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I'm very sympathetic to those who want focus on the climate disaster, but I'm not convinced that genAI's carbon pollution is a major problem. Maybe I've missed

I'm very sympathetic to those who want focus on the climate disaster, but I'm not convinced that genAI's carbon pollution is a major problem. Maybe I've missed a memo, but the biggest polluters and criminals in the climate story are still by far the fossil fuel industry (eg. Shell, Exxon) and the agricultural industry (eg. Cargill). At some point I was even hearing the claim that digitization (e.g. GenAI) was finally divorcing the tight connection between economic growth and resource extraction. I'd bet it's incorrect, but it's much less fanciful than thinking that growth in oil or beef would help us grow without strip mining the earth. Bray's first issue —the influence of GenAI on labour's (and also the democratic people's) decreasing power versus capital— is much more important and interesting.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
We could be doing both more efficiently, but we have to drive and we have to grow food. Unlike those cases, producing slop isn't a necessity.
tuatoru 1y ago
Add tourism and fast fashion to the list of bigger problems.
sshine 1y ago
From the article: > Then there’s the other thing that nobody talks about, the massive greenhouse-gas load that all those data centers are going to be pumping out. Arguably, the GPU emissions are lower than the carbon footprint of the human workers they seek to replace. Before you downvote: yes, we can’t just “deprovision” humans, but unless you think reproduction is immoral because of the environmental impact (an extreme), it has to be possible to increase total industrial production and negate global warming simultaneously. It’s a big equation. The hard part seems to coordinate anything whatsoever as a species.
- tptacek 1y ago
  I don't think we even approach this science-fiction analysis of the carbon footprint of human workers vs. LLMs, because LLM inference apparently has a carbon impact in the vicinity of, like, a couple Google searches. The environmental concerns over LLMs seem mostly to be ported in from cryptocurrency (where they were a very real concern, because crypto put a serious cash value on energy arbitrage).
  - shawndrost 1y ago
    You have this extremely wrong. TLDR: LLMs singlehandedly reversed the secular decline in US power emissions, which were the only reason for climate optimism. The story of US power sector emissions was a good story. Emissions appeared to be in secular decline from 2005 through 2022, through the crypto nonsense, and the ramp-up of EVs. In large part, this was due to stable power growth, the replacement of coal with natgas, and the adoption of wind and solar. We were on track to go to 0-10% of historical emissions by 2040. https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2024-GHG-Trend.png https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2024-GHG-Tre... LLMs changed that story; it is now a bad story. Emissions are back on the increase. Natural gas power plants are sold out for six years plus. We are on track to go back to 100% of historical emissions by 2040. EVs are a factor but were a factor in 2018-2022 as well. In terms of popular narratives, it's pretty accurate to say that LLMs singlehandedly reversed the only reason for climate optimism in the US.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      I'll read any source you have for this, but it seems unlikely given the low percentage of US energy consumption data centers account for. Your home air conditioning is most of American electrical consumption.
      - shawndrost 1y ago
        My statements about the recent history of declining US power sector emissions are pretty vanilla and I won't source them here, but they should be pretty easy to verify. What I'm asking you to take on faith (or to google) is that the positive trend was a mix of flat load growth and the energy transition (from coal to natgas, wind, and solar). Load growth was flat 2005-2020, and now it's growing at circa 2%. Recent growth is almost all commercial and industrial, not residential [1]. There has been some manufacturing reshoring, etc, but the main driver is data centers [2]. "[D]ata centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 [and ~1.5% in 2014]." "[T]otal data center electricity usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023 and estimates an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028 [which would be circa 20% YOY growth]." [3] Total US power use in 2023 was ~4000TWh. Compute power demand was at 4.4% of that and has been growing at ~20% YOY. (McKinsey forecasts 23% YOY growth and 2025 data center capex is growing 30%[4] but let's be conservative.) If 20% holds from 2023 through 2030 data center power demand will be at ~630TWh (16% of the size of the 2023 grid). If it holds through 2040 it will be at ~4000TWh (100% of the size of the 2023 grid). (No citations here, this paragraph is just analysis, and 630/4000 TWh are just 176*1.2^7/17. However these numbers are similar to the forecasts in [2] and [3].) New data centers are more often powered by natural gas (and less by wind/solar) vs the grid at large, and will be true for the foreseeable future. I don't have a definitive citation for this but it's obvious to anyone close to this industry (as I am) and you can dig up any number of confirming citations about specific data center stories or utility IRPs (integrated resource plans). One concrete fact supporting this narrative is that gas turbines are sold out for the next ~6 years, which I don't believe has happened before in this century. Gas is on an absolute tear. (Zero-carbon data centers that you read about, like Three Mile Island or next-gen geothermal, are specifically manufactured to disrupt the powered-by-gas narrative. They are about as common as data centers built in a way that revives coal plants; that is, they are a real but small phenomenon.) So, that is the story. A) Power sector emissions were in decline, because of flat load growth and the replacement of coal with wind, solar, and natgas. B) This isn't true anymore; the grid is expanding quickly again, AI is the main culprit. C) At least for now, load growth is happening in a way that is dirtier than today's grid. C) If you believe that AI is going to continue to grow for 5-15 years like it is now, you also think that AI is (and especially, will be) a major driver of US greenhouse gas emissions. And to add an anecdotal rebuttal to your earlier comment: sure, inference is just a few google searches worth of power. But now google searches have inference, so they are a few more times more power-hungry than they used to be. And when I code, I use way more inference than the number of times I used to google. And remember that when we say "inference", we are talking about last-gen LLMs; reasoning models (which are, as of a few months ago, the default in chatbots) are a chain of inferences which can be arbitrarily long. The current status quo is much more worrisome than your quip, and the problem compounds quickly if you extrapolate at all. We have discovered a new and outrageously popular way to use compute, we built $455B worth of power-hungry data centers last year [4], and it is having (and will have) a huge effect on greenhouse gas emissions. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264 [2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/load-growth-challenges-supply-demand-brattle/745302/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/load-growth-challenges-supp... [3] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval... [4] https://www.ciodive.com/news/data-center-ai-cloud-infrastructure-capex-gpu-servers/743002/ https://www.ciodive.com/news/data-center-ai-cloud-infrastruc...
fraboniface 1y ago
Fossil (in particular coal) thermal plants that were planned for shutdown are being kept online or restarted because of AI energy use. Tech had a pretty minor environmental footprint until now but it's growing rapidly due to AI, for use cases that are clearly not vital and for a good part garbage.
christianqchung 1y ago
> the biggest polluters and criminals in the climate story are still by far the fossil fuel industry (eg. Shell, Exxon) What does this actually mean? It feels like when people say this it implies that gas companies just burn gas randomly for no reason. They sell their gas to everyday consumers, actual people. Why is this Shell/Exxon's fault and not consumers?
- billy99k 1y ago
  I suppose it's similar to the obsession with the economy of Nordic countries, but failing to mention it's propped up by the fossil fuel industry.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    Only Norway and Denmark have significant oil exports. Sweden and Finland do not.
- hughw 1y ago
  We need to rewire the economy in a zillion different ways. Nobody should be using fossil fuels if they can avoid it, but so many cannot at present e.g. air travel, steel mills. Shell and Exxon aren't forcing people to burn their product. If they shut down tomorrow, millions worldwide would starve. We better keep them going as long as we need them. Edit: I work in oilfield services and probably am a little biased.
  - onedognight 1y ago
    > Shell and Exxon aren't forcing people to burn their product. Is this a joke? They are lobbying against the subsidy of alternatives that are better for society. The repeal of subsidies was just successfully achieved in the OBBB. Yet, they continue to get subsidies themselves. Have you noticed the special exemption for oil and gas extraction on your tax forms? It’s in your face.
    - SR2Z 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Veedrac 1y ago
> At some point I was even hearing the claim that digitization (e.g. GenAI) was finally divorcing the tight connection between economic growth and resource extraction Kind of? Mostly it's a result of renewables. The US basically doesn't build new fossil fuel power any more. Not every country is on exactly the same point on the curve but they're all approximately following the same curve. Energy use has also decoupled which I think is what you're referring to, but I'm not sure the cause neatly decouples.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

