What a surprise with all the wars going on, and AI depleting Earth resources, what a change from about the pandemic era when everyone was into paper straws and cups and promising to be a better person, because that is what was going to change anything.

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qgin 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.

So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

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lm28469 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2"

Guess what happens when you add them up...

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logicprog 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.

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moralestapia 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Guess what happens when you add them up...

I'll guess, they add up to 100%?

I don't see what's the insight here.

	▲	Ancalagon 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.

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tencentshill 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.

	▲	rvz 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute. AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.

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cshores 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It will normalize though once everyone is out of a job

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Fricken 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.

	▲	qgin 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage: * Electricity: 27% * Industry: 24% * Transportation: 15% * Agriculture & land use: 11% * Buildings: 7% Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use. So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions. It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.

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Zigurd 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.

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unglaublich 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.

It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.

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lambdaone 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

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DangitBobby 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's much less cynical than that. People both fear and dislike AI, recognize that the "it may destroy my livelihood and commodify human creativity" complaint falls on deaf ears, and are latching onto anything resembling a credible ethical complaint that people may actually listen to.

	▲	14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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al_borland 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?

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alex_young 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.

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9rx 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions

The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.

	▲	alex_young 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But aren’t we doing just that? Many more people eating more meat than ever before? Methane has a shorter shelf life, but is far more potent, meaning that any increase is worrying, and decreases could have a dramatic impact.

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pjmlp 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed lets tear down forests to build soya fields for all that fake meat tofu.

	▲	pingou 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.

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pjmlp 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A bunch of energy, water and Earth rare materials, nothing really to care about.

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moogly 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would be fine if LLMs disappeared tomorrow, but if I couldn't heat my house, I'd freeze to death. But I guess some would argue that everyone needs to live in a city with district heating.

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epolanski 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which in turn are also relatively small compared to the damages of cattle and fishing.

Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.

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pjmlp 13 hours ago | parent [-]

What about putting trees down for soya fields?

	▲	aziaziazi 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Speaking of deforestation: > Globally, 77% of soya is produced for animal feed, 19.2% for direct human consumption and 3.8% for industry (biodiesel, lubricants, etc.). https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect... Poultry protein efficiency is 21% and beef 3% > We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1... Edit: Note the soy usage vary around regions. The first link is from a French gov page, after the previous citation it gives the world repartition: > In animal feed, the largest consumer of soybeans is chicken (37% of world production), followed by pork (20.2%), aquaculture products (5.6%), dairy products (1.4%) and beef (0.5%). Which is quite different than the French reparation : > flesh and egg poultry account for 44% of total [imported] soy, then diary/mixed cows (36%) then flesh cow (8%) and pigs (6%) (fr) https://chaire-bea.vetagro-sup.fr/en-france-les-animaux-dele... Soy protein are 97.9% as digestible as beef > protein qualify can be scored in terms of its Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS). Soy achieves a PDCAAS of 0.92, comparable to beef at 0.94. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets The DIAAS is sensibly worse (soy 0.898 - beef 1.116) but still far from the beef protein efficiency cited above (3%) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...

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bluGill 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is also much more likely to use renewable energy. Data centers look at the local energy mix when planning where to put one. (though they are perhaps taking energy that would otherwise be shipped to a different city/state)

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15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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valiant55 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is definitely not always the case[0], let's not pretend these companies give a fuck about the communities in which their data centers operate[1].

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

1: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...

	▲	bluGill 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Community has nothing to do with it. They are asking about energy mix because that is important to enough of their customers that it is worth looking at.

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ceejayoz 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.

When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.

	▲	hackeraccount 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah that assumes that AI is an absolute negative. What if it impacts positively? I mean you gotta spend money to make money.

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noslenwerdna 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As we all know, global warming wasn't happening until AI data centers started being built. They are honestly a drop in the bucket

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15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]