SA Drink Of The Week

Mark Rowland

Musical Pilgrimage

Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the “carbon glutton” and “silicon saviour” camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons paradox and the “time value of carbon” complicate any tidy answer. He leaves listeners with a practical, human-scaled way to think about their own digital footprint.

Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery supplies the South Australian Drink of the Week, and it’s a genuine coup: their single malt has just been named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, outscoring Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal. Head distiller Paul Burnett returns to the show to talk peat, oak and the fine art of finishing a whiskey in casks that once held tawny, muscat and Tokay.

The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode on a reflective note, with Steve premiering his own composition, Higher Legacy, written for two Adelaide City Council gardeners whose combined century of service tending the city’s parks and squares is honoured on a plaque in Rymill Park — and for everyone, past and present, quietly building something worth protecting.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: The Great AI Climate Debate

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:04:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There SA Drink Of The Week this week is 23rd Street Distillery Australian Single Malt Whisky.

Steve opens with a pop quiz: name a South Australian product that just outscored Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal at a fraction of the price. It’s whiskey, specifically Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery, freshly named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, with their single malt scoring 96 points against entries from 39 countries.

Head distiller Paul Burnett, returning for another visit, credits the win to restraint rather than showmanship: a low-level peat profile, around half a percent in the finished blend, used as what he calls a “complexing agent,” paired with an unusually wide range of cask finishes, from first-fill bourbon barrels to old tawny, muscat and Tokay casks. Steve, tasting alongside him, works through notes of honeyed fruit, fig, all-spice and a citrus edge that shifts as the glass warms in his hand, while Paul walks through the distinction between “heads, hearts and tails” in distillation and how the team’s small-batch, six-way finishing blend has quietly shifted in proportion release after release.

The pair also compare notes on serving it right: a proper tulip glass, a touch of water, room temperature rather than ice, and, in Paul’s case, a slice of chocolate or nuts alongside it. Steve, for his part, admits an evening spent testing whiskey sours and old fashioneds the night before only confirmed his preference for drinking it neat.

00:35:20 Mark Rowland and Adelaide Climate Action Week

Steve opens by declaring his hand: he uses AI daily for work, has solar and a battery, drives an EV, and admits the more he learns about what sits behind that lifestyle, the less smug he gets to feel about it. It’s a fitting frame for a conversation built around nuance rather than tribal certainty.

Mark explains why Adelaide Climate Action Week chose an actual Oxford-style debate over a polite panel discussion, tapping into people’s competitive instincts to get them to actually take a position rather than scroll through it. The audience voted before and after: undecided voters dropped from 24% to single digits, and belief that AI will be a net negative for climate rose from 56% to over 70%. The real story, though, was in the follow-up conversations, where the deciding factor wasn’t the argument itself but the time horizon people used. Ask about the next five years and the mood turns pessimistic; ask about 20 to 50 years out and people start to believe things will improve.

The pair dig into the “carbon glutton” case, distinguishing AI-specific energy demand from data centres in general, since cloud storage and streaming were already drawing power long before AI arrived. Mark points out that air conditioning, EV charging and industrial electrification are all expected to outgrow AI’s energy demands in the years ahead, and that steel and concrete for data centre construction already account for roughly 14% of global emissions. He also raises a genuinely alarming case: a data centre approval in an African nation that led authorities to cut off a village’s water supply, with fatal consequences, the kind of guardrail failure he says South Australia needs to avoid as its own data centre legislation opens the door to rapid growth.

On the more optimistic “silicon saviour” side, Mark describes a proposed Barossa data centre project that would generate two to three times the renewable energy it needs, feed the surplus back into the community, and capture atmospheric moisture from its waste heat to supply water to nearby farmers and wineries, reducing pressure on the Murray. He frames this as “hybrid intelligence” in action: letting machines handle the split-second optimisation work, like grid load-shifting to squeeze more renewables in without new poles and wires, while humans retain the judgement calls machines aren’t suited to.

Steve presses on the Jevons paradox, the pattern where efficiency gains simply invite greater use rather than genuine savings, and confesses to his own sprawling AI toolkit, from Claude to NotebookLM to Suno. Mark’s response is refreshingly proportionate: an individual’s prompt volume is negligible against industrial-scale use, and Google’s own sustainability reporting shows the energy and water cost per prompt has dropped by roughly half in a couple of years, even as overall usage climbs. The conversation lands on the “time value of carbon,” the idea that AI’s emissions are happening now while its promised climate benefits, if they arrive at all, are speculative and delayed. It closes with Mark’s own conviction, shaped by a master’s degree in climate change, that humanity’s Anthropocene-era warming is real, drawn partly from personal memory of snow days in his native England that simply don’t happen anymore.

