Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
This is not true. It banned Chinese made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
> The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.
This is not true and this is misinformation in the way stated.
While agreed that emissions going up will lead to some ecosystems, some food problems, some water supplies getting worse.
But in aggregate, the things are all around going to get better - life expectancy will go up either way. Food insecurity will go down. Prosperity goes up.
So you will be in a better situation in 100 years without reducing emissions.
I have been trying to look for sources myself and I feel like this whole sector is rampant with "noble lies".
If you dig into the sources you will find
Economic predictions:
The most serious mainstream institutions[1] will dress it up us an imminent catastrophe as if humanity itself will collapse if we don't do anything. But once you read the real predictions, you will realise that that it they just say things would be better if you had reduced emissions compared to if we did not, but not compared to today (crucially)
Tail risks and irreversible damage:
I have read on tail risks, ecological collapse, species death and all of these models are strange and not supported by the mainstream generally. For example [2] article says that 5% of our species will go extinct by 2100 or so. That means more than 200k species! And in the last 50 years fewer than 1500 or so went extinct and it is not some abnormal number.
I would encourage you to actually read the studies and see what people believe and the models used.
> Your argument is just linking to credible sources that make the opposite argument as you, and then stating "I disagree" afterwards?
Dude, read the first document and then tell me whether they say things will get worse than now or not. They explicitly compare the counterfactual against with or without emissions not against today. This is my issue with this kind of misinformation.
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Ok. A serious question.
I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
This is a far from the truth as a I can imagine. There are still a large number of wind and solar projects in progress and I don’t believe the cadence has changed.
The reason here is it makes no sense for what they are trying to do. They want to power a DC, the sun sets and wind comes and goes. You would need overcapacity on both and then batteries. Probably something in there with not wanting to connect to the grid.
Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.
Your statements are borderline lies. Texas gets a lot wrong but it is still building out lots of solar and wind but neither of those power and onsite DC very well.
And what does that have to do with what I said? Absolutely nothing. I don’t agree with the administrations stance at all but equally I don’t like comments like yours that make no sense.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job.
You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
Climate catastrophe itself is ideology driven. The mainstream view isn't that if we increase emissions, it will lead to a literal catastrophe. Our lives will become better in 100 years with emissions or without.
I would urge you to stop spreading misinformation about imminent catastrophe unless we reduce emissions. Catastrophe meaning our lives would be even worse in the future than now.
Europe is burning, rivers are at all time lows, new temperature records ar being set every year, oceans are rising and you have the gall to demand we ignore the obvious?
Please share numbers on the predictions instead of anecdotes. You are doing the thing where you focus on specifics instead of focusing on the whole. Please share sources that show that things are overall going to get worse instead of specific cases.
This is actually a very good example to prove my point. Nowhere does it say that things get worse overall. It doesn't talk about overall increasing GDP / Life expectancy or anything sociologically.
It simply repeats the claim that sea level rises, things get hotter and so on. Its a good rhetorical move because it doesn't quantify the impact it has on us (deaths or economic).
An example,
>widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people
Ok. How many deaths? What impact? Any metric? Couldn't they have simply said something like "X number of people are going to die.."? Or something like "people are going to become X poorer"?
They don't because other studies did it and came to the conclusion that GDP still rises.
Since you seem to be able to easily quantify it, would you be able to bet on the fact that our life expectancy reduce and we would get poorer if emissions don't reduce? And would you bet that this (above) is the mainstream idea? And would you be able to show some sources? Here's mine:
>Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
This my problem with y'all. What pray tell me is the objective measure? Life expectancy? HDI? Literacy? All are going to go up. The main issue is that you will never accept an objective measure and dance to the tunes of anyone who says what you want because ultimately it is unfalsifiable.
Come up with few metrics. Convince yourself that these metrics are important. And then show me that it will get worse. I hope you agree that life expectancy is a fundamental one.
A couple of excerpts from the front page, without even registering to access the full report:
1.1.5 Heat-related mortality
Failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge 23% since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year.
1.2.1 Wildfires
The risk of wildfires is growing: 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5)
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.
Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.
Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.
What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
The overall American economy is going to pay the price in the long term. And current foreign policy is reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner, which will make things even worse.
