Google's emissions are up over 50%, Amazon builds huge data centers powered by 75% natural gas.
Remember all those posts telling us that "AIs climate impact isn't that bad" supported by some really funky math/perspective and/or numbers Sam Altman invented?
Here's the actual impact.
"AI" is a fossil fuel technology.
@tante
…and they are trying to bring back #nuclear with #AI …
While #nuclearenergy is not #fossil it not #green at all - but #colonial , #deadly & totally unfair because, like in AI, the #profits are being privatised, the costs are hitting the whole #society & the #planet
But from the point of view of someone believing in #cybernetics or one of its #TESCREAL grandchildren it is great - because in cybernetics EVERY problem will be solved in "the future" by "technology"
@Kuttenfunker @Katika not "everyone" uses AI. Adaption is way lower than LinkedIn makes you think (because of lack of quality, political reasons, security issues etc.).
"AI" is neither everywhere nor inevitable
@tante the whole AI bubble imploding would be the most beneficial outcome for humanity. I just fear, it won't happen anytime soon 😩
@eliasp @tante @Kuttenfunker @Katika i thought "everyone" was in reference to the companys.
because to me it's very clear that many users don't use AI (especially not intentionally using it).
Every week I write 0,0 prompts.
I think in my circle of friends the number is a bit higher but still much below 0,5.
from my POV the AI is something companys push but it's mostly a shareholder stig and the normal humans get near nil benefit from it
I believe that it's not an either/or - as in not being able to use AI environmentally friendly and ethically.
AIs specialised on limited tasks can be trained with smaller datasets, we could slow the expansion of data centers and wait till the technology doesn't consume as much power anymore (remember the cooling a computer with less power than your phone needed 10-20 years ago?)
The science is advancing, algorithms are being developed that reduce the needed model size, etc.
But what we see is a "cool" technology under capitalism. Big corporations want to exploit it *fast* and *first*. "The winner takes it all". It's a brutalist approach - just throw size, growth and resources at it.
@Kuttenfunker @tante @Katika And currently it's mostly junk we don't need. I'm sick of getting chat bots thrown at me at every corner.
Engineers who have no idea what they are doing just throw the largest LLMs at things instead of designing task specific software.
Generative AI with its hallucinations is ruining quality everywhere...
But the problem won't go away without some kind of regulation.
@scatty_hannah @Kuttenfunker @tante @Katika
The purpose the Niagara of money being thrown at AI is from the delusion that they will create AGI because the platform billionaires have convinced themselves they’re in a winner take call race, where “win” is totalitarian control of everyone everything in the world.
Each of them say that they are the only one that will use it for good. If you don’t know who or what NRx is it’s time to read a little about it. They are bonkers.
Well, not everyone. Some by choice, some by not having access
And nuclear is only low in CO2 if you find a ready build nuclear power plant and a store of ready-to-use nuclear fuel
And do not take any of the storage/treatment of waste into your calculation
And… much more
Nuclear is deadly. And shifts responsibility to later generation that were not asked nor do they profit
We do not even have a form of communication that can exist as long as nuclear is deadly
“U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.”
The nuclear waste is an exaggerated problem. Very little is generated. Future generations profit by also getting a stable source of clean energy.
Who wrote this comment? Exxon?
> Nuclear is deadly.
https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel-emissions-higher-previously-thought
Eight million dead every year already from fossil fuels. But once the climate catastrophe really gets going, most of humanity will be gone.
And one of the reasons we will kill the planet is this insane idea that nuclear is more dangerous than fossil fuels.
Watching the environmental movement ignore fossil fuels while destroying nuclear power has been just horrifying.
@tante @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @TomSwirly @Katika no, they're in highly controlled environments, why?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor
Did you think that just because you don't know about something it doesn't exist? That's not how it works...
@tante @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika
This is a deadly serious issue. You being insulting makes it very very hard to take your contribution seriously.
@markhburton @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante Vitrified and put back into the original mines, for example.
IF the world didn't have a terminal issue with over two *trillion* tonnes of waste CO2 in the atmosphere, I wouldn't be suggesting this.
