By this stage in the presidential campaign, much has been made of the severely conservative politics of Ron DeSantis. Voters have also become well acquainted with what a clumsy campaigner he is. But those two facts have perhaps eclipsed a third essential characteristic of the Florida governor: the astonishing sweep of his (apparently legal) corruption. DeSantis has demonstrated a prolific ability to use the power of government to raise money and reap other perks while working to shield that behavior from public view.

“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” one DeSantis aide wrote to others in 2019, in an email obtained by The Washington Post and published over the weekend. It was part of a broader strategy: Once DeSantis took office, his aides made a list of 40 lobbyists with a goal of raising millions for the governor’s political-action committee and other funds. For the golf scheme, the idea was to get a lobbyist to shell out, using his client’s cash, to play a round with DeSantis and his wife, Casey. Experts told the Post that the arrangement was legal under Florida law. DeSantis was aware of the plan and updated on its progress.

[David A. Graham: The queasy liberal schadenfreude of watching Trump wreck DeSantis]

“It’s about getting your phone calls returned and having the ability to make asks,” one lobbyist told the Post. “You want to engender access and goodwill with the governor.” A DeSantis campaign spokesperson, meanwhile, told the paper that “donors never have and never will dictate policy for Ron DeSantis—just ask Disney.”

But everyone already understood that most big donations are about buying access, even if it’s admirably blunt for one of the participants to say so on the record, albeit anonymously. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump was even more transparent, explaining his past donations to Democrats including Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding,” he said at one debate. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.” This frankness gave Trump credibility with some voters when he promised to “drain the swamp” of unethical behavior in Washington, though it should really have served as a warning about how he would operate in office.

DeSantis has promised to be a president like Trump but without the drama, and he has apparently learned from the former president how to use his office for personal benefit. As NBC News uncovered this spring, some members of the state administration hit up lobbyists for donations to DeSantis’s presidential campaign. Once again, this is probably legal—as long as the staffers weren’t using state resources or time on the clock to make the requests. Yet it’s also extremely sketchy. As one lobbyist pointed out, DeSantis will remain governor even if he doesn’t become president, so lobbyists have to maintain their access, especially because DeSantis has proved he’s willing to punish any perceived disloyalty.

Don’t cry for the poor lobbyists, who are writing checks out of client cash, and don’t cry for the clients, who are paying the lobbyists to get access in order to get what they want from the state government. The victims here are constituents who don’t have the money to drop on 18 holes with the governor and first lady. But not only is the public shut out of whatever the benefits of the spending are; DeSantis has done his best to make sure they can’t even know who’s doing the spending and on what.

One way he’s done this is to structure his political operation to obscure the spending. Someone paid for DeSantis’s flop of a trip to Europe, but good luck figuring out who. As Politico reported, DeSantis’s office said no taxpayer money went to the trip. But neither his PAC nor the state party disclosed any expenses related to the travel. DeSantis’s campaign has relied heavily on charter jets, many times with unclear funding. The New York Times was able to trace some of the tab to (surprise!) Florida lobbyists, but in other cases found that the funding was hidden from view by a nonprofit organization established to pay for them. (Now, with DeSantis’s campaign reeling, donors have become annoyed about all the expensive air travel.)

When clever loopholes in existing law don’t present themselves, DeSantis has changed the law. In May, DeSantis got the state legislature to pass a law that hides travel-related records from the public. “The law applies retroactively and would cover his extensive use of state planes throughout his time as governor. It would also cover records related to visitors to the governor’s mansion, opponents said,” CNN reported. Florida has long been a model for the nation on transparency laws, but DeSantis has worked to weaken such provisions.

[David A. Graham: How a purple state got a bright red sheen]

The campaign-finance system in the U.S. makes nearly every candidate for major office complicit, willing or not, in a distortion of democratic values through implied, and sometimes explicit, peddling of access. Even though DeSantis has been particularly zealous in embracing the possibilities, that hasn’t received the same sort of scrutiny that his campaign tactics or feud with Disney have. It should, though. Even if none of it is illegal, as so far appears to be the case, it is a form of corruption beyond even the normally grubby standards.

DeSantis’s aggressive approach on campaign finance is consistent with his embrace, as governor, of what I’ve called “total politics,” seeking to use the most aggressive methods available under law, precedent or prudence be damned. As with DeSantis’s record of conservative achievement as governor, one wouldn’t expect him to be able to translate all the same methods to Washington were he president. Federal laws are different from state laws, and Congress is not so easily bullied as a Republican-dominated, term-limited state legislature.

But his unethical approach here is likely a model for how he might approach the presidency. Perhaps no one should be surprised that Florida would produce such a swamp creature.

