- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.
Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.
Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.
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These companies 100% said they’d be carbon neutral by 2030 in order to take the wind out of the sails of people pushing for carbon taxes, rather than because they actually intended on doing it.
Could be the other way as well. Prepare to become carbon neutral in order to have less tax burden. But once that fell though, they didn’t care again. The only way they will be carbon neutral is if governments make it more expensive for them to not be.
Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.
Time to use less paper straws, folks #weareinthistogether🌎
I turn off my lights when I’m not in a room and don’t own a server farm. #doingmypart🌳
I realized the reading lights on my private jet were all incandescent. Recently flew it to Italy and had them swapped out there for LED.
BUT YOU PLEBS BETTER NOT TURN ON THE AC
The stuff about tech companies going carbon neutral or whatever was such bullshit. It was clear this was mostly PR and if there was a need to massively increase carbon emissions (as happened with current “AI” trends), they wouldn’t think twice.
It would seem that we shall be requiring you peasants to give up another 10% of your daily carbon footprint to meet the demands of our new machine overlord.
to meet the demands of our new machine
overlorddunsel
But by all means, everyone don’t use plastic straws! You’re killing the environment!
Plastic straws are harmful to sea turtles. That is why their use has been reduced.
Do you like turtles?
I know this is true, but I find it bizarre that there’s this fixation on straws and not the hundred other things we are likely doing that also kills turtles.
It’s like someone saw that viral video of the turtle with a straw up it’s nose and decided that’s the only thing to focus on.
Detractors have that fixation on straws, for the EU legislature it was just another regulation among many.
Also the plastic straw fixation is now kinda fading in favour of attached bottle caps. People will literally lose 50 IQ points and stub their nose to spite Berlaymont instead of rotating the bottle 90 degrees.
I bought this like, prepared meal thing. It was like curry or something. Packaged, shelf stable. It harked on eco-friendly packaging. I figured, I’ve gotten curry before that was in a foil bag which I assume is easily recyclable. Probably something like that, right?
Every component was individually plastic wrapped. Even the bowl. Except for the bamboo “spoon”. That was wrapped in paper. I put “spoon” in quotes because it was vaguely spoon shaped and functioned more like an oat from a rowboat.
Like, was this just a piss poor attempt at green washing?
No straw though, right? You’re in the clear.
Yeah dawg we can’t possibly do two things that are good for the environment, we have to pick one. Everyone knows that.
I pick guillotining the rich as my one thing
What about choking them with plastic straws?
who would have guessed the giant corporation would have lied about something, because we haven’t been lied to before.
I wonder if this is taking into account the energy mix of the particular data centers, or just using the average energy mix?
Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.
Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.
But you can measure how much of the power of a grid is generated with fossil fuels at a particular place and time. For example, if they have more data centers where energy is cheap like from hydro or geothermal, then the carbon footprint will be less than if they were just using average power statistics.
That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)
While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.
I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.
using surplus power to make steel
isn’t steel still primarily made through the coking process? Or is that transitioning to more efficient means, last i heard the barrier was efficient hydrogen generation.
You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.
In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.
https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)oh, you were talking about europe" I was thinking about america. Yeah i imagine it’s going to be a while here.
Steel mills operate in two distinct ways. The traditional production method occurs at large, vertically integrated mills, which use ovens to heat coal into coke;1 combine the coke with iron ore in a blast furnace to produce pig iron; and then melt the pig iron in a basic oxygen furnace to produce liquid steel. This production process is commonly known as the Blast-Furnace/Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) method. The alternate method occurs through “mini-mills,” which use electric arc furnaces (EAFs) to melt steel scrap and, in some instances, use iron pellets to produce liquid steel. Unlike integrated mills, mini-mills do not require coke ovens or blast furnaces. However, some mini-mills use a process called direct reduction to remove oxygen from iron ore with heat from burning natural gas; the resulting product, direct reduced iron (DRI) or sponge iron, is turned into a lump, pellet, or briquetted form that can be transformed into liquid steel in EAFs.2 Once steel is produced in its liquid state, it is cast into rectangular slabs (long billets a few inches on a side) or other shapes and left to cool. Rolling mills then shape the semifinished steel into a variety of products, generally classified as either “flat” products (plate and coils of steel sheet) or “long” products (bars, rails, wire rods). The rolled steel products often undergo additional finishing operations, such as coating, painting, and galvanizing, to produce finished steel. Figure 1 shows the process for manufacturing iron, steel, and finished steel products.
pulled from a US government thing, seems like most cleaner methods use refined iron. Although from some quick googling, it seems like this is a preparation method for iron ore, so maybe this is just a semantics thing here.
ok, and some statistics, it seem slike 30% of US production is using vertically integrated mills, or coal based production (presumably) Seems like they’re even cheaper, generally. Which is also a benefit.
So i guess overall, the steel industry is better than i expected.
there are almost certainly heuristics you can use, but these are going to be heuristics the size of the national US grid, with physics similar to how water flows through pipes. Except these pipes are dynamic and significantly less restrictive.
Plus source generation is very sparse, CCG gas plants for example generally only run when peaking, and solar only works during the day, generally, and nuclear power runs 24/7 around the clock, so it’s not quite trivial to calculate. More than likely what the heuristic they’re using here is that they consume 43% more power as a corpo, and thusly, produce 43% more CO2.
So, lets get this straight. Humans are going to die. Animals are going to die. Plants are going to die.
…so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Yes, corporationS. Plural. What? You think google is the only one using AI?
I mean, yeah.
One of the hallmarks of our species is its insatiable, irrational greed.
That’s a hall mark of our civilisation/society, not our species. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and the vast majority of cultures in that time have been relatively stable, with checks on excessive greed.
(see Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn Of Everything for some good examples.)
and that’s unfortunately only true because the greedy groups have destroyed all the non-greedy ones by slaughter or forced participation
I agree with everything except that A.I. doesn’t make money and may never solve a problem important enough to justify the cost.
What problem would it solve?
It’s so we can make silly AI songs to send to each other :)
so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Sure. But they do that by providing services. Services like Gmail and (probably for a large part) cloud hosting for other companies, companies whose services you’re probably using as well.
And honestly, it usually is more economical (Both financially as well as in eco footprint) for those companies to use cloud services that scale based on demand, rather than having a fixed set of servers running for the potential max capacity.
Don’t get me wrong, increased carbon emissions is bad, but the picture is a bit more nuanced than “Google flip switch, kill animals, get money”.
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
I hope so. AI spam causing too much internet noise to the point where we can’t tell which one’s true or not would be one big hurdle.
Who knows, maybe it’ll teach people to be more skeptical of the things they read online, and actually look for the underlying sources.
Literally not a single person on the planet thinks Google is the only one using AI. Agree with the rest though…
Anti correlated with search quality
Speed running two apocalypse fronts.
Surprising nobody.
Classic corporate behavior. Get market share, enshittify (Enshittification) for quarterly profits. At the expense of their users. What a waste.
Net-zero in 2030 is a lie. Google, Microsoft, whoever, - doesn’t matter. It’s only five years left. I don’t even think that bigcop can go from increasing carbon emissions to decreasing before 2030.
Who better than these obnoxious companies to build solar and wind farms to power their own server farms?
50% more energy so it can tell me to superglue my pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? Not seeing the value.
There should be an AI-free ‘eco’ option… I can live without the AI.