Asked to leave listeners with something to hold onto, Mark returns to a theme James Clear would recognise from Atomic Habits: start with the smallest available step. Downloading rather than streaming a favourite album, watching YouTube at 720p instead of 4K on a phone, deleting old emails sitting in a data centre somewhere: none of it solves the problem alone, but it restores a sense of agency against the temptation to slide into overwhelm or apathy.

Further information

Adelaide Climate Action Week

Google’s 11th annual Environmental Report

01:27:56 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Higher Legacy by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos

The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unexpectedly personal turn this week. Prompted by a photograph shared in a local Facebook group of a plaque in Rymill Park honouring brothers Antonio and Carmine Lepore, whose combined century of tending Adelaide’s parks and squares began back when Clydesdales still pulled bakers’ carts through the suburbs, Steve wrote an original song called Higher Legacy.

Inspired by the plaque’s closing line, borrowed from the idea that a society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they’ll never sit in, the song also nods to Jane Goodall’s advice to Adelaide listeners years ago: when the world’s problems feel overwhelming, start with the square metre you’re standing on. Brought to life with Steve’s virtual session band, The Virtualosos, it’s offered as a piece for anyone who wants to take it, own it, and perform it as their own.

Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the &ldquo;carbon glutton&rdquo; and &ldquo;silicon saviour&rdquo; camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons paradox and the &ldquo;time value of carbon&rdquo; complicate any tidy answer. He leaves listeners with a practical, human-scaled way to think about their own digital footprint.
Renmark&rsquo;s 23rd Street Distillery supplies the South Australian Drink of the Week, and it&rsquo;s a genuine coup: their single malt has just been named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, outscoring Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal. Head distiller Paul Burnett returns to the show to talk peat, oak and the fine art of finishing a whiskey in casks that once held tawny, muscat and Tokay.
The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode on a reflective note, with Steve premiering his own composition,&nbsp;Higher Legacy, written for two Adelaide City Council gardeners whose combined century of service tending the city&rsquo;s parks and squares is honoured on a plaque in Rymill Park &mdash; and for everyone, past and present, quietly building something worth protecting.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: The Great AI Climate Debate
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:04:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There SA Drink Of The Week this week is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.23rdstreetdistillery.com.au/products/australian-single-malt-whisky">23rd Street Distillery Australian Single Malt Whisky</a>.
Steve opens with a pop quiz: name a South Australian product that just outscored Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal at a fraction of the price. It&rsquo;s whiskey, specifically Renmark&rsquo;s 23rd Street Distillery, freshly named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, with their single malt scoring 96 points against entries from 39 countries.
Head distiller Paul Burnett, returning for another visit, credits the win to restraint rather than showmanship: a low-level peat profile, around half a percent in the finished blend, used as what he calls a &ldquo;complexing agent,&rdquo; paired with an unusually wide range of cask finishes, from first-fill bourbon barrels to old tawny, muscat and Tokay casks. Steve, tasting alongside him, works through notes of honeyed fruit, fig, all-spice and a citrus edge that shifts as the glass warms in his hand, while Paul walks through the distinction between &ldquo;heads, hearts and tails&rdquo; in distillation and how the team&rsquo;s small-batch, six-way finishing blend has quietly shifted in proportion release after release.
The pair also compare notes on serving it right: a proper tulip glass, a touch of water, room temperature rather than ice, and, in Paul&rsquo;s case, a slice of chocolate or nuts alongside it. Steve, for his part, admits an evening spent testing whiskey sours and old fashioneds the night before only confirmed his preference for drinking it neat.
00:35:20&nbsp;Mark Rowland and Adelaide Climate Action Week
Steve opens by declaring his hand: he uses AI daily for work, has solar and a battery, drives an EV, and admits the more he learns about what sits behind that lifestyle, the less smug he gets to feel about it. It&rsquo;s a fitting frame for a conversation built around nuance rather than tribal certainty.
Mark explains why Adelaide Climate Action Week chose an actual Oxford-style debate over a polite panel discussion, tapping into people&rsquo;s competitive instincts to get them to actually take a position rather than scroll through it. The audience voted before and after: undecided voters dropped from 24% to single digits, and belief that AI will be a net negative for climate rose from 56% to over 70%. The real story, though, was in the follow-up conversations, where the deciding factor wasn&rsquo;t the argument itself but the time horizon people used. Ask about the next five years and the mood turns pessimistic; ask about 20 to 50 years out and people start to believe things will improve.
