Comment on ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks ago
Fair, but corn has a use. (Also not one I agree with but you get my meaning.)
ObtuseDoorFrame@lemmy.zip 5 weeks 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 5 weeks ago
Yeah, exactly.
flowers_galore2@lemmynsfw.com 1 month ago
This was a subtly sponsored video for which he got a lot of shit iirc. Didn’t he retract this?
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month ago
Then i might be remembering wrong and if so I apologise.