9 papers covering AI energy and water consumption, embodied carbon, the Jevons rebound, sustainable AI practice, and the token cost of agentic coding. The OECD policy report and several agentic-energy references are link-only.
Each entry links to the canonical version of the paper — on arXiv, the journal, or the publisher. Where a paper is paywalled, the DOI is given for UCT-library access.
3.1 · What Does AI Actually Consume?
Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models
Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?
How Do AI Agents Spend Your Money? Analyzing and Predicting Token Consumption in Agentic Coding Tasks
3.2 · Infrastructure, Scale and the Rebound Problem
Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing
Efficiency is Not Enough: A Critical Perspective of Environmentally Sustainable AI
The Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training Will Plateau, Then Shrink
3.3 · Critical Minerals and AI
Sub-lesson uses news reporting and policy documents (CHIPS Act, EU CRMA, US Geological Survey) which aren’t redistributable PDFs.
3.4 · Sustainable AI: What Can Be Done?
Green AI
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
The agentic-energy estimate in Sub-Lesson 3.1 also draws on these non-paper sources (reports and documentation rather than academic papers):
- Stanford Digital Economy Lab (2026). How are AI agents spending your tokens? — analysis of the token-consumption study above.
- Anthropic (2026). Effort documentation (Claude effort levels: low / medium / high / xhigh / max) — platform.claude.com
- US EPA. Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle (~0.25 kg CO₂/km) — epa.gov
- Republic of South Africa (2024). 2022 Grid Emission Factors Report (~0.9 kg CO₂/kWh) — gov.za PDF
Linked but not redistributed
OECD (2022). Measuring the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence compute and applications. DOI:10.1787/7babf571-en 3.4
Open-access on the OECD library — included as a link rather than a downloaded copy because the OECD URL changes occasionally.