~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion.
point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating meat, not mining bitcoin, not using chatgpt, not driving cars - are a drop in the bucket compared to standard practice overseas manufacturing.
us privileged folks could "just boycott", "buy renewable", "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue. this is not to say that the environment isn't important - it's critically important. it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way, it's ludicrous to point fingers at each other and worry that what we do day-to-day is destroying the planet.
That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall emissions.
"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.
Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.
Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.
I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those talking points despite them being significantly less true for them; because they see it so much online.
I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight, biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I realized a few things:
- same duration as the train
- it give me the exercise I needed
- it relaxes me
- it is free since I already have a bike
Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It have been 6 months.
My point is: those who complain about biking being terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may fit you.
See, my point is that everyone first goes “it’s not me”, then they understand it is them and go “but it’s not my policies” and then they vote in the policies which are the problem. It’s totally fine to go “we need collective action to fix this”. But you have to actually join the collective action. You think billionaires are getting rich by committing environmental arbitrage? Then don’t oppose attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must now pay your fair share too.
Sure, recognizing that the problem is political is step one. Step two is... political activism, I guess? Lack of local political engagement and organizing is part of what allows problems like these to form.
Not just lack but outright apathy and villainizing of these attempts. If you try to tax gas some oil CEO will run a campaign explaining to the working class that their commute will now cost 10% more, which obviously makes people upset. Part of it is that we, unfortunately, can’t actually subsidize car commuters anymore. But part of it is that CEO is going to incur a cost of 50%, as he should, which is why he’s bothering to spend money riling people up.
Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.
Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon).
But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.
- Efficient Lighting (LEDs now, but others before)
- Santa Claus
There are certainly examples of a large portion of the population of the planet working together towards common goals. A lot of people putting in a little bit of effort _does_ happen, and it _does_ produce results.
There was a profit motive in all of those except Santa. For instance until the main players in CFCs (which were the main cause of ozone depletion) were able to invent, patent, and market an alternative to CFCs they successfully lobbied against any change. Then they got a new patent, turned 180 degrees, claiming CFCs were the worst thing to ever exist - and made a ton of money after they were banned. Same thing with stuff like asthma inhalers.
When people want to do something, we're unstoppable. But unfortunately that means the good and the bad, and right now polluting actions are incredibly beneficial, and the alternatives are mediocre and not only unprofitable, but generally incur a substantial cost. There's a reason places like the US/Canada/Australia talk a mean game about climate change, yet remain some of the biggest polluters per capita, by far.
Yes, a big multi government marketing campaign "Just don't eat meat 1 or 2 days a week" can definitely work. E.g. friday is "Fish day" in a lot of places (education/public) due to Catholic church influences.
There are mechanisms for such coordination. Diets have shifted around the world to more McD's, more western cuisine. Wild catch changes all the time as we overfish stocks to endangerment.
Always driven by money. McD's is cheaper and easier to mass produce. Wild catch changes when it is no longer economical to fish one kind of fish. There's never an "enlightenment" of people.
The “just a little” argument will immediately be offset by new inhabitants (whether babies or immigration).
In fact, behaviors have convinced me that the goal of ecologists is not a greener Earth, but an Earth with fewer resources used by whites and more resources for the already-90% population that isn’t white. Green is just a racist ideology.
Most of the world isn’t white so even if you’re not being upset about white people being oppressed or whatever this just makes sense from an equity perspective.
I think this might be the first idea I've ever heard that I truly feel will backfire far worse than alcohol prohibition. I almost want to see it happen.
All families can't afford meat daily, let alone any type of meat they want. So, some families might favor chicken and certain processed meats here and there, but most cuts of beef and lamb for example might be out of the question, and so will daily meat consumption. The same applies for dairy, they might afford big blocks of tasteless cheese, but won't touch often cheese with taste, French or otherwise. There is no enforced rationing, but choice is reduced if not removed for a good fraction of the population, purely for economic reasons.
What's missing from this type of discussions is performance quantification and scientific attitude. It assumes solid food is indulgence and ultraprocessed vegan shakes paired with appropriate willpower is all it takes to do anything.
Things just don't work that way. Been there, done that. Willpower does nothing. Extra calories around your berry is extra calories around your berry. It's much more worthwhile to think about reducing GHG emission from farming than deceiving yourself into self-harming and projecting your own doing onto greater society.
Vegetarian here. People who eat meat tend to reduce their consumption if you 1. charge them appropriately for it and 2. give them good alternatives. Telling them to not do something usually makes them angry unfortunately.
How effective IYO was Morgan Spurlock (RIP) the activist filmmaker ("Supersize Me", [0]) at trying to educate the general (meat-eating) US public on US meat production, the restaurant industry, nutrition, marketing?
(PS:it's not a dichotomy between strict vegetarianism vs meat 4+ days/wk. Can encourage people to eat healthier and more sustainable.)
I mean I’m not an expert but I think the general sentiment among Americans about meat is “yeah I hear meat production is gross/polluting/inhumane but I like meat and don’t want to think about that”. Charitably I think we have a lot of things we can care about and most people want to ignore this, plus there’s a lot of cultural baggage tied to diet people don’t want to leave. I think actual solutions will mostly involve the idea that reduction is good instead of throwing up your hands because you’re unable to commit to being vegan, and adding options to people’s diet that they actually enjoy. I think we have a very hard time solving “I can’t completely solve this and also it requires changes I don’t like so doing nothing at all is fine”.
Angry people are spiteful. I generally find it a lot more productive to get them to understand why their choices have consequences, how the can (progressively!) fix the problems, and watch things improve from there.
Environmentalists and those championing similar causes politically have taken this approach for decades. The result has been a perpetual shift to the right-wing who has no qualms about playing dirty, using fear, anger and other tribal emotions to gain support. Everywhere in the West, authoritarians are seizing power.
Good luck with continuing the virtuous approach while the world goes up in flames. It hasn't worked and has gotten us to where we are right now.
I think people should be angry about that, yes. I’m not particularly interested in tying eating meat to racism or whatever it takes to make people fearful enough to support you.
And this is why everything will keep going up in flames - you're not interested in doing what it has been shown to take to get people to support your cause.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter what we think people should be angry about. FWIW I obviously completely agree with you! People should be angry about those things! Turns out they aren't. What matters is the reality we live in.
There's less extreme government action possible: tax meat & dairy higher.
There are already precedents for that, for example here in Germany cigarettes are taxed to about 70% and hard-liquor (altho it's more complicated to calculate as it depends on exact alcohol content) to about 40%.
Meat is only taxed at 7% via VAT (similar to sales tax in the US).
People, especially men, get irrationally angry by even the slightest thought of their precious meat being touched (including here on HN; there are more than a few crackpots over here who promote a meat only or even red meat only diet). If there would be a reason to violently overthrow the gov, this would probably be it; not for the things that actually matter to better or save humanity, but to save their daily meat platter.
Not by rationing, if you meant the US government: US per-capita consumption of meat is 328 lbs/year [UN FAO]. You'd try to reduce the subsidies and incentives for meat/ corn/ soybean production which are baked into the USDA budget ($200bn in 2024), since the 1930s (Great Depression), and more since the 1950s (and related stuff like the marketing tool of the "Food Pyramid"). These will be as politically hard to cancel as defense production or military bases or prisons.
