 I'm... sort of becoming hopeful that we might just get on top of this whole climate change thing at some point? I don't want to rock the doomer boat too much, but the uptake of renewables over the past year or two has been utterly staggering. The numbers feel made up. 5 comments
 @jsbarretto AI energy consumption, current and proposed 5 gigawatt AI data center, feels like a nail in coffin of doing less than nothing and exacerbating the climate change trend. @shanecelis Counterpoint, somewhat: increases in energy demand trigger new energy infrastructure investment, which lowers the barrier for extra renewable capacity too. It's important to remember that the carbon cost of these things is determined by our current energy generation mix, and that this can - and is - being changing under our feet for the better. Of course, I don't intend to defend the absurdity of training enormous AI models for the sole purpose of wilful copyright infringement. @shanecelis I think I explained myself poorly here. If your hypothetical grid supports 1 TW with constant demand, of which 50% is renewable, then the desire to eradicate the 50% non-renewable is low. The up-front cost of building infra is high, maybe too high to leave the local minimum status quo. But if you've projected demand for 2 TW next year, it's time to get building for an extra TW: and while you're at it, why not the extra capacity needed to ditch the 0.5 TW of non-renewable power too? Climate change is past-present-and-future at this point. It's already happened, it's continuing to happen, and it will continue to happen. But there's an enormous spectrum of possible outcomes here, and I'm starting to think that the more hopeful ones - where we fuck a lot of things up, but not quite enough to actually do us all an extinction - might be more plausible than I thought. |
Gregory's Server
Don't jump in my replies with "what about baked-in warming?" or "what about the insects?". Yes, yes, I'm a gardener. It's scaring the crap out of me already.
But the energy transition was always one of the biggest components on the critical path out of this mess, and it does seem to be happening.