In Facebook’s youth, most of the website was powered out of a single building in Prineville, Oregon. That data center, holding row upon row of refrigerator-size racks of servers filled with rows of silicon chips, consumed huge amounts of electricity, outstripping the yearly power usage of more than 6,000 American homes. One day in the summer of 2011, as reported in The Register, a Facebook exec received an alarming call: “There’s a cloud in the data center … inside.” Following an equipment malfunction, the building had become so hot and humid from all the electricity that actual rain, from a literal cloud, briefly drenched the digital one.

Now Facebook, or rather Meta, operates well more than a dozen data centers, each much bigger and more powerful than the one in Prineville used to be. Data centers have become the backbone of the internet, running Amazon promotions, TikTok videos, Google search results, and just about everything else online. The thousands of these buildings across the world run on a shocking amount of electricity—akin to the power usage of England—that is in part, if not mostly, generated by fossil fuels. While the internet accounts for just a sliver of global emissions, 4 percent at most, its footprint has steadily grown as more people have connected to the web and as the web itself has become more complex: streaming, social-media feeds, targeted ads, and more.

All of that was before the generative-AI boom. Compared with many other things we use online, ChatGPT and its brethren are unique in their power usage. AI risks making every search, scroll, click, and purchase a bit more energy intensive as Silicon Valley rushes to stuff the technology into search engines, photo-editing software, shopping and financial and writing and customer-service assistants, and just about every other digital crevice. Compounded over nearly 5 billion internet users, the toll on the climate could be enormous. “Within the near future, at least the next five years, we will see a big increase in the carbon footprint of AI,” Shaolei Ren, a computer scientist at UC Riverside, told me. Not all of the 13 experts I spoke with agreed that AI poses a major problem for the planet, but even a moderate emissions bump could be destructive. With so many of the biggest sources of emissions finally slowing as governments crack down on fossil fuels, the internet was already moving in the wrong direction. Now AI threatens to push the web’s emissions to a tipping point.  

That hasn’t quite happened yet, as far as anyone can tell. Almost no data are available for how much carbon popular models such as ChatGPT emit (a spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment for this article). The emissions from AI are hard to calculate, depending on the computing power used in a data center, the amount of electricity it requires, and how that electricity is generated. Some signs suggest that electricity usage is already ticking upward during the AI boom. Water usage is a rough proxy for electricity demand, because data centers use water to stay cool, and their water usage across the globe is increasing quickly; Google’s on-site water use rose roughly 20 percent in 2022, Ren said, driven in part by investments in AI that are only growing.

[Read: America already has an AI underclass]

Generative AI produces emissions in three ways. First, carbon is burned to build the computer chips and data centers that AI runs on. Second, training a large language or other AI model requires power. Training a system like ChatGPT, for instance, can produce carbon emissions equivalent to those of several, if not several dozen, U.S. homes in a year, Jesse Dodge, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me. Third, the chatbot or any other end product requires electricity every time it is used. A language model from Hugging Face emitted about 42 pounds of carbon a day during an 18-day stretch in which it received 558 requests an hour, for a total equivalent to driving about 900 miles.

That might seem small, but those numbers could compound quickly as many billions of dollars continue pouring into generative AI. These programs are getting larger and more complex, with training datasets ballooning exponentially and models doubling in size as frequently as every three months. New models are constantly released, old ones frequently retrained. Even if a single chatbot message uses a tiny amount of energy, “we want to chat with anything and everything, and so these unit costs are going to really add up,” Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at Hugging Face who studies AI and sustainability, told me. As generative AI begins to fully saturate the web, deployment of bots could account for three-fifths of the technology’s emissions, if not far more.

Consider Google Search, which is already in the process of getting chatbot functionality. Google receives an average of 150 million search queries an hour, and each AI-powered search result might require five to 10 times as much computing power as a traditional one, Karin Verspoor, the dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, in Australia, told me. Data centers are already seeing their power consumption jump due to AI, and McKinsey predicts that data centers’ electricity use will more than double by 2030. Exactly how much of an emissions bump this would be is unclear, but “the bottom line is we have more people doing more sophisticated things on the internet, and that is going to lead to a significant increase in the overall energy,” Vijay Gadepally, a computer scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, told me.

That the chatbots will be a carbon bomb is far from guaranteed. Even without generative AI, global internet traffic has expanded 25-fold since 2010, but electricity use has climbed more slowly because of improvements in the efficiency of data centers, computer chips, and software. Data centers are asked to do more and more, but “the efficiency of how we produce the computing also goes up pretty fast,” Jonathan Koomey, a former researcher at Stanford who is an expert on the environment and digital technology, told me. While Google has expanded its machine-learning research in recent years, its electricity use has not outpaced the rest of the company’s, according to research from David Patterson, an emeritus professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. Some efficiency improvements will simply be economically necessary to turn a profit. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described the computing costs of ChatGPT as “eye-watering.” On its current path, AI could burn itself out before it burns up the planet.

