Today, more than one billion people across 193 countries mark Earth Day — the largest secular civic event on the planet. In Rio, school children are planting trees. In Tuvalu — one of the world's most climate-threatened nations — communities are gathering at the lagoon to demand action. In Italy, clothing swaps and repair workshops are filling town squares. One planet, ten thousand different expressions of the same urgency.
A day that means different things, everywhere
Earth Day was born in 1970, when 20 million Americans took to the streets in the largest environmental demonstration in history. It went global in 1990. But what it looks like — and what it feels like — varies enormously depending on where you are and what you stand to lose.
The theme for Earth Day 2026 — Our Power, Our Planet — is a call to triple global renewable energy by 2030, powered not by any government alone, but by communities and businesses acting together. That framing resonates with us.
🇹🇻 Pacific Islands Rising seas are a present reality here. Earth Day is a chance to be heard by a world that created a crisis they did little to cause. | | 🇧🇷 Latin America Tree planting, river cleanups, youth-led climate education. The Amazon’s fate remains one of the most watched environmental stories on earth. | | 🇮🇳 India The LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment) movement promotes eco-conscious habits as daily practice — championed at COP26 and beyond. | | 🌍 Europe Clothing swaps, circular economy events, and policy summits. With four years to the 2030 SDG deadline, turning ambition into action is the central conversation. |
It's a collective challenge. And it includes us.
A reflection we owe you: the cost of AI
Here at Pencil, we build AI. And on a day like today, we think it's important to be honest about what that means for the planet.
Building with AI means holding a genuine complexity. The infrastructure behind it — data centres, hardware, cooling systems — is among the fastest-growing consumers of energy and fresh water in the world. These are real costs, and the industry is still learning how to account for them honestly.
At the same time, AI used with intention can genuinely reduce footprint. Fewer physical reshoots. Less overproduction. Faster iteration without the logistics — the flights, the sets, the print runs — that traditional production requires. Some leading models reduced their energy cost per query by over 30 times in a single year. The picture is more complex than either the optimists or the sceptics tend to allow.
"If we want AI to genuinely contribute to a sustainable future, we first need a clear picture of its environmental cost to society. That starts with transparency." — Alex de Vries-Gao, researcher, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
We're not going to pretend those challenges aren't ours to grapple with too. The honest position is this: AI has a footprint, and every company building with it has a responsibility to understand it, reduce it, and be open about it.
Something to hold Data centre energy and water use is growing rapidly. Transparency across the industry on environmental impact is still incomplete — and worth pushing for. | | Something to build on AI can displace higher-footprint activities. Efficiency is improving fast. Used thoughtfully, it enables teams to do more meaningful work with less physical waste. |
But there's another side to this story
There's another dimension worth considering. Advertising has always been a physically intensive industry — shoots, sets, flights, print runs, packaging, and dozens of concept iterations that never make it past the first review. A significant amount of that production never reaches an audience at all.
AI doesn't change the underlying creative challenge. But it does change the footprint of getting there. Fewer reshoots. Less material waste. Faster iteration that doesn't require a plane ticket. For smaller brands especially, the ability to test and refine at scale — without the logistics of traditional production — is genuinely new.
None of that makes AI a green technology by default. It makes it a more efficient one, when used with intention.
Using AI more sustainably
Efficiency matters at every level. Simpler, well-structured prompts generate fewer tokens — and fewer emissions. Task-specific models use orders of magnitude less energy than general-purpose ones. And using AI to replace a physical reshoot is a fundamentally different act than using it to generate noise. Intent shapes impact.
The planet is asking for less noise, more meaning
There's a creative dimension to all of this that we think about a lot at Pencil. The world is saturated with content. Billions of ads, posts, reels, and banners are produced every year — most of them immediately forgotten. A significant chunk never needed to exist. And the planet, in its own way, is asking us to reconsider that equation.
What if Earth Day isn't just a prompt to reduce our physical footprint — but also our creative one? What would it mean to make fewer things, but better things? To use the efficiency that AI provides not to produce more volume, but to produce more meaning?
The brands that tend to resonate most on sustainability don't make more noise about it. They make something that lands — and then they stop. One honest campaign, deeply felt, is worth a thousand impressions of greenwashing. The same logic applies to how we use the tools we build.
Today, as communities from Tuvalu to Turin mark the urgency of this moment, we're thinking about our role in it. Not just in the data centres behind our product — but in every brief, every asset, every creative decision made using Pencil. The power to make is also the power to choose what's worth making.
Happy Earth Day, from everyone at Pencil. 🌿
This year's theme is Our Power, Our Planet. We think that's a brief worth taking seriously.
