But the Average joe using plastic straws is the real reason for climate change. /s
If there was money to be made from solving climate change, it would’ve been solved yesterday.
No one is arguing that
I think there’s a lot of money to be made in confronting climate change… but it will be made more than two fiscal quarters in the future, so capitalists are not just willing, but actually proud to ignore it.
You’d be correct. Recent estimates are that climate change caused issues will reduce global income by about 15% and cost $40 trillion annually by 2050.
They’d make more money by tackling climate change. It’s in the math. But that math has to be done over multiple years not just next quarter as you said.
it’s very well comprehensible if you’re good with numbers.
Billionaires trying to kill the rest of us faster.
They don’t realise that it’s gonna be their own funeral, too. Sure, Elmo and Bebos will most likely die of old age (or drug abuse) in a few decades but many of those cunts are under 30, and they absolutely will have to deal with the apocalyptic consequences of their actions.
And it’s not just them at this point; thousands of politicians and property developers are in it as well. I don’t think most of them are trying to do harm, they’re just blinded by greed.
They know that things are going to be shit. They just wasn’t the nicest yacht to live on when it does.
I think if they could fully comprehend what was happening right now, they wouldn’t do it.
It’s a hydra though. If a capitalist leader/billionaire/oil super power abdicates, all available capitalists swarm to fill the vacancy and rake in the power and profits that were given up.
They don’t care the world is ending due to their greed and corruption, they just want to be rich and powerful.
I don’t think that’s true.
I think they know the future is bleak, and they just want to have the best bio dome or whatever the case may be.
As in, they know they’re making things worse, but if they don’t do it someone else will. So in a bleak and shit future, do you want to live like a king, or choke to death like the rest of us.
maybe they are bitter because they cant live forever and want to take us out. Make as much money out of us as they can, live lavish life and leave everything in ruins after they are done. If we let them, we deserve it. But i dont think we should let them.
Anyone that can should do at least some act of resistance, even if it feels meaningless. Throwing a fucking rock at datacenter physically affects nothing, but symbolically it has value. Imagine 100 people throwin a rock at datacenter, while still likely doenst do anything it would be big message to everyone else. Though it would likely also result in getting into trouble, so everyone should also do some risk evaluation what they can get away with. But simple graffitti could also be effective or even just plain speaking your mind loudly about things.
And most importantly, what the enemy fears most is our unity. So everyone should definitely do everything they can to improve that. Together we stand, separated we die.
But i dont think we should let them.
Honestly, I don’t think we can really stop them. The only people they have to answer to are politicians/government officials and those can be bribed. Sure, we can protest data centres and stuff but even if we’re victorious in stopping one from getting built in place a, there’s always a place b.
I hope humanity hasnt become too docile, walking peacefully into the slaughterhouse.
Peaceful resistance is good if you have infinite amount of time, so we should be prepared to be non-peaceful and actually resist these fuckers. Maybe even forcing their hand and making them tighten the screws on populace to keep control would help with people wanting actual change because they wouldnt be so comfortable with the oppression anymore, i dont know.
but at this point i’m at peace with either option, resist or die. i just would prefer if humanity didnt go out / lose all potential because of few vile beings.
i just would prefer if humanity didnt go out / lose all potential because of few vile beings.
I’d prefer that as well but I feel so defenceless in the matter
Too used to money insulating from reality.
We really have literacy crisis on our hands. Their estimates put the industry (if we pretend it’ll not crash and keep growing) at 34 million tonnes of CO2. What percentage of USAs yearly emissions is that? 0,6% of net emissions.
It’s not the animal AG that’s doing it, not the oil industry, and not the car industry. It’s the 0,6% that MAYBE might happen.
I say this not to ignore those things, but to sensitize your valid impulse to fix global climate change issues to the real culprits. Most importantly, I’d like people to adjust their levels of effort and outrage to the actual impacts instead.
If you cared as much as you pretend you do, you’d already be vegan.
They don’t want us dead, they want us making money for them
Not really. They are actively trying to circumvent consumers as a step to making money. That is what the entire AI-circlejerk bubble is about.
That’s funny because I would prefer them dead and I bet there are more who think like me than there are who think like them. Maybe they should start getting frightened. I’m not saying we should kill them, but I wouldn’t bat an eye if they just dropped dead. And I bet not much would be lost for humanity after we sat down and made a plan how to redistribute their wealth and equity.
They’d really love it if we could be dead and making money for them. They live in hope!
Yes, but they also don’t care if the grand majority of us are dead.
They have what they need.
