Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
www.theregister.com
Coal making a comeback as US datacenters demand power
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It's fucking insane how much is invested (both money and natural resources) in the emperor's new clothes. Let's scorch the planet because every idiot out there buys into the marketing and hype. We are utterly and truly doomed because of ourselves.
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Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population and call us sleep walkers. I know, as I'm one of them. Life is difficult enough already without jeopardising my freedom as the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
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the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
Sadly, yes.
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There's still time for a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.
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All of these problems are caused by a remarkably small network of people. I'm not even necessarily talking about the CEOs. It's the boards of directors. This is also the pool from which CEOs are drawn one and the pool to which CEOs return after their golden parachute. They function as a living repository of evil. A warehouse of criminals and nepo-babies. (Ex: Airbnb guy joined DOGE and is on teslas board. So first he destroys the housing market for a generation, and then destroys the government, and he is the person who directs Tesla.)
Like, the network is so small it could fit in one big room.
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Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population
If it makes you feel any better, our '01, '08, '14, and '20 recessions all put hard downward pressure on carbon emissions.
If Trump manages to throw us into the first full blown Depression in a century, he may do more to curb US emissions than any president in history.
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Reminds me of this song. Carbon based lifeforms. World of sleepers
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AI and the investment around it are literally the only thing holding up America’s economy right now. If you take the artificial growth and the vast amounts of investment that are being pumped in AI development data centers, the US economy has barely grown half percentage point.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs until it falls apart along with the US economy.
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No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs
I mean, they could use their fascist power grab to drive through the infrastructure work to expand power transmission lines needed to support a modern economy, renewables, and yes more datacenters
Additional coal is just the easiest way since we already have century old power lines bringing that power where it’s needed
Yes, in this case, coal might be easiest, cheapest, fastest because we can continue to neglect infrastructure. It’ll fall apart on someone else’s administration
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Well, I mean it's not all marketing and hype. I was able to get it to write a piece of code to scrape a RSS feed and email me if it met certain perameters. I couldn't have done that without a real grind / if at all. This is effectively the only time I've used it, and I think it's atrocious the amount of petty shit people use it for.. but there can be a functional benefit to generative AI. Makes me shed a tear thinking of the energy demand though.
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People have been making web crawlers for the past 30 years. Why do you need to torch an acre of forest to do the same?
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i have been using "rss2email" for years. extremely simple, works great, deterministic. no need to reinvent the wheel for a simple use case, and thats half the point here - a lot of "solutions" being found were already solved.
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Wow, you managed to do something you could have done without AI, but used more resources to do it.
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Lame story.
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Jesus fucking Christ, man. RSS parsers and emailing are literally next up after "Hello, World" in programming. If that would have required "months and months of learning" as you stated elsewhere, then maybe programming just isn't for you — AI or no AI. It's OK not being able to do something! However, it's some next level 1st world entitlement shit to think that you're somehow entitled to be able to create programs without any effort on your part and with a complete disregard for the cost to the environment and the planet.
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Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
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And capitalism!
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Hooray for cancer, asthma and bronchitis! Make America Healthy Again. Lung health is like Karate -- black is the best!
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What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger! Or chronically ill, but in a cool way, really.
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they built it in red states, because theres less resistance to regulate polluting data center, and in rural areas.
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Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.
Here is a fact: an authoritarian non-democracy is doing a lot for securing the future of humanity, while the "leader of the free world" are vandalizing the climate and accelerating apocalyptic climate catastrophe.
In 2025, China is a net positive for the future of humanity, while the USA is a net negative.
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: "facts don't care about your feelings".
If you, like me, care about the future of democracy, we have to do a LOT of digging.
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Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we're back staring at its approaching collapse. I don't think we can escape that long term, and we'll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we'll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.
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Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.
BUT
AT
WHAT
COST
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
It might be cold comfort, but none of these business models have the liquidity behind them to build out coal power at the levels they claim they'll need.
Nevermind that solar/wind would be cheaper. Or that the raw manpower to yield coal in quantity no longer exists. So much of these proposals are - at their heart - the same vaporware that promised waves of new nuclear construction and hydro-power and geothermal.
Bottom line is that GenAI's primary revenue comes from dumb VC and bad debt. They can't build, much less operate, any of this shit.
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We are a nation of man/woman children. Petulant little kids who don't want to grow up and be responsible for anything.
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And a lot of burying.
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We were too addicted to AI slop to save ourselves.
Actually no, no one was addicted to AI slop, it was just shoved into every product so that huge companies could make a profit and everyone hates it.
But wait! The huge companies are losing tons money on this.
Why did we destroy the planet again????
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The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with "AI" cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).
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Wish my coworkers would get the memo. Constantly trying to shove AI videos in my face like "haha look at MLK Jr and Tupac as pro wrestling announcers haha"
As an artist I am deeply repulsed by AI. But other people around me? They love it for some reason.
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its the techbros that are obsessed with AI slop.
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And I thought AI killing us would use cool robots and Shit. Well.
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So close, AI will kill us with coal robots and Shit-Wells
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TBF it requires minimum effort from the ai. Efficient.
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We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky
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This one sums up humanity quite well these days: "Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you!" - Londo Mollari
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It's the paperclip maximizer in action.
