New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Whole Nations

There isn't a battery in the world big enough to provide enough power for data enter if this size.

Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.

"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

Last year, China installed 1.5GW of nuclear and 300GW of renewables. China's total coal use decreased as they decommissioned and under-utilized more coal than they installed.

This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.

It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.

Nuclear is useful but it's hard to see it as a panacea. Renewable energy on the other hand is hard to beat. The economics of it keeps getting better, and previous estimates of the lifecycle of things like solar was grossly misrepresented.

Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.

Yes, and that dates from the era when everyone thought that a "nuclear winter" (from an exchange of nuclear bombs between the US and USSR) was a more immediate risk than a long slow problem of climate change. That's what the French government carried out a terrorist attack against Greenpeace in New Zealand for: the Rainbow Warrior was protesting against French nuclear weapons testing.

Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?

Something tells me if they manage to get nuclear plants accepted, they will be built far, far away from the billionaires' doomsday bunkers.

Please. Show me a nuke that was under 10 billion over budget and less than 20 years late.

Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.

Environmentalists are full of scammers.

Right wing idiots are against solar and wind. Left wing idiots are against nuclear… leaving us with no alternative other than gas and oil!

The common denominators are “idiots” and oil.

Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.

Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.

That doom take has a few roots in truth, but it is mostly false. Our grid for the most part is very good and improving. A lot of the gloom is it is good for today, but here is why we are trying to expand it anyway - that is the gloom itself is helpful to get the needed changes made.

There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.

If you're worried abour grid health, how is adding distributed generation colocated with new loads dystopian?

Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.

Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.

With unlimited money, you'd be able to do unlimited over-build. At least that's what we thought until recently...

Presumably chasing states and localities with generous tax breaks as well. That is no doubt what is really driving the choice of location.

I assume, for ideological consistency, that you don't have kids.

You should always assume these that benefit most from the technological forefront think they can outrun the output of climate change or any of the outputs.

It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.

Yeah, this seems like a textbook case where one could apply Jevons Paradox.

"with increases in productivity, we'll all work 2-4 hours a week and maintain the same output!"

No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.

>More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work..

But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

But it’s hardly industrialized right?

So is that a fair comparison?

That's not to mention talking people to suicide, which by the way is the far more likely way that it would kill your son or daughter, should you have or ever have one.

And for all that cost, are they bringing us real hope? The most ambitious people talking about this technology basically say that when it takes over all thought, there won't be much point in humans anymore.

We went from being evangelists of a message of hope to evangelists of a message of doom.

I'm not going to be one of those people. Fuck those people. I believe in the future. I will stand up and tell the next generation there is still hope, still compassion, still community and humanity and love out there. I fight for the users!!!

Emitting as much greenhouse gas as a country?

That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, hot, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.

Heavy fossil fuel use leads to health problems and given a large enough population deaths. Lung cancer, Asthma, heart issues etc

Guessing that is what GP means by body count

Have you ever been in India while they have those incredibly hot heatwaves in the summer? That kills thousands of people every year. This will only get worse the more greenhouse gasses we emit so slop machines can generate funny videos of the pope breakdancing.