[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon

The point is that they use a lot of electricity, and this is an active concern to many Americans who see electricity prices go up and polluting energy sources being used more as data centers roll into their state.

[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.

Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.

But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...

It's nothing relevant to your comment, I thoroughly agree, but just got me curious.

ill keep supporting my local politicians who take a private jet for 100 kilometer journey to advocate for co2 reductions

What's the intended message here?

Since it's obvious to you, why don't you share your take on it?

Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.

I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".

I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.

Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?

This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.

I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.

Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.

I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.

I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.

That's the spirit!

I would say 'Acting Dead' is actually sitting at home ordering on Amazon/Temu, watching brainless TikTok/Instagram/Netflix/YouTube videos, and talking to a transformer model all day.

I think reducing this discussion into only two polar opposites is rather juvenile, the struggle we face is on how can we be more efficient, and less damaging to the our general environment while providing for people.

That's a lot more sci-fi to me than sending rockets to Mars to colonise it.

From the article:

A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.

-> So the comparison is based on the assumption that identical hardware is used.

Also from the article:

Emissions estimates are based on the current average emissions intensity of each regional electricity grid, which has been the norm in greenhouse gas accounting.

Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)

  0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
  4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
  166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production

maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:

  DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
  DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution

Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.

Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.

but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.

basically, imagine returning to per-industrial times, because that's what required to achieve the goals you believe to help achieve by abstaining from burgers.

Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now? Telling others the only solution is to either sacrifice everything or do nothing? Simply not fact based.

yes, by 15%, if you'd managed to convince 100% of our extremely hedonistic and selfish species to voluntarily abstain from something 95% of us want. I can't fathom why the futility of evangelizing something so absurdly unrealistic is not obvious to you, and I tried to help you fathom it by pointing out other sacrifices you could make but probably aren't particularly inclined to.

>Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now?

the activists who use the climate angle to attack things they feel strongly about. 5 years ago, bitcoin was going to boil the oceans. having children was a carbon sin. now it's chatbot prompts. it will be something else when there's a new current thing.

That will put some sweat on some brows :)

The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.

And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.

It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.

I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)

One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.

But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this

I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.

Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.

I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.

How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?

What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.

if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money

Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.

If you eat meat, you’re producing more CO2 and using more water than 100 vegan vibe coders sitting around creating slop 24/7. It’s not on the same level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...

“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”

0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.

One AI request is 0.38 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas

(Tofu is about 0.1 to 0.3kg of Co2, Seitan about 0.1kg of Co2 per equivalent 100g)

A burger made in New Zealand likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Switzerland which likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Texas.

What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?

Just go vegan for a week or something and you’ve offset your AI water use for a few lifetimes.

And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*

For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.

China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.

Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.

https://danskfjernvarme.dk/viden-vaerktoejer/udgivelser/taen...

https://danmarksdagblad.dk/article/datacenter-paa-15-million...

https://pulse.microsoft.com/da-dk/transform-da-dk/government...

I don't think anywhere would want to be entirely reliant on a single datacentre, at least not at the scale of district heating use in Denmark.

(I gave some pages in Danish, you can search "Denmark datacentre district heat" yourself if you like.)

AtNorth's are under construction: https://www.atnorth.com/news/selected-group-will-utilize-sur... and https://www.atnorth.com/news/denmark-data-center-to-supply-h...

Microsoft's is operating: https://danskfjernvarme.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2026/dataskyen-se... (I can't find an English source.)

"Will" means "in the future".

But you can do your own searching, you seen determined that this doesn't exist.

Even in the very sentence you quoted they are writing about plans to retire a coal plant by 2025 in future tense. This should be a very obvious hint that the text was written some time ago - unless, of course, the reader is not aware of what year we currently are living in.

In 2024, Fjernvarme Fyn reported ([1], page 19) they were recovering enough heat from that very site to heat almost 7000 homes in Odense and that the number can still rise significantly as the data center expands.

[1] https://stateofgreen.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SoG_W...

Power connections.

How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?

That content is coming either way.

And if you require them to over offset their load to the grid, it's literally fossil fuels burned over all.

I would agree that there should be some tariffed token usage based on CO2, efficient datacentres pay little, polluting ones pay a lot - would help even the field and export good practice.

By completely replacing workers with AI? Unless their new job will be from home or out in the open, they'll continue to consume the same.

If we're talking of completely eliminating people, I guess we can consider the emissions they would cause during their whole extant life. Should we kill them or just wait for them to die of starvation?

This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?

They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?

By what?

You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.

1. Hydropower 40%

2. Nuclear 27%

3. Wind 22%

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...

No, electricity is categorically not. Exhibit A for this is persistent regional variation in unlevered pre-tax prices. Even in well-integrated power markets, only a fraction of electricity is listed, and that's before we get to off-grid power.

This per se doesn't make something non-traceable. Plenty of perishables operate on a global market.

Power being hyper-perishable, hyper-regulated and opaque (lots of off-grid and unlisted-on-exchanges power) sort of destroys the international power market. (Regionally, power markets are also pretty efficient in most parts of the world, at least in the short term. That makes profiting with a ship of capacitor carriers hard if not impossible.)

The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.

Like 2/3rds or 4/5ths of it on a fossil heavy grid.

TX generated 4x the absolute solar electricity as Sweden and 5x per person in the last 12 months.

... and shows why you still need to know things in order to safely use LLMs. If I hadn't known the approximate populations of both Texas and Sweden, I would have been more likely to believe the parent comment without question.

What's the point you're making?

Point is each geographic entity is maximizing their resources. And they have every right to without outside interference.

The C02 output is interfering with life outside their borders.

Not really when they create a global problem. Tragedy of the commons, huh...

But where would Texas find gas?