Here's even a 2023 editorial from the Kansas City Star pointing the blame at Big Ag "Corn drives US food policy. But big business, not Midwestern farmers, reaps the reward" [0]:
> No, corn is not an evil crop, nor are farmers in the Corn Belt shady criminals. However, the devastating effect of corn owes to the industrialization of the plant by a small group of global agribusiness and food conglomerates, which acts as a kind of de facto corn cabal. These massive corporations — seed companies, crop and meat processors, commodity traders and household food and beverage brands — all survive on cheap commodity corn, which currently costs about 10 cents a pound. Corn’s versatility makes it the perfect crop to “scale” (commoditize, industrialize and financialize).
A libertarian take is the Cato Institute "Farm Bill Sows Dysfunction for American Agriculture" [1]:
> The Sprawling Farm Bill:... has its roots in the century-old New Deal and is revised by Congress every five years... "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), was added to the Farm Bill in 1973 to ensure support from rural and urban lawmakers, accounts for about three-quarters of the omnibus package. Some lawmakers and pundits have proposed splitting SNAP from the Farm Bill to stop the logrolling and facilitate a clearer debate on farm subsidy programs, which make up the rest of the bill." ...aslo criticizes crop insurance subsidies (which mainly go on the four big crops),
Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) ("Welfare for Wealthier Farmers"), Crop insurance subsidies (" originally envisioned as a more stable and cost-efficient alternative to ad hoc disaster payments, but they have acted more as a supplement than a replacement—and may have actually increased risks along the way.")
The US government could help by ending subsidies towards meat and dairy production, which will prevent those products from being artificially underpriced.
Not encouraging population growth everywhere but particularly in the highest per-capita consuming and polluting countries, but rather allow them to naturally level off and even gradually decline would go a much longer way. It would enable significant emissions reductions and reduction in all other environmental impacts of consumption without impacting quality of life.
Eating bugs and living in pods sounds great and all, but if the end result is just allowing the ruling class to pack more drones and consumers in like sardines then it's not really solving anything.
Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions)
I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of environmental destruction on individual buying habits, rather than the people in power who actually have the ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move the needle.
Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing the mass production and importation of plastic garbage waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas emissions but pollute the environment in other, irreversible ways.
And if your government and leaders don't make this a priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a new government.
Meat and dairy are bad for GHG, but they are also terrible for most of the other bad things we do to the planet. Eutrophication, species extinction, habitat loss, water use.
And the people in power do what the people want, that's why they are in power. Imagine telling people they couldn't eat as much meat. Would be political suicide.
That's why individual buying habits are important. If many individuals change, we might change as a society. And at some point there might be a tipping point where the people in charge can make a change.
Also, blaming other people for all the problems is not a great way to solve a problem. Take some responsibility.
How much of Americans driving to work is because they choose too though? Amazon's 5 day RTO policy is a good example. How many of the people now going to an office 5 days a week would've done so without the mandate? I see the traffic every day, and saw the same area before the mandate, so I can tell you with confidence that there's many more cars on the road as a result of this commute. this all funnels back to the corporate decision to mandate 5 days in office.
Exactly. IMO, any politician who's serious about saving the environment or reducing the number of cars should be proposing bills to heavily tax employers for every unnecessary commute they require of their employees (maybe $100-$500 per employee per unnecessary day required in the office).
if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact
This is a good sentiment. But, in context, it is a fallacy. A harmful one.
Consumer action on transport and whatnot, assuming a massive and persistent global awareness effort... has the potential of adding up to a rounding error.
Housing policy, transport policy, urban planning... these are what affects transport emissions. Not individual choices.
Look at our environmental history. Consumer choice has no wins.
It's propaganda. Role reversal. Something for certain organizations to do. It is not an actual effort to achieve environmental benefit.
We should be demanding governments clean up. Governments and NGOs should not be demanding that we clean up.
The emissions from vehicles are different from plastics produced by factories.
Also, while important, 2-3% of world emissions is a drop in the bucket compared to the other 97%. Let's consider the other causes and how we can fix them.
Think about this: for many people, not driving to work is a big deal. If people collectively decide to do that, that's a lot of effort and inconvenience just for 2-3%.
There isn’t really a magic wand we can wave and get 50% back for free and without inconvenience. The other 97% involves things like individually figuring out where our electricity generation goes. Or figuring out which farms to shut down, or what manufacturing we don’t like anymore. All of this must happen. It will be inconvenient. I picked a slice that is immediately relevant to a lot of people here. But there are a lot of axes to look at this.
while 3% might sound like a drop in the bucket, there isn't any single specific chunk of the rest of the 97% that will immediately cut, say, 30-40% of emissions (also remember that 2-3% is the super specific "Americans not driving cars", not "everyone in the world not driving cars").
> That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.
Even an example like this that is carefully chosen to make consumers feel/act more responsible falls short. You want people to change their lives/careers to not drive? Ok, but most people already want to work from home, so even the personal “choice” about whether to drive a car is basically stuck like other issues pending government / corporate action, in this case to either improve transit or to divest from expensive commercial real estate. This is really obvious isn’t it?
Grabbing back our feeling of agency should not come at the expense of blaming the public under the ridiculous pretense of “educating” them, because after years of that it just obscures the issues and amounts to misinformation. Fwiw I’m more inclined to agree with admonishing consumers to “use gasoline responsibly!” than say, water usage arguments where cutting my shower in half is supposed to somehow fix decades of irresponsible farming, etc. But after a while, people mistrust the frame itself where consumers are blamed, and so we also need to think carefully about the way we conduct these arguments.
I wish the world would ditch public transit entirely. It's nothing but a misery generator. It's far better to switch to remote work and distributed cities.
I unironically like public transport because someone else does the “driving” for me. I’m sure someone is going to explain how Waymo solves this but sitting on a train with my laptop and breakfast while I magically get teleported to my office is much nicer than even being in the back seat of a car.
This reads like an attempt to pass the blame to others. Per capita CO₂ emissions in the US are one of the highest in the world, and significantly higher than those in China or SEA. This is despite the US/Europe moving some of our dirtiest/cheapest manufacturing to that region.
Personal choices matter. See the amount of energy used on air conditioning in the US compared to areas of Europe with comparable weather for a banal example. If we want to significantly reduce emissions it will happen through a combination of personal choices, corporate action and government policy.
I have always felt this way too. Our personal choices do not move the needle on fossil fuel and plastics. One could embrace aversion to these out of a sense of sustainability to signal virtue, but lets not pretend it will save the planet. It won't. Restricting aviation flights, stopping wars and minimizing the dirty fuel used in maritime freight does much more. But the world will not do it.
One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases impacting climate.
While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too late.
This line of thinking is what undermines democracies and ruins the environment. Your choice might just be a drop in the ocean, but guess what the ocean is made out of.
This is nothing but head-in-the-sand, arms-in-the-air, feel-good baloney to convince oneself to sleep well at night.
Guess what happens when you buy a used laptop instead of a new one?
That's right: less "standard practice overseas manufacturing".
