A) That datacenter is breaking the law, and the government isn’t enforcing it. The government absolutely should shut them down.

B) That’s only a single datacenter, we’re discussing Global usage and trends, not individual situations. As far as I know that’s the only datacenter doing that. There’s individual idiots who burn tires in their backyard too.

It’s fine, I’m just going to take advantage of you using AI. You’re clearly going to fall for that given that logic doesn’t matter to you at all.

You are trying to pinch a penny (reduce the power usage for something absolutely tiny) while ignoring your own choices that cause much larger wastes (large detached houses, car culture, meat heavy diets)

If you can’t understand how that’s a problem, your education has failed you.

Care to explain your logic that would make those things similar?

I’m pretty sure AI running in a datacenter isn’t causing someone to have an asthma attack, or forcing them to close their windows to avoid a horrific smell.

Again, while you’re right that the industry tried to hide it and use PR to obscure it. The fact that plastics weren’t being recycled wasn’t hidden information, it was publicly visible to anyone who read up on it. This is an education and propaganda issue.

2009 Study saying the same thing. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article-abstract/364/1526/2115/20977/Plastics-recycling-challenges-and-opportunities?redirectedFrom=fulltext

2001 OECD Guidance that also identified that a lot of stuff didn’t get recycled, including plastics. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2001/03/extended-producer-responsibility_g1gh2874/9789264189867-en.pdf

Which itself refences studies done in the 90s and 80s about this same topic.

1993 https://one.oecd.org/document/OCDE/GD(93)194/en/pdf Table 1 in that document shows that less than 5% of plastics are being recycled.

However, you’ve sidetracked the conversation. The plastics industry DID lie, as have many other industries before it (Tobacco, Pesticides, Meat production, etc) however, I don’t see how that immediately makes AI bad. If every industry is bad, then why are we going after such a small industry instead of the existing giant ones?

You talk about plastics recycling, then link stuff about PFAS. You’re so confused you hurt yourself.

You literally just admitted that people got tricked by a company through propaganda to buy their products, while people knew and said there was a problem, ignored those people, and bought the products anyways. Then blamed the company.

It must be so easy to live your life in such ignorance. You never have to think hard about anything, just believe the marketing campaigns and ignore everything else.

This is exactly the same situation. You’re being lied to about AI, there is literally massive amounts of money flowing into anti-AI marketing right now, and instead of asking why anyone would spend money on that, you just accept it as truth because it doesn’t come from a company.

Ever heard the saying “Penny Shy and Pound Foolish”

It’s literally what you’re doing right now.

I’m not full of shit. Suburbanites have been blasting carbon into the atmosphere for a century at a rate the AI datacenters could only dream of. You’ve given no evidence to prove otherwise while I backed up my numbers.

Meanwhile 70%+ of pollution comes from industry.

Industry exists so that humans can consume. There is no industry on the planet who’s production (and energy use/pollution) can’t be directly or indirectly attributed to a human customer.

You buy the electricity that’s generated from the natural gas power plant. The pollution to produce and burn that is yours. Your car is made of metals that produced pollution and used energy (which also produced pollution) to extract and refine. That pollution is yours. The energy that went into rendering Toy Story 5, and building the movie theater, and growing the popcorn. That’s all yours.

Stop blaming industry, industry doesn’t exist unless people buy their products. You make the choices with your wallet.

It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)

That’s the projected increase from YOUR OWN FUCKING SOURCE by 2030, and it’s not 2%, it’s 0.38% of global energy use.

You’re clearly moving the goalposts because you recognize you’ve lost. I know it, you know it, and you’re still choosing to be mad about it instead of mad that global meat production uses somewhere between 12% and 20% of global energy usage. We could all literally start eating vegetarian, and save somewhere between 31x and 52x more energy than AI datacenters are projected to use. You could eat vegetarian just one day a week, and you’d still save somewhere around 5x as much energy.

You don’t practice what you preach, you’re a hypocrite.

It’s not even close to enough to eradicate poverty from this planet. You vastly overestimate how much small amounts of money affect things. It may pull some of the ultra-poor out of poverty, but a single $2,000 payment wouldn’t manage to get anyone in the first world out of poverty, and there are plenty of people living in the first world.

Cost of living varies by country, you’re trying to suggest that redistribution would help people, and it would, but A) that’s not how any sort of tax would be redistributed and B) the amount of money relative to each country isn’t enough to solve any of the problems we’re seeing.

Even if it is just a blip on the radar compared to energy that is used to survive, it is still more load that comes on top of current usage

You aren’t allowed to be this upset about AI power usage while at the same time almost completely accepting the individual choices you’re making to waste 100s of times more power. There’s a term for this, Hypocrite.

The scales you’re suggesting are just not even close to each other. We could build 10x more AI datacenters, and we (the population of the world) would still end up saving significantly more energy by eating meat one fewer day per week and eating vegetarian that day instead. I’m not even kidding.

The things we could do by adjusting our diets, choosing more appropriate housing sizes, cohabitating more, walking, biking, public transit. Individually every single one of those dwarfs the amount of energy used by AI by orders of magnitude.

It’s the equivalent of yelling at your kid for leaving the LED bulb on in their bedroom all day, when you drove them to school and picked them up and it’s only a mile away. One driving trip, one day, uses more energy than that bulb does if left on all year.

Those numbers are for US billionaires divided by US population. If you were to try to divide global wealth from billionaires vs global population it likely wouldn’t even be a thousand dollars.

You simply don’t seem to understand scale.

Lets use your article’s number. 68 Gigawatts of capacity required Globally, which is a little under 600 Terawatt hours per year. Global electricity production is around 29,000TWh Global total energy consumed per year (including non-electricity sources) is about 150,0000 to 160,000TWh

That puts AI use at about 2% of electricity use, and about 0.38% of total energy consumption. It’s quite literally a fraction of 1% even by your own numbers.

Your China argument math is bad as well. You can remove a billion people from China’s population, and they would still have more people than the US. They have 4.2x more people, and have only 2.8x as many carbon emissions.

My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.

If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.

Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.

The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.

Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.

The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.

Do me a favour. Go look up the energy use per person for me in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Then go look up the energy usage per person in the USA or Canada and tell me again how necessary it is that transport, food, and heating are required energy use at the levels that currently happen in North America. You can repeat that same look from the “good” countries I listed to even lower use areas like Lithuania who still manage to heat and feed themselves on even less.

The way we live here is wasteful beyond belief, and the total value of that waste makes global AI energy usage look like a rounding error on one of the decimal points.

I’ll even make it easy for you by giving you a link to a page that has these values. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Total Datacenter energy use globally is about 1.5% of total Electricity use, which electricity usage itself only makes up about 20% of total global energy use. All Datacenter use isn’t even AI use, it’s every single datacenter holding up the internet from Netflix to Amazon to the Wix page created for your home business.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand?country=~OWID_WRL

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

So again I assert (with sources that back me up) that AI energy use/pollution is a small fraction of a single percent of overall use.

You’ve been lied to, now you need to ask WHY you’re being lied to about AI energy use and pollution being a problem.

You’re also absolutely wrong about heating and transportation being necessities in their current form. There are real choices you can make to drastically reduce your footprint on the environment including things like living in a smaller home, or with more people under the same roof. Those choices can quite literally reduce your individual heating requirements by 70-90%, and often those housing options are located in higher density urban locations where public transit, walking, and cycling are significantly easier to do. Practically everyone in the world could live in Cities and realize these efficiencies, there’s no real reason stopping that from happening other than personal choice. People in North America have just normalized this ultra-spread out suburban bullshit that’s literally costing us the planet.