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Republicans are kinda like robots
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Fuck AI and these energy guzzling data centers. For decades we were told to conserve power and such and now all of those savings are being sucked up, and more, by these centers.
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Remember, everytime us plebs are told to sacrifice for the environment it’s so the corpos and parasites can off load moral responsibility onto us.
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they funded alot of campaigns doing that.
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And for some reason OUR utility bills are going up to pay for it.
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Yep. People are charged the marginal cost of power generation. Everyone pays the price of the most expensive source of electricity. The market is rigged.
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its actually raising electricity prices in many areas.
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Disgusting
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Earth was past 7 of 9 planetary boundaries to support human life.... before AI happened. That is again, boundaries to support HUMAN LIFE.
Article from when it was 6/9:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-have-crossed-6-of-9-planetary-boundaries/
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Datacenter != AI
If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth. And that includes nearly everyone using social media.
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Sure but energy use per datacenters was on a downward trend before ai, then it went the other way hard
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Datacenter != AI
Except the demand for new data centers is driven entirely by the capacity constraints of the current AI models.
If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth.
"Why are you mad at my five ton diseal SUV when you just adopted a pet chihuahua? They both emit carbon!"
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Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn't a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.
These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It's the 2 that's the problem.
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I'm perfectly fine with Lemmy being limited to 100% renewable power. Don't burn coal or LNG for me.
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This would be 99% of businesses at this point. Stop using AI to make memes and clickbait videos.
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Looking forward the 2026 ESG reports of large companies that are so happy to embrace AI :)
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I think you would have an easier time searching for those who didn’t.
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I’m not into gold panning… though it’s not like all companies are using AI so much that it will transpire in their ESG. Now I now a couple that were so far very happily ignoring this source of carbon and, as far as I remember, it was not reported by the cloud providers either.
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The coal and O&G industries have been pushing themselves as suppliers to power AI, so don't blame AI without blaming the coal and O&G industries.
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People get distracted over the fate of the pure speculative frenzy could be an AI bubble, and the harm to the hapless speculators and banksters could have a minor impact on the rest of the economy.
Reality is far worse than an AI bubble. It is a US mission for a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel that is too big to fail. Bubble in AI investments becomes unlikely, but total destruction of rest of US economy/prosperity becomes assured when the "plebs able to eat in America bubble" bursts is a sacrifice that a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel is willing to make.
If Americans are still able to afford to eat, then China or Iran wins.
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Hey, regime 🖕
(Just expressing what is left to express here)
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Now they just have to understand what sustainable means beyond it being a buzzword.
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Another reason to avoid the US.
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Our most advanced tech is dependent on some of our most old tech.
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It doesn't make any difference whether they use coal, nuclear, or renewables.
If they were using renewables the rest of us would need the coal generated power to keep the lights on.
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There's one exception - when they are self-sufficient, or even net positive, with renewables.
One example is the Google datacenter in Hamina, Finland. They build it in an old unused paper mill, built their own renewables (3/4ths of their required at this point), and they use the cooling loop for district heating for the city. That extra heat provides around 75% of the required heating, meaning the city could stop relying on their old natural gas heaters so now the district heating runs on renewables as well.It's easy to be an energy neutral datacenter, simply pour enough money to building new renewables that wouldn't have been built without your contributions, and you don't tax the power grid.
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I'll begrudgingly concede that this is a good point.
Part of me wants to say "just force these assholes to build renewables without the datacentres" but I know that's nonsensical.
I guess this is how carbon credit schemes are intended to work, but I'm aware that aside from a few specific cases carbon trading has just been a way to obfuscate carbon emissions.
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Exactly, people don't seem to realise that higher demand for energy means higher demand for all sources of energy including fussil fuels.
If doesn't matter if this datacenter runs 100% on renewables if that means that the overall demand on the powergrid increases and now other clients that used to get (a higher percentage of) their power from renewable are getting it from coal, it's just a green washing shift blame technique.
Crash can't come soon enough
Will it crash, though? It's replacing people, and people are expensive.
Yes. This tech can't replace people like some think it can. Most companies aren't reducing head count just outsourcing.
It's doing a shit job at replacing people, it's still too prone to hallucinating for the vast majority of its applications.
In many of the applications where AI has replaced people the promised performance gains never materialized because of the insane amount of babysitting a LLM agent requires.
Doesn't matter if it can write 10 hours of code in 5 minutes if you still need a software dev to troubleshoot the output for 25 hours.
They have like 90% reliability (figure pulled directly from my ass) but they need 99.99% reliability to actually be effectively reliable.
They've burned through all their hype and still haven't made it reliable yet. I think they're not going to get it done before the bubble collapses.
It'll be similar to the dotcom boom, infinite hype implosion collapses the market to a few core players and then those core players will get there over the next 15 years.
Isn't going to disappear but it's absolutely going to fade into the background of day to day life.
Edit: Wow. Folks really can't take a joke!
The people can stay, it is the AI that has to go.
The ones advocating for corporate greed and AI are the same ones talking about a birth rate crisis. I guess they just want more proles to slave for them and damn the ones who die young in the process.
Fuck this timeline
Are you one of the too many people?