@Kuttenfunker @markhburton @art_histories @Katika @tante
This is the biggest problem ever to face the human race, and yet you seem to think it's a great big joke.
Every day my opinion of humanity falls another notch.
@markhburton @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante
We can certainly agree that a managed energy descent would be the best way. And honestly, we know that isn't going to happen.
So nuclear will delay the inevitable, but make the final result somewhat worse.
Given the horribleness of humans, perhaps it's not worth trying to eke out survival a bit longer that way.
@mnalis @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante
This is the same argument we started with.
Your plan is the one we have been doing for generations now, and it has resulted in steady, exponential increases in CO2 emissions.
There has yet to be one year when the new renewables added even counterbalanced the increase in fossil fuels from the previous year!
I had this exact argument in the 1970s when someone argued that renewables would soon make nuclear obsolete.
1/
@mnalis @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante
Here it is, almost fifty years later, and we've emitted well over a trillion tons of CO2 since then, and the emissions are still increasing exponentially.
The IPCC's predictions where we don't kill the planet requires some new massive and cheap source of non-emitting energy bigger than all the existing ones put together so we can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Only nuclear power, in the form of fusion, could possibly be that source.
2/
@mnalis @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante But thanks to generations of "environmentalists", nuclear is a dirty word. Investment in fusion research is a fraction of what it was in the 80s. Even new fission plants cannot be built in most developed countries.
I'm sure this argument, "Even though we're losing this war entirely, we still don't need this huge ally of nuclear power," will continue until it all collapses.
@TomSwirly @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante Your argument seems to be that we have a ton of already built unused nuclear capacity which just sits idle because people dislike using it.
If we're talking only about that, I'd be completely with you - let's continue using existing nuclear until their projected useful life ends.
However, if we're talking about building NEW capacities, even on purely economic basis, nuclear is not a good choice anymore in 2025 (while it was in 1970s) 1/
i.e. for the same €, you'll get MUCH less W with nuclear than with solar.
I agree that fossil use has grown and that it is horrible. But I disagree with your analysis of the root cause: you seem to imply that if "we just did continue building nuclear that fossil fuel consumption wouldn't rise". I argue it would've happened all the same.
As for folks being anti-existing-nuclear: yeah, democracy sucks when you're in minority 2/
And focusing on solar/wind for new installations is not "ignoring the nuclear ally", it is REALLOCATING all our resources to the BEST and MOST ECONOMIC solution.
Instead of locking away some of those resources in less efficient and more costly nuclear (and I'm not even counting the problematic need for long maintenance contracts for 1000+ years which someone will need to continue paying for, even after the plant is long shutdown) 3/
And here is some sociology 101: If you have a choice between:
- something majority is onboard with (i.e. solar) and
- something which there is strong opposition from many (i.e. nuclear)
then it makes sense to prefer the former, even if it was LESS
economical -- as you'd get greater buy-in!
And when the same one is BOTH more popular/less controversial, AND more economical, there should be a clear winner.
4/
Re: IPCC, well neither nuclear nor renewables are that "miracle".
IOW, there is no future ANYMORE where humanity avoids catastrophic effects, if we continue with old bad habits and "just change energy sources".
At this point in time, humanity is definitely doomed unless we change the way we behave DRASTICALLY (i.e. forbid personal cars and airplanes for at least 70% of the population, reduce consumerism drastically etc.)
5/5
@mnalis @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante
> At this point in time, humanity is definitely doomed unless we change the way we behave DRASTICALLY (i.e. forbid personal cars and airplanes for at least 70% of the population, reduce consumerism drastically etc.)
This is true.
"Sociology 101": I think the chances of humanity doing this are zero.
Your idea that people are more willing to stop nearly all their consumption than use nuclear is absurd.
1/
@mnalis @Kuttenfunker @art_histories @Katika @tante
Your renewables-only solution means continuing exponential increases in CO2 emissions for at least two decades to come. And without some sort of huge energy source to suck the CO2 we've already emitted, we're guaranteed to devastate our ecosystem.
We're losing this war. We need all the help we can get.
/thread.
To be clear also, my "Renewables only" idea is NOT going to fix the problem and stop the catastrophe - even if it were adopted much faster than we are currently doing.