In other words, although generative AI will require more computation, it may not proportionally increase electricity demand. Nor is rising power usage guaranteed to increase emissions as the world turns to  renewable energy, Mark Dyson, the managing director of the carbon-free-electricity program at the think tank RMI, told me. Spokespeople at Meta, Google, and Microsoft all pointed me to the investments they are making in renewable energy and reduced power and water use at their data centers as part of ambitious emissions-reduction targets. But those improvements could take years, and the generative-AI boom has already started. The need for data centers running AI to have a lot of power at all times could lead them to stick with at least some, if not substantial, fossil-fuel sources, Luccioni said. You can easily burn more coal or natural gas when needed, but you can’t make the wind blow harder.

Even if all of these efficiency improvements continue—in hardware, software, and the grid—they may not entirely cancel out the growing computational intensity of AI, Luccioni said, a phenomenon sometimes known as the rebound effect. When technology grows more efficient, the extra resources fuel more demand. More efficient coal-burning in the 19th century only accelerated industrialization, resulting in more factories running on coal; wider highways don’t ease congestion but lead more people to drive and can create even more traffic. Data centers and AI programs that use less electricity might just allow tech companies to cram generative AI into more websites and software. Silicon Valley’s business model, after all, relies on getting people to spend as much time as possible on websites and apps. A chatbot that emits less carbon per message, multiplied over exponentially more messages, would still increase emissions.   

[Read: The future of recycling is Sorty McSortface]

The carbon footprint of generative AI doesn’t need to grow exponentially to threaten the planet. Meeting our ambitious climate targets will require decreasing emissions across every sector, and AI makes it much harder to stabilize, let alone shrink, the internet’s share. Even if the tonnage of carbon the internet pumps into the atmosphere didn’t budge for decades—an improbably optimistic scenario—and everything else in the world reduced its emissions enough to stop warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as is the goal of the Paris agreement, that would still be “nowhere near enough” to meet the target, as one 2020 opinion paper in the journal Patterns put it. As AI and other digital tools help other sectors become greener—improving the efficiency of the grid, enhancing renewable-energy design, optimizing flight routes—the internet’s emissions may continue creeping up. “If we’re using AI, and AI is being sold as pro-environment, we’re going to increase our use of AI throughout all sectors,” Gabrielle Samuel, a lecturer in environmental justice and health at King’s College London, told me.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of AI’s carbon footprint is that, because the internet’s emissions have always been relatively small, almost no one is prepared to deal with them. The Inflation Reduction Act, the historic climate law Congress passed last year, doesn’t mention the web; activists don’t chain themselves to data centers; we don’t teach children to limit their search queries or chatbot conversations for the sake of future generations. With so little research or attention given to the issue, it’s not clear that anybody should. Ideally AI, like coal-fired power plants and combustion-engine cars, would face the economic and regulatory pressure to become emissions-free. Similar to how the EPA sets emissions requirements for new vehicles, the government could create ratings or impose standards for AI model efficiency and the industry’s use of renewable-energy sources, Luccioni said. If a user asks Google to decide whether a photo is of a cat or a dog, a less energy-intensive model that is 96 percent accurate, instead of 98 percent, might suffice, Devesh Tiwari, an engineer at Northeastern University, has shown. And does the world really need AI-powered beer brewing?

The internet can appear untethered from the physical world: digital and virtual, two-dimensional, in cyberspace instead of material space. A chatbot is not visibly plugged into a smokestack belching gray plumes, does not secrete the acrid smell of gasoline from an exhaust pipe. But the data centers and computer chips it connects to, and the electricity and carbon they generate, are of our world—and our problem.

What are we all doing here?

The Republicans’ first primary debate dangles on the calendar like one of those leftover paper snowflakes slapped up on the mini-fridge. It feels like a half-hearted vestige—it’s late summer, five months before the first votes are cast; precedent calls for a lineup of haircuts on a stage. And for the most part, the qualifiers will oblige, except for the main haircut—former President Donald Trump, barring some last-minute fit of FOMO that lands him in Milwaukee en route to his surrender to authorities in Georgia.

So why should the rest of us bother? Would anyone watch a Mike Tyson fight if Iron Mike wasn’t actually fighting? Or The Sopranos, if Tony skipped the show for a therapy session (with Tucker Carlson)?

Poor Milwaukee, by the way, which already suffered desertion three summers ago when it was selected to host the Democratic National Convention only to have COVID keep everyone home. Joe Biden blew off his own convention and didn’t bother to send an emissary (no Jill, Kamala, or even Doug). Delegates were told to stay away, and the city was left all spiffed up for only a crew of surgical-masked functionaries.