Lifestyle change right there.
Buying less, using the same for longer, buying used goods instead of new are lifestyle changes that anyone can make and have an undeniable very clear impact by reducing the amount of stuff that needs to get made. Using my smartphone for 6 years instead of changing every 3 years doesn't mean the one I didn't buy gets sold elsewhere. It means one less sale.
This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution.
Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.
Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing there.
It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.
“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”
“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“
“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”
Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.
Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.
That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1 kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd knock out 15 million tons of CO2.
Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else this time".
Finally someone who speaks this out. What we do is more or less fly poop ... good four own well being but with almost zero impact.
I'll go on doing some things because I think that some of that are the better ways to handle this or that or it's better for my health but with no expectation that I'll change anything.
Yet we also see that hyperscale cloud emissions targets have been reversed due to AI investment, Datacenter growth is hitting grid capacity limits in many regions, and peaker plant and other non-renewable resources on the grid are being deployed more to handle this specific growth from AI. I think the author, by qualifying on "chatgpt" maybe can make the claims they are making but I don't believe the larger argument would hold for AI as a whole or when you convert the electricity use to emissions.
I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently in its infancy) more efficient.
[edit wording]
Yep, this is the real answer. It's also the only answer. The big fiction was everyone getting hopped on the idea that "karma" was going to be real, and people's virtue would be correctly identified by overt environmentalism rather then action.
Fossil fuel companies won, and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed environmentalism since...well I'll let you know when it stops.
Why do you belive this? Datacenter uses just a 1-1.3 percent of electricity from grid and even if you suppose AI increased the usage by 2x(which I really doubt), the number would still be tiny.
Also AI training is easiest workload to regulate, as you can only train when you have cheaper green energy.
Is that true though? Data centers can be placed anywhere in the USA, they could be placed near a bunch of hydro or wind farm resources in the western grid which has little coal anyways outside of one line from Utah to socal. The AI doesn’t have to be located anywhere near to where it is used since fiber is probably easier to run than a high voltage power line.
Build new data centers near sources of power, and grid capacity isn’t going to be a problem. Heck, American industry used to follow that (building garment factories on fast moving rivers before electricity was much of a thing, Boeing grew up in the northwest due to cheap aluminum helped out by hydro). Why is AI somehow different from an airplane?
There are a large number of reasons the AI datacenters are geographically distributed--just to list a few off the top of my head which come up as top drivers: latency, data sovereignty, resilience, grid capacity, renewable energy availability.
Why does latency matter for a model that responds in 10s of seconds? Latency to a datacenter is measured in 10s or 100s of milliseconds, which is 3-4 orders of magnitude less.
If you look at a model with a diverse competitive provider set like llama 3 the latency is 1/4 second, and it will definitely improve at a minimum incrementally if quality is held constant: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... Remember that as long as you experience the response linearly (very much the case for audio output for eg) then the first-chunk latency is your actual latency, not to stream the entire response.
Two reasons that I understand 1. not all these AIs are LLMs and many have much lower latency SLAs than chat and 2. These are just one part of a service architecture and when you have multiple latencies across the stack they tend to have multiplicative effects.
This is a great article for discussion. However articles like this must link to references. It is one thing to assert, another to prove. I do agree that heating/cooling, car and transport use, and diet play massive roles in climate change that should not be subsumed by other debates.
The flip side to the authors argument is that LLMs are not only used by home users doing 20 searches a day. Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what. New nuclear and other power facilities are being proposed to power their use, this is not insignificant. Schneider Electric predicts 93 GW of energy spent on AI by 2028. https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/schneider-electric-pred...
The question this is addressing concerns personal use. Is it ethical to use ChatGPT on a personal basis? A surprising number of people will say that it isn't because of the energy and water usage of those prompts.
I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation.
Still, LLM queries are not made equal. The environmental justification does not take into account for models querying other services, like the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests.
I see people complaining that ChatGPT usage is unethical for environmental reasons all the time. Here's just the first example I found from a Bluesky search (this one focuses on water usage): https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq...
"the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests"
Can you provide more information about that? I don't remember gearing about that one - was it a case of someone using ChatGPT to write code and not reviewing the result?
Bluesky is a special place, I am not surprised you will bump into the sort of activists who will critique every bucket of water that go into making a hamburger there. For those of us who avoid contact with the axe grinding hoards of short form media, meeting somebody who spends any portion of their day fretting about the water usage of language models is indeed a rarity.
It’s not specific to Bluesky. I’ve seen it on Threads, X, Facebook, and Reddit. It’s a talking point for people who hate AI and they tell anybody who will listen.
I don’t have the time to re-read it now so if I am misremembering and it is a training-time effect rather than query-time effect then my bad, though the point largely stands.
> I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation.
I assume this comes from the 60GWh figure, which does translate to about 200 flights (assuming energy density of gasoline; in actual CO2 emissions it was probably less since likely cleaner energy was used than for running planes).
By TFA do you mean the author of the article? It seems to be using an outdated [and incorrect] claim (as far as I know, GPT-4 has no note of taking 200 flights of energy to train), arguing against it saying that those numbers are especially small, when they are potentially significantly larger.
The section on training feels weak, and that's what the discussion is mainly about.
Many companies are now trying to train models as big as GPT-4. OpenAI is training models that may well be even much larger than GPT-4 (o1 and o3). Framing it as a one-time cost doesn't seem accurate - it doesn't look like the big companies will stop training new ones any time soon, they'll keep doing it. So one model might only be used half a year. And many models may not end up used at all. This might stop at some point, but that's hypothetical.
It briefly touches on training, but uses a seemingly misleading statistic that comes from (in reference to GPT-4) extremely smaller models.
This article [1] says that 300 [round-trip] flights are similar to training one AI model. Its reference of an AI model is a study done on 5-year-old models like BERT (110M parameters), Transformer (213M parameters), and GPT-2. Considering that models today may be more than a thousand times larger, this is an incredulous comparison.
Similar to the logic of "1 mile versus 60 miles in a massive cruise ship"... the article seems to be ironically making a very similar mistake.
737-800 burns about 3t of fuel per hour. NYC-SFO is about 6h, so 18t of fuel. Jet fuel energy density is 43MJ/kg, so 774000 MJ per flight, which is 215 MWh. Assuming the 60 GWh figure is true (seems widely cited on the internets), it comes down to 279 one-way flights.
Thanks, I missed that 60 GWh figure. I got confused because the quotes around the statement, so I looked it up and couldn't find a quote. I realize now that he's quoting himself making that statement (and it's quite accurate)
I am surprised that, somehow, the statistic didn't change from GPT-2-era to GPT-4. Did GPUs really get that much more efficient? Or that study must have some problems
It talks at great length about data center trends relating to generative AI, from the perspective of someone who has been deeply involved in researching power usage and sustainability for two decades.
I find the following to be a great point regarding what we ought to consider when adapting our lifestyle to reduce negative environmental impact:
> In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the activity is to our lives.
The further example with a hospital emitting more than a cruise ship is a good illustration of the issue.
Continuing this line of thought, when thinking about your use of an LLM like ChatGPT, you ought to weigh not merely its emissions and water usage, but also the larger picture as to how it benefits the human society.