That’s why most have bunkers.
Fuckerbergs is in Hawaii.
They just want us to make money. They don’t give a fuck if you die.
Sometimes I wonder where we could be if all the AI money was spent on e.g. fusion energy research instead.
I guess we would be 30 years from stable scalable fusion reactions?
I’ve been cynical about them for years but there’s been enough interesting milestones crossed lately that I wonder if an injection of AI money wouldn’t just do the trick.
Who cares about fusion? There was a study in the late 90’s stating that if only 10% of the capital put towards oil research, exploration, extraction, etc, annually, was put towards renewable energies it would catapult the research output by a factor of 30, by year.
We could have, by now, moved completely towards renewables for everyday life needs and start towards producing more energy we could ever need and put that excess towards greater achievements.
We could be exploring the stars instead. NASA’s original plan was land on Luna, survey, then build a shipyard. Instead we just launched a rocket asap and told Ivan to suck it. The centuries long plan NASA had was just…one small step
You solve the problems you have at home before you start making yourself concerned with what your neighbor is doing at theirs.
Space exploration, as it was sold to the general public, was an arms race. The public demonstration of which nation could build faster the engine and carcass capable of delivering a nuclear payload on the other. The money spent on that would have been better spent towards achieving true and long lasting civilizational goal, like disease and poverty erradication, environmental preservation, clean energy and so forth.
It’s the broken window falacy.
Remember when Elon was all about “transitioning the world to sustainable transportation”? LOL
He was never about that.
He said he was, but actions speak louder and if he ever was he’d be promoting Hydrogen-electric with a Hydrogen ICE transition* instead of battery electric which isn’t sustainable and is environmentally disastrous in its own way.
*Diesel ICE can be converted to Hydrogen ICE (note: they still need ~5-10% diesel, so it’s not a forever technology) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/engineering/research-technology/is/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-hydrogen
Give it up. Hydrogen is not happening. Batteries have won. Now we need to move to more sustainable chemistries.
Oh, and yeah, Elon was always just posing.
While I believe that the various pushes for hydrogen in cars and light trucks is a shameless attempt at replacing the revenue stream from petrol, hydrogen does make a lot of sense for heavy trucks, trains, ships - anywhere diesel or bunker fuel is used now.
Batteries have a much smaller overall environmental footprint than traditional ICE vehicles. Hydrogen is also produced at scale in a super dirty way right now. There is no clean way to produce hydrogen fuel. So, our goal should be less travel overall, public transit, and EVs, in that order.
If we find a way to mass produce hydrogen in a clean way, then I’m all for hydrogen vehicles. But, we aren’t there yet.
My diesel car has run on B100 (100% biodiesel) just fine for years. That’s already good enough and requires no new technology or infrastructure Hydrogen is stupid as hell.
Hydrogen can make some degree of sense if we take as an energy reserve, stockpileable, for an event where it is necessary to suplement energy needs.
So many countries with solar farms being turned off to prevent grid collapse could consider building hydrogen plants or, those with sea acess, dessalination stations, to stockpile fresh water underground and extract minerals directly from the water.
Found the Toyota rep
“Futurism” hits like a religious word now that you need a blind faith that’s contrary to logic to believe there’s a future for us at all.
That is fundamentally a problem with using polluting power sources, not AI. AI is just wasting huge amount of power, but that wouldn’t nearly be as big of a problem with clean power sources.
I heard this before:
That is fundamentally a problem with using polluting power sources, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just wasting huge amounts of power, but that wouldn’t nearly be as big of a problem with clean power sources.
I am 100% sure big oil is heavily invested in pushing AI data centers.
Feels more like the fossil fuel industry would be quite happy with people pointing fingers at AI for the more fundamental problem they are causing.
They are the same. AI companies are using excess energy powered by fossil fuels for no reason at all. We don’t need it. If they were using renewable energy then they would be taking renewable energy from projects that are much more important for our daily survival.
All energy consumed by AI is energy we could have spend for something actual useful. That they are using fossil fuels just underlines what a mountain of “fuck you” to humanity the entire AI project is. It exists solely to provide more billions for billionaires and no other reason.
Same is true for meat. Meat is to nutrition what AI is to intelligence. An extremely wasteful, ultimately unnecessary version with better alternatives.
The main difference for all the complainers is of course that they already don’t use AI. Not using meat would, in contrast, require actual effort beyond moaning and bitching.
If your morals depend on whether it requires personal effort, you’re not moral, you’re a hypocrite.
If they were using renewable energy then they would be taking renewable energy from projects that are much more important for our daily survival.
