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Comment by robnado | Hacker News Reader

That's why much of the world is gradually shifting over to renewable energy usage. In a world where energy is renewable, does not generate greenhouse gas and (hopefully) does not produce other externalities, our best way of dealing with these resource allocation problems is the free market.

The alternative is regulation, which, I'm not even sure how it could be used to address this particular issue. Ban AI or crypto? Humans will find new ways to waste vast amounts of energy with computers. Require that computers have a certain efficiency rating of megaflops/joules? People will use more of this now far more efficient computing, resulting in more overall usage. Require corporations to be audited for energy efficiency and be certified? Goodbye all small players that cannot handle all the overhead of such legislation.

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The trouble I see is that new consumption matching (or even some locations where proposed DCs exceed) new green generation may not let us displace dirty generation such as coal, which we should be looking to eliminate.

The other issue that comes up with green generation is how variable it is, sometimes it'll be cloudy and still air, others will be windy and sunny, and the grid needs to capable of supplying everyone in both scenarios and not overbuilding generation they can't turn off. Having industries available to soak up an appropriate amount of energy available within their ecosystem would be great, but it's a hard sell to anyone to invest billions in sites where there could be no guarantees on utilization if they get bad weather for a few months. If there is any "plays nicely with others" regulation on consumption of a common resource, it's going to be reactive to problems than ahead of time.

The solution to all of these problems is an aggressive buildout of nuclear fission plants to provide baseline power and accelerate the closure of all remaining plants which burn fossil fuel. Subsidized if necessary, as essential infrastructure.

Which is better -- subsidize what you perceive to be the solution or tax what is known to be the problem (carbon emissions)?

Infrastructure is routinely subsidized because of the benefits it brings. Taxing the problem can help pay for that subsidy, that has some hazards because now government revenue depends on carbon emissions, but it can be part of the solution, sure. Tax revenue all goes in the same bucket no matter what the government claims.

It helps that the actual electrical generators don't care where the steam is coming from, so we could be leveraging the gensets from decommissioned coal plants in fission reactors. All that's missing is the political will.

Tax data center usage

And watch the entire compute infrastructure and industry of vital importance (state of the art compute capabilities in AI) move to other nations and then later end up being dependent on them.

State of the art compute capabilities, aka hardware, is already built in other nations.

Mandating domestically owned servers is commonplace.

And this was in response to someone whose best idea was “ban ai”

Is the problem the data center or is the problem carbon emissions?

How about tax the carbon emissions.

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