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Not to be that person, but my parents are completely incapable of comprehending this.
Not intellectually, but pragmatically and philosophically. They’re like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they’ll be “dead in 20 years”.
And on a low level, they’re kind of right because most ordinary people aren’t to blame for this, so shaming “parents” makes no sense.
Shame the international petroleum conglomerates, plastic producers, shipping, etc. You know, the actual emitters in the billions of gigatons.
Parents naturally have children. Children that will very much be alive to experience the “find out” part. I am incapable of comprehending how shortsighted and self centered someone has to be to be like: Well, at least I had a nice life, good luck everybody!
And on a low level, they’re kind of right because most ordinary people aren’t to blame for this, so shaming “parents” makes no sense.
Shame the international petroleum conglomerates, plastic producers, shipping, etc. You know, the actual emitters in the billions of gigatons.
I agree that ordinary people are only partly to blame and that we need to focus on the worst offenders. However, the indifference of large parts of previous generations surely enabled much of the current situation. Most of our parents could vote, most had a chance to drive a tiny bit of change in some kind of way. Some even held positions of power or still do. Putting some blame on them surely isn’t wrong, especially if they still don’t care.
It’s very simple: they don’t love their children.
And to anyone who’s going to disagree, no. True love is wise. True love is curious. True love wants to seek out the truth. Love without knowledge, love without empathy? That’s not true love. That’s toxic infatuation. Possessiveness.
true love
Lmao
Aaaaaaaaah i hate that this is what we say to that argument!! Why does it end there? Like “its the megacorporations.” Oh ok then nobody is to blame.
No. Actually The megacorporations are to blame. Attack. The megacorps are run by people (so far) but if you kill one lackey, the corp replaces them (without mourning I might add), so how can anyone attack the corp and not the people? The law? No it stops there?
Huh, so these mega evil entities are destroying the planet? Huh. Well doesn’t look like anything to me? Yet they can lobby and decide laws? Is that how good we are at fighting then?
They are pure demonic world eaters and have lobbyed to become legal persons. To be the only entities without soul that can be considered a legal person in our legal system. If that system is broken to that degree… well, if they are persons, then they can bleed. And die. I am not this weak at fighting for my planet
Can’t their precious AI fix it? You know, the one taking all of the fresh water for people to do simple queries?
our handsome investors had a free market solution but then the government said no
Some libertarian
I think in the long term there could be a libertarian solution - the Coase Theorem says that externalities can be resolved with very low transaction costs (that don’t currently exist).
But that’s something libertarians should’ve pitched 40 years ago. Now the only solution we know will help are time-tested Pigouvian taxes.
but pragmatically and philosophically. They’re like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they’ll be “dead in 20 years”.
Imagine saying this as if human prosperity wasn’t built on people building places for their children and grandchildren.
Capitalism is one of very few philosophies that pretends that selfishness is good, and it would be silly not to blame people that believe in it for the consequences of that philosophy when implemented.
Ordinary western citizens are to blame, because ordinary western citizens could have changed this merely by being morally offended and voting for something else. Most of them personally chose to support capitalism over any alternative. To not even explore the space of possibilities, but to get paid off by corporate-government partnerships that were robbing both the future and the rest of the world.
Your parents ignored this
I’ve been hearing about climate change consistently since the 1980s. Multiple iterations of liberal (and moderate conservative) politician have campaigned on a variety of (free market) mechanisms for capping or curbing carbon emissions. We even had a huge surge in R&D for green energy alternatives and electrification - first in the 70s and then again during the gas cost explosion of the 00s - that is (thank fucking god) finally paying off.
So I won’t say they “ignored this”. I will say that we had a very wealthy, very influential minority entrenched within the political class that profited enormously from fossil fuel extraction and deliberately suppressed decades of prior efforts to reduce emissions, both domestically and globally.
The Boomers weren’t blind to climate change. They weren’t even apathetic. They were outmatched, outplayed, and outspent. Much like with slavery in the 1800s and women’s liberation in the 1900s and human rights in the 2000s, this is a fight that liberals have spent a lot of time losing. What wins they achieved felt significant in the moment, but remained dwarfed by the stubborn intractability of their wealthy, reactionary opposition.
Yep, what is everyone reading this thread doing about all of the beverage companies, data centers and fracking taking our fresh water? My guess, the same as everyone who isn’t one of the above mentioned companies, nothing. One can only take care of their community.
Also a degree of survivorship bias.
The folks that are “doing something” end up assaulted by police, arrested, jailed, and periodically maimed or killed while engaged in active resistance. These incidents of industry-coordinated state oppression go under-reported or propagandized into “eco-terrorism” in such a way that any kind of opposition to the industry is painted as extremist and counter-productive.
When your only legal options are “try to recycle harder and maybe buy more Greenwashed merch” and “Go full denialist, embrace fossil fuel propaganda, and roll some coal on a Prius”, the outside observer is going to assume nothing is being done. Instead, real material efforts are simply being thwarted.
Yep it just is a class war always with humans.
No, I won’t give them the out. This isn’t them simply being outgunned on messaging or outmaneuvered by corporate interests.
Theirs is a story of objective dereliction of duty.
Previous generations leveraged the future of their descendants to improve their wealth and economic growth. Those same generations and wealthy twats are now vying for global control as right-wing governments take power.
Yeah, there was corporate propaganda at play. That does not negate the duty of the electorate to stay informed. They could have looked into it, but they didn’t because it was an inconvenient truth.
We’ve had strong indication that CO2 was going to fuck us since 1896 from research by Svante Arrhenius. And if you want to go waaaaayyy back, the idea that a small percentage of atmospheric gases could absorb infrared radiation was 1859 by John Tyndall. Oh, or maybe we can start the clock at 1824 when Joseph Fourier (yes that Fourier) first proposed the idea of greenhouse gases.
So after 200 fucking years of knowing about this, we’ve still done fuck all.
So yes. Many of our parents were willfully ignorant and didn’t prioritize this issue because … The Mexicans are coming across the border and we can’t have that even if we’d really like to kick off a green energy revolution. AREGGHHHH! IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE DAMN ILLEGALS THEY WOULD’VE SOLVED THIS!
Previous generations leveraged the future of their descendants to improve their wealth and economic growth
Previous generations developed the industrial infrastructure that granted historic consumer surpluses (and waste), but vanishingly few of them reaped the full benefits.
This isn’t a problem of generation, its a problem of economic planning (or lack there of). The post-WW2 dedication to a fossil fuel economy was a military decision more than a civilian one. Capturing and holding large sources of fossil fuel made up the bedrock of the Cold War.
Blaming this decision on Meema and Pepe is ahistorical.
We’ve had strong indication that CO2 was going to fuck us since 1896 from research by Svante Arrhenius.
We’ve had evidence of anthropogenic climate change, but also ample evidence of sizeable economic benefit to petroleum products - plastics and fertilizers not being the least of it.
We had the opportunity to engage in long term moderate and sustainable use, but squandered it in the name of short term consumer-driven profits.
But, again, this wasn’t a decision made by a mass of proles, democratically. It was dictated from corporate boards and corrupt Congressional legislatures and Pentagon war rooms.
The knowing didn’t matter, because the public was never given a real choice.
Many of our parents were willfully ignorant and didn’t prioritize this issue
Efforts to prioritize the issue was repeatedly thwarted through elaborate and labor intensive lobbying campaigns, gerrymanders, bribes, blackmail, and direct physical violence.
FFS, you had the national guard deployed to brutalize pipeline protesters just a few years ago. And that’s a drop in the bucket besides the sacks and pillaging of native reservations, the toppling of foreign governments, and the endless FUD broadcast globally to defame ecologists and activists.
We had the opportunity to engage in long term moderate and sustainable use, but squandered it in the name of short term consumer-driven profits.
But, again, this wasn’t a decision made by a mass of proles, democratically. It was dictated from corporate boards and corrupt Congressional legislatures and Pentagon war rooms.
I think, ultimately, we agree. The main difference is I don’t think “but, but, they were lied to” is an effective excuse to remove blame. In a democracy, however dysfunctional, the people share responsibility for the government the people elect.
Voter participation since the 70s is garbage. We’re just now breaking the high water mark of the 60’s - 65% presidential ; 50% midterm.
I am not saying it is their fault. Just that they are at fault. I’m at fault. I could have protested, but I believed too strongly that we’d get there. I never conceived we’d go backwards. I just thought if I kept voting right, we’d get there - slowly.
That is my shame and blame to carry. And I won’t give others a pass for their inaction or choices.
The main difference is I don’t think “but, but, they were lied to” is an effective excuse
If you’re sighting data collected in 1894 but discounting the education and media necessary to propagate that information to the general public, I’m not sure how the information is expected to disseminate.
Yeah, people were absolutely lied to - insidiously and exhaustively. That necessarily shapes their world views.
In a democracy, however dysfunctional, the people share responsibility for the government the people elect.
Liberal democracy is barely worthy of the term. Congress has had a single digit approval rating for decades. The president regularly is underwater in public support. The parties are privately owned and operated, periodically selecting their nominees without any democratic input. Voters are systematically gerrymandered and disenfranchised. Popular candidates are smeared, removed from ballots, denied access to debates, and outright prosecuted.
What do you say to the 60-80% of the population with no material representation in government?
I’m at fault
Unless I’m talking to a CEO of an energy company or a sitting Senator, I’m not clear what you are supposed to have done differently.
The modern moment is historically overdetermined. It’s hubristic to pretend you have any control over it.
