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Discussion (119 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
There's no question that global CO2 levels are increasing, but the increase is largely caused by China and not the US.
It is not "settled science" that increasing CO2 levels will result in a long-term increase in global temperatures or hurricane frequency/intensity, but rising CO2 levels HAVE resulted in an increase in agricultural yields.
https://www.jw.com/news/epa-greenhouse-gas-findings/
>GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States
Immediately following that is the text
"It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow"
It's also worth noting that the headline turns "largest single source" of CO2 to "top source" of climate pollution. They say pollution in the text, but context would suggest they are talking about CO2. To say otherwise would be a much stronger claim which I don't think you can assume unless they clearly assert it.
I'm not sure if it is possible to quantify scale of climate impact between different types of pollution, but it seems like a stretch to unilaterally declare that the single top producer of CO2 is the top environmental impact. It may be, but they are making claims beyond what were made in their sources.
I was under the impression that there were a few chemicals that had an outsize effect on climate pollution.
For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.
Edit: https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers
Texas is just ripping through these things since it’s so permissive. That’s troubling for the other states who will all inevitably bear some burden.
Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?
I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way.
People raged at me for saying this and assumed I was a crypto shill, in spite of me loathing crypto and never owning any.
All this to say I appreciate your comment and the desire for precise criticism. I hate aggrandizement whether I agree with the position or not.
I think of this as the Wikipedia effect. People perceive Wikipedia as unreliable because they can perceive the mechanism by which it can be wrong. Study after study has shown Wikipedia to be more reliable than other encyclopedic sources that simply assert their accuracy while leaving the mechanisms by which they work hidden.
It is similar to the idea that something that saves 5 unidentified lives at the cost of one identified life is considered far worse than something that costs 5 unidentified lives to save one identified life.
Crypto and AI have also the problem that people cannot understand scale. How much is a million litres of water in terms of swimming pools, or showers? Thing uses as much electricity as [country that uses gas for heating and does not have typically have air conditioning]. Or Training an LLM produces a big looking number of CO2 which is as much as n cars in their total lifespan which makes it look like a different scale. Weirdly, the last figure I read on that suggested that if 10% of Americans trained their own personal leading edge LLM from scratch, cars would still emit more CO2. I don't know if that is true or not, but it frames the entire thing in a different light.
Sadly there aren't much support to do this. The largest coalition see thermal power stations as critical to manage grid stability and voted to have natural gas defined as "green", since they view it as necessary to enable renewable energy to be built. The other major coalition do want to decrease the need for thermal power plants by increasing base load through nuclear power, but they are not openly against thermal power plants as a way to reduce costs. EU lacks any movement that are willing to pay the cost of not burning fuel in order to generate electricity. Same for basically every other place on earth right now, despite EU and most countries being in agreement that climate change is real and fossil fuels should be stopped yesterday.
Even with today’s energy polices, electricity costs have skyrocketed (this was the case before the data center demand). Couple that with electrification of vehicles, phase out of natural gas/oil heaters, I think its reckless abandon to push policies which harm middle and lower class families. Not to say some of these countries even consider nuclear energy “evil”. Absolutely ridiculous.
Everyone's for progress when you can have your cake and eat it too.
Years ago Seattle demanded residential composting — the most progressive thing in the zeitgeist at the time — and also demanded they ship all their smelly compost over the mountains to deep-red eastern Washington.
That plan failed by the way, and they got stuck processing their own turd-stinking food scraps locally.
The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job.
By and large, renewables are marching towards a state where they will provide enough of the generation that what remains would be insignificant.
I would be interested to know where the gas is coming from for this particular data centre. There are a few cases that generation by gas is preferable to what is happening right now. One good example is if the gas is from sources that would otherwise be flared off. I have heard in the past that businesses have been reluctant to harness energy from gas rather than flaring it off because any user of the energy gets tagged with the CO2 emissions. If it just gets burnt off it makes no difference to the amount of total emissions, but it avoids the CO2 being attributed to their industry.
Now you will have the AI lobby pushing against EVs (so that oil drilling can create gas as a byproduct), as if it wasn't already an uphill battle in the US...
It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far less than my father did throughout his life.
Life isn't some strict binary, all or nothing affair.
Very whataboutism
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
these actions are exactly the opposite of what they claim to try to strive towards.
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
Texas is the largest producer of renewable energy in the country.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
No worries, at the current rate it will stop in four to ten centuries.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPXRjoqbcAATWUu?format=jpg
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
That said there has never been argument about whether we are on that trajectory, we want to be on that trajectory
Or maybe not. Maybe this is a civilizational growing pain these aliens are familiar with. Maybe they went through the same period themselves.
Or maybe you'd prefer this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI
So China and India can use all the fossil fuels they want, and other counties too not just them.
But the West has to kowtow to Net Zero / ”Renewables” nonsense?
We’re not buying it anymore.
Everything has tradeoffs.
Destroying the economy and letting low income and poor people freeze in the dark or melt in the sun is passé.
The #1 increase in world electricity demand is people rising out of poverty. China has been producing the most solar in the world and still hasn't been able to cover their own demand increase with it. Eventually that form of growth will slow down. Sustainability should always look at the second derivative.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/amazon-updates-s...
However, building new nuclear reactors is a slow process. These reactors aren't expected to be built before the 2030s.
China is currently the fastest at bringing new reactors online. Even there it takes 6-7 years from construction start to commercial power generation, e.g. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-reactors...
Personally, I think we should look at a structure similar to the military for running the plants. No profit motive, enlistment terms, court martial, stigma associated with dishonourable discharge, veterans benefits, etc. The military is the only one I know of with a track record in nuclear energy that I would trust.
All jokes aside, yes, we should invest massively in nuclear.
SMRs are vapourware and are similarly economically uncompetitive.
Just build solar, wind, and batteries, and we'll worry about solving for the last 15% of electricity demand when that is actually a live problem (for which there are solutions that don't involve nuclear power and don't rely on magic beans being invented).
No need to worry though, on the current trajectory I doubt our civilization will have the opportunity to deal with it.
Not considering this tradeoff has led to much carbon waste.
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
Sure, climate change is bad and has the potential to disrupt and end the lives of many in the future. But other forms of air pollution like pm2.5 particulates in the air are already causing an estimated 5 million premature deaths per year as well as a slew of other health problems including lowering of IQ.
Any amount of focus would be "so much".
I gather you believe other people pay too much attention to CO2.
That the planet is warming suggests to me they do not pay enough.