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New gas-powered data centers could emit more greenhouse gases than whole nations
- philipallstar 5mo ago> New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024 "Have the potential to", "Morocco". Presumably doesn't count the greenhouse gases emitted by Moroccans using overseas cloud services and AI. At least the example wasn't Vatican City.
- melling 5mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/01/iran-energy-crisis-asia-dirty-fuels-coal https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/01/iran-energy-cr... It’s quite impressive how the world is unable to reduce greenhouse emissions.
- leonidasrup 5mo agoIn history of the world there was almost never a reduction of greenhouse emissions. Only time that world did reduce greenhouse emissions was in times of economic crises and COVID-19. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions Asia will do what US did in 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979. "Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun." https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-...
- twoodfin 5mo agoVery quick Googling suggests Wired’s estimate would be ~1.9% of US emissions. AI data center investment is, at core, a bet on increasing the productivity of labor. That’s what businesses will pay for, and what will earn the big money. If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nextaccountic 5mo agoYou are supposing that with more productivity people will emit less carbon but there's no mechanism for that More productivity means the employers just demand more from the workers
- asymmetric 5mo agoYeah, this seems like a textbook case where one could apply Jevons Paradox.
- twoodfin 5mo agoOK well now you have to look at changing the economy-wide energy mix or embracing de-growth. Switching data centers to 100% solar or nuclear or … solves Wired’s complaint but not this one.
- gambiting 5mo ago"with increases in productivity, we'll all work 2-4 hours a week and maintain the same output!" No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- monegator 5mo ago> If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate I can promise you it won't happen in a million years. More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work.. Or at least we have decades of data proving that is what realistically happen. So the only way to reduce emissions is either using carbon neutral sources (gas is... not?) or forbidding people from using energy in the first place (and let's be honest, that will not happen.)
- lpcvoid 5mo agoI hope the AI bubble bursts before our earth is too hot to survive on for millions of people.
- conartist6 5mo ago[flagged]
- kleiba2 5mo agoWhat?
- Havoc 5mo agoHeavy fossil fuel use leads to health problems and given a large enough population deaths. Lung cancer, Asthma, heart issues etc Guessing that is what GP means by body count
- conartist6 5mo agoEmitting as much greenhouse gas as a country? That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.
- kleiba2 5mo agoBut isn't it kind of one-sided to single out data centers like that?
- conartist6 5mo agoSure. But a race to the bottom isn't a vision for the future. Tech used to offer society a vision for the future.
- energy123 5mo agoMost emissions are harder to reduce because industry isn't electrified (it runs directly on oil/coal not electricity). This is electricity usage. Electricity emissions are the easiest to avoid. AI industry also promises to replace everyone, and they have access to large amounts of capital they could use for renewables. That they punch down on everyone, including people outside of their country who don't benefit from the tax revenue they'll generate, with massive amounts of emissions, is a slap in the face.
- aresant 5mo agoThe AI data center narrative is the perfect storm: First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer” Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth. And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super-intelligence-enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.
- melling 5mo agoDon’t forget environmentalists have been fighting against nuclear energy for decades. Update: Since I’m being downvoted I’m going to add a little sting: Good luck with your solar power web servers and skipping flights. Poor judgement really does have a price. It’s now inevitable that it’s going to get a bit warmer… everywhere. We’ll be lucky to hit Net Zero by 2100.
- lpcvoid 5mo agoAs they should, now that we have renewables and batteries.
- Bluestrike2 5mo agoEven if modern renewables and batteries kill the need for future nuclear power plants, that doesn't excuse the consequences of decades of burning fossil fuels because environmental groups fought against nuclear power altogether. We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc. The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
- kleiba2 5mo ago> the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Does that comparison mean anything to anybody?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- iwontberude 5mo agoYeah that’s quite the yardstick they’ve chosen
- venzaspa 5mo agoFor some context, it's a country with 40 million people.
- atonse 5mo agoBut it’s hardly industrialized right? So is that a fair comparison?
- cyanydeez 5mo agoAre you, like, just not very into reading things or remembering things or is it just one of those things where you're stuck in the 1980s and haven't updated your books since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Morocco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Morocco
- atonse 5mo agoYeah, clearly I haven't done any meaningful reading regarding Morocco. I will read up more to fix the gaps in my knowledge. :-)
- anticorporate 5mo agoIt actually sits right about in the middle of all countries for percentage of GDP from industrial sectors. It's pretty heavily fossil-fuel powered right now, but like most of the rest of the world Morocco is planning to capture most of its growth in energy demand with renewables. Because, getting back to the original discussion, it'd be idiotic to choose fossil fuels over renewables in 2026.
- oomuinio 5mo ago[dead]
- 5asU 5mo agoBurning natural resources for bitcoin and chibi cartoon figures is the goal of this administration. All while increasing natural gas prices through blockades and threats of secondary sanctions. It will make oil billionaires (e.g., like the ones who founded the Daily Wire) very happy.
- usrusr 5mo agoAnd the sad part is that ai would be a perfect fit for intermittent energy sources: run inference 24/7 (on whatever you can muster, even if it's fossil it simply does not consume all that much compared to training) and over-build training to achieve whatever total throughout you need in time of energy abundance. How heavy would CO2 pricing have to be to make the market do this instead of the exact opposite?
- pjc50 5mo agoYou can't price out these people, they have seemingly unlimited money.
- leonidasrup 5mo agoWhat would be the economy of these data centers if they would run using power source with say, for example 25% capacity factor? What is the capital expenditure of a data center? What is the yearly operational expenditure of a data center? I found that a 100 MW datacenter can cost roughly $3.35 billion, with a significant portion going to high-end GPUs like the B100 or H100. For electricity, 100 MW data center can incur annual power costs ranging from $41 million to over $131 million, depending on regional energy prices.
- beAbU 5mo agoCompute has massive initial capital requirements, and a very short obsolescence window. It does not make sense to invest in compute and then not run it 24/7 at 100%. Hardware sitting idle waiting for sunshine/wind is leaving money on the table. Especially if you can burn gas during that time and still be hugely profitable.
- discobot2 5mo agogood
- L_226 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/L1twq https://archive.ph/L1twq
- markus_zhang 5mo agoAh, I knew electricians still have a future.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoOur species is going to go extinct over samurai cat memes.
- binary132 5mo agoMeanwhile anyone can run a capable LLM in their own living room, or even on their own mobile device, but nobody wants to talk about that. And no, 99.999% of slop does not need a math Olympics finalist model, sorry.