New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Whole Nations

Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.

- Data centers don’t sleep

- Data center load (for AI) could be shifted to follow the sun

- The energy requirements mean you aren’t likely to overbuild your solar farm

At night just stop running your GPUs and / or pull from the grid

There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.

Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.

Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.

This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.

It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.

It's so boring to relitigate this constantly on HN. It's like debating whether the sky is blue. Ridiculous that this comes up so often.

Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?

Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.

Right wing idiots are against solar and wind. Left wing idiots are against nuclear… leaving us with no alternative other than gas and oil!

The common denominators are “idiots” and oil.

Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.

Green energy is diffuse. Fields of solar. Ridges dotted with turbines. Each unit needs a power cable running away from it, access roads, etc, etc. A lot of area has to be developed for a given payback (sellable power).

Environmentalists and have been instrumental in making it economically impossible to develop land cheap enough to make low value density projects like that pencil out.

The higher power cost states in the US would likely be dotted with all manner of solar infill if not for up front costs that these shortsighted and selfish people have imposed on any land alteration larger than approx SFH lot size. Farmer Johnson would love nothing more than to put up solar on that ~2ac hillside he owns but cannot farm economically. Neither he nor some 3rd party who would put up the panels will shell out half a mil for an EPA CG permit just to clear the vegetation because the panels will never pay that back in their lives.

The economics of compliance are why the only greenfield development that happens these days is value dense commercial stuff (shopping plaza, big box store, data center, office buildings etc) or dense SFH development.

The most rosy possible outlook is that we "just" wait for the hippie boomers who cooked this crap up to croak, shit can the clean water act and come up with some new way of regulating development that doesn't saddle these super low impact projects (it's hard to be lower impact than panels or turbines) with fixed-ish costs that are a non-starter except at huge scale.

But of course there are so many parties who are making rent off this broken system who won't go down without a fight.

So is that a fair comparison?

No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.

It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.

That is a tough sell in the current environment. It's a regressive tax, so opposed on both ends of the political spectrum. People on the far right don't believe in climate change, and people on the far left don't believe in market efficiency. With 20% of the world's oil flow crimped in the Strait of Hormuz for who knows how long, higher energy prices is the last thing people want to contemplate.

In the longer run, a carbon tax is the best option. The fossil fuel price shock is a strong signal to produce energy through other means. There are major engineering initiatives around developing cheaper and safer nuclear energy. and it's cheaper now to deploy a solar farm than a coal plant.

A carbon tax would raise money to pay off national debts and encourage consumers and producers to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish their needs while minimizing their carbon footprint. It's a tough sell today, but this is they way to go for a better quality of life tomorrow.

But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Guessing that is what GP means by body count

And for all that cost, are they bringing us real hope? The most ambitious people talking about this technology basically say that when it takes over all thought, there won't be much point in humans anymore.

We went from being evangelists of a message of hope to evangelists of a message of doom.

I'm not going to be one of those people. Fuck those people. I believe in the future. I will stand up and tell the next generation there is still hope, still compassion, still community and humanity and love out there. I fight for the users!!!

That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.