For example: Was this tech built with ethically sound methods[0]? What are its the foreseeable long-term effects on human flourishing? Does it cause a detriment to livelihoods of the many people while increasing the wealth gap with the tech elites? Does it negatively impact open information sharing (willingness to run self-hosted original content websites or communities open to public, or even the feasibility of doing so[1][2]), motivation and capability to learn, creativity? And so forth.
[0] I’m not going to debate utilitarianism vs. deontology here, will just say that “the ends justify the means” does not strike me as a great principle to live by.
Sort of off-topic, but it does make one think about usage of compute (and the backing energy / resources required for that)...
i.e. it doesn't seem too much of an exaggeration to say that we might be getting closer and closer to a situation where LLMs (or any other ML inference) is being run so much for so many different reasons / requests, that the usage does become significant in the future.
Similarly, going into detail on what the compute is being used for: i.e. no doubt there are situations currently going on where Person A uses a LLM to expand something like "make a long detailed report about our sales figures", which produces a 20 page report and delivers it to Person B. Person B then says "I haven't time to read all this, LLM please summarise it for me".
So you'd basically have LLM inference compute being used as a very inefficient method of data/request transfer, with the sender expanding a short amount of information to deliver to the recipient, and then the said recipient using an LLM on the other side to reduce it back again to something more manage-able.
That sounds like the opposite of data compression (inflation?) where the data size is increased before sending, then on receiving it is compressed back to a smaller form.
> "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
Emissions directly caused by Average Joe using ChatGPT is not significant compared to everything else. 50,000 questions is a lot for an individual using ChatGPT casually, but nothing for the businesses using ChatGPT to crunch data. 50,000 "questions" will be lucky to get you through the hour.
Those businesses aren't crunching data just for the sake of it. They are doing so ultimately because that very same aforementioned Average Joe is going to buy something that was produced out of that data crunching. It is the indirect use that raises the "ChatGPT is bad for the environment" alarm. At very least, we at least don't have a good handle on what the actual scale is. How many indirect "questions" am I asking ChatGPT daily?
The article needs to exist because the idea that ChatGPT usage is environmentally disastrous really has started to make its way into the human hive mind.
I'm glad someone is trying to push back against that - I see it every day.
Such a stupid post, I know people on HN don’t like absolute descriptors like that and sorry for that.
Obviously the LLMs and ChatGPT don’t use the most energy when answering your question, they churn through insane amounts of water and energy when training them, so much so that big tech companies do not disclose and try to obscure those amounts as much as possible.
You aren’t destroying the environment by using it RIGHT NOW, but you are telling the corresponding company that owns the LLM you use “there is interest in this product”, en masse. With these interest indicators they will plan for the future and plan for even more environmental destruction.
It's not like they are mixing that water with oil and pumping into the aquifer. Water evaporate, turn into clouds, that precipitate into rain that fall on the ground and water bodies, where it can be used again. So what's the problem, with datacenter water usage? Has the water cycle has stopped and I was not informed?
Fresh water is finite. Infinite in reuse, but we can only take so much from a river before that river ceases to be. If you have a megabit connection, it doesn't matter that your cloud backups have infinite storage, you are limited by bandwidth.
Water vapor stays aloft for wild, so there's no guarantee it enters the same watershed it was drawn from.
It's also a powerful greenhouse gas, so even though it's removed quickly, raising the rate we produce it results in more insulation.
It's not a finite resource, we need to be judicious and wise in how we allocate it.
Plenty of companies have revealed exactly how much energy and CO2 they have used training a model. Just off the top of my head, I've seen those numbers are available for Meta's Llama models, Microsoft's Phi series and DeepSeek's models - including their impressive DeepSeek v3 which trained for less than $6m in cost - a huge reduction compared to other similar models, and a useful illustration of how much more effect this stuff can get on the training side of things.
Similar feelings about the repeated references to the apparently agreed consensus that individual action is pointless vs systematic change like switching to a renewable energy system. Jevons Paradox would like a word.
I don’t care about energy usage. How exhausting it must be to be a climate hysterical person and try to factor the climate cost of every single action you take in life.
Charge the consumer of energy the requisite price. If you want to make them pay for some externality, great. But I refuse to worry and be burdened by anxiety over every single unit of electricity consumed. Such a tiring, bullshit part of life the progressives have foisted on elites. And it is elites only as poors don’t give a shit
A lot of conversations regarding the environment feel so frustrating because they are either qualitative or use aggregate high level data or are like we'll be dead in 50 years (lol my personal favorite)
Why not start capturing waste/energy data for all human made items like nutritional data on food? It won't add much overhead or stifle economies as people fear
That way when I log in to use any online service or when I buy/drive a car or when I buy an item I can see how much energy was consumed and how much waste I produced exactly
"personal carbon footprint" is a term invented by BP and is the single hack that derailed the environment discussion by making people personally responsible and removing the actual polluters from the discussion.
If you use chatgpt somehow saves you from making one trip to the doctor in your car it can offset the entire year worth of chatgpt usage in terms of co2 impact.
ChatGPT is probably adequate to provide a slightly more user-friendly but also slight-less-reliable replacement for a reliable consumer-oriented medical reference book or website for the task of determining whether self-care without seeing a doctor or seeing a doctor is appropriate for symptoms not obviously posing an immediate emergency.
My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use of resources.
More constructively, the middle ground of asking a doctor about some minor symptoms over async messaging or tele-appointments (whatever the term for those is), is probably always something to consider for the trivial stuff.
There is no need to nitpick obvious comments. If you have a running nose and fever in winter, it's 99.99% a cold and a doctor visit will do nothing to help you, yet millions of people waste doctors time for that
what does "water used by data center" even mean? Does it consume the water somehow? What does it turn into? Steam? So uploading a 1GB file boils away nearly 1 liter of water? Or is it turned into bits somehow in some kind of mass to energy conversion? I sorta doubt that. Also this means data centers would have cooling towers like some power stations. Are we talking about the cooling towers of power stations?
I think at least that graph is complete non-sense. I will try and have chatGPT explain it to me.
Yes, datacenters have cooling towers. There are lots of good articles about this topic. A good starting point is "water usage effectiveness" (WUE) which is one way this is tracked.
The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed - its just temporarily unavailable.
Also why doesn't uploading a 1GB file to my NAS boil a liter of water? are maybe all the switches and routers used between me and the datacenter water-cooled? I mean I can see such switches existing but I don't see them be the norm. Why doesn't the DSLAM on the Street outside emit steam. Is there maybe one bad switch somewhere that just spews steam?
What I am saying is that at least that graph is without further explanation... bad.
> The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed
Water consumption in all contexts is mostly fresh water returned from immediately usable form to either evaporation or the ocean. It is not "extremely misleading", because when it returns to immediately usable form by, e.g., precipitation, that's when new water is considered to be made available. The normal definitions are internally consistent and useful.
I did a bit of research and even water just "involved" in the process is counted as used in this context. For instance river water that is used for cooling and returned is counted.
I think these sort of graphs are simply misleading and should not be used.
