Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

But later you'll save mental tokens when reading "BNPL" instead of "Buy now, pay later".

> we

Maybe America, not many countries on earth, especially in Asia which are full steam ahead on renewables, pun intended.

OP did not say this is what we were doing. Said this is what we should do.

What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.

Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.

We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.

Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.

The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.

If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.

Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.

The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.

All of the cradle-to-grave studies I've seen about greenhouse gas emissions for renewables versus coal/oil still indicate massive improvements.

This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.

Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.

Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.

Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.

They're manufactured once and then generate way more energy than was used to make them.

Which is a tiny CO2 spend compared to the benefit, unless you dishonestly factor in manufacturing energy costs as coming from oil.

No, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.

Slavery. They've all specifically stated that exact goal as well. No contradiction at all.

Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?

Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.

Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.

It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.

And most all of it is actual shit. Literal garbage stacking up in landfills.

You use the disabilities to get done what must be done, where reason and institutions can not work.

And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the carbon bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel by air, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil. But also, the economy at large is transitioning and there’s little that Trump can do about it. There’s no future in fossil fuels and Trump can’t change that. At best he can divert some money to his fellow crooks in the short term.

What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.

Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?

It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.