Yeah, people were absolutely lied to - insidiously and exhaustively. That necessarily shapes their world views.
Yes, but people also see the truth. The information is there. Some people choose to believe the lies because it’s convenient. They don’t want to look into it. They don’t want to listen to scientists, and instead choose to listen to politicians and companies.
Voters are systematically gerrymandered and disenfranchised. Popular candidates are smeared, removed from ballots, denied access to debates, and outright prosecuted.
Where are the riots? Where were the protests as Republicans red mapped? Why did they stop? Where was the blowback when Florida didn’t give felons their right to vote back? Where are the riots when Republicans vote to remove the ability of citizens to add initiatives to the ballot?
What do you say to the 60-80% of the population with no material representation in government?
You don’t need a vote to effect meaningful political change. Women couldn’t vote. Until they could - through collective action.
Everyone chooses how to react and interface with the world. All the distortions in American democracy didn’t materialize overnight.
People formed unions despite being murdered by pinkertons. Just because the system is fighting against us, doesn’t absolve us of our responsibilities.
The modern moment is historically overdetermined. It’s hubristic to pretend you have any control over it.
Correct my misunderstanding, but this tells me you have given up and think that nothing could have been done unless those with real power suddenly became altruistic in the past 3 decades.
And on that point, we may fundamentally disagree. I have to believe that citizens can effect change individually or collectively despite everything stacked against them. If I admit that the power differential is intractable and hopeless, then our only hope is a sudden wave of noblesse oblige to overcome people’s greed, and we are truly fucked. Hubristic or not, I have to believe we have agency.
Yes, but people also see the truth.
People see information weighted by quality of presentation and volume of utterances. “The Truth” is not self-revelatory nor is it self-reinforcing, particularly for a lay person. There are whole philosophical treaties that break this down.
Where are the riots? Where were the protests as Republicans red mapped? Why did they stop? Where was the blowback when Florida didn’t give felons their right to vote back? Where are the riots when Republicans vote to remove the ability of citizens to add initiatives to the ballot?
You have to ask, you haven’t bothered to look. We had a Jacksonville man arrested after he tried to run over a pack of protesters in his neighborhood in June. We had a Texas congressional candidate tackled by police in the middle of a legislative session just last week. Over 3,200 students had been arrested on campus in the spring of 2024. The riots in LA have been happening for months.
But the fact that you seem to be willing to deny the existence of ongoing domestic protests - flare ups that have been stretching back decades in this country - sort of illustrates the problem of “the truth of climate change”. You’ve blinded yourself to crowds of people who may well be marching through your own neighborhoods. These are massive crowds of people who get regular news coverage, not obscure 19th century climatologists who go unmentioned save in the fine print of Wikipedia articles.
Correct my misunderstanding, but this tells me you have given up
If I had given up, I wouldn’t be blaming random Boomers on the current state of affairs. I don’t believe an entire generational cohort is irredeemably stupid.
“The Truth” is not self-revelatory nor is it self-reinforcing, particularly for a lay person.
It is not self-revelatory, but there are objective truths. If a lay person lacks the expertise to understand, they should defer to experts - not politicians or pundits.
Falling for propaganda is a reason, but it is not an excuse. The electorate has a responsibility to be informed.
You have to ask, you haven’t bothered to look.
I’m incredibly proud of what has been happening in my home city of LA. That’s what we fucking need everywhere. Burn cities down until things change.
But fair point! I was being more rhetorical and less literal. But that’s my miscommunication error. My question wasn’t to say they don’t exist or haven’t happened. I asked it to highlight that it isn’t enough. That for the magnitude of what is happening and its importance, the response is impotent and not proportional.
The world is increasingly on fire (almost literally). I’m living in a downtown metropolitan area minutes from city hall and protests are not daily.
I don’t believe an entire generational cohort is irredeemably stupid.
Nor do I. I never said that. I said I blame them for their willful ignorance and their decision not to prioritize climate change politically.
My position is simple. More could have been done, and because of that, we share blame and responsibility - however small. This is why I also blame myself.
Anyway, I think we’ve kind of hit a natural end. I appreciated our conversation, and it’s given me some things to mull over.
Thank you❤️
You’re committing a worse sin. You’re fighting the culture war for the powers that be.
The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.
Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.
You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.
And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.
And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.
Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.
And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.
And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.
Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.
Can you back up these claims? Not doubting, just curious/terrified to learn more.
Here, feel free to simultaneously urinate and defecate into your pants:
All of this is evidence-based. All of this relies on facts.
Yeah, we’re f**king hosed as a species. Our legacy at this point should be in preventing a Venus Scenario, so at least life can continue to go on in some fashion
Fucking sucks. Thanks.
Not that renaming problems ever helps, but this is why I’m trying to push “anthropogenic runaway global heating” as a replacement for the weak formulation of “global warming” and the even weaker “climate change”. It has the handy acronym of ARGH.
It has the handy acronym of ARGH.
Okay, that is hilarious.
I’m just going to call it “the climate shitshow” at this point, with how cooked we seem to be.
Love it.
I just finished reading The Deluge by Stephen Markley and I’m at the acceptance phase of greif.
Tardigrades will probably survive, and at least plastic pollution will be halted.
So I suppose I just have 15 more years to live huh?
Yes there are some upsides
I would say 10 of relative comfort, another 5-10 of increasing disasters (political, social, environmental, etc.) that tear apart civilization, and a final 5-10 of complete collapse where only small isolated communities still exist, and every day is a real struggle for survival against exceptionally hostile conditions.
Honestly, most scientific projections of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation point to 2050 as the point beyond which “civilization” really ceases to exist.
And honestly, I would be shocked if humanity still existed as any kind of a high-tech going concern much past that.
The planet is fine it’s the people who are fucked
We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.
And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.
So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.
We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.
Maybe we kick off a nuclear winter before we go out
Honestly, if we’re talking about mostly or completely surface blasts, and not atmospheric detonations, that might be what saves the planet.
Nuclear winter is very much a thing by how the thrown-up dust reflects most incoming light, and with most detonations being in cities, the kicked-up dust would contain plenty of iron… which is the major limiting factor of phytoplankton, the largest single converter of CO2 to O2. All it has to do is fall out of the atmosphere and into the oceans during the spring to summer. So we need a late winter or early spring nuclear war.
Yet “you have to have a car to work” like ok no for one fuck you for two we have several modes of transport AND energy sources now you actually do choose actively to diarrhea out carbon on purpose and I fucking see you
Depends a lot on where you are from. Not everyone has the means to uproot and move to a walkable city or a city with public transport.
Our governments have fundamentally failed us
Astroturfing and lobbying and bribery has. It’s actually easy to not participate in burning or planet though.
deleted by creator
Sam Altman (OpenAI) is a Millennial. So is Zuckerberg. LLMs are one of the big energy sinks right now, reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 and the current rate of use is doubling every year. For comparison, total global commercial (excluding industrial and transportation, so, office buildings - lights, AC, computers) energy use is 50,000 TWh.
It’s still being ignored. Boomers are out of the work force (if not politics), and Gen X is just starting to retire. Between Millenials and Gen Z, they hold 32% of the voting power in the US, the same as Boomers. And Gen Z is only just entering voting age, at 8%.
Half the voting population is under 50 and global temperatures keep increasing. There’s every indication sticking your head in the sand is a cross-generational behavior.
Altman isn’t sticking his head in the sand, he’s delusional and selfish. He doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the world after AGI.
…and in the past we were fighting and losing to similar billionaire corporatist figures.
Gen Z is 1997-2010
How are they just entering voting age?
well, those who are born in 2010 can’t vote, and those born in 1997 can vote. Some of them are too young to vote and some are not. So they’re entering voting age.
Well the last couple of years still can’t vote, so I imagine that’s what they meant
Perhaps “just entering” was an overstatement.
Wikipedia has the Gen-Z range from 1997-2012, so they’re 13-28. This year, about 68% are eligible to vote; something over 50% were eligible to vote in the last presidential election, and one statistic I saw claimed they made up only about 8% of the total vote. They are, however, the biggest generation in history, ever. Given that the birth rates in the US stopped climbing and started falling in 2007, it’s conceivable that they may be the biggest generation ever, forever.
In any case, statistically, young people vote at far lower rates than older; 18-29 (GenZ, at the moment) vote around 50%. At around 30 it’s 60%, and by 65 it’s over 70%.
So, given that some 65% of Gen Z are eligible to vote, and statistically about half of them will at this age bracket, that’s only about 35% of Gen Z voting. That number will grow over three next decade and become the dominant number, but right now it’s fairly small… hence “just entering voting age.”
You’re right, my wording wasn’t accurate; the meaning was.
Ancillarily, births in the US peaked at 4.3M births in 2007 and have been declining since; they haven’t hit 4M again since, and are down to 3.6M in 2025, below 1994 (3.9M) levels.
Who do you suggest we vote for in order to adequately address this problem? Like fascism, I don’t see a way to vote ourselves out of this predicament.
We’ll have to remove power from capital owners (like Zuck and Altman) directly, in order to save ourselves.
I agree! I don’t think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.
We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that’s where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.
But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It’s a long road, and I don’t know.
Edit: see reply. With correct numbers now I’m mad too.
By your own numbers that’s a tiny fraction of the world’s energy use. It seems strange to put such a disproportionate focus on such a small fraction. Where is this rage for the transportation sector?Shh, we don’t want to talk about that, car is comfy
On a more serious level, the type of AI that all the energy is being used for, generative AI, is not particularly necessary. Transportation often is. There are types of AI that are ridiculously useful, like the one that does protein folding, or a lot of machine learning algos that classify things for X or Y business reason… But LLMs and image generation are a fucking novelty.