To me the "ChatGPT is destroying the environment "card always felt somewhat like bad faith arguing from the anti-AI crowd trying to find any excuse for being against AI. Like, the same people who complained about "using AI is destroying environment" seemed to have no issue with boarding a plane which would emit a bunch of CO2 so that they can have a vacation in Europe or the like. Selective environmentalism.
Who is this person you’re constructing? Being concerned about plane emissions and travel is an incredibly common thing and people are adjusting their lifestyles accordingly - lots of overnight sleeper train lines are reopening due to demand.
I mean, it's a literal net new expenditure of power and water. I also deeply doubt they have "no issue" with plane travel. You're just assuming the worst and most hypocritical position to someone, which seems deeply bad faith as well.
It's literally true that most of the AI vendors and their data center partners are writing off energy and water conservation targets they'd had for the near future because of LLM money. That is actually bad in the short and likely long term, especially as people use LLMs for increasingly frivolous things. Is it really necessary to have an LLM essentially do a "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google Search for you at some multiple of that environmental cost? Because that's what most of my friends and coworkers use ChatGPT for. Very rarely are they using it to get anything more complex than just searching wikipedia or documentation you could have had bookmarked.
A person has a choice of if they take a flight and if it's worth it for them. They have no power except for raising a complaint in public on if OpenAI or Google or whoever spends vast amounts of money and power to train some new model. If your bar is that no one is allowed to complain about a company burning energy unless they live a totally blameless life farming their own food without electricity then random companies will get to do any destructive act they want.
It's less bad faith, more a meme that has become so prevalent that it's impossible to dispell as it's something too nuanced for social media. I've seen more than a few social media posts asking "do they really cut down a rainforest every time someone generates an AI image?"
What about the people who take the protection of the environment seriously?
They got now a setback because not only didn’t we reach our previous goals on lowering energy consumption but know we put new consumption on top of that. Just because the existing one ate worse doesn’t make it good.
There is a reason why MS missed its CO2 targets and why everyone is kn search for more energy sources.
It's discomforting to me when people compare resource usage of ChatGPT, a computer, to the resource usage of a human being.
I've seen charts like this before that compare resource usage of people to corporations, implying corporations are the bigger problem. The implication here seems to be the opposite, and that tone feels just a little eugenicist.
In my country there's a lot of institutional hype about green algorithms. I find the whole idea quite irrelevant (for the reasons explained in this post) but of course, it's a way to get funding for those of us who work in AI/NLP (we don't have much money for GPUs and can't do things like training big LLMs, so it's easy to pitch everything we do as "green", and then get funding because that's considered strategic and yadda yadda).
It's funny, but sad, how no one calls the billshit because we would be sabotaging ourselves.
I published this as a comment as well, but it's probably worth nothing that the ChatGPT water/power numbers cited (the one that is most widely cited in these discussions) comes from an April 2023 paper (Li et al, arXiv:2304.03271) that estimates water/power usage based off of GPT-3 (175B dense model) numbers published from OpenAI's original GPT-3 2021 paper. From Section 3.3.2 Inference:
> As a representative usage scenario for an LLM, we consider a conversation task, which typically includes a CPU-intensive prompt phase that processes the user’s input (a.k.a., prompt) and a memory-intensive token phase that produces outputs [37]. More specifically, we consider a medium-sized request, each with approximately ≤800 words of input and 150 – 300 words of output [37]. The official estimate shows that GPT-3 consumes an order of 0.4 kWh electricity to generate 100 pages of content (e.g., roughly 0.004 kWh per page) [18]. Thus, we consider 0.004 kWh as the per-request server energy consumption for our conversation task. The PUE, WUE, and EWIF are the same as those used for estimating the training water consumption.
There is a slightly newer paper (Oct 2023) that directly measured power usage on a Llama 65B (on V100/A100 hardware) that showed a 14X better efficiency. [2] Ethan Mollick linked to it recently and got me curious since I've recently been running my own inference (performance) testing and it'd be easy enough to just calculate power usage. My results [3] on the latest stable vLLM from last week on a standard H100 node w/ Llama 3.3 70B FP8 was almost a 10X better token/joule than the 2023 V100/A100 testing, which seems about right to me. This is without fancy look-ahead, speculative decode, prefix caching taken into account, just raw token generation. This is 120X more efficient than the commonly cited "ChatGPT" numbers and 250X more efficient than the Llama-3-70B numbers cited in the latest version (v4, 2025-01-15) of that same paper.
For those interested in a full analysis/table with all the citations (including my full testing results) see this o1 chat that calculated the relative efficiency differences and made a nice results table for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/678b55bb-336c-8012-97cc-b94f70919d...
(It's worth point out that that used 45s of TTC, which is a point that is not lost on me!)
The major players in AI are collectively burning 1-2 gigawatts, day and night, on research and development of the next generation of LLMs. This is as much as my city of a million people. The impact is real, and focusing on inference cost per query kind of misses the point. Every person who uses these tools contributes to the demand and bears some of the responsibility. Similar to how I have responsibility for the carbon emissions of a flight, even if the plane would have flown without me.
I'm saying this as someone who finds LLMs helpful, and uses them without feeling particularly guilty about it. But we should be honest about the costs.
"Other bad things exist" does not mean this thing isn't bad. Or absolutely could be that all these other things are huge energy wasters AND chat gpt is an energy waster.
We have to stop thinking about problems so linearly -- it's not "solve only the worst one first", because we'll forever find reasons to not try and solve that one, and we'll throw up our hands.
Like, we're well aware animal agriculture is a huge environmental impact. But getting everyone to go vegetarian before we start thinking about any other emissions source is a recipe for inaction. We're going to have to make progress, little by little, on all of these things.
Except that's not the point of this: the point is that humans have absolutely finite time to think about problems, and so the way you distract from a problem is by inventing a new more exciting one.
LLMs are in the news cycle, so sending all the activists after LLMs sure does a good job ensuring they're not going after anything which would be more effective doesn't it? (setting aside my thoughts for the moment of the utility of the 'direct action' type activists who I think have been useless for a good long while now - there could not possibly be more 'awareness' of climate change).
Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene. Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where most of us were up until very recently.
Indeed, it doesn't solve the problem that people will misinterpret data and spread misinformation to justify their bad feeling about AI with invalid arguments.
~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion.
point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating meat, not mining bitcoin, not using chatgpt, not driving cars - are a drop in the bucket compared to standard practice overseas manufacturing.
us privileged folks could "just boycott", "buy renewable", "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue. this is not to say that the environment isn't important - it's critically important. it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way, it's ludicrous to point fingers at each other and worry that what we do day-to-day is destroying the planet.
[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368
That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall emissions.
"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.
Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.
Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.
I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those talking points despite them being significantly less true for them; because they see it so much online.
> I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
They do, because their experience is that transit and biking really do suck and are useless. Which is accurate, for where they've lived.
The problem is that you have to convince people that things could be better, when their lived experience is that it's always terrible.
I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight, biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I realized a few things: - same duration as the train - it give me the exercise I needed - it relaxes me - it is free since I already have a bike
Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It have been 6 months.
My point is: those who complain about biking being terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may fit you.
