posted in Technology
The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible
futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pollution-ai-data-centers-severe
Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO~2~ emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it’s energy from non CO~2~ emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
“AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO~2~ emisions.”
A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There’s a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn’t just cleaner, it’s cheaper.
What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:
- Humanity’s apparent level of dependence on fossil fuels, when accounting for deliberately wasteful endeavours like mega data centres. and
- Humanity’s actual level of dependence on fossil fuels. This is higher than it should be and requires some changes to society to improve, but it’s not nearly as high as it might seem at a glance.
These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch