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AI adoption in US adds ~900k tons of CO₂ annually, study finds
- zahlman 1y agoTo save a click on the writeup: > This is not a small amount but equates to a relatively minor increase when viewed in the context of nationwide emissions. About 64,000 people worth (or as the article frames it, 0.02% of said nationwide emissions). The study itself is https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0e3b https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0e3b .
- bryanlarsen 1y agoFor comparison, the average car emits about 5 tons per year, and the average American household emits about 50.
- louthy 1y ago[flagged]
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoI am sure there are more than 18.000 households the majority of US Americans would democratically decide on to cull.
- simianwords 1y agoIt is quite a fair and reasonable way of looking at it.
- tclancy 1y agoYou’re totally right!
- cpursley 1y agoThis solution is production ready!
- bayarearefugee 1y agoOr we could have done something really wild like not insist on RTO just to appease the ego of middle managers across the US.
- tencentshill 1y agoCOVID did far more than that. The upcoming healthcare cuts for the most vulnerable should take care of at least that many.
- micromacrofoot 1y agowell if we take the covid losses as a "close enough" timeline we've still got a lot of room to grow
- diogocp 1y agoOr deport them. > Unauthorized immigrants live in 6.3 million households > Almost 70% of these households are considered “mixed status,” meaning that they also contain lawful immigrants or U.S.-born residents. That works out to 1.9 million households with only illegal immigrants. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
- myrmidon 1y agoIf those are below average in CO2 emissions you would make the numbers worse though, and that seems pretty likely to me. Need to deport only rich immigrants owning more than one car.
- jansper39 1y agoHow many Elon Musk's would we have to deport?
- myrmidon 1y agoCounting just private jet flight about 200 Elons (5kt CO2/y). Some people are even higher, and large yachts are worse than business jets I'd assume. But I'd say that people tend to actually overestimate the share of super-rich; ten thousand normal US citizens emit more than a single billionaire, and there's not that many billionaires.
- louthy 1y ago> Or deport them. Deported people stop producing CO₂? Never heard that before. How does it work? Do they lose the ability to light a fire or drive a car once not in the US? And, presumably, they'd have to stop eating and breathing too?
- myrmidon 1y agoIt might be a tiny bit more feasible to convince 200000 households that they don't need a second car (or switch to electric ones), but mass murder would have a comparable effect on CO2 emissions, yes.
- rikafurude21 1y agoWhich makes the 900K tons annually even more implausible. Elon aside, which datacenter nowadays runs completely on gas?
- nandomrumber 1y agoZoom in and enhance. 900,000 / 5 = 180,000 As of 2023, there are approximately 285 million registered motor vehicles in the United States, with around 96.9 million of those being cars.[1] 180,000 additional cars is something like less than one tenth of the decrease in registered cars between 2022 and 2023. There were five million fewer registered cars in 2023 than 2022. 900,000 / 50 = 18,000 Which is … random statistic comparison, about the same number of households in Bakersfield CA that are female householder with no husband present (2010 census) [2]. If there’s an argument to be made that AI is putting a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it certainly isn’t either of these. 1. https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-cars-us https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-cars-us 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,_California
- Aurornis 1y agoThis is a terribly misleading comparison. Your CO2 emissions are more than your house and your car. Do you consume food that was farmed and shipped? Buy things that were made in a factory that produces emissions? Fly on airplanes? Your personal CO2 emissions are more like a proportional fraction of global CO2 emissions. All of those factories and cargo ships and airplanes aren’t emitting CO2 just because. They’re doing it for individuals who buy those products and services, and therefore your household’s CO2 footprint is primarily external to the house itself.
- behnamoh 1y agoFuture generations will laugh at us for harnessing such primitive sources of energy when "the sun is just out there" and available to the planet 24/7.
- crimsonnoodle58 1y agoTo be fair on fossil fuels, they are simply stored energy from the sun. You can think of them like a dense battery, more dense than our current battery technology allows.
- mlnj 1y ago'Density' is not the concern we all have about fossil fuels. It's the effects on the atmosphere.
- octopoc 1y agoI believe gp was saying that density is an advantage for fossil fuels. Nobody thinks it’s a disadvantage/problem for fossil fuels.
- nandomrumber 1y agoDensity is the concern we all have for solar. Solar is so diffuse, just bringing it to where people need it has doubled the price purely in transmission infrastructure costs. Reference: Australia - the place that’s supposed to be solar’s poster child has more than doubled electricity prices in the last three to four years because, unsurprisingly (we were warned), getting solar and wind to where they’re needed turns out to be incredibly expensive.
- rossant 1y agoSure, though there’s a difference between extracting energy stored for millions of years and capturing the continuous flow of energy from the sun.
- zahlman 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- davidfekke 1y agoHey, whatever happened to those Killer Bees?
- dosinga 1y ago900k is a large plane flying from Dallas to Sydney and back
- infecto 1y agoFor some reason that math does not seem correct.
- simianwords 1y agoThe real math is that it is equivalent to ~3000 - 5000 10 hour flights.