See, my point is that everyone first goes “it’s not me”, then they understand it is them and go “but it’s not my policies” and then they vote in the policies which are the problem. It’s totally fine to go “we need collective action to fix this”. But you have to actually join the collective action. You think billionaires are getting rich by committing environmental arbitrage? Then don’t oppose attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must now pay your fair share too.
Sure, recognizing that the problem is political is step one. Step two is... political activism, I guess? Lack of local political engagement and organizing is part of what allows problems like these to form.
Not just lack but outright apathy and villainizing of these attempts. If you try to tax gas some oil CEO will run a campaign explaining to the working class that their commute will now cost 10% more, which obviously makes people upset. Part of it is that we, unfortunately, can’t actually subsidize car commuters anymore. But part of it is that CEO is going to incur a cost of 50%, as he should, which is why he’s bothering to spend money riling people up.
Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.
Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon).
But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.
- Ozone
- Efficient Lighting (LEDs now, but others before)
- Santa Claus
There are certainly examples of a large portion of the population of the planet working together towards common goals. A lot of people putting in a little bit of effort _does_ happen, and it _does_ produce results.
There was a profit motive in all of those except Santa. For instance until the main players in CFCs (which were the main cause of ozone depletion) were able to invent, patent, and market an alternative to CFCs they successfully lobbied against any change. Then they got a new patent, turned 180 degrees, claiming CFCs were the worst thing to ever exist - and made a ton of money after they were banned. Same thing with stuff like asthma inhalers.
When people want to do something, we're unstoppable. But unfortunately that means the good and the bad, and right now polluting actions are incredibly beneficial, and the alternatives are mediocre and not only unprofitable, but generally incur a substantial cost. There's a reason places like the US/Canada/Australia talk a mean game about climate change, yet remain some of the biggest polluters per capita, by far.
Uh, Santa is the biggest advertising campaign for consumerism the world has ever known
Smoking, drinking - both on the decline for the last decades.
Yes, a big multi government marketing campaign "Just don't eat meat 1 or 2 days a week" can definitely work. E.g. friday is "Fish day" in a lot of places (education/public) due to Catholic church influences.
Just need a catchy day for "Veggie Wednesday".
There are mechanisms for such coordination. Diets have shifted around the world to more McD's, more western cuisine. Wild catch changes all the time as we overfish stocks to endangerment.
Always driven by money. McD's is cheaper and easier to mass produce. Wild catch changes when it is no longer economical to fish one kind of fish. There's never an "enlightenment" of people.
The “just a little” argument will immediately be offset by new inhabitants (whether babies or immigration).
In fact, behaviors have convinced me that the goal of ecologists is not a greener Earth, but an Earth with fewer resources used by whites and more resources for the already-90% population that isn’t white. Green is just a racist ideology.
Most of the world isn’t white so even if you’re not being upset about white people being oppressed or whatever this just makes sense from an equity perspective.
You do this through the government. Implement meat rations. Everybody is only allowed so much meat per week. So you have to make it count.
I think this might be the first idea I've ever heard that I truly feel will backfire far worse than alcohol prohibition. I almost want to see it happen.
All families can't afford meat daily, let alone any type of meat they want. So, some families might favor chicken and certain processed meats here and there, but most cuts of beef and lamb for example might be out of the question, and so will daily meat consumption. The same applies for dairy, they might afford big blocks of tasteless cheese, but won't touch often cheese with taste, French or otherwise. There is no enforced rationing, but choice is reduced if not removed for a good fraction of the population, purely for economic reasons.
What's missing from this type of discussions is performance quantification and scientific attitude. It assumes solid food is indulgence and ultraprocessed vegan shakes paired with appropriate willpower is all it takes to do anything.
Things just don't work that way. Been there, done that. Willpower does nothing. Extra calories around your berry is extra calories around your berry. It's much more worthwhile to think about reducing GHG emission from farming than deceiving yourself into self-harming and projecting your own doing onto greater society.
The USDA budget totals ~$200bn, of which 70% goes to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
Table FNS-1, p58 https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-usda...
Vegetarian here. People who eat meat tend to reduce their consumption if you 1. charge them appropriately for it and 2. give them good alternatives. Telling them to not do something usually makes them angry unfortunately.
How effective IYO was Morgan Spurlock (RIP) the activist filmmaker ("Supersize Me", [0]) at trying to educate the general (meat-eating) US public on US meat production, the restaurant industry, nutrition, marketing?
(PS:it's not a dichotomy between strict vegetarianism vs meat 4+ days/wk. Can encourage people to eat healthier and more sustainable.)
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1041597/
I mean I’m not an expert but I think the general sentiment among Americans about meat is “yeah I hear meat production is gross/polluting/inhumane but I like meat and don’t want to think about that”. Charitably I think we have a lot of things we can care about and most people want to ignore this, plus there’s a lot of cultural baggage tied to diet people don’t want to leave. I think actual solutions will mostly involve the idea that reduction is good instead of throwing up your hands because you’re unable to commit to being vegan, and adding options to people’s diet that they actually enjoy. I think we have a very hard time solving “I can’t completely solve this and also it requires changes I don’t like so doing nothing at all is fine”.
He didn't try to educate. He sensationalized for profit. Supersize Me was a grift. He drank himself fat and fabricated his numbers.
> Telling them to not do something usually makes them angry unfortunately
Then it's up to you to get even angrier.
Angry people are spiteful. I generally find it a lot more productive to get them to understand why their choices have consequences, how the can (progressively!) fix the problems, and watch things improve from there.
Environmentalists and those championing similar causes politically have taken this approach for decades. The result has been a perpetual shift to the right-wing who has no qualms about playing dirty, using fear, anger and other tribal emotions to gain support. Everywhere in the West, authoritarians are seizing power.
Good luck with continuing the virtuous approach while the world goes up in flames. It hasn't worked and has gotten us to where we are right now.
I think people should be angry about that, yes. I’m not particularly interested in tying eating meat to racism or whatever it takes to make people fearful enough to support you.
And this is why everything will keep going up in flames - you're not interested in doing what it has been shown to take to get people to support your cause.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter what we think people should be angry about. FWIW I obviously completely agree with you! People should be angry about those things! Turns out they aren't. What matters is the reality we live in.
There's less extreme government action possible: tax meat & dairy higher.
There are already precedents for that, for example here in Germany cigarettes are taxed to about 70% and hard-liquor (altho it's more complicated to calculate as it depends on exact alcohol content) to about 40%.
Meat is only taxed at 7% via VAT (similar to sales tax in the US).
People, especially men, get irrationally angry by even the slightest thought of their precious meat being touched (including here on HN; there are more than a few crackpots over here who promote a meat only or even red meat only diet). If there would be a reason to violently overthrow the gov, this would probably be it; not for the things that actually matter to better or save humanity, but to save their daily meat platter.
Not by rationing, if you meant the US government: US per-capita consumption of meat is 328 lbs/year [UN FAO]. You'd try to reduce the subsidies and incentives for meat/ corn/ soybean production which are baked into the USDA budget ($200bn in 2024), since the 1930s (Great Depression), and more since the 1950s (and related stuff like the marketing tool of the "Food Pyramid"). These will be as politically hard to cancel as defense production or military bases or prisons.
