“AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO₂ 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