Tonight’s pageant of also-rans must go on too. The Republican National Committee has decreed this kickoff debate to be a landmark event, sanctifying August 23 as a key date in the 2024 cycle. (“Cycle” feels like an especially apt cliché here—events spinning hypnotically in circles.) Never mind that Trump upended the traditional presidential campaign cycle years ago, and that it is now dictated by whatever whim he decides to follow at a given moment. No matter how much thunder Trump steals from this proceeding—by skipping it, counterprogramming it with Tucker, and potentially following it up with a morning-after mug shot—everyone else is still required to treat this spectacle as some big and pivotal showdown.

[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]

As such, the media will swarm into town—because this is what we do and what we love (and because datelines impress). The host network, Fox News, will hype the clash—the “Melee in Milwaukee,” or some such. One-liners are being buffed, comebacks polished, and umbrage rehearsed. And no matter how effective certain gambits are deemed to be in practice, the absence of the GOP’s inescapable front-runner will only underscore how impotent the rest of the field has made themselves.

Who knows? A debate stage crowded with eight twitchy egos carries the possibility for surprise. Strange things do happen. That’s why we watch. Trump has given his opponents an opportunity, at least in theory. They can seize this chance to hammer away at the most important issue of the campaign: Trump himself, his radiating legal jeopardy, and the recurring debacle of the GOP nominating him again and again (and probably again). This need not be the televised festival of appeasement that so many expect. And no doubt, there will be a few feisty outliers on the stage. Some of the bottom dogs—Chris Christie, maybe Mike Pence—will probably unleash some unpleasantness in the direction of the truant front-runner. They will have their “moments,” and commentators will praise them for “landing some punches.”

Even so, tonight’s contest will inevitably suffer from two basic structural flaws. The main point, theoretically, of a political debate is to try to persuade voters to support your campaign instead of the other candidates’. But that presupposes a constituency of voters who can be persuaded by hearing a set of facts, or are open to being educated. This, on the whole, is not the audience we have here. A large and determinative and still deeply committed portion of the GOP electorate—the MAGA sector—has been more or less a closed box for seven years now.

The rigid devotion that Trump continues to enjoy from much of his party keeps affirming itself in new and dispiriting ways. A CBS News/YouGov poll released over the weekend contained this doozy of a data point: 71 percent of Trump supporters said they are inclined to believe whatever Trump tells them. That compares with 63 percent who are inclined to believe what their friends and family tell them, 56 percent who believe conservative-media figures, and 42 percent who believe religious leaders.

[Read: What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump]

The other structural defect involves the likely self-neutering of tonight’s putative gladiators. Ideally, a debate features participants who actually want to win. That generally requires a willingness to attack their biggest adversary, whether he’s participating in the event or not, and especially when he holds a massive lead over them. Other than Kamikaze Christie, whom Republicans will almost certainly not nominate, most of the remaining “challengers” on the stage seem content to play for second place—running mate or 2028.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis insisted otherwise on Monday, when he claimed on Fox News that he would be the only Republican debater who is “not running to be vice president, I’m not running to be in the Cabinet, and I’m not running to be a contributor on cable news.” This reeked of projection, even though DeSantis would seem especially ill-suited to being a cable personality—even less well suited than he is to running for president.

DeSantis suffered another indignity last week when The New York Times reported that a firm associated with the super PAC supporting his campaign, Never Back Down, had posted hundreds of pages of internal debate-strategy documents on its website. The game plan, summarized by the Times, called for DeSantis to “take a sledgehammer” to upstart Vivek Ramaswamy while also taking care to defend Trump from Christie’s likely bombardment. In other words, DeSantis would try to score easy goodwill by sidling up to the bully and vivisecting the real enemy, the thirsty biotech guy. So noble of the governor. Maybe Trump will send a thank-you note.

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth]

DeSantis remains, for now, the Republicans’ most legitimate threat to Trump. But if these debate directives are a guide, why is he even bothering? The blueprint appears fully emblematic of everything wrong with his campaign: a bloated venture, playing for continued viability, and zero stomach for taking on Trump in a serious way. It’s also telling that someone decided to post the document trove in such a findable space online—which is either really dumb or really indicative of how badly someone in DeSantis World wants to embarrass him.

Whether intentionally or not, DeSantis actually coined something memorable the other day when he chided Trump’s supporters for mindlessly following his every pronouncement—“listless vessels,” he called them. (He later said that he was referring to Trump’s endorsers in Congress, not voters.) This struck me as sneaky eloquence from DeSantis, or whoever wrote the line for him. But again, the phrase carried a strong whiff of projection as DeSantis prepared to lead the real parade of listless vessels to Milwaukee, content to bob along in the wake of the Titanic.