You can power a datacenter with solar panels and hydro, there is no green way to raise cattle.
There is absolutely no green way to extract all the material needed to build a datacenter.
There is plenty of green ways to raise cattle, however with these ways you can’t feed everyone beef at almost every meals.
Just when I’m ready to give up on this hivemind, you go and make a sane comment.
Thanks, I’m glad to see I’m not only one.
There’s a billion obese people in the world and tons of food get wasted every second. Same for hardware, there’s disposable ecigs and they put leds on packages now. Unlimited greed and excess can hardly be green in every case scenario.
So you’re agreeing with him, right?
I’m just pointing out that the level of exploitation you apply into something play the biggest role in making it green or not.
Yeah but that’s what the guy you replied to was also saying, so you’re agreeing with him right? (Genuinely asking because I’m not sure i understand you, no ill will, i hope you understand)
What was the green way to raise cattle (asking as a cheeseburger lover). I don’t see any real way to do so. Seaweed in their feed is a good way to reduce methane production I’ve read but I’ve never raised cattle, just a few hens in the backyard for eggs. They roam around eat the bugs, weeds, grass, etc but are all around an easy pet(?) to have.
5 hens, no roosters, roughly 2 dozen eggs a week. Obviously supplement with feed but care is easy. Hose down the coop on the outside, and replace pine chips which last a decent bit, but they compost/biodegrade and with chicken shit on them I think using them for mulch in the garden should be good for the garden as well… The chickens may eat your garden though haha
There is absolutely no green way to extract all the material needed to build a datacenter.
Isn’t this just energy dependent lol? Renewable energy and safe mining practices is all it takes. Let alone space mining, dyson spheres, cold fusion, even regular nuclear.
Energy is only a fraction of the issue and easily solvable, I’m not a 100% certain but I think that some mines are even powered with renewables energy.
The main issue is tailings, millions of cubic meters of toxic, sometime radioactive, full of heavy metals mud. The tailings are piled up behind dams that regularly breaks and contaminate entire regions.
Even of the dams don’t break it is still hundred of square kilometers of land that is contaminated for millennia.
That is a massively easy problem to get around. I’m really not sure how you think there aren’t safe ways to mine lol. Flouting shitty industrial practices in the name of getting people a $100 phone is the problem by shipping them to people viewed as cattle in less developed areas is the problem. One that’s not even hard to fix.
Actually there are ways to do that. Recycling of materials used in various technologies (including lithium batteries and solar panels) is always improving. Chip companies like Intel are increasingly pushing for conflict free minerals. Just because something isn’t being done in a sustainable way doesn’t mean it can’t be done sustainably, just like with farming.
What is the difficult part for datacenters, that isn’t true of every other building? I was under the impression that the most inefficient part of most electronics is the batteries, which is a problem looking to go away with new chemistries.
You can also not power a datacenter that’s only for generating powerpoints and instead use the renewables to replace coal plants. Until all our necessities are covered by renewables and we’ve retired fossil fuels, we should be dialing back the conspicuous consumption.
The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.
Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.
Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.
Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.
This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.
There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!! This isn’t aimed at you.
The worst thing about political activists is that in general these types of people have never built a real world solution to anything, especially large scale problems. These people will always be obsessed with the next ideological struggle allowing for more and more protests, demonstrations, riots, and revolutions instead of coming up with workable solutions to material problems.
Like problems politics and awareness are useful for, activists see the climate crisis as an ignorance and malice problems with easily solvable lack of awareness and systemic oppression. Maths, logistics, economic, and practical engineering considerations don’t enter the arena in emotionally satisfying ways so they are considered trivial or already solved. Most activists would have no trouble cancelling someone because they said something mistaken once a long time ago. Maybe this is changing, but only because of public backlash. Not because they actually understand the consequences of publically shaming someone.
/s
Do you get it now? That’s what it’s like to be told you are the problem and you aren’t capable by people who themselves can’t solve this issue independently. If climate change is ever going to get solved we are going to need technical solutions while also trying to change things like systematic oppression and the problematic aspects of capitalism. Things like solar panels and wins turbines come from engineers not political activists. Carbon taxes and shale gas bans come from political activists. We need to work together, not be at each other’s throats.