Exactly … the problem with AI is that it’s wasting energy.
Then there is another problem, which is that a lot of our energy comes from sources that cause pollution.
The wasting of energy would not be that significant of a problem if enough clean energy was available. They are not the same. Just related.
Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.
They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.
Regardless of what power source you use, all of the power going into a datacentre comes out as heat. So even a 1GW solar plant powering an AI datacentre is putting 1GW of heat into the atmosphere.
This is MAGA levels of bad take lol
Sure but if we are building out renewable capability as quick as we can, but it’s being outstripped by demand, then maybe demand is part of the problem.
We aren’t, though, not even close. And we’ve also been holding back over the years. Trump even paid a german company to abandon an already approved offshore windpark.
Even still, I beg people to stop falling for the same sensationalist trick that makes every conservative foam at the mouth about immigrants. PUT ABSOLUTE NUMBERS INTO RELATION TO SOMETHING!! What is the estimated 34 million in 2030 in percent? What is the impact of non-veganism in the same time? What percentages are we looking at?
Our outrage and effort should be in relation to the negative impact of each problem. Animal AG has a gigantic impact in every sensible metric, and it’s far far far bigger than AI. Be honest, do you think even a fraction of the loudest complainers about AIs resource use are vegan?
Can we really believe people whose morality stops wherever they’d personally need to actually do more than bitch and moan?
Wait till you see what the US military does!
Bring back filing cabinets and stationary. This has all gone too far.
Usable quantum computing will annihilate the need for these data centres. They’ll be defunct within a decade. The earth will be worse off and the money laundering that they provide will move elsewhere. Fuck this timeline.
Sorry to burst your bubble but DC’s aren’t going anywhere. Even if we are in a position to make quantum computers commercially available in the next 10 years they’ll still need to be housed somewhere, powered, cooled and connected.
Besides, quantum computers are great at complex calculations and simulations but you wouldn’t use them to host a website or a VPS. They’ll be hideously expensive so will only be used for the specific workloads that they excel at and everything else will done with the same servers we have now.
AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don’t require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.
Neural nets and LLMs are not doing complex math, they’re doing very large amounts of simple math. Quantum computing is probably not going to accelerate our current NN tech.
This is why GPUs are excellent for AI applications, they are built around the goal of doing large amount of pixel shader computations, which is pretty simple math. You could do the math to shade a pixel by hand, for example.
Fair enough, I didn’t realise they were so different from traditional DC’s.
They shouldn’t be. One of the issue the sheer size and volume, they’re being built based only on speculation not actual need (all the ssd/ram/gpu are sitting in warehouses waiting for these DC to be built — if they’re fabricated at all). They’re also being built where it’s cheap, not where they would be needed (industrial and urban areas) just to save money, externalize costs, and avoid regulations.
They’re not servers. It’s just gpus. It’s not really a data center, basically the same as bitcoin mining.
They’re still servers, the focus is on the GPU side though. A single DGX B300 has 8 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 2 Xeon 6776P CPUs. And networking, RAM, storage. Consumes 14 kilowatts and looks like this
You COULD host a website on one if you wanted to. You’d be stupid to do it, but you could.
Sure, sure… Host them in space, built from privately mined asteroids and powered by fusion!!!
If AI is so wonderful they could afford to put up solar panels to power the data centers.
What happens at night?
You’re being sarcastic, right?
Sure if you like
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So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that’s not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can’t keep doing.
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The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US’s largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.
Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.
Its one of those things right?
If AI was so great we should be seeing OpenAI and Anthropic investing in high schools and Universities, “the next generation” so to speak. If AI is “so cool” we should be seeing investment in the next generation to use it. But we are not seeing that, OpenAI got $50 billion from Nvidia and all of that went on Nvidia GPUs, none of it went towards the people who will be using it in 20 years!
You have this thing that a lot of very rich people think is going to be biger than the printing press or the internet and they are not facilitating people to learn it… Their moto seems to be “build it and they will come”.
Think what you want about AI… “It is the best thing since sliced bread” or “it is the Anti Christ”. These companies need 10x even 100x uptake to justify this years spending, Alone. Never mind next financial year. These companies need so much more uptake to be profitable to the point where the level of investment from the MAANG companies makes sence that we should be seeing investment in schools and universitiy programs for these tools to be used so that the next generation and the generation after that, wants to use these tools. Amazon used to run hackathons where they would promote their tools over Microsoft or Google because they knew the developers who use their tech will advocate for their tech. We are not aeeing that level of support for AI tools and, to me, that speaks volumes.
