Regarding my last post about why we should not be adding new large energy burdens, I think Nate Hagens' notion of "energy blindness" is important to bear in mind. Energy blindness is the idea that a lot of people don't understand a basic physical reality of using energy, and thus are not fully equipped to assess the impacts of proposed
#climatechange remediations. So let me try to spell it out a bit.
Let's say we manage to convert all
#fossil #fuel #energy generation into a fully-sustainable, non-polluting, harmless form. After this hypothetical conversion we have all the energy we could ever want, with no pollution, no resource depletion, no direct ecosystem destruction. That would be good, right? That would solve the
#climatecrisis, right?
No, it would not solve the climate crisis. If you don't immediately see why, please read on because you might have a bit of energy blindness.
Energy usage, by its nature, releases heat. Basically, by using energy you are converting "structured" energy (low entropy) into "unstructured" energy (high entropy == waste heat); the conversion process lets you do something useful like cook, heat your dwelling, drive a car, make an artifact, etc.
If we had clean, worry-free energy sources available, we might stop the emission of carbon but we would keep generating heat. Jevon's paradox suggests we'd generate even more heat than we do now, since generally whenever a technology increases the efficiency of a resource's usage we end up using more of the resource than we did before we made the technology. Jevon's paradox aside, exponential growth of any economy, national or global, requires exponential growth in energy usage, which in turn entails exponential growth in heat generated.
Carbon pollution makes the blanket thicker, but energy usage generates the heat held in by that blanket (some of it anyway--the sun sends in a bunch!). If our heat generation continues to increase exponentially year after year after year, we will induce our own heat death regardless of how thin we make the carbon blanket. That's a basic physical fact. Carbon capture will not help; that just thins the blanket. A technology that vents heat directly into space without warming the atmosphere would be required.
In lieu of such a planet-wide, perfectly-insulated exhaust pipe, the exponential growth in usage must be stopped, or physics will stop it for us. It'll be a lot more pleasant if we choose to stop it ourselves than if we wait for physics to do it. Just as we prefer walking down a staircase to falling 1 story and being stopped abruptly by the floor below, we really ought to prefer stopping the exponential growth in energy usage to waiting for physics to stop that process on our behalf, because physics doesn't care if it hurts.
I think rejecting energy-heavy technology like
#ChatGPT and other
#LLM and
#LatentDiffusion based text and image generators is a small sacrifice to help ensure we don't collectively faceplant in our own heat death. This is a major reason I come out so strongly against these technologies as they are constituted today and think you should, too. I personally believe only the energy blind can embrace the widespread deployment of this type of energy-heavy technology given where we stand with respect to the
#climatecrisis .
zimpenfish_top9
Anthony
Martin Heinze | marts~
WetHat💦