this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That 'almost' in "Almost Incomprehensible" is doing a lot of work there.
Listen, an AI waifu is worth the increased speed of destruction to the planet.
You: "How much will this speed up our doom?"
Your waifu: "Calculating… oh, it's actually less than 1%."
tears in your eyes the Old Yeller soundtrack starts playing
I probably should have /s this comment. I don't have or want at AI waifu. If I'm wrong please say so, but it sounds like you're nbd'ing AI waifus because they aren't the worst offender.
P.S. Please cite ya sources for this 1% number.
P.S. literally the comment you were initially responding to sources it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there's always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
But...but...but... the RAGE! With a measured approach to topics like that, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUEL THE RAGE!?!?!?!11
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that's a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn't require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
That's the thing we're even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position.....
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don't we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I'm not American, don't insult me by assuming I'm one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
So less food variety and I get trash for the trade, are you the White run merchant buying any random crap the Dragonborn drags in by any chance?
Listen, I didn't say you can't ever eat meat. Just eat a single patty hamburger instead of a double. It's not less food variety, it's called not gorging yourself on things that are bad for your heart health.
Dude I barely eat half the time, regardless it's a piss poor trade given how AI is quite literally worthless to me. It could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't notice if no one talked about it at least for the shit that these data centers are for. For all the resources dumped into this dumbfuck AI race we could've done damned near anything else and have gotten more value for it with a fraction of the economic and environmental cost, even a bridge to nowhere has better utility.
So how's bout we go down the have no AI and do literally anything else bargain.
It's useless to you, but not to other people. Libraries are useless to me because I pirate books, but I'm not going to say it's a waste
Where do you think the pirated books come from?
Usually library copies
Usually the new releases are from people who personally bought them, not people who wait for them to be put in a library.
Last few physical books I read I just bought because they were rare
Oh I forgotten y'all are Americans, where your libraries have to wait for books instead of getting a copy pretty much immediately
or have double meat and no ai.
Bad for heart health, unless it's chicken which already has much lower emissions in the first place
AI is bad for your brain and society, so there's that.
AI is great for society. Just because it's still in its early years doesn't mean we won't have better uses for it later.
Ah, you're just a dipshit, fair
Sure, just handwave the damage and fast forward a century.
That's the only way we can get out of having to do boring, repetitive jobs literately forever until the end of time.
Yeah such as (checks notes) Art, Music, Writing and joy, so we can (checks notes) be the condom between Claude and Production, be a babysitter for a stupid AI, and have our livelihoods destroyed.
I love that
Not everyone likes AI art or music. I have no qualms about AI email spam. I am cheering for the "corporate email marketing" team to be eliminated as a position
Well yeah, that's cause you're a shill with no sense of taste and bad opinions
Sounds like a bad solution to me
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
A quarter of Americans eating more chicken because it's better for the environment is even more realistic. Chicken is tasty!
Personally I'll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there's ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah's Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
I'm not vegan and yours is a shitty take, sorry to have to tell you this.
What a whiny little bitch you are.
I'm not even vegan. But meat eating morons signal posting that they're sick of vegans are way more common and annoying than vocal vegans.
Its such a overplayed prejudice for as long as i can remember. I came across overreaching vegans which actually annoyed me maybe five times in my life. Signalposting meat heads are more like a weekly occurance.
Random vegan at a bbq "hey, can i have small sliver of aluminum foil for my stuff and if you guys dont half intentionally wrench the meat juices over my veggies, that would be cool"
What always follows: 10-30 minute moronic rant of some meathead because eating meat is his whole personality.
Too much too.
But muh brisket...
I'm sure that my argument isn't bullet-proof, but raping animals, raising their babies based on the profit you can make out of processing their corpses and running an endless ad cycle and bribe system aimed at making people want to participate in and perpetrate this practice of cynical violence on sentient beings doesn't scale well.
PS: I'm not even a vegetarian, but the argument may be unpleasant in terms of form, not of content.
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
I present to you...the French.
The French that started by beheading kings and nobles... and shortly after anyone who had a slightly different opinion? The French who shortly after that madness had a new Emperor? THAT French?
Abolitionists are an easy example.
Now if you mean a majority of people, yeah not really. But people in general, it happens.
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO~2~ emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it's energy from non CO~2~ emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There's a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn't just cleaner, it's cheaper.
What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:
These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch