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Most folks are taking it as understood, these days, that fossil fuel refineries are something we should be having fewer of. That argument's mostly settled save
by eropple 3y ago
Most folks are taking it as understood, these days, that fossil fuel refineries are something we should be having fewer of. That argument's mostly settled save for the echoes of the shouting.
The externalities of data centers should be effectively measured, captured, and accounted for, same as anything else. I don't think, as things humans do, they're particularly drastic consumers; that doesn't mean they shouldn't be explored and understood, and there are probably worthwhile conversations to have about how to economically incentivize positive uses of large-scale compute and, similarly, how to disincentivize negative ones we as societies don't want to see grow.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe capacity of human society to have worthwhile conversations is limited, so if we spend a lot of time discussing one thing we won't have enough time to discuss the other thing, which is a problem when the former thing is literally a million times less important than the latter thing. The capacity of American oil refineries has never been higher, and the production of fossil fuels has also never been higher. I see no evidence that leads me to believe that the decline of the fossil fuel industry is a social consensus. And, again, the amount of water used by fossil fuel production and refining globally is literally eight orders of magnitude greater than the water used by information and communications.