You can absolutely raise cattle in an energy neutral (or potentially even energy positive) way. Cattle, in nature, consume grass. Most of the energy the cows get from the grass comes from solar energy. If they’re being raised on land that is not being used for anything else and no equipment or anything else is used, the area gathers more energy than it costs.
However, this is generally not how cattle is raised. In order to meet the large demands of our society other methods are used that cost more energy. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it won’t be done on a large scale.
Unless you find a way to prevent cows methane farts, being energy neutral won’t solve the problem.
The Methane is generated from chemical reactions involving what they eat. The corn they’re fed frequently in the US (because of our massive corn subsidies) makes them worse than they would normally be. No matter what though, they expel what they take in. The carbon for the Methane is gathered by grass from carbon dioxide in the air. Methane breaks down relatively quickly back into CO2. It’s mostly a non-issue if it were done in a healthy way.
Again, we aren’t and won’t be doing it sustainably (at a large scale), so this is all a thought exercise. If you were to raise cattle yourself on land that doesn’t otherwise have a use, it’d be carbon and energy neutral. It’s all a part of a system. Humans break that system, but cattle don’t need to. They only do when humans are involved.
I keep hearing promising things about certain types of seaweed being an additive to cattle feed that dramatically lowers their emissions.
But that costs money, so I’m not holding my breath on factory farms implementing it on their own prerogative.
I’d rather switch the datacenters to green energy before trying to convince people to give up cheeseburgers.
We cannot afford to do one before the other. We’re need to do both
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
Quick googling shows that in 2021, agriculture produced 10.9 billion tons of emissions, while fossil fuels produced 36.8. There might be some overlap between the two, but I’m assuming not for ease of math.
The way I see it, doing both would be nice, but if we try that, fossil fuel companies and bacon enjoyers are going to end up on the same team, and that’s going to be very difficult to fight. The corporations can easily push propaganda like “Fight this legislation, they want you to eat bugs and tofu instead of real meat for your Fourth of July barbecue,” and then nothing gets done.
On the other hand, if we target fossil fuels first, we may be able to cut 77%, and by doing so we overcome the “it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do about it” mindset, and no longer have fossil fuel industries trying to fight us when we target agriculture next. Plus, getting people to drop meat keeps getting easier as meat alternatives get better.
We’ve got to strategize. Targeting both at once may be the only way we can hit the target, but it’s so much less likely. I’d rather stop emissions after missing the target than fail to stop them at all.
Those figures are likely to be concerning CO2 emissions only because I know that methane, a significant part of agriculture’s climate impact, increases climate heating far more than CO2 does, per ton, and this makes it hard to quantify climate harm due to emissions. (Though I’m not personally familiar with the figures or how they’re calculated, so it’s possible that yours were an aggregated comparison or similar)
but if we try that, fossil fuel companies and bacon enjoyers are going to end up on the same team
I understand what you’re saying about lobbying forces clubbing together, but we simply don’t have time to attack one, then the other: Consider a world where we win the fossil fuel fight, but we’re still fucked because of all the other sectors killing the planet — how do we overcome the “there’s nothing we can do about it” when it too late. Ofc, “too late” isn’t a hard cut off deadline (because if it were, we’d have already passed it), but we are exponentially heading to a complete climate collapse.
I’m arguing that if we want to avert the climate catastrophe, the average bacon eater does need to eat a heckton less bacon. But it’s not the average bacon eater I’m worried about, it’s the massive agricultural industry, which has financial interests that massively overlap with the fossil fuel industry. They’re functionally already on the same side, and my opinion is that we won’t start making progress in the battle against climate change until we acknowledge that.
Are these datacenters doing scientific research or are they generating AI images and crypto? These things do not have equal value to society.
I’m not computer worker person but I’m pretty sure most are just serving websites and podcasts and music and all the shit we actually love about the Internet. Websites like this, and Netflix, Amazon (horrible company but so glad I can buy shit on my phone that shows up in an hour or 2) even ones like Plex, pirate Bay types, or foss things. But also crypto and AI bullshit, and probably sex trafficking and illegal dangerous goods . Modern luxuries we enjoy come with bullshit attached. It’s all or nothing as far as I see.