- entuno 1y agoI don't know how much a fully laden "large plane" weighs, but it's nowhere near 450,000 tons. Which means that the claim it releases 450,000 tons of CO2 on a single flight is clearly bollocks.
- amirhirsch 1y agoWhat if the goal of writing about how “AI is bad for the environment” (because of the energy and water it uses) is to identify gullible people and on-ramp them into a lifetime of media manipulation?
- dahart 1y agoOTOH, what if the goal of downplaying the environmental risks is to try to make people gullible and stop caring and spend more of their money now and ignore the consequences, as industrialization has been doing for a couple of centuries?
- simianwords 1y agoincorrect. It is 900k tonnes so multiply your estimate by 1000.
- cluckindan 1y agoNo, that would be closer to 2,000 tons of co2 emissions. So 450 large planes flying that route.
- rohitv 1y agoI wonder how much CO₂ is removed from the hours saved because of AI.
- wobfan 1y agoI am not yet aware of an AI that is able to straight up remove hours out of a timeline. Time goes by pretty fast recently though, maybe AI is the reason?
- davrosthedalek 1y ago[put my hand up]. I recently had to/wanted to convert my lecture slides from latex-beamer/lyx into html/reveal.js. I did a couple of slides per hand, and then asked AI to convert the rest, following my example. Saved me hours of tedious and boring work.
- simianwords 1y agoDon’t know why this is downvoted. AI helps in productivity in many places so it is definitely a fair point. I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.
- wobfan 1y agoBecause it's wrong. AI doesn't save any CO2 or hours. > AI helps in productivity in many places so it is definitely a fair point. The productivity per hours might be higher, but the CO2 per hours is also higher, per definition. This isn't about productivity though, OP talked about CO2 emissions, and they can only rise, per capitalism's definition. If any company owner says "Okay we're doing a workday's work in an hour now, so now we'll just leave the office after one hour", then yes, we may save CO2. But this is not what's happening. The hours still go by as fast as before, but instead of only having working humans, we have additional data centers that pollute the air. In comparison to effectiveness, AI may (or may not, I saw studies that suggested otherwise) may reduce the CO2/LoC cost, but saying "AI saves CO2" is just entirely wrong and a misconception. It adds a massive amount of CO2. The rich people running the companies only earn money a little more faster than before. > I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query. But the time didn't go away. You consumed more energy in a smaller timeframe, but the rest of the 15 mins that you "saved" didn't go away. You probably did something else in there. So it just added CO2.
- philipallstar 1y agoBut at least some management consultants will have an easier time generating reports no one will ever read.
- beezlewax 1y agoFoolishness an LLM will of course read them.
- marcosdumay 1y agoSeveral LLMs. Even many where no person will look at their results. Now, we just take the original prompter out of the loop, we can achieve a pure LLM "knowledge" economy!
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoOur management now lets AI rank team members based on our weekly 1:1 documentation which consists of the team members pre-1:1 summary, the 1:1 transcript summary and the manager written response to the pre-1:1 summary. Since my manager does not read any of that and wouldn't understand it even if he tried I can write down pretty much anything, making outrageous claims about my work and be happy about the highest salary increase in my team.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoTo put this in perspective: world wide the emissions were ~ 37.8 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) in 2024 and 4.77 billion tonnes in the US. So, we're talking about 0.019 % of US emissions. That's not nothing but also not that high relative to some other things. Addressing this is not going to do much to solve the overall problem that the US is emitting a lot of CO2. AI usage is probably going to grow over time. But it will have to grow a lot to get to displace e.g. transport, industrial heating, or agriculture as dominant sources of CO2 emissions. Short term the tendency of AI data center providers to solve their energy needs with gas powered generation (mainly) is not great of course. It's opportunistic, there's extra underused gas generation capacity currently that's more or less readily available. But long term there are some obvious cost savings there as well. Gas isn't cheap; even in the US. And gas turbines are actually scarce. Increased demand is hard to meet with just gas for this reason. AI data centers aren't picking the cheapest energy source but the easiest accessible energy source. Some companies are even looking at nuclear. And not because it's cheap. Likewise, some companies are apparently considering doing some AI compute in space (solar powered). Long term, solar, wind, and batteries are likely to be the cheapest way to source energy in this sector as well as is already the case in other sectors. Energy is one of the largest cost components for providing AI compute and competition is likely to be fierce. There's no way that companies dependent on expensive forms of energy will be able to compete long term. The short term game is about grabbing market share. Surviving long term will require aggressive cost savings on energy generation.
- jmyeet 1y agoThere are actually a ton of problems with the energy use of AI data centers. 1. Exploiting local laws to basically pollute in essentially residential areas. This is what's happening with Grok's Memphis DC [1]. The gas turbines count as "mobile" so don't need the same pollution controls; 2. Domestic electricity production is heavily natural gas dependent. This is significantly better than coal but obviously not as good as renewables. But we are creating all this new demand for natural gas that is going to do nothing but drive up the price for everybody. This isn't just data centers. It's the policy of massively increasing LNG exports; and 3. For those DCs connected to the local grid, dthey are essentially getting residential customers to pay for the infrastructure and to subsidize the energy usage. Thing is, we've been here before [2]. So we have people with less income because company spend is moving to AI and the money those people have is being further eaten away by higher electricity prices. This is going to be a problem long before the CO2 emissions will be. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph... [2]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-cryptomining-comes-to-town-high-electricity-use-spillovers-to-the-local-economy/ https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...
- jeffbee 1y agoThe study is a massive pile of guesses multiplied together, but one of the key assumptions I would point out is that AI data centers use the national average grid carbon intensity.
- juujian 1y agoThis space is changing quickly, and their numbers are already outdated. In Pennsylvania they are building a 4.5GW gas-fired power plant specifically to power AI data centers: https://www.homercityredevelopment.com/project-overview https://www.homercityredevelopment.com/project-overview Even if it does not provide base load (which the co-location with the AI data center suggests it may come close to), that single power plant will emit millions of tons of CO2 per year.
- beanjuiceII 1y ago[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 1y agowhat are people not doing when they're using AI? google searches? web browsing? how many tons of co2 do website scrolljacking effects create by spiking my cpu?
- scottcorgan 1y agoBut we banned plastic straws ...
- Aurornis 1y agoAs usual, any emissions headline that doesn’t include comparisons or perspective is simply trying to scare you. For some perspective, air travel produces on the order of 1 billion tons of CO2 annually. In other words, this AI adoption CO2 number is 1/1000th of the CO2 emissions of air travel alone. Anyone doing hand-wringing about AI CO2 emissions but not giving a second thought to major contributors like air travel or industrial processes that produce many orders of magnitude more CO2 isn’t actually concerned about CO2 emissions. They’re just looking for reasons to be angry about AI or data centers.
- simianwords 1y agoAlso called “fake concern”. There are people who are threatened that AI can undo their status in society. These are the sorts that bring up ridiculous arguments against AI. Which is simultaneously useless to society but also extremely harmful. Simultaneously so costly to run that it is a bubble but also so cheap to run that so many data centers are not needed. Then there are the pause AI sorts that try to cash in on regulatory politics.
- cm2012 1y agoStreaming video takes order of magnitude more
- alecco 1y agoI dare you do the CO2 added due to outsourcing to India, a country whose electricity is 75% generated from burning coal in dirty old power plants.
- nandomrumber 1y agoSince we’re here making comparisons, here’s the USA’s electricity production breakdown: 22.2% Nuclear 19.5% Renewable 31.7% Natural gas 26.0% Coal 0.6% Petroleum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States —— Edit to add: in response to your reply and because I’ve hit my rate limit for replies (this being one of my few favourite things to rant about)…: It’s actually a much better mix than how I thought I remembered it. If that’s the US’s plan, it’s a good one. I just wish the Australian government would get onboard with nuclear, and ditch the renewables for gas. We export as much LNG by volume as Qatar!
- alecco 1y agoThanks for the info. That does look like a much better composition and obviously less CO2 for same energy. I've heard the US government plan is to do gas generation aggressively for next few years to bridge untile they get all the new nuclear power plants online. And never mind a modern power grid vs an old one causing waste of 15-16%.
- zahlman 1y agoThe article you linked is about overall energy use, so it doesn't clearly support your numbers. But I'm actually shocked that the US is generating that much nuclear electricity. It always comes across as mired in impossible amounts of red tape.
- nandomrumber 1y agoYou’re right, the Wikipedia entry for electricity in the US has nuclear closer to 18%. Close enough to make approximately no difference. I’m sure there’s a dashboard online somewhere that shows a live feed of generator data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
- didip 1y agoMeh… datacenters are a big specialized location where you can do a lot of fancy green energy tech. This small amount can easily be reduced to zero.
- pbiggar 1y agoThere's ethical AI companies which are trying to reduce this, for example https://thaura.ai https://thaura.ai
- tibbon 1y agoI care a lot about the environment. It seems obvious that there is an impact, but it seems relatively small- something that if it wasn’t AI would be counted as a rounding error by many. People keep raising AI’s environmental impact to me as a concern, and I’m open to learning more, but at this point it seems potentially even long term neutral if it really does insert the efficiencies to productivity that many claim it will. For example: look up the co2 impacts of gas powered lawn equipment. By one number I found that in 2020 it released 30 million tons of co2 in the US alone. Yet, when this equipment was coming into popularity no one expressed the moral panic they are over AI. I know people who will stomp around about how AI is bad, and then go use their gas powered leaf blower for a few hours.
- grigio 1y agoNobody talks about the waste of GPU for gaming :D
- xnx 1y ago> This is not a small amount but equates to a relatively minor increase when viewed in the context of nationwide emissions Who is claiming this is an increase? What would the money have been spent on otherwise?
- singron 1y agoThe paper is based on an estimate of productivity increases per industry due to AI. The highest increases are around 0.2% and most industries are <0.1%. In that world, AI isn't transformative and doesn't accelerate. In some ways I think this is probably realistic, but it's not compatible with outcomes touted by boosters. They estimate 28 PJ/year, which is only about 0.9 GW. Stargate was planned to build 10 GW of capacity alone, so they can't both be true
- dahart 1y agoRight! I can’t reconcile their estimates at all against actual known usage…