People need to stop calling fossil gas "natural".

There's nothing natural about burning it and wrt environmental and human health harm, it's many times closer to the other fossil fuels than anything remotely clean or sustainable.

Not just that. Gas turbines emit multiple times more nasty emissions than proper gas power plants that work by heating water instead of with inefficient motors.

They could have built these next to the massive amount of wind turbines that were supposed to go up. The consumption was off the charts way before AI and they sabotaged every other option since then.

The oil lobby fucked us again and it even found itself the perfect scape goat, global warming is now because of AI.

Lol, the bubble will pop long before that. The real question is what scam they'll pivot to in order to recoup their loss.

My money is on using the consumer hardware shortage to push subscription based virtual desktops.

Assuming there's any left by then.

So glad I dropped a huge chunk of change for a new roof and solar panels. I do not want to deal with the stupid fucking electricity prices these stupid fucks are causing all for advanced predictive text.

So I was just thinking recently about the Boston Tea Party and how the people at that time were just squeezed to the point where it wasn’t tolerable anymore by the powers that be and decided that it was time to take action. Maybe all those data centers can help us read up on neat history lessons.

USA! USA! USA!

:someone whispers rapidly in my ear:

Ah, about my recent outburst. I'd like to DOUBLE DOWN ON THAT AND USA! COAL! GAS! DIESEL!! SMOKE!!! FIRE!!!!! NUKULAR!!!!!!! WARRRR!!!!!!!!!

.......erm, sorry. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.

(sarcasm aside, be nice if we could have more renewables. If we used something like a tenth of the land we grown corn on just to turn into ethanol (i.e. not food, not even cattle feed, but corn that we turn into ethanol only, adn 10% of that land) - if we used that for solar, we could power ALL of the cars in the US on electric, and free up 90% of that corn-ethanol land to grow food or something else on)

Unless they are stopped.

That's an interesting selection of two countries to pick

A of things could happen.

These already contribute the rise in coal use.

The rise in coal use was largely driven by the growth of data centres. Last year, US energy secretary Chris Wright said coal would be “essential” to “winning the AI race”

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/us-coal-biggest-contributor-by-far-to-rise-in-global-emissions/

Most of this could be avoided by making polluters pay, ie collect a carbon tax than represent the real cost of pollution. The alternative is to keep having everyone else pay for the damages and cleanup (more illnesses, higher income/sales tax, higher insurance premiums, ...).

Blocks adblockers.

This is why people who claim that AI has its uses are always dead wrong. Sure it can help you write sloppy code ten times as fast, or make you "research" (lease out your brain) things slightly faster (minus all the factchecking to see if it hallucinates). It may even help medical research, but all these advantages, which are all "this can be done slightly faster", does not make up for the fact that it significantly contributes to burning up our planet a lot faster than it is already on its way to doing.

We can live without any of its advantages, but we literally cannot live with all its disadvantages.

They could be running on renewables if someone hadn't literally spent billions to stop already planned projects.

The oil lobby fucked us, this is a scape goat. Natural gas consumption was already sky high before AI. Any effort put into moving away from dirty energy is constantly sabotaged.

This is why they want the "AI race." The AI tech sector is sponsored by the fossil fuel sector.