is an ability to breathe without assistance. The grid is flicking like a haunted lightbulb, the customer support queue is an endless, synthesized loop of pan flute music, and the executive board is aggressively pivoting to AI-driven, synergized biomass optimization while forgetting to buy actual coal.

The entire global infrastructure is held together by two rolls of gaffer tape, a stressed-out intern named Kevin, and pure, unfiltered institutional incompetence.

Now, normal advice for surviving a world run by weaponized toddlers and collapsing utility firms involves hoarding tinned beans, buying gold bars, or writing angry letters to your MP.

Don’t bother. The beans will rot, the gold will be confiscated by a regional warlord, and your MP is currently stuck in a SMART meter installation loop.

Instead, the only logical, practical response to our present nightmare was figured out in 1993 by a former Russian quantum physicist named Vadim Zeland.

Vadim took one look at post-Soviet chaos, handed in his resignation, and dropped a truth bomb that makes the Matrix look like a mild safety suggestion: Reality Transurfing.

The Infinite Movie Roll

According to Zeland, reality isn’t a single, rigid track where we are all trapped together in a sinking boat. Reality is an infinite space of variation—a cosmic streaming catalog containing every version of your life that has ever existed, is currently existing, or could exist.

WW3 is happening on this track. The energy company losing your direct debit and cutting off your gas is happening on this track.

But three inches to the left on the quantum spectrum? There is a reality where the proxy wars were settled via a aggressive game of laser tag, energy is free and generated by enthusiastic hamsters, and your local power company actually answers the phone on the second ring.

So, how do you get there? You don’t “fight” the system. You slide.

Step 1: Stop Feeding the “Pendulums”

In Transurfing, massive collective structures—like nation-states, global energy cartels, tech monopolies, and doom-scrolling media loops—are known as Pendulums.

A Pendulum feeds on one thing: Your mental energy.

It doesn’t care if you love it or hate it.

If you wave a flag for the proxy war, the Pendulum eats your rage.
If you march in protest against the energy prices, the Pendulum eats your frustration.
If you spend three hours screaming at a customer service bot called “Clara,” the Pendulum absorbs your rising blood pressure and uses it to fuel its next corporate rebrand.

When you get angry at the incompetence of the world, you lock yourself directly onto the timeline where that incompetence escalates. You become a battery for the chaos engine.

The Transurfing move? Drop the importance.

When the news announces that a rogue drone strike just knocked out a pipeline, or your energy bill arrives looking like the phone number for a small municipality in Wales, do not scream. Do not panic.

Shrug. Give it a zero out of ten for effort. Render yourself completely un-hookable.

Step 2: Eliminate “Excess Potential”

Zeland points out that the universe is aggressively lazy and obsessed with balance. Whenever you attach extreme emotional weight, anxiety, or desperation to an outcome, you create Excess Potential.

And the universe hates Excess Potential. It sends in “Equilibrium Forces” to slap you back down.

Desperate for the war to end? Equilibrium Forces will ensure your specific sector gets targeted by a supply-chain crunch.
Obsessed with keeping your house warm this winter? Equilibrium Forces will ensure a regional manager named Nigel accidentally trips over the main grid breaker in Slough.

What you chase emotionally creates physical resistance. The more you clench your fists and demand that the world make sense, the more the world will send incompetent middle managers to explain why your gas meter is suddenly recording usage in ancient Roman sesterces.

Step 3: The Quantum Slide Protocol

If you want to survive the ongoing collapse of Western infrastructure without going mad, here is your daily Transurfing operational checklist:

Adopt “Amused Detachment”: View the proxy war and the collapsing energy sector not as a tragedy, but as a poorly scripted sitcom being performed by untalented actors. You are an observer sitting in the back row with popcorn.
Lower the Importance to Zero: When the grid stutters, do not treat it as an existential threat. Treat it like bad weather. You don’t yell at rain; you put on a coat. Lowering importance drains the Pendulum of its power over you.
Slide the State: Instead of acting from desperation (which snaps you straight into the “Everything is Broken” timeline), act from quiet, calm intention. Pay the bill (or don’t), fix the generator, adjust your coat, and focus on your immediate personal space.

Reality doesn’t change because you fought it; reality changes because you stopped paying attention to the script the world was trying to hand you.

Let the big energy companies bankrupt themselves through sheer, unadulterated stupidity. Let the geopolitical warlords fight over uninhabitable sandboxes on TikTok.

Step off the track. Slide three inches to the left.

The room is warmer over here, the coffee is better, and Kevin from customer support doesn’t even exist.

Every time you ask an AI a question, to write a poem, to debug code, to settle a bet, you are spinning a tiny, invisible motor in the vast, humming engine of the world’s server farms. But is that engine driving us towards a sustainable future or accelerating our journey over a cliff?

This is the great paradox of our time. Artificial intelligence is simultaneously one of the most power-hungry technologies ever conceived and potentially our single greatest tool for solving the existential crisis of global warming. It is both the poison and the cure, the problem and the solution.

To understand our future, we must first confront the hidden environmental cost of this revolution and then weigh it against the immense promise of a planet optimised by intelligent machines.

Part 1: The True Cost of a Query

The tech world is celebrating the AI revolution, but few are talking about the smokestacks rising from the virtual factories. Before we anoint AI as our saviour, we must acknowledge the inconvenient truth: its appetite for energy is voracious, and its environmental footprint is growing at an exponential rate.