Crypto and AI are crazy power intensive to run. Far beyond what it takes a streaming service to send you a video file and considering many people are choosing streaming over driving their gasoline fueled car to the theater, it’s a net gain.
That’s not the kind of data center its talking about
You know very well what the data enters in question are doing. They’re making money, that’s why they get funding. Science does not make enough money to fund it.
People giving up cheeseburgers and SUVs has been on the table for at least forty years. If you’re younger than forty, that’s your entire lifetime. It has never not been a problem. It has always been exacerbated by republiQans. It will not change, it will not go away, it will never be wrong. Give up cheeseburgers and SUVs or kill the planet with arrogance and greed.
Guess which one we’ve picked for forty years. G’head. Guess.
Or you could use the materials necessary to create that data center and its energy production infrastructure and instead shut down coal and petrol energy generators.
You realize you need data centers for the platform you are using now, right?
You realize the point of decentralization is to not have to use data centers?
You realize there’s a major difference between what we’re doing here and the processing power necessary to train LLMs?
No that’s not the point at all. Most of these instances are hosted on public clouds. Lemm.ee which is the instance I use is hosted on Hetzner I believe. Maybe you should actually listen to what instance admins are telling you instead of guessing.
Also the cloud is decentralized. Data centers are spread all over the world. Splitting them up smaller wouldn’t reduce their power usage either. If anything it would increase it.
Isn’t the majority of the problem with cattle the diet which causes more methane?
There’s also a food chain issue. Vegan diets are less CO2 intensive per calorie. There are ways to have some meat with negligible CO2 impact, but it’s not going to be coming from factory farms.
I agree, but I guess the scope is more about oppurtunity costs - “At maximum expanse of renewable energy, should we use that energy for fancy justifications of layoffs of middle to owning class tech jobs or for e.g. electrified heat pumps and vehicles for working and middle class people”
I don’t see the connection?
Each sector has to do its part: Food production, Housing AND, yes, computation. AND, not XOR.
The AND part ain’t happening
the skill issues of one sector doesn’t allow fud about the others. call it unfair, but it was rigged from the beginning and giving up simply isn’t an option (kinda rare characteristic for human conflicts).
tldr: so what
The post isn’t saying ‘give up’ it’s calling out the tech sector.
For… not being the energy sector? I’m not sure what people are getting at.
New technology uses energy! We still don’t have 100% renewable energy everywhere! How dare they!
Each sector has to do its part
Me, doing my tiny part to help
Billionaire, undoing the efforts of millions of people
Energy prices surging. Agriculture collapsing. Heat waves killing thousands of people. Wars erupting over access to potable water.
Everyone doing their part.
I don’t think downplaying our efforts is really helpful to our goals.
I also don’t believe in the individual vs collective action blame dichotomy, because we should build pilitical infrastructure that fosters climate action and prevents emissions -> If we continue to put or keep lawmakers into power that empower the extreme rich, we disempower ourselves.
The subsequent economic system doesn’t really matter, but the physical output matters.
I don’t think downplaying our efforts is really helpful to our goals
The math don’t lie. When you’re working on the scale of kilowatts and kilojoules, while your local hedge fund is operating on the scale of gigawatts and giga joules in the opposite direction, you’ve been outgunned by orders of magnitude.
Hedge funds consist of the labour of individuals in collectives (ie companies). Their products are only valuable because people keep their function and infrastructure intact (physically, legally).
Scales cannot be compared that way. I don’t know the right term, but a better comparison might be between your efforts and the impact of a single ‘buyer’ of those hedge funds (or in the case of the extreme rich, the labour of a single worker that creates/created their power). Scales require similar spatial or material flow boundaries to be comparable.
Indeed, I just don’t bother. That energy can and should be used in more meaningful, impactful ways like protests and policy changes. Which isn’t much but it’s the best we got.
Quite a bit of modern progressive reform was won by being giant assholes towards people in power until they capitulated.
I don’t think climate change will be resolved any differently.
You absolutely should be giant assholes to those people doing the most damage.
But this does not preclude you from doing something to decrease your own, likely outsized, damage yourself. It certainly does not excuse you from doing nothing.
