The shipping industry emits a billion tons of CO~2~e per year. Training a model emits… maybe a thousand? An impact that could be offset by reducing Chinese imports by 0.0001%. Or arbitrarily limited by strong-arming the very few companies involved. DeepSeek knocked off a few orders of magnitude and R1 seems to work, as well as any of these things work.

But some people don’t really give a shit about the electricity involved - it’s just a negative for them to latch onto.

Now, it is a problem locally, where datacenters turn power straight into heat, as fast as they can manage. Anything like a tiny sliver of the global shipping industry becomes noticeable when it’s concentrated in one building within range of a commute.