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People of every generation were told it doesn’t matter and that it won’t be a problem. With the advent of social media and associated algorithms, the village idiots are loud, organised and getting others to bark at the moon with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I suppose I just have 15 more years to live huh?
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.
Yes there are some upsides
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
deleted by creator
Younger generations are ignoring it as well. They’re busy blaming past generations, while they themselves are some of the biggest contributors to our current climate crisis.
So bezos and his guests flying dozens of individual private jets to Venice are the “younger generations”? It doesn’t have a lot to do with age but seems to correlate with wealth. The wealthier you are (as a nation and an individual) the more you typically (on average) contribute to climate change.
So bezos and his guests flying dozens of individual private jets to Venice are the “younger generations”?
As wasteful as that may seem, it’s doesn’t make much of a difference in the bigger picture. What does make a big impact is using all the services Bezos is providing. And not just his. Every cloud service uses an insane amount of energy. Youtube, TikTok, streaming services, online games, iCloud, Dropbox, video calls, crypto valuta, A.I. They can’t build data centers fast enough to supply the demand.
They are not ignoring it, you silly Billy. They are treating it like everyone else is.
They are the some of the biggest consumers of electronics and technology. What do you think powers that. Fairy dust?
Two things.
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Your original statement was that they were ignoring it, not that they were contributing to it. They are definitely not ignoring it. They have less ability to ignore it that any previous generation.
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Their consumption of electronics is the result of how they were brought up. Not that they have some kind of suicidal death wish. If you were in their generation you would be doing the same thing. As would I.
And if they where in an older generation, they would have done the same thing as that generation. That’s exactly my point. Every generation follows the trends and do what they have to to get by. What gets my piss boiling is their whining that the climate crisis is the fault of older generations, while they themselves aren’t any better.
That’s a valid point.
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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.
Well pick up your gun and go do something I guess
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
You dont understand. The poor billionairs need their money nowwww!
Finally, this is the first time I saw this graph that DIDN’T use logarithmic scale for time - which makes this sharp spike look “natural”.
Did they ignore it? Yes but the only reason they ignored it was because…
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The oil industry (and other adjacent industries) did their best to make sure everybody doubted the science of climate change
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Governments (the U.S gov’t in particular) took the oil industry’s side and subsidized their ventures
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Libertarian think tanks (like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC) took money from Big Oil to misinform the public about climate change and its connection to fossil fuel burning.
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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?
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.
He’s also delusional if he thinks AGI is coming if you just keep pumping up LLMs.
We didn’t invent the automobile by breeding faster, and faster, horses.
He’s not delusional, he’s lying. He saw a chance to be the first trillionaire and grabbed at it
I don’t think any serious ai researcher things that
…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
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.
Love this one. It’s one of the best illustrations of the “hockey stick effect” and a perfect way to explain why the excuse that “were just coming out of an ice age” is dead wrong.
AI is going to fix this by increasing the scale of the Y axis.
Just hallucinate better data
Phew, looks like the industrial revolution just saved us from falling below the safe climate zone! /s
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 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.
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.
This is like the “both sides” argument in politics.
It resonates with people and encourages apathy supporting the status quo.
Its true that the actions of an individual aren’t very impactful. Its also true that large corporations are responsible for the vast majority of the problem.
However, if no one bought products from those companies, or owned their shares, then they would exist.
While “no one” is not possible, what if everyone just used 5% less, or 5% of people switched to an “ethical” 401k / pension funds that didn’t invest in these companies.
We dont need a few people doing climate mitigation perfectly, we need everyone doing climate mitigation imperfectly.
It sounds like such a small change, yet we’re unable to achieve it.
For example, here in Australia our conservative party is presently trying to discard our pathetic carbon emissions targets saying they’re unachievable.
Ah, but is it apathy to support the systematic teardown of these major sources? Like actually destroying private jets for instance
It’s the truth
Oh please. It’s like you didn’t even read my comment. Your claim may be “true” but it’s precisely what governments and polluters want you to be thinking and saying. “I personally can’t do anything about this.”
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.
Imagine seeing this and not immediately going full Avalanche blowing up reactors n shit…
Reactors would be helpful in this situation honestly. They only emit steam
Like the ffvii reference, don’t like your hippie lib attitude. Downvote
Yeah nuclear isnt the immediate or root problem here.
Note that the “reactors” are, in-game, energy plants that convert literal life force into electricity.
I like Joshua’s answer here. The mental gymnastics is insane
I really don’t see how slaying the planet in a magical way is so different than slaughtering the planet in a greedy astroturfing way? After giving mass ff7 lore he just convulse into rants about how bad antifa is and nobody even asked. The megacorps and their lobbyists ARE killing our planet and using faschism and world order war… the fucking boreal is our Mako. If they burn, similarly no new soul will be born.
He also wraps it up with a bit of climate denial, so he thinks the real problem is imaginary.
Extra mental gymnastics as he interpreted reports of significantly improved pollution when we shut down everything as proof, somehow, that humanity didn’t really make that much of a difference… So either a difference is observed and that means it’s the rest of the way reversible so it can’t be that big of a deal or no difference would’ve been seen and he would have concluded humanity must not make a difference because no difference was seen…
Wow, I couldn’t get through that… Feel like it’s a sign of some mental issues to produce that much word diarrhea in a Quora answer…
But yeah, “the bombings in the game and their collateral damage including death of civilians are good, but you know what is truly evil? Some people that mostly just hold up protest signs and stand around protesting Trump.”
Sorry the actual discourse hasnt risen above the level of thirty year old video games, it’s really hard to tell sometimes.
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.
…my parents beat me for trying to do something about it: fuck them, they’re complicit to this day…
My parents, to their extremely rare credit, complained about it and separated their trash.
Edit: paper, plastic, metal, and now that i think about it; offspring. They really were thorough!