Yep. Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need and is a huuuuuge amount crueller and orders of magnitude more polluting. Get rid of both and we’d be like a quarter of the way to fixing our emissions
Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need
I can eat steak. I cannot eat AI.
This is a popular notion, but I don’t think it’s correct, based on the precipitous drops in pollution that the world experienced after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID closures.
The collapse of the travel industry and the significant decrease in daily commuting after both of these events created unprecedented improvements in air quality and carbon output, and the animal herds weren’t any smaller.
AI datacenters are 3-4 orders of magnitude more polluting than agriculture comparatively. There’s just currently more agriculture than datacenters, which is something these AI companies would like to change
Get rid of both like I said, it’s not like we’re fighting for one to have the right to ruin our world over the other.
I’d love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.
Animal agriculture: The FAO’s most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030
Animal agriculture only causes more pollution than AI data centers today because Agriculture is a mature industry with thousands of years of supply and demand built up over time, whereas the AI datacenter boom has barely begun.
One Acre of land used for livestock farming emits on average 0.5-1 metric ton of CO2 equivalent annually.
One Acre of land used for a datacenter is anywhere from 150-300 metric tons of CO2 annually.
I love you Lemmy math nerds. Thank you.
What a great title
Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
Too much too.
But muh brisket…
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that’s a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
- 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
- To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
- So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
- That’s 2% of all americans
That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
- Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
- Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
- Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don’t we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I’m not American, don’t insult me by assuming I’m one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
So less food variety and I get trash for the trade, are you the White run merchant buying any random crap the Dragonborn drags in by any chance?
or have double meat and no ai.
Sounds like a bad solution to me
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
A quarter of Americans eating more chicken because it’s better for the environment is even more realistic. Chicken is tasty!
Personally I’ll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there’s ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
I’m not vegan and yours is a shitty take, sorry to have to tell you this.
So you’re a childish contrarian asshole, who cares
Finally looked in a mirror eh?
What a whiny little bitch you are.
I’m not even vegan. But meat eating morons signal posting that they’re sick of vegans are way more common and annoying than vocal vegans.
Its such a overplayed prejudice for as long as i can remember. I came across overreaching vegans which actually annoyed me maybe five times in my life. Signalposting meat heads are more like a weekly occurance.
Random vegan at a bbq “hey, can i have small sliver of aluminum foil for my stuff and if you guys dont half intentionally wrench the meat juices over my veggies, that would be cool”
What always follows: 10-30 minute moronic rant of some meathead because eating meat is his whole personality.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there’s always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
But…but…but… the RAGE! With a measured approach to topics like that, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUEL THE RAGE!!!11
Listen, an AI waifu is worth the increased speed of destruction to the planet.
You: “How much will this speed up our doom?”
Your waifu: “Calculating… oh, it’s actually less than 1%.”
tears in your eyes the Old Yeller soundtrack starts playing
I probably should have /s this comment. I don’t have or want at AI waifu. If I’m wrong please say so, but it sounds like you’re nbd’ing AI waifus because they aren’t the worst offender.
P.S. Please cite ya sources for this 1% number.
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
I present to you…the French.
The French that started by beheading kings and nobles… and shortly after anyone who had a slightly different opinion? The French who shortly after that madness had a new Emperor? THAT French?
Abolitionists are an easy example.
Now if you mean a majority of people, yeah not really. But people in general, it happens.
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it’s energy from non CO2 emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
“AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.”
A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There’s a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn’t just cleaner, it’s cheaper.
What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:
- Humanity’s apparent level of dependence on fossil fuels, when accounting for deliberately wasteful endeavours like mega data centres. and
- Humanity’s actual level of dependence on fossil fuels. This is higher than it should be and requires some changes to society to improve, but it’s not nearly as high as it might seem at a glance.
These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch
Chatgpt, why is it incomprehensible?
grock, summarize this answer.
Headline is very sensational. The article says the estimates greenhouse emissions are ~24-44 million metric tons, which is about .69% of the estimated emissions of the entire country, according to the EPA estimate of 6343 million metric tons.
Less than 1% of all emissions is hardly incomprehensible.
The source the article draws from also says they could reduce the emissions by 73% and water usage by 86% range with proper infrastructure, so that’s cool.
I personally believe the political and socioeconomic impact I’d far worse. We’re being shown very clearly how easily bought out local governments and regulatory agencies are. Explaining why the proper infractructure to resolve these data center issues is so difficult to enforce.
by the current weight of growth my niece will weigh 260.000 kg by 2030
