The Global Landscape of Environmental AI Regulation: From the Cost of Reasoning to a Right to Green AI

ArXi:2603.00068v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Artificial intelligence (AI) systems impose substantial and growing environmental costs, yet transparency about these impacts has declined even as their deployment has accelerated. This paper makes three contributions. First, we collate empirical evidence that generative Web search and reasoning models - which have proliferated in 2025 - come with much higher cumulative environmental impacts than previous generations of AI approaches.