The kicker is we need agriculture and industry, like it or not. Whereas no one apart from some billionaires and tech bros want or even need AI.

Emissions from AI datacenters offend because of just how unnecessary they are.

I eat food, and the food I eat doesn't just walk to my place.

So... sure I'd rather have a lot less energy spent on agriculture and industry but if there is one place where I feel energy use is legitimate, it's feeding us.

Meanwhile I do NOT want better tools for scammers, spammers and fake experts.

A lot of it comes down to how much people want the product, combined with how easy it is to get rid of carbon emissions in the process. If people are against AI in the first place, it's easy to get rid of the carbon emissions. Getting rid of the emissions from concrete production is a much more difficult proposition.

Well in the agricultural sense the only thing we can do is to make more people vegetarian (not really happening)/and make more affordable plant based milk. The latter one is actually in here already! I've seen plant based milks not that much more expensive than a cow's milk in Hungary.

Once again “general populace” means “people in the United States”.

The rest of us are still in the Paris agreement, and where I’m at one of the most heated political arguments is about emissions from agriculture.

Why do I get a feeling that OP doesn't talk much to farmers?

All are horrible and a problem but what do we get out of these three? Doesn't take a genius to see something of value in two of them.

well established industry itself seeks efficiency. The emissions are generally from energy use, Energy costs money, they try to find more efficient ways. Stable industries will have already done a lot of innovation to improve efficiency and may even have hit diminishing returns to research once their processes are well understood. Pick any industrial process and you'll find loads of papers on efficiency at all steps. But at the end of the day if you need to smelt iron ore into high quality pig iron, you're going to need a lot of heat for a period of time. Best way to reduce industrial GHG emissions is probably to buy less stuff or maybe buy better quality stuff that lasts longer. Not many consumers wan't to do that though.

Agriculture is weird because we've pushed yields up very high with all the fertilizers and monocultures and so on, but i'd think its similar, diminishing returns - and maybe yields have actually been pushed higher than they should for long run soil health, so you might have a viscious cycle of fertilizer development. You could maybe try to shift people to have less meat and more crops, or maybe stuff like seaweed or algae based food, or try to stop them overeating. I feel like the food industry does get a bit of stick for obesity - not that that seems to do much.

Problem with AI is the bubble that means the focus of effort is unlikely to be efficiency; so long as investors are dumb, don't know what they're buying and/or speculation oriented then the bang for buck investment (in the short term) is to generate hype. They'd gladly burn energy, to generate more hype to, borrow more, to buy more energy , to generate more hype, to borrow more . . . all the while they're 'crowding out' boring established investments in well understood processes.

“General populace”?

This meme wildly overestimate that the genpop has the faintest clue about the cost of AI. In my very few discussions with people that even bother to bring it up with curiosity absolutely none of them understood how big of a resource hog data centers are. A few might’ve had a clue that AI results can be wrong, but then they went on to basically apologize for AI’s current errors by stating how much good it could do via research while not having any idea what was different between say medical AI and one they use to make their animated memes or converse with.

thank you, finally somebody says it

the big energy revolution will happen in industry. everything else doesn't matter.

even the agriculture sector basically doesn't matter since most of the GHG emissions are re-absorbed the next year. literally it's a cycle.

and the most effective way to do anything is to build solar & wind energy. that really changes the picture. reducing industrial output doesn't work without hurting like 90% of the population either through job loss or material losses.

Turn electricity into wind, solar, and nuclear, and you'll not only shrink electricity's impact to a sliver, but also bite a chunk out of industry due to removing the need for oil, gas, and coal.

Those two are the biggest global emission contributers.

Agriculture needs to move away from land use and into significantly more GM and vertical farming, "organic" products be damned.

Looks to me like 1/3 the industrial emissions are fossil fuel production, which are best handled by exactly what we’re already focusing on: renewable energy and EVs.

Now if we can only encourage everyone to eat less beef, that brings over the agriculture sector

"improving industrial and agricultural processes" sounds like something nuanced and complicated that should be (and probably is) discussed by field (both meanings) experts. Not the general public.

Motherfucker the AI bullshit isn't better than the rest of the emissions; it's actively compounding them in a way we do not fully comprehend, and is absolutely moving the timeline of our extinction up by decades. As a wicked sick bonus, AI is also destroying all the funding systems we would've used to try and fight Climate Change in the private market.

Fighting AI is not ignoring the rest of the problems; it is fighting to make sure we CAN CONTINUE to try and deal with those problems.

Note that OP is using a bit unrelated title. They're doing it in case you forget to click their image.