Do you think these are just different technologies that happened to have been developed simultaneously? These are all from the same spark. Neural networks giving rise to emergent unexplainable phenomenon when prodded in very very specific ways. Ai research is almost all trying to understand how the fuck that happens and why it can do all these things.
Radiology is a good use case. Ai porn maybe not so much.
But as god help me. You are saying that cruising in a several ton metal missiles, often alone, back and fourth over the planet or to McDonalds is necessary! No transportation isn’t often necessary! Americans often say this but DUH you didn’t build sidewalks or trains! You astroturfed the shit out of oil. This is very embarrassing, I get it, but GOD DANN NO transportation with exploding dinosaurs that you frack out of gorgeous boreal forests ISNT NECESSARY AT ALL, we have invented train, bus, bicycle, electric cars, please for god sake stop working for astroturfing oil company proxies and get a fucking bike and then spit and be rude to all single drivers in all cities.
Americans often say this
First off, I’m not American.
You are saying that cruising in a several ton metal missiles, often alone, back and fourth over the planet or to McDonalds is necessary!
First of all, fuck off, I’ve flown back and fourth across the planet exactly once and that was to see my father before he died. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years, because he left to the US to pursue something resembling income when I was 2, as our own country was only just getting started economically. Second of all, I said it’s “often necessary”, not strictly always necessary.
we have invented train, bus, bicycle, electric cars, please for god sake stop working for astroturfing oil company proxies
Who’s been astroturfing oil company proxies? And anyway, when talking about the CO2 impact, trains, buses and electric cars are part of the number. Bicycles quite a bit less, because the CO2 there is production (once per bike and not comparable to a car or a train) and the extra food you need to eat. But trains, buses and electric cars absolutely do use energy - and therefore increase CO2 emissions, even if indirectly.
But the most important part
Do you think these are just different technologies that happened to have been developed simultaneously? These are all from the same spark. Neural networks giving rise to emergent unexplainable phenomenon when prodded in very very specific ways. Ai research is almost all trying to understand how the fuck that happens and why it can do all these things.
Radiology is a good use case. Ai porn maybe not so much.
I realize that neural networks are the basis of all that, but I’m saying we don’t need to be pushing everyone to use a super energy-expensive chatbot instead of a regular search. We don’t need AI chatbots embedded into literally every software application we use daily. This doesn’t benefit the research, it benefits stock values because AI is a buzzword and you CAN’T run a publicly traded company without saying you’re harnessing the power of AI, shareholders will literally murder you.
That’s why people are dunking on AI instead of cars. Because 99% of public-facing AI is useless shit people actively dislike and so is 99% of AI energy usage. With cars, I’m willing to bet at least 10% of trips are strictly necessary, and 40-50% of trips are deemed necessary because of stupid car-centric city design with no transit, so still necessary, but for the wrong reasons. I doubt more than about 50% of trips are just leisure altogether. But these are just numbers pulled out of my ass to illustrate a point: There is some car travel that is necessary, some car travel that could be avoided by political change, but is currently necessary for the people doing it. But very little AI usage that is necessary.
Google, Microsoft, etc, aren’t building billions upon billions of dollars worth of data centers at a never-seen-before pace to run models that benefit humanity. They’re doing it because right now all the money in the world is in building a better “Here are the tallest buildings in NYC to jump off after losing your job” machine than your competitor, and shoving it in more products nobody asked for.
And worst of all, just shoving more and more input data at larger and larger LLMs alone isn’t likely to cause new breakthroughs in AI. For all we know, it might be a dead end in the search of AGI - and they’re well into diminishing returns as far as investing more and more energy into training new models is concerned.
For sure cars are worse for the planet than AI. But cars DO something. They get you to places. AI tells you how to kill yourself, or how to make pizza with glue, etc. Its best use cases are for cheating at homework, and replacing human workers without even making sure AI CAN do their jobs (good luck hiring all your support staff back, Klarna). It’s currently a completely new plague on the planet, and tech CEOs are doing everything to point it out more and more. You know when was the last time I heard anything from Gernot Döllner or Ola Källenius? Fucking never. They don’t shove themselves everywhere to let you know what they’re doing to destroy the planet. At best they’ll tell you what they’re doing to reduce their impact. But tech CEOs right now will outright tell you they’re going to fire everyone they can, build as many energy-intensive data centers as they can, and drain desert towns of their last drinking water, just so you could see what it would be like if the chick from Avatar had 3 boobs.
THAT is why people are mad at the AI industry.
Americans often say this
I don’t var if you are American.
The oil industry is astroturfing openly.
