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Can the climate survive the insatiable energy demands of the AI arms race?
(www.theguardian.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
Between billionaires having penis-waggling contests with rockets, megacorps slurping up electricity to feed their LLMs, gigantic Bitcoin miners reopening defunct coal plants to power their operations, and authoritarians cozying up to fossil fuel companies, I think there's a lot more confounding factors to our survival than just bloated LLM processing centers.
It's striking how these technologies do so little of use to ordinary people, yet they hog the world's energy and the media's attention.