Well yeah, it's basically locked in now that in 50 years America won't be a world power any more. It'll be in a similar place to Canada at best.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
Modern data centers can be designed with near-zero direct water consumption. It isn’t fundamentally necessary to consume huge amounts of water to cool computers. What’s the story with those new data centers? Do they actually choose to do evaporative cooling that people are complaining about or people are complaining about problem that doesn’t exist?
This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms. It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
> It also made solar inverters illegal last week.
This is not true. It banned Chinese made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]
1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...
> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.
The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]
2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...
Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?
They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.
That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at
It banned all foreign made solar inverters i.e. all solar inverters.
Do people really believe this stuff? Wow
> Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy.
Can you tell me how much water a data center uses? If you have strong opinion on the construction of data centers I hope you can answer this basic question about data centers. (Many opposed to them cannot)
Depends on the cooling system, but around 1 to 9L per kwh. [1]
A lot, but not all, of these datacenters are using evaporative cooling, which is what kicks their water usage so high.
So a 40MW datacenter will consume around 4 million liters of water per day if it is evaporatively cooled.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Assuming that it's surprisingly little and without pollution concerns, then an acceptable and enforceable policy should be a very simple request, no?
> What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy?
having learnt about wesftoid demokwafee over the last years, post oct 7, i know what is the rational bet. it´s completely clear.
The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.
But hey, line go up!
Don't worry; republicans are way ahead of that refugee crises by generation fervent far right ethnic nationalism globally, independently of course.
> The entire planet will lose as ecosystems die out, food and water supplies run low, refugee crises and global conflicts ramp up.
This is not true and this is misinformation in the way stated. While agreed that emissions going up will lead to some ecosystems, some food problems, some water supplies getting worse.
But in aggregate, the things are all around going to get better - life expectancy will go up either way. Food insecurity will go down. Prosperity goes up.
So you will be in a better situation in 100 years without reducing emissions.
Do you have any source? The global scientific community and more specifically the GIEC have been saying the opposite for years...
I have been trying to look for sources myself and I feel like this whole sector is rampant with "noble lies".
If you dig into the sources you will find
Economic predictions:
The most serious mainstream institutions[1] will dress it up us an imminent catastrophe as if humanity itself will collapse if we don't do anything. But once you read the real predictions, you will realise that that it they just say things would be better if you had reduced emissions compared to if we did not, but not compared to today (crucially)
Tail risks and irreversible damage:
I have read on tail risks, ecological collapse, species death and all of these models are strange and not supported by the mainstream generally. For example [2] article says that 5% of our species will go extinct by 2100 or so. That means more than 200k species! And in the last 50 years fewer than 1500 or so went extinct and it is not some abnormal number.
I would encourage you to actually read the studies and see what people believe and the models used.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...
[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4461
Edit, can't reply:
> Your argument is just linking to credible sources that make the opposite argument as you, and then stating "I disagree" afterwards?
Dude, read the first document and then tell me whether they say things will get worse than now or not. They explicitly compare the counterfactual against with or without emissions not against today. This is my issue with this kind of misinformation.
Your argument is just linking to credible sources that make the opposite argument as you, and then stating "I disagree" afterwards?
Both you and the person you replied to are making claims about the future. Neither of them are true.
This is just pure histrionics, you have no understanding whatsoever of the scale of data center water consumption, electricity consumption, new capacity coming online, etc.
How much water does a DC use?
Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.
So even when xAI (which is now Tesla? Or SpaceX maybe?) was "operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country"[0] this didn't place them above this new Amazon not-even-built-yet data center? Are they competing who can destroy the earth the fastest or what's going on?
- [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
> It seems wrong that Amazon should get in trouble for this when it was XAI that began this new race to the bottom.
Who gives a shit who started it? The ones who continue engaging in it, should clearly be punished as they're working against humanity's best interest of keeping this planet survivable.
If you're one of the largest companies in the world, constantly brag about how environmental friendly you are and how much you care about "sustainability" or what the trendy word is today, and you end up building a data center that sets a record in pollution (either directly or indirectly), you're doing something massively fucked up and are misaligned with the rest of the people on this planet.