We could be doing both more efficiently, but we have to drive and we have to grow food. Unlike those cases, producing slop isn't a necessity.

tuatoru 1y ago

Add tourism and fast fashion to the list of bigger problems.

sshine 1y ago

From the article: > Then there’s the other thing that nobody talks about, the massive greenhouse-gas load that all those data centers are going to be pumping out. Arguably, the GPU emissions are lower than the carbon footprint of the human workers they seek to replace. Before you downvote: yes, we can’t just “deprovision” humans, but unless you think reproduction is immoral because of the environmental impact (an extreme), it has to be possible to increase total industrial production and negate global warming simultaneously. It’s a big equation. The hard part seems to coordinate anything whatsoever as a species.

tptacek 1y ago
I don't think we even approach this science-fiction analysis of the carbon footprint of human workers vs. LLMs, because LLM inference apparently has a carbon impact in the vicinity of, like, a couple Google searches. The environmental concerns over LLMs seem mostly to be ported in from cryptocurrency (where they were a very real concern, because crypto put a serious cash value on energy arbitrage).
- shawndrost 1y ago
  You have this extremely wrong. TLDR: LLMs singlehandedly reversed the secular decline in US power emissions, which were the only reason for climate optimism. The story of US power sector emissions was a good story. Emissions appeared to be in secular decline from 2005 through 2022, through the crypto nonsense, and the ramp-up of EVs. In large part, this was due to stable power growth, the replacement of coal with natgas, and the adoption of wind and solar. We were on track to go to 0-10% of historical emissions by 2040. https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2024-GHG-Trend.png https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2024-GHG-Tre... LLMs changed that story; it is now a bad story. Emissions are back on the increase. Natural gas power plants are sold out for six years plus. We are on track to go back to 100% of historical emissions by 2040. EVs are a factor but were a factor in 2018-2022 as well. In terms of popular narratives, it's pretty accurate to say that LLMs singlehandedly reversed the only reason for climate optimism in the US.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    I'll read any source you have for this, but it seems unlikely given the low percentage of US energy consumption data centers account for. Your home air conditioning is most of American electrical consumption.
    - shawndrost 1y ago
      My statements about the recent history of declining US power sector emissions are pretty vanilla and I won't source them here, but they should be pretty easy to verify. What I'm asking you to take on faith (or to google) is that the positive trend was a mix of flat load growth and the energy transition (from coal to natgas, wind, and solar). Load growth was flat 2005-2020, and now it's growing at circa 2%. Recent growth is almost all commercial and industrial, not residential [1]. There has been some manufacturing reshoring, etc, but the main driver is data centers [2]. "[D]ata centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 [and ~1.5% in 2014]." "[T]otal data center electricity usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023 and estimates an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028 [which would be circa 20% YOY growth]." [3] Total US power use in 2023 was ~4000TWh. Compute power demand was at 4.4% of that and has been growing at ~20% YOY. (McKinsey forecasts 23% YOY growth and 2025 data center capex is growing 30%[4] but let's be conservative.) If 20% holds from 2023 through 2030 data center power demand will be at ~630TWh (16% of the size of the 2023 grid). If it holds through 2040 it will be at ~4000TWh (100% of the size of the 2023 grid). (No citations here, this paragraph is just analysis, and 630/4000 TWh are just 176*1.2^7/17. However these numbers are similar to the forecasts in [2] and [3].) New data centers are more often powered by natural gas (and less by wind/solar) vs the grid at large, and will be true for the foreseeable future. I don't have a definitive citation for this but it's obvious to anyone close to this industry (as I am) and you can dig up any number of confirming citations about specific data center stories or utility IRPs (integrated resource plans). One concrete fact supporting this narrative is that gas turbines are sold out for the next ~6 years, which I don't believe has happened before in this century. Gas is on an absolute tear. (Zero-carbon data centers that you read about, like Three Mile Island or next-gen geothermal, are specifically manufactured to disrupt the powered-by-gas narrative. They are about as common as data centers built in a way that revives coal plants; that is, they are a real but small phenomenon.) So, that is the story. A) Power sector emissions were in decline, because of flat load growth and the replacement of coal with wind, solar, and natgas. B) This isn't true anymore; the grid is expanding quickly again, AI is the main culprit. C) At least for now, load growth is happening in a way that is dirtier than today's grid. C) If you believe that AI is going to continue to grow for 5-15 years like it is now, you also think that AI is (and especially, will be) a major driver of US greenhouse gas emissions. And to add an anecdotal rebuttal to your earlier comment: sure, inference is just a few google searches worth of power. But now google searches have inference, so they are a few more times more power-hungry than they used to be. And when I code, I use way more inference than the number of times I used to google. And remember that when we say "inference", we are talking about last-gen LLMs; reasoning models (which are, as of a few months ago, the default in chatbots) are a chain of inferences which can be arbitrarily long. The current status quo is much more worrisome than your quip, and the problem compounds quickly if you extrapolate at all. We have discovered a new and outrageously popular way to use compute, we built $455B worth of power-hungry data centers last year [4], and it is having (and will have) a huge effect on greenhouse gas emissions. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264 [2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/load-growth-challenges-supply-demand-brattle/745302/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/load-growth-challenges-supp... [3] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval... [4] https://www.ciodive.com/news/data-center-ai-cloud-infrastructure-capex-gpu-servers/743002/ https://www.ciodive.com/news/data-center-ai-cloud-infrastruc...

