How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away with It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it.
So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations.
But none of that is the worst part.
The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else.
In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre.
In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps.
But that isn't the kind of world we live in.
And there's nothing that can be done about that.
It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.
but also, like, alberta makes a killing selling oil for others to burn. its still our carbon footprint and its a lot worse than that data center and cant be converted to non-emitting
I can see the link between it and the subject that I raised but I don't understand the point that you're trying to make in the context of the conversation.
Extracting, exporting, and burning fossil fuels not so much.
But it shouldn't be a case of lets do A or B, but A and B.
They aren't wrong but I can see how it can be seen as trying to undermine an argument.
But anyway why is this datacenter using a bunch of electricity a particularly less good use of electricity than anything else?
Those are becoming more expensive than clean alternatives (renewables, batteries, EVs, Heat pumps), particularly for the 70% of countries that rely on imported fossil fuels.
Now the implosion of the American empire also makes those imports less reliable and more expensive.
America can delay this for a while, but they hurt themselves by doing so. Hopefully one day they realize that.
It is not science. It’s just propaganda.
That also isn't even close to what the word means.
I imagine there are some choice concepts in US employee health "benefits" to filter out high-insurance-risk employees.
> For example, The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS) found that Americans spent an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and ~ 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles in 1992–1994 (Klepeis et al., 2001). This has potentially increased since the COVID-19 pandemic (Young et al., 2024), with many people working-from-home in environments with poor mechanical air-ventilation (Nazaroff, 2021). The proportion of time spent in indoor, CO2 enriched environments could also contribute to the changes in blood chemistry noted in the NHANES data and is an important consideration in interpreting changes over time, and forecasts for the future.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
Typically you balance out CO2 excess with phosphorus/calcium, so again, seems intuitive.
But a lot of things that are intuitive can be completely wrong because of something one can be ignorant of. Time shall tell.
Humanity has overcome many things by working together. Much of humanity is already working together to overcome climate change. In fact, if the Republican Party in the US would get to work on it, that may be a sufficient fraction of humanity. And if the US led on it, more would participate.
It is kind of depressing, really. We can't even agree on not killing each other. I mean, no one wants to get killed right, and the solution to this is the simplest there is, we just need to collectively decide not to kill. And if we did that, just consider how much resources it would free up: military, security, no need to rebuild what war has destroyed if there is no war.
So if we can't simply decide not to kill each other even though it would be a net, immediate benefit, how deciding to care for climate, which will involve at least a global reduction in comfort for many years before things get better is going to work?
It has gone on for all of history, yet people working together have mostly eliminated it - exactly what you say. It has gone on for all of history, and most of what humans have acheived by working together have been done contemporaneously with it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-huma...
The ones who actively prevent collective measures to stop the climate change are the richest of the rich. And they also spend pretty significant money on lies and propaganda designed to prevent collective work against climate change.
Can we pay our way out of it? If we could it would be to direct our actions towards things like nature restoration rather than anything that could directly increase consumption. In fact it would actively decrease production and reduce consumption by sucking direct resources out of the market economy. Yes, you are being paid to fix some problems but also pulling our of manufacturing thus increasing the prices of almost everything you purchase.
But that is a part of the idea behind planned degrowth. Use the system to actively scale down consumption before ecological and resource constraint blow back forces it. Better to be proactive than reactive.
This is why things like the Dark Mountain project came about - https://dark-mountain.net/about/
This idea is to be like serotinous plants. Seeds and cones that can only open up when the fires come through to melt the resin that holds them shut. In a way this is what the Solar punk movement is all about. Depict, advocate and produce futures that will out last the 'line goes up' society.
But when it comes to climate action it really seems like scale and latency has really hidden the full scale of the issue.
It is so big that few if any people really comprehend the hyper object and the systemic nature of it. It is so slow to show up direct results that most can ignore it short term.
I have said that the right lives in denial and the left lives in delusion. The right say it isn't at thing or it isn't a big issue. The left tend to seek technical solutions that aren't all that. Near me is a mural of Greta Thunberg that was put up in 2020, it calls for "Net zero by 2025." that was never going to happen on a time scale like that.
As for the Republicans changing the tastes of the world, unfortunately the one thing that Trump has done very well the last decade is burn through any sense of trust of the nation. Regardless of everything else, trust is the one resource you do not want to run out of, it is the foundation on which everything else sits.
Seems dramatic but if you assume the mainstream numbers were driven more by politics than science or economics then it makes sense.
Under President Biden, there was extraordinary pressure for big business to address climate change. The Trump administration is now pushing companies to abandon climate goals and encouraging the use of more oil, gas and coal, claiming that environmental initiatives are “woke” distractions that hamper economic growth.
Liked to say one thing and do another. Get the feeling they would have loved to point that out during the election period but that would have alienated half their potential voters.
I get that a lot of politicians will try to put a positive image forward, but that was a bit rich.
Would still prefer that kind of stability over whatever we have now.