> Peoplecheered xAI on and admired how quickly they were able to move, without much regard to the methods or legality. IMO competitors had no choice but to respond in kind when they see XAI not just getting away with it, but also getting a pass on legal issues.
I guess this is what late-stage capitalism gives you ultimately, companies who feel like it's fine doing whatever because competitors are also doing whatever. No one I know have been cheering for anything like that, I suggest if you have people cheering about stuff like that near you, get far away.
All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.
Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.
Most polluting power plant so far
This race to the bottom will have plenty more to give us in the coming years.
Who could have predicted that Microsoft building their own nuclear reactor would be the lesser evil.
Note that this is about absolute pollution, not relative to power output. Pollution is high, because power output is high. Relatively, for what it's worth, it's just a fairly normal gas plant.
So the most interesting thing to take away from this: There is a lot of demand for more power and in this instance it's satisfied by gas. Which is still much better than coal. Which is still much worse than renewables.
Luckily the Trump administration has just paid over a billion dollars for the second time to stop a renewable energy project...
Ok. A serious question. I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Then why are they using gas turbines? Is it because they can generate more power with a smaller real estate footprint?
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.
In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.
This is a far from the truth as a I can imagine. There are still a large number of wind and solar projects in progress and I don’t believe the cadence has changed.
The reason here is it makes no sense for what they are trying to do. They want to power a DC, the sun sets and wind comes and goes. You would need overcapacity on both and then batteries. Probably something in there with not wanting to connect to the grid.
Wind and solar would require lots of land next to the DC to guarantee power.
Your statements are borderline lies. Texas gets a lot wrong but it is still building out lots of solar and wind but neither of those power and onsite DC very well.
What if..... the USA had a national grid and what if.... they connected solar and wind across the country and for kicks, invested in storage.
Trump paid a wind farm company $1,200,000,000 of taxpayer money to stop building a wind farm
And what does that have to do with what I said? Absolutely nothing. I don’t agree with the administrations stance at all but equally I don’t like comments like yours that make no sense.
They are using gas because it's more reliable during peak usage. Wind generation in Texas isn't optimal throughout the entire state and conditions aren't optimal all the time. They still use wind, but from a pure numbers perspective, gas infra already exists, the gas is there, and gas is more reliable, so wind isn't always the cheapest form of energy. There are also diminishing returns on just adding more wind turbines.
I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points. Texas is number two in the nation in solar power: https://seia.org/media/16020/texas.pdf/
Texas is not at all against renewables. Maybe, just maybe, whatever axes the people building data centers are optimizing on rule out solar/wind over factors other than "renewables are for leftists, so fuck that we're gonna burn gas even if it's more expensive."
15th for non-residential? Sounds like people overwhelmingly put it on their roofs, and politicians avoid it.
Under current administration, I'm not even sure its possible to build out green energy for this sort of thing at scale - this article[1] was on the front page just yesterday
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
For a DC it's probably reliability. You need wind to be spread over a large area to even out random changes in power availability. And, obviously, solar power works during the day.
It's because the permits are easier to get. It's very hard to get people to organize to make renewable energy permitting easier.
In some cases, aren’t the permits not even being sought?
Eg https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
How is it more expensive? Any links? Once built out yeah there is maintainance but no need to drill baby drill anymore.
You need a ton of land for solar and no renewable is as reliable as fossil fuels.
gas turbines are not intermittent
> I frequently hear that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity
presumably they put zero value on stable production or count subsidies as income
A recent discussion
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208686
Bitcoin received a lot of backslash due to its power usage and ecological footprint. It's obvious that HN users don't have the same criticisms towards AI data centers. Maybe someone with a short position will coordinate that communication soon..
Bitcoin was just purely wasting power for a token only used for crime and speculation.
Now no one talks about global warming and climate change.
You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.
None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.
All this at the very low cost of: your job. You can't have an unbreachable blockade 24/7 in front of there, very soon they'd send police to disperse. Fire dept has to justify the failing, if everything up to code and the inspector make it fail it will delay for at most a week and the guy will lose his credibility. The guys delivering and installing the UPS are just trying to make a living too, destroying the thing will get them fired while only delaying a little the time getting another delivered. You are replaceable.
Do you think the rest of your life will be of very high quality in any scenario?
