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Google’s carbon emissions soar by 48% due to AI

The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.

Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.

SirEDCaLot ,

50% more energy so it can tell me to superglue my pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? Not seeing the value.
There should be an AI-free ‘eco’ option… I can live without the AI.

pyre ,

BUT YOU PLEBS BETTER NOT TURN ON THE AC

naught101 ,

Anti correlated with search quality

HotsauceHurricane ,

Surprising nobody.

TheReturnOfPEB ,

No wonder AMZN/MSFT/GOOG have been paying people to fluff nuclear power here and on reddit.

ToucheGoodSir ,

Classic corporate behavior. Get market share, enshittify (Enshittification) for quarterly profits. At the expense of their users. What a waste.

_sideffect ,

But by all means, everyone don’t use plastic straws! You’re killing the environment!

androogee ,

Yeah dawg we can’t possibly do two things that are good for the environment, we have to pick one. Everyone knows that.

Holzkohlen ,

I pick guillotining the rich as my one thing

naught101 ,

What about choking them with plastic straws?

evolvor ,

Plastic straws are harmful to sea turtles. That is why their use has been reduced.

Do you like turtles?

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

I know this is true, but I find it bizarre that there’s this fixation on straws and not the hundred other things we are likely doing that also kills turtles.

It’s like someone saw that viral video of the turtle with a straw up it’s nose and decided that’s the only thing to focus on.

JasonDJ ,

I bought this like, prepared meal thing. It was like curry or something. Packaged, shelf stable. It harked on eco-friendly packaging. I figured, I’ve gotten curry before that was in a foil bag which I assume is easily recyclable. Probably something like that, right?

Every component was individually plastic wrapped. Even the bowl. Except for the bamboo “spoon”. That was wrapped in paper. I put “spoon” in quotes because it was vaguely spoon shaped and functioned more like an oat from a rowboat.

Like, was this just a piss poor attempt at green washing?

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

No straw though, right? You’re in the clear.

barsoap ,

Detractors have that fixation on straws, for the EU legislature it was just another regulation among many.

Also the plastic straw fixation is now kinda fading in favour of attached bottle caps. People will literally lose 50 IQ points and stub their nose to spite Berlaymont instead of rotating the bottle 90 degrees.

nivenkos ,

The answer is nuclear power.

JohnDClay ,

Or at least not decommissioning old ones. A dollar invested into new solar or wind goes further than new nuclear right now, but we’ll see if it tips more towards nuclear once the grid is a higher percentage intermittent and needs a lot more energy storage with it.

Modular nuclear reactors seem really cool though for replacing large long term generators like at construction or excavation sites.

KillingTimeItself ,

a lot of older nuclear plants were built in the 70s and 80s and those plants are going to be EOL even with extensions, unless we’re going to extend the lifecycle of those a second time. They should probably be decommissioned, unfortunately.

JohnDClay ,

I obviously don’t know all the cases, but if extending the life a second time is cost comparable to renewables, yes we absolutely should do it.

KillingTimeItself ,

i think comparing nuclear to renewables is irresponsible at face value. Nuclear energy and renewables pair together extremely well, and i feel as if we should be building nuclear to satisfy the hard challenges of renewables, while building renewables to augment nuclear.

Nuclear is a base load power plant, of which nothing but very few hydro plants are capable of accomplishing, most nuclear plants have an extremely high capacity factor, i’ve even seen some operating at 100%+ Solar pairs extremely well with residential cooling throughout the summer, providing cheap power when most needed. While also pairing reasonably well with heating in the winter, since you want it colder at night anyway. Though you would have a relatively low draw in the morning heating up your home throughout the day until the evening when you stop heating it, or possibly even earlier.

The main reason i mentioned a second extension is that im not sure its even possible, legally speaking it would have to be approved, and they’ve already approved one extension, so it might very well be “EOL, legally speaking” by now.

Nuclear plants almost alleviate energy storage problems with renewables, if not alleviate, because most nuclear plants (modern ones) also have some capacity of thermal battery, meaning they can operate some level of peaking. (more than likely just using it for augmenting renewables though)

They are extremely expensive to build, however, that makes them very apt for subsidies and government spending. It’s also relatively insured power production after having been built, considering that you can run them for 30 years, minimum. Maintenance costs are relatively high, but modern plants are a lot simper than they used to be, and i’ve seen pretty reasonable price estimates out of designs like the SSR, though they have the downside of not existing yet.

It seems like the future of nuclear reactors is going to be either, molten salt pool reactors, or molten metal type pool reactors. Either using lead or a eutectic mixture of lead and bismuth. Like russia is currently developing.

Mouselemming ,

Or how about cutting back on the idiotic and venal misuse of poorly-developed AI?

jorp ,

I think it’s unfair to call it poorly-developed, the rush to market it and apply it in every corner is driven entirely by capitalist speculation, the engineers and scientists working on developing these systems are not to blame

Mouselemming ,

Are you happier with “inadequately-developed”?

In both cases I was referring to the fact we’re letting the equivalent of a toddler run amok while being exploited by greedy capitalists and trained by fascists. It’s a very smart toddler but that just makes things worse.

jorp ,

oh yes I’m not excited about humans being replaced by bias amplifying machines with corporate morals

gh0stcassette ,
@gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The technology is promising, it’s just not remotely ready for what they’re trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it’s almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.

The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn’t ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.

Mouselemming ,

Exactly what I meant by poorly-developed.

