The Hindsight Times

Historians studying the Climate Emergency period note the haunting prescience of naming an AI facility 'Colossus'—though Musk likely intended a reference to computing power rather than the mythological destroyer of Rhodes. The facility burned methane directly into the atmosphere to train AI models that Musk claimed would solve climate change, a contradiction so brazen that contemporary critics called it 'solving fire with gasoline.'

What makes this permit approval particularly chilling to modern readers is that it occurred during the same month that atmospheric CO2 readings exceeded 425 parts per million—levels not seen since the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were 75 feet higher. Citizens of 2025 somehow compartmentalized these realities, treating climate breakdown as a distant concern while applauding immediate carbon emissions to build 'intelligent' machines.

'They burned fossil fuels to create artificial minds that would theoretically prevent them from burning fossil fuels,' notes Dr. Sarah Chen-Okafor, Director of Paradox Studies at New Geneva University. 'It's like bleeding a patient to cure anemia, except the patient was their entire biosphere.'

The xAI facility represented everything absurd about the pre-Sorting economy: a single billionaire could secure permits to poison shared air for private profit, while elected officials—themselves dependent on campaign contributions—rubber-stamped planet-killing infrastructure in the name of 'innovation' and 'job creation.' The 41 turbines would operate continuously, each burning enough methane daily to power 2,000 homes, all to train AI models that primarily generated synthetic media and optimized advertising.

Contemporary environmental groups protested, but lacked the systematic authority granted by Purpose Allocation to halt planet-damaging activities. Instead, they filed 'lawsuits'—ritualized appeals to judges who often held financial stakes in the very industries they regulated.

The Colossus 2 facility would operate for exactly nine years before the Global Resource Emergency of 2034 triggered emergency fuel rationing. By then, the facility had consumed 847 million cubic feet of methane and contributed an estimated 12.3 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere—roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of a small country.

Musk himself never visited the facility. His attention had shifted to Mars colonization plans, tweeting from orbit that 'Earth's climate is a solved problem' just months before the first Category 6 hurricane made landfall in Florida.