A lot of new data centres have been announced in Alberta, Canada. Which is a weird location given that Alberta has a derelict power grid that can barely serve the current load, and runs almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Meta, for instance, plans a $13B data centre in Sturgeon County.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/alberta-approved-a-932-me...
They all plan on powering them by building massive natural gas generating stations with each. In a free for all race to destroy the environment and doom humanity (aside from your plutocrats who'll live in their bunkers). Until a week or so ago Meta still had a clean energy pledge, but finally they just abandoned that silly greenwashing lie: https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/meta-quits-clean-e...
We are basically in the end game now, and despite that weird guy running through these comments telling everyone how great everything is going to be in a hundred years, things are looking utterly grim.
Oh, Alberta. That makes sense. Land of pissed off coal miners, isn't it?
If we reach AGI at some point, it will wonder why we are so dumb
If we ever reach it, it will tell us "you destroyed any chance of survival in your quest to get to me first, dipshits."
It is insane how we're accelerating the climate catastrophe in an ideology-driven race to be king of the ashes.
Capitalism is a death cult, AI capitalism doubly so.
Communism dried up the third largest lake in the world just for irrigation (while starving tens of millions in the meantime).
The irrigation plan was in response to the famine, and it worked, it was the last famine in the soviet union.
also the soviet union was totalitarian, not communist
We only have two options.
No one mentioned communism?
I think I get your point; that the inverse of corrupt (I call it fake) capitalism is not necessarily communism, or something reactive. It might just be a system that works better, even if we have not named it yet...
Climate catastrophe itself is ideology driven. The mainstream view isn't that if we increase emissions, it will lead to a literal catastrophe. Our lives will become better in 100 years with emissions or without.
I would urge you to stop spreading misinformation about imminent catastrophe unless we reduce emissions. Catastrophe meaning our lives would be even worse in the future than now.
Europe is burning, rivers are at all time lows, new temperature records ar being set every year, oceans are rising and you have the gall to demand we ignore the obvious?
Please share numbers on the predictions instead of anecdotes. You are doing the thing where you focus on specifics instead of focusing on the whole. Please share sources that show that things are overall going to get worse instead of specific cases.
You can find latest ipcc report (short version) here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
Please share your sources saying it's not getting worse.
This is actually a very good example to prove my point. Nowhere does it say that things get worse overall. It doesn't talk about overall increasing GDP / Life expectancy or anything sociologically.
It simply repeats the claim that sea level rises, things get hotter and so on. Its a good rhetorical move because it doesn't quantify the impact it has on us (deaths or economic).
An example,
>widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people
Ok. How many deaths? What impact? Any metric? Couldn't they have simply said something like "X number of people are going to die.."? Or something like "people are going to become X poorer"?
They don't because other studies did it and came to the conclusion that GDP still rises.
Since you seem to be able to easily quantify it, would you be able to bet on the fact that our life expectancy reduce and we would get poorer if emissions don't reduce? And would you bet that this (above) is the mainstream idea? And would you be able to show some sources? Here's mine:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...
Edit, can't reply
>Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
This my problem with y'all. What pray tell me is the objective measure? Life expectancy? HDI? Literacy? All are going to go up. The main issue is that you will never accept an objective measure and dance to the tunes of anyone who says what you want because ultimately it is unfalsifiable.
Come up with few metrics. Convince yourself that these metrics are important. And then show me that it will get worse. I hope you agree that life expectancy is a fundamental one.
Have you tried to satisfy your open-minded curiosity on this question?
A simple Google search brings up: https://lancetcountdown.org/2025-report/
A couple of excerpts from the front page, without even registering to access the full report:
1.1.5 Heat-related mortality
Failure to curb the warming effects of climate change has seen the rate of heat-related deaths surge 23% since the 1990s, to 546,000 a year.
1.2.1 Wildfires
The risk of wildfires is growing: 2024 saw a record-high 154,000 estimated deaths from wildfire smoke-derived small particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5)
Why would you measure the goodness of the future in GDP?
Why is HN so absolutely terrible at understanding the scale of pollution, water consumption, etc? It is quite minuscule in real terms, but everyone here is losing their mind. Ridiculous.