You'd still NEED to have **drastic changes in human behaviour**, in addition to changing to cleaner energy sources.
It is just that "renewables only" gives us slightly better survival chances than "renewables+nuclear". But not even cheap fusion could fix it by itself now
I definitely DON'T think that people would be WILLING to reduce their consumption to such levels (quite the contrary!)
I'm only saying that it is the ONLY chance the humanity has to avoid the catastrophe.
Nuclear (or solar) doesn't even enter the story there; I though I made that clear when I sad that it is WAY TOO LATE to fix the problem by "just changing energy sources".
We have to do MUCH more, or face the consequences.
@art_histories @TomSwirly @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante which is more dangerous?
The waste from nuclear reactors?
Or the waste from fossil fuel plants?
BECAUSE WE ALSO DON'T DEAL WITH THE WASTE FROM FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS. THERE IS NO SAFE WAY TO STORE IT AND IT IS KILLING THE PLANET.
@art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
No one's proposing ocean dumping. Why did you post that?
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
We needed to already, in the past, to have reduced those three huge bands marked Oil/Gas/Coal by 90% from where they actual are to avoid disaster in the future.
We didn't. Now we are racing against catastrophe to reduce those huge bulges by over 90% almost immediately. We need all the non-emitting sources we can get and we aren't building enough new renewables...
1/
@art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante ...even to cover the growth in fossil fuels year over year, let alone to reduce it.
You know, I've been listening to this line of reasoning for fifty years now, and yet there are always never any actual numbers, just "nuclear bad" and now, here we are, with the end in sight.
The consequences of the climate catastrophe are already here. Fossil fuels are already killing 8 million people a year: https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel-emissions-higher-previously-thought
Think I'm wrong?
2/
@art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
Then show us the numbers! How many people will die for each gigajoule of energy? What would be the consequences of different energy mixes?
Any rational calculation shows that the risk to humans of destabilizing our climate, emptying the tropics of life, and drowning our coasts is *orders of magnitude* greater than that of nukes.
So let's see those numbers, some actual science. Your uninformed opinion is has little value.
@TomSwirly
I absolutely agree with you that ordering from worst to least bad (note I did not say "good") is: fossil fuels, nuclear, solar. You know what is the best? Using LESS energy (e.g. via more efficient devices).
It has been a big thing thing in EU for decades. Every aplliance from lightbulb to fridge to a car comes with the efficiency rating. But most Americans (sadly) love their gas-guzzling cars MORE if they have bad MPG 😢
@art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
@mnalis @art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
Oh, yes, if there's one thing we can agree on is that AI (and cryptocurrencies for that matter) have negative value to humanity and should be stamped out with extreme prejudice!
@mnalis @art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante We need both, of course!
I'm absolutely all for renewables, but we are losing this war at a faster rate every day.
---
Someone made the argument that more nuclear would just delay the inevitable; that humans won't get off fossil fuels till they're gone and we'll end up with a degraded environment AND a lot of nuclear waste.
Sadly, I have no refutation for that.
@mnalis @art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
In that same year 2023, fossil fuel consumption increased by 2%.
But we needed to decrease fossil fuel use by over 90% by 2023 to avoid climate disaster.
Now climate disaster is baked in: we are now sprinting toward catastrophe.
We are losing the war. We need every single weapon in our armament.
You know, I've been having this argument since the 1970s.
1/
@mnalis @art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante
Always the counterparty argues that renewables will soon be so cheap that fossil fuels will wither away and we won't need nuclear.
Here we are, 50 years later. We have emitted 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 since then, 3/4 of all that humans have ever emitted. Fossil fuel use continues to grow exponentially. CO2 emissions continue to grow exponentially. Public sentiment makes nuclear impossible.
2/
@mnalis @art_histories @Katika @Kuttenfunker @tante And in the United States, the subsidies that made renewables increase so fast are being removed, and pollution controls on fossil fuels are also being removed, making them cheaper to use.
And here you are, fifty years later, with that same argument that the problem is already solved and we don't need nuclear.
It's incomprehensible.
I thought we might not win this war. What I didn't anticipate is that we wouldn't even try.
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