Here's even a 2023 editorial from the Kansas City Star pointing the blame at Big Ag "Corn drives US food policy. But big business, not Midwestern farmers, reaps the reward" [0]:
> No, corn is not an evil crop, nor are farmers in the Corn Belt shady criminals. However, the devastating effect of corn owes to the industrialization of the plant by a small group of global agribusiness and food conglomerates, which acts as a kind of de facto corn cabal. These massive corporations — seed companies, crop and meat processors, commodity traders and household food and beverage brands — all survive on cheap commodity corn, which currently costs about 10 cents a pound. Corn’s versatility makes it the perfect crop to “scale” (commoditize, industrialize and financialize).
A libertarian take is the Cato Institute "Farm Bill Sows Dysfunction for American Agriculture" [1]:
> The Sprawling Farm Bill:... has its roots in the century-old New Deal and is revised by Congress every five years... "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), was added to the Farm Bill in 1973 to ensure support from rural and urban lawmakers, accounts for about three-quarters of the omnibus package. Some lawmakers and pundits have proposed splitting SNAP from the Farm Bill to stop the logrolling and facilitate a clearer debate on farm subsidy programs, which make up the rest of the bill." ...aslo criticizes crop insurance subsidies (which mainly go on the four big crops), Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) ("Welfare for Wealthier Farmers"), Crop insurance subsidies (" originally envisioned as a more stable and cost-efficient alternative to ad hoc disaster payments, but they have acted more as a supplement than a replacement—and may have actually increased risks along the way.")
[0]: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-com...
[1]: https://www.cato.org/policy-investigation/farm-bill-sows-dys...
> Implement meat rations.
I don't think we can ever be friends.
The US government could help by ending subsidies towards meat and dairy production, which will prevent those products from being artificially underpriced.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/10/usda-livestoc...
Not encouraging population growth everywhere but particularly in the highest per-capita consuming and polluting countries, but rather allow them to naturally level off and even gradually decline would go a much longer way. It would enable significant emissions reductions and reduction in all other environmental impacts of consumption without impacting quality of life.
Eating bugs and living in pods sounds great and all, but if the end result is just allowing the ruling class to pack more drones and consumers in like sardines then it's not really solving anything.
Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions)
I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of environmental destruction on individual buying habits, rather than the people in power who actually have the ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move the needle.
Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing the mass production and importation of plastic garbage waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas emissions but pollute the environment in other, irreversible ways.
And if your government and leaders don't make this a priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a new government.
It won’t be 1.45% but it will be 1.3%. Meat is exceptionally inefficient compared to non-meat. It sounds false but it really is like that :(
Meat and dairy are bad for GHG, but they are also terrible for most of the other bad things we do to the planet. Eutrophication, species extinction, habitat loss, water use.
And the people in power do what the people want, that's why they are in power. Imagine telling people they couldn't eat as much meat. Would be political suicide.
That's why individual buying habits are important. If many individuals change, we might change as a society. And at some point there might be a tipping point where the people in charge can make a change.
Also, blaming other people for all the problems is not a great way to solve a problem. Take some responsibility.
I was able to cut out 95% of meat without it being much trouble.
How much of Americans driving to work is because they choose too though? Amazon's 5 day RTO policy is a good example. How many of the people now going to an office 5 days a week would've done so without the mandate? I see the traffic every day, and saw the same area before the mandate, so I can tell you with confidence that there's many more cars on the road as a result of this commute. this all funnels back to the corporate decision to mandate 5 days in office.
Exactly. IMO, any politician who's serious about saving the environment or reducing the number of cars should be proposing bills to heavily tax employers for every unnecessary commute they require of their employees (maybe $100-$500 per employee per unnecessary day required in the office).
if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact
This is a good sentiment. But, in context, it is a fallacy. A harmful one.
Consumer action on transport and whatnot, assuming a massive and persistent global awareness effort... has the potential of adding up to a rounding error.
Housing policy, transport policy, urban planning... these are what affects transport emissions. Not individual choices.
Look at our environmental history. Consumer choice has no wins.
It's propaganda. Role reversal. Something for certain organizations to do. It is not an actual effort to achieve environmental benefit.
We should be demanding governments clean up. Governments and NGOs should not be demanding that we clean up.
The emissions from vehicles are different from plastics produced by factories.
Also, while important, 2-3% of world emissions is a drop in the bucket compared to the other 97%. Let's consider the other causes and how we can fix them.
Think about this: for many people, not driving to work is a big deal. If people collectively decide to do that, that's a lot of effort and inconvenience just for 2-3%.
There isn’t really a magic wand we can wave and get 50% back for free and without inconvenience. The other 97% involves things like individually figuring out where our electricity generation goes. Or figuring out which farms to shut down, or what manufacturing we don’t like anymore. All of this must happen. It will be inconvenient. I picked a slice that is immediately relevant to a lot of people here. But there are a lot of axes to look at this.
while 3% might sound like a drop in the bucket, there isn't any single specific chunk of the rest of the 97% that will immediately cut, say, 30-40% of emissions (also remember that 2-3% is the super specific "Americans not driving cars", not "everyone in the world not driving cars").
I think many Americans driving to work would be happy to work from home if not RTO mandates (encouraged by the government at least on a local level).
This assumes all emissions / externalities are created equal, which they are not.
Could you say more?
Are you talking about comparing CO2 to N2O to CH4 to fluorocarbons, for example?
You are right. Though for CO2 that simplification comes pretty close to true.
> That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.
Even an example like this that is carefully chosen to make consumers feel/act more responsible falls short. You want people to change their lives/careers to not drive? Ok, but most people already want to work from home, so even the personal “choice” about whether to drive a car is basically stuck like other issues pending government / corporate action, in this case to either improve transit or to divest from expensive commercial real estate. This is really obvious isn’t it?
Grabbing back our feeling of agency should not come at the expense of blaming the public under the ridiculous pretense of “educating” them, because after years of that it just obscures the issues and amounts to misinformation. Fwiw I’m more inclined to agree with admonishing consumers to “use gasoline responsibly!” than say, water usage arguments where cutting my shower in half is supposed to somehow fix decades of irresponsible farming, etc. But after a while, people mistrust the frame itself where consumers are blamed, and so we also need to think carefully about the way we conduct these arguments.
> Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.
This is easily solved by switching to EVs. A small-size EV (perfect for personal transportation) is only slightly less CO2-efficient than rail ( https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint ).
I wish the world would ditch public transit entirely. It's nothing but a misery generator. It's far better to switch to remote work and distributed cities.
I unironically like public transport because someone else does the “driving” for me. I’m sure someone is going to explain how Waymo solves this but sitting on a train with my laptop and breakfast while I magically get teleported to my office is much nicer than even being in the back seat of a car.
This reads like an attempt to pass the blame to others. Per capita CO₂ emissions in the US are one of the highest in the world, and significantly higher than those in China or SEA. This is despite the US/Europe moving some of our dirtiest/cheapest manufacturing to that region.
Personal choices matter. See the amount of energy used on air conditioning in the US compared to areas of Europe with comparable weather for a banal example. If we want to significantly reduce emissions it will happen through a combination of personal choices, corporate action and government policy.
