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This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
So China and India can use all the fossil fuels they want, and other counties too not just them.
But the West has to kowtow to Net Zero / ”Renewables” nonsense?
We’re not buying it anymore.
Everything has tradeoffs.
Destroying the economy and letting low income and poor people freeze in the dark or melt in the sun is passé.
This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
Why? Because you said so? So China and India can use all the fossil fuels they want, and other counties too not just them. But the West has to kowtow to Net Zero / ”Renewables” nonsense? We’re not buying it anymore. Everything has tradeoffs. Destroying the economy and letting low income and poor people freeze in the dark or melt in the sun is passé .
This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
I have long advocated that EU should be in the forefront and start sunsetting fossil fueled power generation, by setting a date when no new construction is allowed and then letting the existing fleet naturally die. It would send a strong signal to the rest of the world that we can't keep constructing new thermal power stations that continue to burn fuel whenever we have need to increase capacity and grid stability. S…
Even with today’s energy polices, electricity costs have skyrocketed (this was the case before the data center demand). Couple that with electrification of vehicles, phase out of natural gas/oil heaters, I think its reckless abandon to push policies which harm middle and lower class families. Not to say some of these countries even consider nuclear energy “evil”. Absolutely ridiculous.
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In broad strokes I tend to agree. I think there is a fairly good path to moving most things to electricity and in turn moving most electricity generation to renewables. The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job. By and large, renewables are marching towards…
There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
Very whataboutism
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People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.) The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just: (1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well…
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize th…
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Per capita the U.S. is a larger emitter than China. (Canada is even larger than the U.S.!) Let me know if you need help understanding what this means or why this matters.
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> fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday At the current rate it will stop in four to ten centuries. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPXRjoqbcAATWUu?format=jpg
Yes at the current rate but if I drew a line at the 2006 rate of solar growth would it have anything to do with the rate now? How about 2016? I’m down about our prospects for limiting the damage but let’s not be irrationally doomer about it either. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
It's possibly worth noting that the source for this is an application for a permit > GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States Immediately following that is the text "It’s worth noting that companies rarely em…
When crypto rage was at its peak and people had done math to figure out precisely the energy impact it had, people were up in arms about how much it used. I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way. People raged at me for saying this and assumed I was a crypt…
I think of this as the Wikipedia effect. People perceive Wikipedia as unreliable because they can perceive the mechanism by which it can be wrong. Study after study has shown Wikipedia to be more reliable than other encyclopedic sources that simply assert their accuracy while leaving the mechanisms by which they work hidden.
It is similar to the idea that something that saves 5 unidentified lives at the cost of one identified life is considered far worse than something that costs 5 unidentified lives to save one identified life.
Crypto and AI have also the problem that people cannot understand scale. How much is a million litres of water in terms of swimming pools, or showers? Thing uses as much electricity as [country that uses gas for heating and does not have typically have air conditioning]. Or Training an LLM produces a big looking number of CO2 which is as much as n cars in their total lifespan which makes it look like a different scale. Weirdly, the last figure I read on that suggested that if 10% of Americans trained their own personal leading edge LLM from scratch, cars would still emit more CO2. I don't know if that is true or not, but it frames the entire thing in a different light.
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Nuclear's top 3 problems: 1. Any equipment or substance that is both nuclear and potentially dangerous has some sort of magical mutant super-power to stimulate superhumanly idiotic behavior in a non-trivial fraction of the people handling/operating/managing the equipment or substance. That behavior is almost always coupled with pathological denials - both from the mutant super-idiots and their supposedly non-mutant p…
Nuclear's top 3 problems: 1. Plant construction is very expensive, and not in small part because people who don't actually understand the technology take every opportunity to tie up construction in the courts and regulatory agencies. 2. General population of humans are quite aware of #1, so even though they know nuclear wins on a technology basis, they know it will be unduly expensive, preferring to knuckle under to…
Vs. those with both the unquenchable zeal and bottomless resources to win a multi-decade crusade to prove that they're Ultimately Right (but no short-term need for electrical power) should embark on an epic quest...
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There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
> I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far…