Comment on ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 days ago“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
There’s also a huge issue around water use which isn’t mentioned in the article.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The water use issue is largely blown out of proportion or not compared to other sources of water use.
The US Corn industry alone uses 80x the water usage of the entire global AI industry.
Hank Green on YT goes over it in more details and with citations: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
Ashtear@piefed.social 2 days ago
It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?
The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Yeah but when but gets 20% more efficient they build a second one. You still end up with a net increase.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fair, but corn has a use. (Also not one I agree with but you get my meaning.)
ObtuseDoorFrame@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is eaten by people. Most of it is used as animal feed (which is catastrophic on their systems as their stomachs aren’t designed to digest corn, so their corn diet slowly kills them) and rest is made into ethanol and added to gasoline. The corn subsidies are so dumb that they require a minimum amount of the corn being grown to be turned into ethanol, which is extremely inefficient.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, exactly.
flowers_galore2@lemmynsfw.com 2 days ago
This was a subtly sponsored video for which he got a lot of shit iirc. Didn’t he retract this?
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I haven’t seen anything saying it was sponsored and getting a lot of shit on the Internet isn’t any indication of being incorrect. The video is still up and no mention of anything like what you’re talking about.
flowers_galore2@lemmynsfw.com 2 days ago
Then i might be remembering wrong and if so I apologise.