KillingTimeItself ,

there are still going to be a lot of people who need power though. Cutting the US of AI isn’t going to magically remove coal plants from the grid, it’s going to do nothing actually. We need to be building new plants, period.

mindlesscrollyparrot ,

We need to be transitioning to zero carbon as fast as possible, period, and even that isn’t good enough. Moderating our energy consumption is vital. There is a cliff at the end of the road and business as usual means driving on down the road.

I am not saying that we need to turn off our lights and heating. I am saying that we first-worlders use a lot of power on frivolous things that we absolutely can live without.

KillingTimeItself ,

i don’t fundamentally disagree with you, but you need to recognize this includes a global perspective. You think china is going to 1/10th is electricity consumption in 20 years? Fuck no.

You think russia is going to do this? It probably won’t entirely out of spite for NATO.

we can focus on this in america, locally, but we need to be in a position to be capable of doing it first. Notably, having a green grid would be a good start. Or at least, an increasingly green grid, which we do currently have, though not to a massively significant degree.

Also, i didn’t realize i had such a good oneliner “The US of AI” what a fucking statement lmao. I’m sure i meant this as “removing AI from the US” but it sounds funnier the other way.

bionicjoey ,

Environmentalism aside, I think it’s shitty that a company can waste so much energy on frivolous things anyway. Even if we were using more nuclear I still wouldn’t want it going to generating more porn of three-breasted women

androogee ,

Why did you pick the one positive use of AI?

JohnDClay ,

I wonder if this is taking into account the energy mix of the particular data centers, or just using the average energy mix?

Humanius ,
@Humanius@lemmy.world avatar

Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.

JohnDClay ,

But you can measure how much of the power of a grid is generated with fossil fuels at a particular place and time. For example, if they have more data centers where energy is cheap like from hydro or geothermal, then the carbon footprint will be less than if they were just using average power statistics.

Humanius ,
@Humanius@lemmy.world avatar

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.

KillingTimeItself ,

using surplus power to make steel

isn’t steel still primarily made through the coking process? Or is that transitioning to more efficient means, last i heard the barrier was efficient hydrogen generation.

Humanius , (edited )
@Humanius@lemmy.world avatar

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

ad.nl/…/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-ja…
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

KillingTimeItself ,

oh, you were talking about europe" I was thinking about america. Yeah i imagine it’s going to be a while here.

Steel mills operate in two distinct ways. The traditional production method occurs at large, vertically integrated mills, which use ovens to heat coal into coke;1 combine the coke with iron ore in a blast furnace to produce pig iron; and then melt the pig iron in a basic oxygen furnace to produce liquid steel. This production process is commonly known as the Blast-Furnace/Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) method. The alternate method occurs through “mini-mills,” which use electric arc furnaces (EAFs) to melt steel scrap and, in some instances, use iron pellets to produce liquid steel. Unlike integrated mills, mini-mills do not require coke ovens or blast furnaces. However, some mini-mills use a process called direct reduction to remove oxygen from iron ore with heat from burning natural gas; the resulting product, direct reduced iron (DRI) or sponge iron, is turned into a lump, pellet, or briquetted form that can be transformed into liquid steel in EAFs.2 Once steel is produced in its liquid state, it is cast into rectangular slabs (long billets a few inches on a side) or other shapes and left to cool. Rolling mills then shape the semifinished steel into a variety of products, generally classified as either “flat” products (plate and coils of steel sheet) or “long” products (bars, rails, wire rods). The rolled steel products often undergo additional finishing operations, such as coating, painting, and galvanizing, to produce finished steel. Figure 1 shows the process for manufacturing iron, steel, and finished steel products.

pulled from a US government thing, seems like most cleaner methods use refined iron. Although from some quick googling, it seems like this is a preparation method for iron ore, so maybe this is just a semantics thing here.

ok, and some statistics, it seem slike 30% of US production is using vertically integrated mills, or coal based production (presumably) Seems like they’re even cheaper, generally. Which is also a benefit.

So i guess overall, the steel industry is better than i expected.

KillingTimeItself ,

there are almost certainly heuristics you can use, but these are going to be heuristics the size of the national US grid, with physics similar to how water flows through pipes. Except these pipes are dynamic and significantly less restrictive.

Plus source generation is very sparse, CCG gas plants for example generally only run when peaking, and solar only works during the day, generally, and nuclear power runs 24/7 around the clock, so it’s not quite trivial to calculate. More than likely what the heuristic they’re using here is that they consume 43% more power as a corpo, and thusly, produce 43% more CO2.

Brickardo ,

Fucking hell

fluxc0 ,

who would have guessed the giant corporation would have lied about something, because we haven’t been lied to before.

TheGrandNagus ,

These companies 100% said they’d be carbon neutral by 2030 in order to take the wind out of the sails of people pushing for carbon taxes, rather than because they actually intended on doing it.

Frozengyro ,

Could be the other way as well. Prepare to become carbon neutral in order to have less tax burden. But once that fell though, they didn’t care again. The only way they will be carbon neutral is if governments make it more expensive for them to not be.

TheGrandNagus ,

Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.

slaacaa ,

Time to use less paper straws, folks 🌎

MeatPilot ,
@MeatPilot@lemmy.world avatar

I turn off my lights when I’m not in a room and don’t own a server farm. 🌳

Imgonnatrythis ,

I realized the reading lights on my private jet were all incandescent. Recently flew it to Italy and had them swapped out there for LED.

morementum ,

Speed running two apocalypse fronts.

kenkenken ,
@kenkenken@sh.itjust.works avatar

Net-zero in 2030 is a lie. Google, Microsoft, whoever, - doesn’t matter. It’s only five years left. I don’t even think that bigcop can go from increasing carbon emissions to decreasing before 2030.

lost_faith ,

Who better than these obnoxious companies to build solar and wind farms to power their own server farms?

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