Yes, obviously AI is emitting way too much. It shouldn’t even be producing 0.2% of global emissions, let alone 2%. My main grievance is that no one ever talks about improving industrial and agricultural processes even though they produce around 29% of emissions and 20% of emissions respectively.
Why do I get a feeling that OP doesn’t talk much to farmers?
All are horrible and a problem but what do we get out of these three? Doesn’t take a genius to see something of value in two of them.
Emissions from AI datacenters offend because of just how unnecessary they are.
Unnecessary power use, unnecessary water.
A lot of it comes down to how much people want the product, combined with how easy it is to get rid of carbon emissions in the process. If people are against AI in the first place, it’s easy to get rid of the carbon emissions. Getting rid of the emissions from concrete production is a much more difficult proposition.
The kicker is we need agriculture and industry, like it or not. Whereas no one apart from some billionaires and tech bros want or even need AI.
Well in the agricultural sense the only thing we can do is to make more people vegetarian (not really happening)/and make more affordable plant based milk. The latter one is actually in here already! I’ve seen plant based milks not that much more expensive than a cow’s milk in Hungary.
to make more people vegetarian
You don’t necessarily need people to go full vegetarian. Just eating less meat is a much easier sell. If 2 people eat 1/2 as much meat as they otherwise would, that’s just as good as 1 person going full vegetarian.
The type of meat also matters. Beef is much higher in greenhouse gas emissions than any other type of meat. So if you just switch beef for, say, chicken or pork, you’re already doing a lot better.
While switching to plant based food is an obvious course of action which would have drastic benefits, several other methods exist by which agricultural emissions. These include:
- Livestock diet changes to reduce methane production
- More accurate fertilizer application to reduce nitrous oxide production
- Draining rice paddies to reduce production of methane by anaerobic microbes
- No till farming to allow more carbon to be stored in the soil
- Farm equipment electrification
- Crops bred for higher yield or lower resource usage
well established industry itself seeks efficiency. The emissions are generally from energy use, Energy costs money, they try to find more efficient ways. Stable industries will have already done a lot of innovation to improve efficiency and may even have hit diminishing returns to research once their processes are well understood. Pick any industrial process and you’ll find loads of papers on efficiency at all steps. But at the end of the day if you need to smelt iron ore into high quality pig iron, you’re going to need a lot of heat for a period of time. Best way to reduce industrial GHG emissions is probably to buy less stuff or maybe buy better quality stuff that lasts longer. Not many consumers wan’t to do that though.
Agriculture is weird because we’ve pushed yields up very high with all the fertilizers and monocultures and so on, but i’d think its similar, diminishing returns - and maybe yields have actually been pushed higher than they should for long run soil health, so you might have a viscious cycle of fertilizer development. You could maybe try to shift people to have less meat and more crops, or maybe stuff like seaweed or algae based food, or try to stop them overeating. I feel like the food industry does get a bit of stick for obesity - not that that seems to do much.
Problem with AI is the bubble that means the focus of effort is unlikely to be efficiency; so long as investors are dumb, don’t know what they’re buying and/or speculation oriented then the bang for buck investment (in the short term) is to generate hype. They’d gladly burn energy, to generate more hype to, borrow more, to buy more energy , to generate more hype, to borrow more . . . all the while they’re ‘crowding out’ boring established investments in well understood processes.
I wouldn’t say that the emissions are all from energy use. Cement and steel making both directly emit CO2 (From coke or calcium carbonate), which makes up a significant portion of global emissions.
