Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

It's possibly worth noting that the source for this is an application for a permit

>GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States

Immediately following that is the text

"It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow"

It's also worth noting that the headline turns "largest single source" of CO2 to "top source" of climate pollution. They say pollution in the text, but context would suggest they are talking about CO2. To say otherwise would be a much stronger claim which I don't think you can assume unless they clearly assert it.

I'm not sure if it is possible to quantify scale of climate impact between different types of pollution, but it seems like a stretch to unilaterally declare that the single top producer of CO2 is the top environmental impact. It may be, but they are making claims beyond what were made in their sources.

I was under the impression that there were a few chemicals that had an outsize effect on climate pollution.

You're right--it's probably fine. Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?

Because without enough information to truly place it in context, you may be focusing on something that may not have a notable impact on the overall problem.

For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.

How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?

Edit: https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers

Texas is just ripping through these things since it’s so permissive. That’s troubling for the other states who will all inevitably bear some burden.

>How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact?

Because without context you have no idea what that actually means.

If you get attacked by an unknown number of duck sized horses, how much of an effect would defeating the largest of them have?

So what context do you think is missing from this debate about whether massive GHG emissions are good or bad?

That is not what this debate is about. The debate is about whether we know that the point of focus can be described as massive GHG when compared in proportion to other emitters.

How much is the plant actually going to emit? Is the number the largest because the field is dominated by many many smaller things that cumulatively sum to a figure so large that if any one value (even if the largest) is removed, it makes no meaningful difference.

What happens to the fuel if they don't use it? Does it get used by someone else who would otherwise had used renewables.

I don't think it is unreasonable to have the relevant information to hand before making a decision. I might make the same decision as you have already done. I'd just like it to be based on actual information that I have.

We have all the info we need to know this is not something we should build if we want to preserve our environment. But yeah keep pretending we don’t or whatever.

Regardless, we expect better from our corporate overlords.

I think, much of the problem is we do not expect better.

For every person asking a company to do the right thing there seems to be a dozen who will say there's no point and how dare you even talk to them.

I don't think that represents the majority of people. I think, in general, people see the toxicity of the debate and decide to just keep their heads down.

Because this one lets consumers pretend they aren’t the source of pollution lol

> Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?

Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?

It was sarcasm. It's also not particularly insightful. "AI data centers" get immense scrutiny right now. Astoria has a similar generation capacity in a much denser (and human populated!) area.

Because combining "Amazon", "top source" "climate", and "pollution" should make this headline a top source of the clicks that Ars needs to pay its own bills?

When crypto rage was at its peak and people had done math to figure out precisely the energy impact it had, people were up in arms about how much it used.

I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way.

People raged at me for saying this and assumed I was a crypto shill, in spite of me loathing crypto and never owning any.

All this to say I appreciate your comment and the desire for precise criticism. I hate aggrandizement whether I agree with the position or not.

>I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way.

I think of this as the Wikipedia effect. People perceive Wikipedia as unreliable because they can perceive the mechanism by which it can be wrong. Study after study has shown Wikipedia to be more reliable than other encyclopedic sources that simply assert their accuracy while leaving the mechanisms by which they work hidden.

It is similar to the idea that something that saves 5 unidentified lives at the cost of one identified life is considered far worse than something that costs 5 unidentified lives to save one identified life.

Crypto and AI have also the problem that people cannot understand scale. How much is a million litres of water in terms of swimming pools, or showers? Thing uses as much electricity as [country that uses gas for heating and does not have typically have air conditioning]. Or Training an LLM produces a big looking number of CO2 which is as much as n cars in their total lifespan which makes it look like a different scale. Weirdly, the last figure I read on that suggested that if 10% of Americans trained their own personal leading edge LLM from scratch, cars would still emit more CO2. I don't know if that is true or not, but it frames the entire thing in a different light.

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