The Convenient Scapegoat

Just a few years ago, the designated villain for tech’s energy gluttony was the cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin mining, an undeniably energy-intensive process, was demonised in political circles and the media as a planetary menace, a rogue actor single-handedly sucking the grid dry. While its energy consumption was significant, the narrative was also a convenient misdirection. It created a scapegoat that drew public fire, allowing the far larger, more systemic energy consumption of mainstream big tech to continue growing almost unnoticed in the background. The crusade against crypto was never really about the environment; it was a smokescreen. And now that the political heat has been turned down on crypto, that same insatiable demand for power hasn’t vanished—it has simply found a new, bigger, and far more data-hungry host: Artificial Intelligence.

The Training Treadmill

The foundation of modern AI is the Large Language Model (LLM). Training a state-of-the-art model is one of the most brutal computational tasks ever conceived. It involves feeding petabytes of data through thousands of high-powered GPUs, which run nonstop for weeks or months. The energy consumed is staggering. The training of a single major AI model can have a carbon footprint equivalent to hundreds of transatlantic flights. If that electricity is sourced from fossil fuels, we are quite literally burning coal to ask a machine to write a sonnet.

The Unseen Cost of “Inference”

The energy drain doesn’t stop after training. Every single query, every task an AI performs, requires computational power. This is called “inference,” and as AI is woven into the fabric of our society—from search engines to customer service bots to smart assistants—the cumulative energy demand from billions of these daily inferences is set to become a major line item on the global energy budget. The projected growth in energy demand from data centres, driven almost entirely by AI, could be so immense that it risks cancelling out the hard-won gains we’ve made in renewable energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is one of the most cited sources. Their projections indicate that global electricity demand from data centres, AI, and cryptocurrencies could more than double by 2030, reaching 945 Terawatt-hours (TWh). To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire current electricity consumption of Japan.

The E-Waste Tsunami

This insatiable demand for power is matched only by AI’s demand for new, specialized hardware. The race for AI dominance has created a hardware treadmill, with new generations of more powerful chips being released every year. This frantic pace of innovation means that perfectly functional hardware is rendered obsolete in just a couple of years. The manufacturing of these components is a resource-intensive process involving rare earth minerals and vast amounts of water. Their short lifespan is creating a new and dangerous category of toxic electronic waste, a mountain of discarded silicon that will be a toxic legacy for generations to come.

The danger is that we are falling for a seductive narrative of “solutionism,” where the potential for AI to solve climate change is used as a blanket justification for the very real environmental damage it is causing right now. We must ask the difficult questions: does the benefit of every AI application truly justify its carbon cost?

Part 2: The Optimiser – The Planet’s New Nervous System

Just as we stare into the abyss of AI’s environmental cost, we must also recognise its revolutionary potential. Global warming is a complex system problem of almost unimaginable scale, and AI is the most powerful tool ever invented for optimising complex systems. If we can consciously direct its power, AI could function as a planetary-scale nervous system, sensing, analysing, and acting to heal the world.

Here are five ways AI is already delivering on that promise today:

1. Making the Wind and Sun Reliable The greatest challenge for renewable energy is its intermittency—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. AI is solving this. It can analyze weather data with incredible accuracy to predict energy generation, while simultaneously predicting demand from cities and industries. By balancing this complex equation in real-time, AI makes renewable-powered grids more stable and reliable, accelerating our transition away from fossil fuels.

2. Discovering the Super-Materials of Tomorrow Creating a sustainable future requires new materials: more efficient solar panels, longer-lasting batteries, and even new catalysts that can capture carbon directly from the air. Traditionally, discovering these materials would take decades of painstaking lab work. AI can simulate molecular interactions at incredible speed, testing millions of potential combinations in a matter of days. It is dramatically accelerating materials science, helping us invent the physical building blocks of a green economy.

3. The All-Seeing Eye in the Sky We cannot protect what we cannot see. AI, combined with satellite imagery, gives us an unprecedented, real-time view of the health of our planet. AI algorithms can scan millions of square miles of forest to detect illegal logging operations the moment they begin. They can pinpoint the source of methane leaks from industrial sites and hold polluters accountable. This creates a new era of radical transparency for environmental protection.

4. The End of Wasteful Farming Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. AI-powered precision agriculture is changing that. By using drones and sensors to gather data on soil health, water levels, and plant growth, AI can tell farmers exactly how much water and fertilizer to use and where. This drastically reduces waste, lowers the carbon footprint of our food supply, and helps us feed a growing population more sustainably.

5. Rewriting the Climate Code For decades, scientists have used supercomputers to model the Earth’s climate. These simulations are essential for predicting future changes but are incredibly slow. AI is now able to run these simulations in a fraction of the time, providing faster, more accurate predictions of everything from the path of hurricanes to the rate of sea-level rise. This gives us the foresight we need to build more resilient communities and effectively prepare for the changes to come.

Part 3: The Final Choice

AI is not inherently good or bad for the climate. Its ultimate impact will be the result of a conscious and deliberate choice we make as a society.

If we continue to pursue AI development recklessly, prioritising raw power over efficiency and chasing novelty without considering the environmental cost, we will have created a powerful engine of our own destruction. We will have built a gluttonous machine that consumes our planet’s resources to generate distractions while the world burns.

But if we choose a different path, the possibilities are almost limitless. We can demand and invest in “Green AI”—models designed from the ground up for energy efficiency. We can commit to powering all data centres with 100% renewable energy. Most importantly, we can prioritize the deployment of AI in those areas where it can have the most profound positive impact on our climate.

The future is not yet written. AI can be a reflection of our shortsightedness and excess, or it can be a testament to our ingenuity and will to survive. The choice is ours, and the time to make it is now.

Shiel Yule

Tag: sustainability

The Art of Quantum Sidestepping