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Muromec 8 hours ago

But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.

So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

scottcha 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.

This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.

barnabee 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.

If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).

Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.

hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Make all DCs provide their own power and suddenly they’d be large amounts of solar and battery in cheap scrubland

A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.

Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.

Muromec 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.

jauntywundrkind 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.

vasco 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.

trollbridge 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.

Muromec 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.

black_puppydog 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.

BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...

Aerroon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We've been paying hefty excise taxes on gasoline in Europe for decades. Yet nothing has changed. Environmentalists still have the exact same demands and supposedly nothing positive has come from this. It has just made everything more expensive. So what's the point?

simianwords 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

DangitBobby 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.

stalfie 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?

I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?

Muromec 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It doesn't have to end the humanity itself. My favorite city being underwater because it's too expensive too pump the water out is already bad enough.

throw-the-towel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.

kergonath 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More than on the cards, it is already happening.

throw-the-towel 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair point! I meant "vastly more painful change than already is happening".

xienze 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.

Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?

hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes.

And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.

Muromec 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think I'm much more compatible with my colleagues from the said countries, who are actually nice people, than I am with the rabid fascists having this kind of a take.

silver_silver 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s anxiety about tipping points more than conspiracy theories. If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity. You may be insulated enough from the direct effects but what about what they trigger? Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices, extreme weather, and dysfunctional migration.

We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.

hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most conspiracy theories think food grows in supermarkets and because they have a job which pays them a good global income they can just pay a bit more.

simianwords 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity

Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.

Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.

They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.

> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices

False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.

> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.

Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".

silver_silver 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.

> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.

The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.

> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is

We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.

simianwords 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.

This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.

> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.

That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.

You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.

> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.

Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.

The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...

kergonath 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.

That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.

At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".

simianwords 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.

What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?

Symbiote 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Air conditioning is increasingly necessary in Europe.

Muromec 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Western Europe mostly, for 6 days a year and that's the part of the world that most certainly has the means to install it whenever it decides so.

It's hardly an existential threat to civilization or locally to societies it affects. It's a symptom of things going sough, sure.

59percentmore 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

*raise the prices