Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.
And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*
For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.
China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.
Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.
The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.
And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.
It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.
I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)
One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.
But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
That will put some sweat on some brows :)
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.
Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.
if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money
If you eat meat, you’re producing more CO2 and using more water than 100 vegan vibe coders sitting around creating slop 24/7. It’s not on the same level.
Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.
One AI request is 0.38 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas
(Tofu is about 0.1 to 0.3kg of Co2, Seitan about 0.1kg of Co2 per equivalent 100g)
A burger made in New Zealand likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Switzerland which likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?
Just go vegan for a week or something and you’ve offset your AI water use for a few lifetimes.
but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.
basically, imagine returning to per-industrial times, because that's what required to achieve the goals you believe to help achieve by abstaining from burgers.
Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now? Telling others the only solution is to either sacrifice everything or do nothing? Simply not fact based.
yes, by 15%, if you'd managed to convince 100% of our extremely hedonistic and selfish species to voluntarily abstain from something 95% of us want. I can't fathom why the futility of evangelizing something so absurdly unrealistic is not obvious to you, and I tried to help you fathom it by pointing out other sacrifices you could make but probably aren't particularly inclined to.
>Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now?
the activists who use the climate angle to attack things they feel strongly about. 5 years ago, bitcoin was going to boil the oceans. having children was a carbon sin. now it's chatbot prompts. it will be something else when there's a new current thing.