The pair dig into the &ldquo;carbon glutton&rdquo; case, distinguishing AI-specific energy demand from data centres in general, since cloud storage and streaming were already drawing power long before AI arrived. Mark points out that air conditioning, EV charging and industrial electrification are all expected to outgrow AI&rsquo;s energy demands in the years ahead, and that steel and concrete for data centre construction already account for roughly 14% of global emissions. He also raises a genuinely alarming case: a data centre approval in an African nation that led authorities to cut off a village&rsquo;s water supply, with fatal consequences, the kind of guardrail failure he says South Australia needs to avoid as its own data centre legislation opens the door to rapid growth.
On the more optimistic &ldquo;silicon saviour&rdquo; side, Mark describes a proposed Barossa data centre project that would generate two to three times the renewable energy it needs, feed the surplus back into the community, and capture atmospheric moisture from its waste heat to supply water to nearby farmers and wineries, reducing pressure on the Murray. He frames this as &ldquo;hybrid intelligence&rdquo; in action: letting machines handle the split-second optimisation work, like grid load-shifting to squeeze more renewables in without new poles and wires, while humans retain the judgement calls machines aren&rsquo;t suited to.
Steve presses on the Jevons paradox, the pattern where efficiency gains simply invite greater use rather than genuine savings, and confesses to his own sprawling AI toolkit, from Claude to NotebookLM to Suno. Mark&rsquo;s response is refreshingly proportionate: an individual&rsquo;s prompt volume is negligible against industrial-scale use, and Google&rsquo;s own sustainability reporting shows the energy and water cost per prompt has dropped by roughly half in a couple of years, even as overall usage climbs. The conversation lands on the &ldquo;time value of carbon,&rdquo; the idea that AI&rsquo;s emissions are happening now while its promised climate benefits, if they arrive at all, are speculative and delayed. It closes with Mark&rsquo;s own conviction, shaped by a master&rsquo;s degree in climate change, that humanity&rsquo;s Anthropocene-era warming is real, drawn partly from personal memory of snow days in his native England that simply don&rsquo;t happen anymore.
Asked to leave listeners with something to hold onto, Mark returns to a theme James Clear would recognise from Atomic Habits: start with the smallest available step. Downloading rather than streaming a favourite album, watching YouTube at 720p instead of 4K on a phone, deleting old emails sitting in a data centre somewhere: none of it solves the problem alone, but it restores a sense of agency against the temptation to slide into overwhelm or apathy.
Further information
<a href="https://my.acaw.org.au/">Adelaide Climate Action Week</a>
<a href="https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/sustainability/2026-environmental-report/">Google&rsquo;s 11th annual Environmental Report</a>
01:27:56&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to <a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/higher-legacy/">Higher Legacy by Steve Davis &amp; The Virtualosos</a>
The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unexpectedly personal turn this week. Prompted by a photograph shared in a local Facebook group of a plaque in Rymill Park honouring&nbsp;<a href="https://adelaideaz.com/articles/brothers-antonio-and-carmine-lepore-honoured-for-a-combined-century-of-tending-adelaide-city-park-lands">brothers Antonio and Carmine Lepore</a>, whose combined century of tending Adelaide&rsquo;s parks and squares began back when Clydesdales still pulled bakers&rsquo; carts through the suburbs, Steve wrote an original song called&nbsp;Higher Legacy.
Inspired by the plaque&rsquo;s closing line, borrowed from the idea that a society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they&rsquo;ll never sit in, the song also nods to&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/podcast-episodes/abc-edition-adelaide-beatles-chimps/">Jane Goodall&rsquo;s advice to Adelaide listeners years ago</a>: when the world&rsquo;s problems feel overwhelming, start with the square metre you&rsquo;re standing on. Brought to life with Steve&rsquo;s virtual session band, The Virtualosos, it&rsquo;s offered as a piece for anyone who wants to take it, own it, and perform it as their own.

A weekly podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, news, interviews, chat and quizzes. 

Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. 

The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis and Nigel Dobson-Keeffe.

Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday (when we have published a new episode) with an overview of that week's show. Plus, consider joining our Inner Circle; a small group of passionate South Aussies who allow us to pick their brains and gain interviewee suggestions.

This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, ...

The Adelaide Show

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

Mark Rowland, co-founder of Adelaide Climate Action Week, walks Steve Davis through the nuance behind the Great AI Climate Debate — carbon gluttons versus silicon saviours, the time value of carbon and the Jevons paradox — while 23rd Street Distillery's award-winning single malt takes out the South Australian Drink of the Week and a new original song, Higher Legacy, honours the parkland gardeners tending Adelaide's civic inheritance.