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.
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.
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.
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
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
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
AI will solve this! We just need more data centers!
/s
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the people behind the biggest investment and financial scam of the century would, to make more money, fuck up people other than just investors!
by the current weight of growth my niece will weigh 260.000 kg by 2030
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.
But it’s WORTH IT when ChatGPT will be able to DIAGNOSE your CANCER because you ate WOODCHIPS after using a Recipe ChatGPT gave you when you asked for Advice on SWIMMING!
Chatgpt, why is it incomprehensible?
grock, summarize this answer.
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.
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.
No one is arguing that
Bring back filing cabinets and stationary. This has all gone too far.
If AI is so wonderful they could afford to put up solar panels to power the data centers.
I’m gonna throw some numbers around based on a conversation with my friend the other day.
He works at an oil refinery nearby and under heavy load the whole facility can use up to 150MW of electricity. That’s while being rated as one of the least environmentally harmful refineries in the US. They have ~300 acres of solar panels supplying ~35MW over the course of a full day (~50MW during daylight hours). That means 20~25% of their power needs are fully renewable.
He also mentioned that the new Meta datacenter going up nearby is projected to use ~400MW! That’s two and a half oil refineries! That also means that to cover its electricity use they would need to set up ~2800 acres of solar panels. That’s ~11 times the footprint of the datacenter itself and two large farms worth of space on some of the best farmland in the country!
They definitely should be 100% powering the facility with renewables, but even then I don’t think model training justifies the space and resources that need to be invested to accomplish that.
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.
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.
What happens at night?
You’re being sarcastic, right?
There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.
One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we’ll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.
Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.
What a great title
Billionaires trying to kill the rest of us faster.
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.
Sometimes I wonder where we could be if all the AI money was spent on e.g. fusion energy research instead.
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.
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.
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.
See they think they’re doing Human Instrumentality from NGE
That they will discover true AGI in their lifetime, and then use it to become a living god.
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.
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.
Yes, when people get to a certain level of rich, they generally lack vision and imagination; they don’t need it anymore.
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.
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.
Too used to money insulating from reality.
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
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.
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.
Found the Toyota rep
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.
And when the AI bubbles bursts and the memory is spent it’s all going to be e-waste
You’re kidding yourself. They’re going to be bailed out by our fascist oligarchies, with contracts to use the data centers for totalitarian mass surveillance “to protect our freedom and national security”.
Not if you organize and do something against it
Except the bailout at this point is more money than exists, you’d have to print so much money as to cause instant hyper inflation and cause an even worse economic crash that would take AI with it anyway.
The data centers will be deemed more necessary to keep track of all the possible dissidents caused by the hyper inflation
For a while, I thought their end-game was simply to get “too big to fail” before the bubble burst and get that bailout. But you are right - they either overshot or have some other idea in mind because now they are too big to bailout.
Hey, at least we’ll be able to make one last upgrade before we die.
Oh my sweet summer child…
“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.
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
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
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
I love you Lemmy math nerds. (Not sarcasm.)
Thank you.
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.
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.
Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need
I can eat steak. I cannot eat AI.
