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> we are still on a path to high warming Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a
by palata 2y ago
> we are still on a path to high warming
Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them.
Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction.
Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).
- fulafel 2y agoAI energy use is a possible future risk if not addressed, but a much bigger problem we have is the massive wasteful fossils use in electricity generation (used for non-IT things) and transport. We need to get everybody much below the Europe line here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)