Our economy is energy-starved and our biosphere is in a precarious situation. Meanwhile, the current generation of AI is energy inefficient as hell, for both training and inference. They need massive datacenters to teach a model what little kids learn effortlessly. The two are neither compatible, nor sustainable. What fraction of AI training and inference is justifiable under the current circumstances? I understand that AI has some novel and urgent applications, including for tackling the crisis itself. But if the justification for AI chatbots for people too lazy to do an old-fashioned web search is corporate profits against the destruction of massive amounts of biomass, we better apply the emergency brakes on it fast. The biosphere and countless lives are vastly more important than the greed of a few rich people who don't even know what to do with the wealth they have.
Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
131–140 of 183 posts
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't. Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so t…
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%. https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
I think the op must have been confused by the inverse square law for omnidirectional wireless transmission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you achieve nation or world scale communism without totalitarianism? I am one of many people who know the history of communism’s failures and will never accept it willingly.
I would be more interested to see your response to the key point of their comment - that the US exemplified this on a large scale in recent history. That would be more compelling than to simply claim to have a lot of knowledge of history
I don’t think the World War II economy is repeatable today. It was a time of great patriotism with the majority of the nation supporting the war. People were willing to sacrifice for the cause and accept rationing of goods and making substitutions. They also knew that these sacrifices were temporary and helped their loved ones win the war and hopefully return to them sooner.
Today in America it is hard to get more than half the population to agree on anything. There is no unifying catalyst to bring about the consensus, cooperation, and personal sacrifice that would be necessary to implement a centrally planned economy in the United States today.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#134Google decision makers are obviously very smart people. Do decisions like this mean they acknowledge that net-zero is more a political ideal than an actually effective policy? After all, if they truly believed this was an existential issue they’d make every effort.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't. Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so t…
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%. https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
I have no dog in this fight, but this is so impressive it sounds wrong. I don’t think it is wrong, I’m just really blown away
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emissions, rather than relying on offsets. if it's a serious committment to being carbon-free, i think this sounds like a positive change. if it's a moonshot that they have no real intention of actually meeting, then it's a lot less impressive.…
What’s the real difference? Don’t offsets also do the same thing? If I emit 5g of CO2 but purchase similar in offsets - the offsets have to achieve a reduction of 5g unless something like a scam is going on.
That assumes the seller of the offset actually offset something rather than created an opaque paper trail that makes it impossible to know if they did anything at all. I don’t think Carbon market makers have a good track record.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should just pave the mojave with solar panels. Nearly no one lives there and no one wants to live there and it is dead center to western states. If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't. Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so t…
Confidently, impressively wrong. Imagine how the power grid would work if there were 95% losses over 900 km.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society. Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized me…
>There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society. That requires resource allocation as a prerequisite and a functioning democracy that values this metric. Blaming the…
Not so strange. Just like communism slips to oligarchy, capitalism slips to plutocracy, and as such actively undermines democracy. It doesn't that campaign budgets are capped when you have the right media owners on your side.
People decide on resource allocation, period. It is as "efficient" as choosing human laws versus natural selection, the latter being exactly the model capitalism is copied from.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cap and trade is a perfectly sound strategy for reducing carbon emissions, and carbon offsets are valid part of the 'trade.' There's the potential for fraud, but fraud can happen anywhere and there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent. The market and regulators have already been accounting for this through third party verification. Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want…
> there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest. The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so…
There are 3rd-party enforcement mechanisms. It's not as simple as the seller saying "We don't pollute, trust us"; there are actual government inspectors and NGO delegates that go out, visit factories, and fine them if their actual emissions don't match the declared permits:
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement
The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions.
But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
Re: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
#140Meanwhile China is on track to install as much solar power in the past year as the US has in its entire history . The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels. Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
Not so much political as strategic. If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment (in the sense that the current shareholders don't really care that much about future over returns within their lifespans)
> If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment
No. That is not true
* Unless you are evil using school yard excuses is off brand. You do the right thing
* Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong
This politics. Burn the planet, it is what Trump would do