fraboniface 1y ago

Fossil (in particular coal) thermal plants that were planned for shutdown are being kept online or restarted because of AI energy use. Tech had a pretty minor environmental footprint until now but it's growing rapidly due to AI, for use cases that are clearly not vital and for a good part garbage.

christianqchung 1y ago

> the biggest polluters and criminals in the climate story are still by far the fossil fuel industry (eg. Shell, Exxon) What does this actually mean? It feels like when people say this it implies that gas companies just burn gas randomly for no reason. They sell their gas to everyday consumers, actual people. Why is this Shell/Exxon's fault and not consumers?

billy99k 1y ago
I suppose it's similar to the obsession with the economy of Nordic countries, but failing to mention it's propped up by the fossil fuel industry.
- triceratops 1y ago
  Only Norway and Denmark have significant oil exports. Sweden and Finland do not.
hughw 1y ago
We need to rewire the economy in a zillion different ways. Nobody should be using fossil fuels if they can avoid it, but so many cannot at present e.g. air travel, steel mills. Shell and Exxon aren't forcing people to burn their product. If they shut down tomorrow, millions worldwide would starve. We better keep them going as long as we need them. Edit: I work in oilfield services and probably am a little biased.
- onedognight 1y ago
  > Shell and Exxon aren't forcing people to burn their product. Is this a joke? They are lobbying against the subsidy of alternatives that are better for society. The repeal of subsidies was just successfully achieved in the OBBB. Yet, they continue to get subsidies themselves. Have you noticed the special exemption for oil and gas extraction on your tax forms? It’s in your face.
  - SR2Z 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Veedrac 1y ago

> At some point I was even hearing the claim that digitization (e.g. GenAI) was finally divorcing the tight connection between economic growth and resource extraction Kind of? Mostly it's a result of renewables. The US basically doesn't build new fossil fuel power any more. Not every country is on exactly the same point on the curve but they're all approximately following the same curve. Energy use has also decoupled which I think is what you're referring to, but I'm not sure the cause neatly decouples.