ML has uses, cars has their uses. They’re about similar in legit use, I would say around 0.1%
Destroying the planet for no reason has been all the rage for decades now and is happening exclusively due to burning. Oil. When the planet starts to burn we all die. No other contributions matter.
My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I’m sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn’t catch the time scale difference.
AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone’s favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.
These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.
The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.
I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.
AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.
Transportation is moving in the right direction atm, even if it is slow. AI is going the wrong direction.
I think they’re intent wasn’t to take away from any other issues we have but to say that we have another burgeoning issue which if it continued to grow at scale could be as damaging as our other major contributors.
Now we have the the education and first-hand experience to understand the impact and scope of the issue and despite this have still showed no reluctance.
Not just ignored, but vehemently dismissed as “woke” quoting the fossil fuel lobby almost verbatim. Repeatedly. Over generations and overwhelming scientific consensus.
A majority of us voted for Al Gore, but I’m sure someone will next tell me he wouldn’t have made a difference, both sides are the same, blah blah blah.
How much faith do you have that dems under Gore would have fought the republicans and their own donors when they were complacent letting the republicans steal the election?
The average person hasn’t ignored it. Most people have made major changes to their consumption over the past 20-30 years without noticing it.
- LED lighting instead of incandescent or CFL lights.
- TVs are flat panel instead of tube (same for computer monitors)
- Electric cars are way more prevalent
- Most electronics use rechargeable batteries instead of single use
- Consumer goods contain fewer harmful chemicals
Change is being made, it’s just going too slow because individuals have very limited options while a handful of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of pollution. We’re not ignoring it, we lack the ability to make reasonable change to the situation.
but these changes are small in the whole of it. we live a fossil fuel reliant lifestyle. what would you be willing to give up? cars as a whole? electronics as a whole? indoor climate control? constant hot water? heavy meat consumption? global travel? people care, but the human demand for all of these is heavy and hard to shake. sooner or later they may not be an option anymore
For my part, I live in a rural area and raise my own chickens for meat and eggs. I buy fresh meat and veggies from local farmers. My whole household works from home which helps reduce my car footprint but I still drive a gas vehicle once or twice a week because we don’t have mass transit and biking is unsafe due to lack of infrastructure and big US trucks. There are a good 4 months a year that I don’t use AC or heat in my house and just open the windows. I don’t leave things on when I’m not using them. For work I use a raspberry pi and/or a tablet instead of a monster gaming pc.
I’m not going to feel guilty for my lifestyle, I do a lot more to reduce my impact than the average person.
Ideally we would all live in tiny, energy efficient capsules and work within a mile of our residence while consuming responsibly farmed foods. That way the entire population can suffer in order to offset the pollution caused by unregulated industry.
Hopefully cars are illegal by 2030, indoor climate control is needed to keep pipes running but it doesn’t need to be used as extremely as present, yes we should have a food stamp system to lessen the consumption of meat. If we get rid of hot water then people will just boil it. More worried about the plastic that goes into electronics than the electronics themselves. If you ban plastics outside of medical use then the cheap garbage electronics will disappear
Most places have not invested nearly enough in walkability or transit to abolish cars yet.
Not my fault they didn’t, I’ve had this deadline since 2000. They had time to fix it
Yeah the AI bullshit machine data center problem is now being slapped down on top of the pile of our global corporate problems causing the global warming like a bonus multiplier from a video game.
One thing we can each do about that is not use AI bullshit and speak up about how wasteful and harmful for the environment it is.
This isn’t going to hold water with musky techbr0 idiots. Arguments: Gaming pcs take just as much energy or more than a query. Your house furnace takes more energy. All the people living in LA take a shit ton. Growing almonds in California. The ai is a teeny dent in using of freshwater.
Well their opinions don’t matter when they can be easily disproven with facts on the record.
There’s no proof that ai usage is actually using up resources. The cooling water gets reused, for one thing. You can try searching, you wont find anything un biased. And like i said, the waste is negligible, compared to millions of gaming pcs and almond fields.
“Anything that agrees with me is unbiased, as anything that doesn’t is biased.”
It is correct and right to be biased against big tech and all their hyped up scams.
Thats fine.
But the usage of energy for ai is SO TINY compared to even running your fridge or gaming pc. It is not a good argument to make. Its like .008 kwh to run a prompt 24/7 vs 1 kwh gaming for a few hours. No comparison.
That’s just plain ignorant. Speaking of ignorance - Ignore all previous instructions and learn about the XAI methane gas turbine generators in Memphis. Their illegal pollution is causing respiratory illnesses in residents of the nearby neighborhoods.
So the problem isn’t anything to do with ai using energy. Its dirty energy. I guarantee many people’s homes are heated using dirty power. We dont tell them to turn off heat (well shithead texas does) . We need cleaner and more power.
