The right reflex here is to push for clean energy usage; not to constrain energy usage. There's this false narrative that constraining energy usage helps solve

The right reflex here is to push for clean energy usage; not to constrain energy usage. There's this false narrative that constraining energy usage helps solve global warming. It doesn't. It helps slow down the pace at which the problem gets worse. Which sounds like it's better than nothing but isn't that helpful. So far carbon emission growth is slowing but it hasn't negated. We need negative growth of carbon emissions. But preferably without killing our economy, which like it or not generally involves increased energy usage. It's economic growth that generates a dynamic of stimulating the fastest growing (generally poorest) nations to consume more energy. Without too much concern for the damage they are doing. So, killing sources of energy usage (aka. economic growth) is not a solution. We can all live like frugal monks and hope for the best. Except there is no royal "we" and good luck convincing the 8 billion or so people on this planet to do so. Especially in those fast growing less wealthy nations. It's a really hard sell. The alternative is switching to clean energy, which we are actually doing at an accelerating rate. It's the thing that works best. It's the thing that has a measurable impact. Like right now. And the irony is that creating more demand for clean energy actually reduces the proportion of dirty energy we have to worry about. To the point where fixing that becomes a manageable challenge. A lot of places already generate double digit percentages of their energy with renewables on an annual basis. In a few decades that's going to result in some notion of net zero at which we're carbon negative world wide. That's a trend we can accelerate that actually creates economic growth. So, AI and energy usage is both an energy challenge and a massive economic opportunity. Meeting this challenge isn't about restraining the use of AI but about sourcing the required energy for it sustainably. There's no good excuse for firing up a lot of gas generators to power AI; which is something Elon Musk has done at his AI company, for example. That's just bad. And of course our usual cloud providers are still a bit hand wavy about where the energy for their data centers comes from. Planting trees (or other carbon offset nonsense) isn't the same as not burning any fossil fuels. One doesn't compensate for the other. People need to stop burning stuff, not compensate for the fact that they are burning stuff. But luckily, renewables aren't growing because they are green but because they are cheap. Cheap energy from the sun or from wind is an easy sell. Even to climate change deniers. Renewables are attractive to any large scale users of energy. Like data centers. That's a good thing. The solution lies in making cloud providers hurry up their transition to green energy. They are super profitable so there's little excuse on that side. They can afford to invest in lowering their energy bills. Their clients could be a bit more critical of with whom they choose to host. Even a little bit of pressure from that side is helpful. If AWS starts losing big customers because their data centers are too dirty, they'll bend over backwards to fix it.