Yeah, it’s why I continue torturing puppies daily for my own pleasure. Sure, it’s bad to do this, but have you seen how much pain a billionaire causes? The total suffering in the world will not meaningfully decrease if I stop torturing puppies, so why bother doing it?
spoiler
/s obviously
That’s a strange logical fallacy but you do you.
This comment is exactly what I meant above. We need both policy changes and individual action, simply because most industrialised societies work that way - as mixed economies.
I also don’t believe in the individual vs collective action blame dichotomy
Wtf
huh?
the tide is coming in, and we’re scooping buckets to protect our sandcastles. yes remove the water, but the buckets are pointless against the rising tide of the ocean if we don’t build a dike first to hold it back. but so many people are like “hey your sandcastle is getting wet, why are you focusing on the dike?”
Bro hit’em with them logic gates
So that’s what we use AI for, solving the climate crisis!
Whew, glad we got that settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_model
Cloud-resolving climate models are nowadays run on high intensity super-computers which have a high power consumption and thus cause CO2 emissions.[44] They require exascale computing […]. For example, the Frontier exascale supercomputer consumes 29 MW.[45] It can simulate a year’s worth of climate at cloud resolving scales in a day.[46]
Techniques that could lead to energy savings, include for example: “reducing floating point precision computation; developing machine learning algorithms to avoid unnecessary computations; and creating a new generation of scalable numerical algorithms that would enable higher throughput in terms of simulated years per wall clock day.”[44]
Let me point a critical part that you seemed to have skipped:
… to avoid unnecessary computations…
Using ML algorithms to add more computations that weren’t necessary doesn’t help. Using it to improve computations can, if it’s more efficient than not using it. ML can be a useful and good thing, but the extreme vast majority of what it’s currently being used for is trying to come up with more places to shove it where it doesn’t reduce computations and instead increases it.
I just copied the Wikipedia part, because I thought it funny how AI in media is different from AI in science. I don’t have a stance on the power consumption of climate models because without the models we’d be very unequipped for the storm we brew.
Sorry for creating the image of me criticising valuable science.
Chilling.
Knee jerk bs response. The poster didn’t say don’t participate in society, but that we all need to do our part.
Replace ‘you participate in society’ with ‘the extreme rich exist’
It’s all NAND under the hood.
That would be funny if it weren’t so infuriatingly true. Don’t forget the layoffs generated by replacing people with the AI and the shittier customer service as they replace more people with ineffective automated systems that completely fail to be able to help you with your problem thereby dumping you in a 72 minute queue with everyone else that the system failed to help in order to talk to a real live person in a foreign country that will do little more than read you a script and then escalate your case to someone that will never call you back.
gasp
I’d have written more but I had to take a breath.
I swear the concept of doing two things at once is lost on nearly everyone on the internet who clutch their pearls.
The doomscrolling rot has infected their minds lol. They overemphasize the effects of climate change while ignoring everything good and green people are doing which is literally countering said climate change through mitigation and adaptation.
Yet… somehow they want to freeze the entirety of the world, magically build enough wind, solar, and hydro to power everything, then just… turn it back on again.
Yeah, literally everyone would do that if they could. It’s not how reality works lol. Prepare for greenwashing comments for quoting studies that aren’t from the 1970s!
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow-or-even-reverse-global-warming
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/adaptation-mitigation/resources/
https://www.un.org/en/un75/climate-crisis-race-we-can-win
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-still-plenty-we-can-do-to-slow-climate-change/
Yet… somehow they want to freeze the entirety of the world, magically build enough wind, solar, and hydro to power everything, then just… turn it back on again.
No, we want billionaires to stop using so much fucking energy and making things disproportionately worse for everyone
You realize they aren’t the ones using it right?
Sorry, didn’t realize we were doing the theatrical pedantry thing, let me clarify: we want the companies that the billionaires own and control to stop using so much fucking energy and making things disproportionately worse for everyone.
Better?
No, because it’s not billionaires or these companies supplying resources to nobody lol.
Lemmy, Reddit, and whatever social media might all believe they aren’t utilizing these things, but they are. People aren’t dropping literal trillions into tech, infrastructure, design, and pushing stuff to live just because they want to.
End users are utilizing it. And data centers are one of the few things we need more of, not less. Let alone how bullshit the energy and water use statistics are for these places lol. Oh no it used up 6% of the city’s water!.. ignore the manufacturing, bottle water places, agriculture, etc. AI BAD SCARY!
1 AI search = 10 google searches. https://www.snexplores.org/article/green-artificial-intelligence-less-energy-ai-climate
How about watching TikTok? 30 minutes of video daily = 28kg of carbon a year. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/social-media-emissions-carbon-footprint/ or https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/energy/features/social-carbon-footprint-calculator/ or https://yoast.com/carbon-footprint-of-website/
No shit people are utilizing things. That’s not the point. The point is that on the way to providing these services, they harm the environment disproportionately more than you or I. As your first article points out:
"AI doesn’t have to be super, super data-hungry or super, super compute-hungry,” says Donti. Instead, we can “imagine AI differently.”
That’s the point. The billionaires and their megacorps could do it better. Your article points out a bunch of ways for LLMs to use less energy, and the amount of energy doing that would save would be orders of magnitude more than if people cut back or stopped their use, or whatever it is you’re suggesting.
Man if that was practical at this stage they would already be doing it. These people spend tones of money on data center hardware and the energy to run them, and it costs them reputation. If they didn’t have to do all that it would increase their profit margin significantly.
Fuck their profit margins, and fuck the shitty double standard billionaires and their holdings are held to. If I’m expected to be energy conscious as an individual, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these rich fucks to make their companies energy conscious as well.
They overemphasize the effects of climate change while ignoring everything good and green people are doing which is literally countering said climate change through mitigation and adaptation.
Overemphasizing the death of all life on the planet? Really? Wow that seems hard to do. Thank goodness the ‘good and green’ people are literally countering said destruction, so that everything’s good and nice again.
Although mitigation isn’t recovery it’s just making it less bad. And adaptation might be good but it’s also inevitable given the dying environment so I’m not sure we should credit that as a win.
I guess burning tons of fuel to crank out some bitcoins for Elmo is okley-fuckin-dokely! I was a grade A moron to doubt it!
Overemphasizing the death of all life on the planet?
Don’t worry mate, life is resilient and will endure.
Humanity, not so much.
You’re wrong about which part survives. If anything does, it’s literally not even metaphorically humans and anything we deem important to us. Everything else is what gets the axe lol.
How can I be wrong about which part survives?
Life will go on, maybe not humanity but life will endure. If I was wrong and humanity survives, surely life would also have survived?
Then you’ve missed the entire point of the original saying. It insinuates humanity will be extinct but some little rodent will survive. Or a lizard, or insects, etc.
Humanity is too good for anything the earth will ever throw at it short of a supervolcano. Extrasolar threats are about the closest thing that could take us out and we are A-OK as far as radiation bursts from nearby exploding stars go. That just leaves asteroids large enough to turn the entire crust into molten rock. In which case all life except potentially the tiniest deep in the crust or reintroduced through contaminated space materials will survive.
Humanity will survive the rest. Us poors might not, but humanity will lol.
Yeah i see this a lot. Hilarious.
I don’t get the joke I’m afraid.
Mmmm.
?
Sure, except for all the species for which we’ve caused extinction.
I went through 3 of your sources and they claim that we can, in fact, turn to renewable energies. And that we should! None said anything about it being impossible. I guess maybe one of the others will say something like that, but honestly I’m not working to make your point for you.
Everybody except your strawmen agree there’s a transition period. The problem is that due to many interests, the powers that be are dragging their feet.
… You never read what I said then because you’re just agreeing with me lmfao.
If you agree with what I’ve said, you need to work your communication skills. Me and everybody who downvoted understood the opposite, and that’s not a few.
No, it’s downvoted because it goes against Lemmy doomers which are the vast majority of people here lol. You are welcome to try to post hopeful good and correctly cited recent climate news somewhere if you’d like though lol.
Being combative at the start doesn’t exactly help but that shit needs to be said in a thread rife with people saying everyone is going to die lol. Who the fuck cares about downvotes if you’re speaking factual well cited truth? All of you shouldn’t.
Read the information for what it is and have a clue about where it’s being said. That’s all you need.
👍
Very Sharp
Very charp