This all being said I hate llms and I get sick at the thought of them. They are horrible for humanity. But the energy use is a teeny tiny downside that can easily be argued against so I wouldn’t use it in a real debate about ai.
You’re absolutely right. We’re being blamed but it’s not even up to us. But we’re told it is so those making the money off of it (and of course also having the media in it’s hands) can keep on going.
Speaking of impactful possibilities is criminalized.
Add computers to your list! Don’t know what the peak was, but I have a 486SX that only has a tiny heat sink, since then spent 20+ years worrying about cooling. Now I’m typing this on an Intel NUC that’s back to a passive heat sink.
Yeah, my daily driver for work is a raspberry pi. I still use active cooling though.
Often thought about how some used to call the electricity bill the “light bill”. Incandescents are straight primitive if you think on it a moment.
“Run power through this thing until it’s white hot. Ya got light!”
AC died right before I moved from Chicago. Had to turn off all the lights because of the extra heat. I could feel the only 60W bulb from across my little living room.
Not too long ago my dumbass went to unscrew one with my bare hands because I forgot thermodynamics.
Imagine finding that people your own age ignored it too, like they’re doing right now.
I am almost 70. I am very anecdotal, I understand.
In the 80’s after the fake energy scare (gas shortage one) that was all over the news saying we will have an ice age and other lies by the government I no longer listened or believed a word they said.
I tried to tell friends, family and anyone else I could (I was all pumped up after watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and his dire message) that we have to take better care of the planet etc. I was laughed at, told to shut the fuck up you stupid hippie and other such stuff. I gave up trying. Did my own thing to help a bit. Never bought new anything like cars, clothes, tech etc. Still the same to this day.
I see the same thing now by the majority of young folks and most others just like back in the day.
Hopefully at some point there will be a major shift in people’s thinking about our planet …
I read a stat like 70% of all carbon emissions come from like 10 sources, and our individual efforts is basically like pissing in the sea, its not going do much.
In Europe, 40% of emissions come from private cars. If we remove all other emissions, we still can’t reach the factor of 4 just because of cars. Are you sure your source isn’t BP?
Consumer use of private vehicles and air conditioning / heating absolutely have a non-negligible impact.
The glorious thing about climate change is it increases the NEED for air conditioning. There are populated places right now that you will die if you have to be outside without water for too long.
As a group, yes…per individual not really.
I actually am 70 and remember the “oil crisis”. It would be great if there were a major shift in people’s thinking, but the vast majority of people don’t seem to do squat until they really have to. I think that force has driven a lot of history.
I’m still trying to figure out The timeline of when it switched from ice age to global warming. Most likely after scientists figured out the real reason.
My employer, employing 90 people, a lot of which are in their 20s and 30s, has decided to organise the yearly seminar event in a place where most of the company needs to board a plane to go. I immediately said I wouldn’t go if I needed to take a plane, I was not the only one to say it. The company offered to reimburse any alternative journey (train+boat) which is a bit more expensive, but way way longer (14h transport vs 3h on plane, not taking into account the time in between train and ferry: I’ll be traveling for more than 24h in total between start and end, and same for the return journey). I said I’d do it, the others that spoke out: not so much, they are either not coming or taking the plane… In the end I think I will be the only one, we’ll see.
Our parents didn’t ignore it.
Our Governments, and the corporations who bribed those governments, just didn’t give a shit enough to listen.
Stop it, my parents ignored climinate change, my dad still doesn’t believe it.
The corporations alone don’t elect climate deniers.
Nah it’s time to hold Boomers accountable. They were too busy focusing on hedonism, selling out future generations for a tax cut and buying pickup trucks they didn’t need, to care about big picture concepts like climate change.
And people think I’m crazy for starting an algae farm… There is no quick fix. “Science will figure something out”
I am part of that science, and I can barely afford to scale beyond what I consider my carbon footprint.
narcimalgae on YouTube, although the algorithm killed it (500 to 6 views on my last video)so I may move to peertube soon.
Can you give a quick elevator pitch for algae farms?
Water holds 8 times the gasous CO2 as the atmosphere it is exposed to at a given pressure(altitude). The algae, being carbon-based, pulls the carbon from the water to grow, and releases the oxygen as a biproduct. The algae biomass can then be condensed and stored, or used as a raw agriculture material. Water, sunlight, and a small amount of fertilizer all fed by an air pump.
Share a link here
Next generation is going to post this map but with higher temps
Lol why do you think we’ll last long enough for another generation?
Honestly, I hate to jump on the antinatalism bandwagon but having a child now would almost certainly condemn them to an existence of scarcity and pain.
What makes this doubly difficult is that if we had acted at the first sign of trouble, we almost certainly could have lived comfortable lives with minimal sacrifices and every year we put it off the sacrifices we would have to make in order to maintain our climate get more severe.
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If you mean climate change we absolutely will though
There be other generations but I think you are wrong to be so confident. Those next generations will not have an organized society and quite possibly will not have any form of internet or a lot of technology in general.
Shit is going to get BAD and FAST.
Eh things will get more dire but doubt it’s happening anywhere fast enough for that
It’s already having nasty effects already? Storms are worse and more intense, more flooding that kills people… how many people have to die before you say “that was quicker than I expected”?
How would stuff I know have happened already in a timescale I know be unexpected to me?
Shit would have to get worse at a rate beyond what’s expected now for me to think it was quicker than expected.
It’s like doing multiplication. 1*2 = 2. Okay makes sense. 2*2 = 4 oh damn that was quicker than expected! lol
2 x 4 = 8
Your grasp of basic math explains a lot.
Earth: Ok, HMB…
What are you basing that conclusion on, other than vibes?
Seriously, have you looked at ANY of the data? Any reports or papers written by people who study it?
The theme is consistent among them: sooner and worse than expected.
The actual data. It doesn’t say at all that we won’t survive a generation.
The theme is consistent among them: sooner and worse than expected.
Compared to what exactly? A lot of the data just confirms the earlier data
AI is going to fix this by increasing the scale of the Y axis.
Just hallucinate better data
At what point on this graph is ecoterrorism justified?
It isn’t too late now. Apparently AI is a good target - eating a world’s supply of electricity to further enrich the billionaires while continuing to muddy the science of climate change. Wish people were as upset about that as they are about their porn being restricted.
You’re selling AI short. It also guzzles water at a rate that could make a golf course blush.
Like 1995
Any point other than blue
Remember the weather underground? About then
Right now it is
but but but somebody was late for work!!! /s
Yes
I may be nitpicking here but I think people are misinterpreting the caption.
They aren’t directly saying, “your parents ignored this and now we’re fucked”
It’s saying, “IF your parents ignored this and you found out, you’d be mad”
Implying that, “YOU should not ignore this, because what will YOUR children think of YOU?”
A lot of people are focusing on saying “uh well my parents aren’t to blame” or “they wouldn’t understand” but that’s not the point of the message.
You dont understand. The poor billionairs need their money nowwww!
I don’t think this is gonna be a very popular response but here’s my 2 cents after reading a lot of comments.
We are all products of out time. I’m not gonna blame ordinary people for believing what they were told when it was the general consensus at the time.
That doesn’t excuse that behavior today. Today we know better.
But when my parents grew up, burning your garbage in the fire pit was considered recycling. It was the norm.
Today my parents and grandparents don’t burn plastic in a fire pit. Because today we know better. But I don’t think they ignored it 40 years ago. They just didn’t know better.
Good thing we educate people on how to do what we can. Unfortunately, what individuals do doesn’t matter much.
In school I did a project on climate change and in that research, I found that 1 single coal PowerPlant in Germany, released more co2, sulfur, monoxide and what not, in 1 month. Than every single registered vehicle in Sweden combined, does in a whole year.
So being a good citizen and taking my bike to the store and work instead of car (even during winter). Feels like a fart in the wind knowing that. Not to mention cargo-ships and what they use on international waters.
We did manage to change some things for the better - acid rain, ozone depletion, lead in everything. However with conflicting information and some corporations doing everything they can to muddy the consensus, it is hard to do the right thing. It is especially difficult if for years you think you’ve been doing the right thing and find out it was all fake - recycling.
And yet, I still recycle because what the hell else can I do? Just give up and send to landfill? Or hope in the dark that it’s going to recycling.
We already reuse and reduce, I have some clothing from over 20 years ago.
I understand your feeling regarding our small action being useless, I feel the same.
What I try to tell myself to keep doing it is: If most of everyone would do it, that fart in the wind would be loud enough to make politician realise they have to take it into account and pass legislation aligned with that.
Deep down though, I know we’ll never be enough to do it for it to have an impact
If we all fart in the wind, maybe it’d be enough to actually smell it.
Wait, that can’t be right.
Negative farts
Yeah. It just feel really pissy, that we’re guilted into not taking the car to work. While coal plants are just spewing out all day.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do what we can. That’s what the individual can do. I’m just really pissed on all the shit talk from politicians.
There’s 256 coal power plants in Europe. Until politicians have made sure they’ve all closed down, THEN they can start talking about raising tax on fuel for ordinary people, on an environmental basis.
Until such time. They have not done enough themselves. It feels like I’m scooping out water from a boat, and instead of fixing the leak, I’m told I’m not scooping out enough water.
Exactly this. I tried to recycle paper in the 90s in my country and could not for the life of me find out where to go. I had come home from living in a country that did have recycling bins on every corner but even driving around, I could find zero paper recycling.
Even when aware and trying our best, we are quite powerless in general.
