Google’s carbon emissions soar by 48% due to AI

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨0x815@feddit.org⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.climateaction.org/news/googles-carbon-emissions-soar-by-48-due-to-ai

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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Comments

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Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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?

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- Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Literally not a single person on the planet thinks Google is the only one using AI. Agree with the rest though…
  
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- Dasnap@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s so we can make silly AI songs to send to each other :)
  
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- FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I mean, yeah.
  
  One of the hallmarks of our species is its insatiable, irrational greed.
  
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  - niartenyaw@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    that’s unfortunately only true because the greedy groups have destroyed all the non-greedy ones by slaughter or forced participation
    
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  - naught101@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.)
    
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- ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I agree with everything except that A.I. doesn’t make money and may never solve a problem important enough to justify the cost.
  
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  - naught101@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What problem would it solve?
    
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- admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - pavnilschanda@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Frozengyro@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.
    
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_sideffect@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
But by all means, everyone don’t use plastic straws! You’re killing the environment!

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- androogee@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah dawg we can’t possibly do two things that are good for the environment, we have to pick one. Everyone knows that.
  
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  - Holzkohlen@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I pick guillotining the rich as my one thing
    
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- evolvor@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Plastic straws are harmful to sea turtles. That is why their use has been reduced.
  
  Do you like turtles?
  
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  - Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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ogmios@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  to meet the demands of our new machine ~~overlord~~ dunsel
  
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slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Time to use less paper straws, folks #weareinthistogether🌎

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- MeatPilot@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I turn off my lights when I’m not in a room and don’t own a data farm. #doingmypart🌳
  
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  - Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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fluxc0@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
who would have guessed the giant corporation would have lied about something, because we haven’t been lied to before.

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kenkenken@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- lost_faith@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Who better than these obnoxious companies to build solar and wind farms to power their own server farms?
  
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Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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nivenkos@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The answer is nuclear power.

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- Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Or how about cutting back on the idiotic misuse of poorly-developed AI?
  
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  - jorp@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think it’s unfair to call it poorly-developed, the rush to market it and apply it in every corner is driven entirely by capitalist speculation, the engineers and scientists working on developing these systems are not to blame
    
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  - gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The technology is promising, it’s just not remotely ready for what they’re trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it’s almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.
    
    The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn’t ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.
    
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  - KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    there are still going to be a lot of people who need power though. Cutting the US of AI isn’t going to magically remove coal plants from the grid, it’s going to do nothing actually. We need to be building new plants, period.
    
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- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Environmentalism aside, I think it’s shitty that a company can waste so much energy on frivolous things anyway. Even if we were using more nuclear I still wouldn’t want it going to generating more porn of three-breasted women
  
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  - androogee@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why did you pick the one positive use of AI?
    
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- JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Or at least not decommissioning old ones. A dollar invested into new solar or wind goes further than new nuclear right now, but we’ll see if it tips more towards nuclear once the grid is a higher percentage intermittent and needs a lot more energy storage with it.
  
  Modular nuclear reactors seem really cool though for replacing large long term generators like at construction or excavation sites.
  
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  - KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    a lot of older nuclear plants were built in the 70s and 80s and those plants are going to be EOL even with extensions, unless we’re going to extend the lifecycle of those a second time. They should probably be decommissioned, unfortunately.
    
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JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder if this is taking into account the energy mix of the particular data centers, or just using the average energy mix?

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- Humanius@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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morementum@lemmy.fosshost.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Speed running two apocalypse fronts.

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pyre@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
BUT YOU PLEBS BETTER NOT TURN ON THE AC

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naught101@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Anti correlated with search quality

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ToucheGoodSir@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Classic corporate behavior. Get market share, enshittify (Enshittification) for quarterly profits. At the expense of their users. What a waste.

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HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.one [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Surprising nobody.

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TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No wonder AMZN/MSFT/GOOG have been paying people to fluff nuclear here and on reddit.

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Brickardo@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fucking hell

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SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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