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Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

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Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#161

Post by TitaRusell »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #45
deepsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.

It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high. Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option…

America produces a ton of LNG. Its cheap and corporations will ALWAYS choose cheap unless the government steps in.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#162

Post by fragmede »

podocarp wrote: post #130
cbmuser wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

»Don't understand why.« Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.

You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.

A rat taking out a DC resulting in a black start event isn't the same thing as being able to turn a DC on and off at will. The thousands of computers in an DC running various bits of software don't just power on like your Windows computer and result in a working data center after a couple of minutes automatically.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#163

Post by pseudohadamard »

dathinab wrote: post #114
culi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally . They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027... That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to…

and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones) A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far) Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a…

Problem is all the (relatively) efficient and (relatively) quiet turbines have long since been snapped up, so the AI sloppers have to go with inefficient, noisy ones for the foreseeable future. And given that no-one knows when the AI bubble will finally burst, no manufacturer wants to sink hundreds of millions into new plant to produce turbines in a year or two when the sloppers may be barely alive on taxpayer cash injections.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#164

Post by pseudohadamard »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #84
deepsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.

When you spend many billions buying GPUs, you want to maximize utilization, and not turn them off during the night.

When you spend many millions buying a government, you want to maximize your return on that investment, not just play by the rules like everyone else.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#165

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

forestrywat wrote: post #32
lazide wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, that’s nonsense. co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume. leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. dilution still helps!

Of course it helps, but where are you going to dilute more co2 these days?

bulk volume is a different problem from concentration

when people suffocate in the fire from CO2 - that's concentration

and dilution helps people to not literally die from that

global warming due to CO2 levels everywhere is entirely different problem. (and if we could dilute CO2 into the space, it would also be solved, lol)

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#166

Post by LogicFailsMe »

acdha wrote: post #142
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #50

Alternatives exist but they aren't free... https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/ https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682... TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.

Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.

Politics is the art of the possible, not the ideal. Vote that down too I guess.

Also, I call BS on your claim it's not working anywhere at scale.

https://www.catf.us/resource/carbon-capture-storage-what-can...

What do you want? To keep chasing the perfect or to embrace digging ourselves out of this mess by whatever means? I think I know the answer and I'll bet we disagree.

But I too would prefer we pivoted to renewables and nuclear, increasingly renewables over nuclear with time, but I'd have to move to China for that (yet they ended up firing up the coal plants because of the Iran War). It's not happening here even when the free market indicates it's the best play because it undercuts oil and gas and they own the politicians as the masses mostly don't bother to vote. What is your plan that works in reality as opposed to the Aldous Huxley semi-dystopia the west has become? I know, I know, getting the job done by any means is wrong think, demanding perfection is right think.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#167

Post by psolidgold »

noosphr wrote: post #158
psolidgold wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that link shows the exact opposite of what you're saying it shows, right? It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.

You do realize that Chinese electricity production quadrupled in that time?

Yes - what's your point? It seems like coal wasn't the golden ticket you're making it out to be so they built alternatives.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#168

Post by acdha »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #166
acdha wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.

Politics is the art of the possible, not the ideal. Vote that down too I guess. Also, I call BS on your claim it's not working anywhere at scale. https://www.catf.us/resource/carbon-capture-storage-what-can... What do you want? To keep chasing the perfect or to embrace digging ourselves out of this mess by whatever means? I think I know the answer and I'll bet we disagree. But I too would prefer we pivoted to renewab…

I’m basing it on things like https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2026.121752 finding that it’s going to be hard both to scale up and get past 90% unless we have massive amounts of clean energy available. To me that means that we shouldn’t be approving any new fossil emissions and treating capture / sequestration as a nice bonus if we can make it work rather than something we can count on the make the numbers work.

The best thing I see is that economic pressure is mounting: even with Trump breaking so many laws on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, people want to deploy solar or wind power because that saves them money.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#169

Post by rjrjrjrj »

psolidgold wrote: post #135
noosphr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where available is limited to Norway. Building enough mountains per capita in the rest of the world is somewhat difficult.

You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts? In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc. Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republi…

Hydro is the primary source of electricity in Canada, around 60%.

Quebec produces far more electricity via hydro than any single US state, some of which gets exported to the northeastern US.

Re: Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

#170

Post by psolidgold »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #169
psolidgold wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts? In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc. Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republi…

Hydro is the primary source of electricity in Canada, around 60%. Quebec produces far more electricity via hydro than any single US state, some of which gets exported to the northeastern US.

Clearly there is no industry in Canada then! /s
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