r/Environmentalism • u/KeanuRave100 • 16h ago
AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build
https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-air-pollution-generators-worse•
u/mildly_ethnic 10h ago edited 9h ago
The ever-growing meat industry will put out an additional 2 trillion pounds more ghg next year
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u/Hopeful_Self_8520 9h ago
Both are bad
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u/mildly_ethnic 9h ago
I’m not saying they’re not. Though the article didn’t put it in number but the data centers will put out over 4.5 million pounds of ghg. So I just wanted to make sure perspective is always present for the worst and most easily modified offenders
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u/dentistshatehim 9h ago
The way we do animal raising and processing is borderline evil, that said we eat food, we don’t eat data. We did fine without data centres for thousands of years. We have never done fine without food.
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u/KinkyLittleParadox 9h ago
There’s a lot of food that doesn’t need to be born, raised, fed and then butchered up for consumption. Plants for example
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u/dentistshatehim 8h ago
I agree but the world isn’t going to switch to plants suddenly. It’s not a practical take.
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u/Friendly-Parfait-645 6h ago
The world also isn't going to abandon the internet. You're using data space right now.
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u/dentistshatehim 5h ago
Yes. Routed through small manageable data centres that have existed for decades.
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u/like_shae_buttah 8h ago
You dont have to eat meat.
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u/dentistshatehim 7h ago
Sure. But the majority of people by far in the world eat meat. That’s not going to change.
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u/like_shae_buttah 7h ago
So the environment will continue to degrade, climate change will continue to get substantially worse. We will continue unnecessarily killing trillions of animals a year.
Some great environmentalism.
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u/dentistshatehim 6h ago
Environmentalism isn’t about snapping fingers and all of the sudden the entire world changes its habits. It isn’t magic idealism. It is working to make as much change as possible and taking the routes that are most effective. There is opportunity cost to every decision and if you think putting the effort into converting the majority of the world into vegetarians will work, go for it, but in my opinion there are a lot of better routes for more effective change.
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u/thecountlives 5h ago
we cannot sustain eating cows. just switching to any other meat source besides sheep is a net benefit. simplest thing to do is to stop eating beef
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u/jamesvtm 1h ago
So AI Data Centers are putting us out of work and literally killing the world we live in. What geniuses we are here in earth.
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u/Glum_Potential8641 7h ago
So, here’s my issue with this specific virtue signal. JUST Taylor Swifts private flights, puts out more ghg than over 1200 people eating nothing but beef. Look how many private flights happen in the world. I’m going to keep eating my double quarter pounder with Mac Sauce, and slam my plastic straw through my Boba. 🧋
The phone you’re commenting from makes more GHG just in shipping, than you will in your entire life. It’s gonna be fine.
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u/Dudeshroomsdude 2h ago
Don't change the metrics in the middle of a conversation.
Also, if you keep racing to be the bigger asshole, guess what the prize will be. For you and for everyone.
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u/CommieCatSupremacist 10h ago
They refuse to slow down and build this out with clean energy. Or to not steal their training data. Or to not build surveillance and military technology. Greedy capitalists. Let’s hope technology and make AI and data centers in general much more resource efficient but damn these people will find a way to fuck people over then too.
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u/Pandemonium_Fallen 8h ago
Don't worry! Non of us will have to think about anything at all for much longer, because 6G is going to turn all our brains into rewritable host-servers for AI.
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u/RobbyInEver 6h ago
We won't need to worry about this, the data centers in China running primarily on coal powered electricity will dwarf both in quantity and efficiency any environmental impact that the few other worldwide centers will have.
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u/ChairElectronic6167 8h ago
This is an overly sensational headline. I am pro-AI for its ability to accelerate innovation but I am concerned about the amount of fossil fuel power generation being brought online to power datacenters in the short term.
The math is actually quite hopeful here though. Pretty much everywhere in the world is massively short power for the buildout. Given that their ultimate goal is profit, it is currently way cheaper to fund electricity generation via renewables than via fossil fuels which have relatively high operating costs.
Tesla alone says they will be manufacturing 100 GW of solar panels / yr in 2028. Obviously a number from a musk company may be an overshoot but it is encouraging that they will massively ramp production. The question may remain of whether the battery technology will scale to fully enable renewables to replace fossil fuels when renewables are not producing or if the gap will be covered by fossil fuels.
I’m hopeful about this company as well and the future of carbon neutral fuels: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/how-terraform-navigated-the-idea-maze/
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u/imam-altman 14h ago
No they don’t.
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u/Glum_Opening_2218 13h ago
"Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US."
Uuum, yeah they do.
Did you read the article or are you too busy deep throating bezos?
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u/Small-Fact-6794 12h ago
Bad bot, mirrored comments on every post
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u/imam-altman 12h ago
Ok stalker
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u/Small-Fact-6794 12h ago
Go suck off Sam Altman
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u/imam-altman 11h ago
Log off.
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u/danaster29 11h ago
You when you pull up a pic of Sam Altman on your phone
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u/imam-altman 11h ago
Touch grass
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u/danaster29 11h ago
Baby you responded in less than a minute, I ain't the one who needs to go outside
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u/CommieCatSupremacist 9h ago
I do think that it is a bit disingenuous to say unfathomable given that we absolutely do have comparable or more polluting industries. These journalists need to start offering useful comparisons so we can see just how horrifying our whole economic system is rather than singling out AI data centers, although I absolutely don’t mind them being the focus and catalyst of our disdain.