I have always felt this way too. Our personal choices do not move the needle on fossil fuel and plastics. One could embrace aversion to these out of a sense of sustainability to signal virtue, but lets not pretend it will save the planet. It won't. Restricting aviation flights, stopping wars and minimizing the dirty fuel used in maritime freight does much more. But the world will not do it.
> it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way
But this isn't going to happen by itself. We need to vote for people who believes in regulating these corporations (rather than deregulating them).
One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases impacting climate.
While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too late.
This line of thinking is what undermines democracies and ruins the environment. Your choice might just be a drop in the ocean, but guess what the ocean is made out of.
This is nothing but head-in-the-sand, arms-in-the-air, feel-good baloney to convince oneself to sleep well at night.
Guess what happens when you buy a used laptop instead of a new one?
That's right: less "standard practice overseas manufacturing".
Lifestyle change right there.
Buying less, using the same for longer, buying used goods instead of new are lifestyle changes that anyone can make and have an undeniable very clear impact by reducing the amount of stuff that needs to get made. Using my smartphone for 6 years instead of changing every 3 years doesn't mean the one I didn't buy gets sold elsewhere. It means one less sale.
> "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue.
But voting with your wallet is literally moving sales to a more developed area with less pollution?
This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution.
Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.
Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing there.
A pretty graph that make it clear just how bad the most egregious polluters are comparatively: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...
What are they doing in the Philippines? Dumping household waste straight into the rivers?
I think they are fishing commerially a lot. Most of the ocean trash comes from the fishing industry (e.g. abandoned nets).
Pretty much. Buying everything in sachets and then not having any real waste disposal; https://earth.org/philippines-plastic/
It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.
“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”
“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“
“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”
Do we talk about pollution or emmissions?
Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.
Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.
That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1 kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd knock out 15 million tons of CO2.
Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else this time".
And 80% of all the trash in the oceans come from fishing industry (e.g. abandoned nets).
Finally someone who speaks this out. What we do is more or less fly poop ... good four own well being but with almost zero impact. I'll go on doing some things because I think that some of that are the better ways to handle this or that or it's better for my health but with no expectation that I'll change anything.
Yet we also see that hyperscale cloud emissions targets have been reversed due to AI investment, Datacenter growth is hitting grid capacity limits in many regions, and peaker plant and other non-renewable resources on the grid are being deployed more to handle this specific growth from AI. I think the author, by qualifying on "chatgpt" maybe can make the claims they are making but I don't believe the larger argument would hold for AI as a whole or when you convert the electricity use to emissions.
I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently in its infancy) more efficient. [edit wording]
Voluntary conservation was only working by accident and guilt tripping never works. The grid needs to become clean so that we can have new industries.
The grid being clean means not having any fossil power. We can only get there by shutting down all fossil fuel power plants.
We can not get there by adding new power generation.
Yep, this is the real answer. It's also the only answer. The big fiction was everyone getting hopped on the idea that "karma" was going to be real, and people's virtue would be correctly identified by overt environmentalism rather then action.
Fossil fuel companies won, and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed environmentalism since...well I'll let you know when it stops.
Why do you belive this? Datacenter uses just a 1-1.3 percent of electricity from grid and even if you suppose AI increased the usage by 2x(which I really doubt), the number would still be tiny.
Also AI training is easiest workload to regulate, as you can only train when you have cheaper green energy.
Is that true though? Data centers can be placed anywhere in the USA, they could be placed near a bunch of hydro or wind farm resources in the western grid which has little coal anyways outside of one line from Utah to socal. The AI doesn’t have to be located anywhere near to where it is used since fiber is probably easier to run than a high voltage power line.
That was already done years ago and people are predicting that the grid will be maxed out soon.
Build new data centers near sources of power, and grid capacity isn’t going to be a problem. Heck, American industry used to follow that (building garment factories on fast moving rivers before electricity was much of a thing, Boeing grew up in the northwest due to cheap aluminum helped out by hydro). Why is AI somehow different from an airplane?
They'll have to build new power generation and build the data centers next to it.
You are massively conflating what is possible with what is done.
I know data centers are built next to wind farms for these reasons already. We have an abundance of those projects out here in the PNW.
There are a large number of reasons the AI datacenters are geographically distributed--just to list a few off the top of my head which come up as top drivers: latency, data sovereignty, resilience, grid capacity, renewable energy availability.
Why does latency matter for a model that responds in 10s of seconds? Latency to a datacenter is measured in 10s or 100s of milliseconds, which is 3-4 orders of magnitude less.
If you look at a model with a diverse competitive provider set like llama 3 the latency is 1/4 second, and it will definitely improve at a minimum incrementally if quality is held constant: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... Remember that as long as you experience the response linearly (very much the case for audio output for eg) then the first-chunk latency is your actual latency, not to stream the entire response.
Two reasons that I understand 1. not all these AIs are LLMs and many have much lower latency SLAs than chat and 2. These are just one part of a service architecture and when you have multiple latencies across the stack they tend to have multiplicative effects.
This is a great article for discussion. However articles like this must link to references. It is one thing to assert, another to prove. I do agree that heating/cooling, car and transport use, and diet play massive roles in climate change that should not be subsumed by other debates.
The flip side to the authors argument is that LLMs are not only used by home users doing 20 searches a day. Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what. New nuclear and other power facilities are being proposed to power their use, this is not insignificant. Schneider Electric predicts 93 GW of energy spent on AI by 2028. https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/schneider-electric-pred...
The question this is addressing concerns personal use. Is it ethical to use ChatGPT on a personal basis? A surprising number of people will say that it isn't because of the energy and water usage of those prompts.
I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation.
Still, LLM queries are not made equal. The environmental justification does not take into account for models querying other services, like the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests.
I see people complaining that ChatGPT usage is unethical for environmental reasons all the time. Here's just the first example I found from a Bluesky search (this one focuses on water usage): https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq...
"the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests"
Can you provide more information about that? I don't remember gearing about that one - was it a case of someone using ChatGPT to write code and not reviewing the result?
Bluesky is a special place, I am not surprised you will bump into the sort of activists who will critique every bucket of water that go into making a hamburger there. For those of us who avoid contact with the axe grinding hoards of short form media, meeting somebody who spends any portion of their day fretting about the water usage of language models is indeed a rarity.
It’s not specific to Bluesky. I’ve seen it on Threads, X, Facebook, and Reddit. It’s a talking point for people who hate AI and they tell anybody who will listen.
> Can you provide more information about that?
Sure, I looked it up and it was a security advisory: https://github.com/bf/security-advisories/blob/main/2025-01-...
I don’t have the time to re-read it now so if I am misremembering and it is a training-time effect rather than query-time effect then my bad, though the point largely stands.
> I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation.
Usually they complain about both.
> However articles like this must link to references.
There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.
Where?
One of the most crucial points "Training an AI model emits as much as 200 plane flights from New York to San Francisco"
This seems to come from this blog https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~....
which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-...
which is talking about models like *GPT-2, BERT, and ELMo* -- _5+ year old models_ at this point.
The keystone statement is incredibly vague, and likely misleading. What is "an AI model"? From what I found, this is referring to GPT-2,
I assume this comes from the 60GWh figure, which does translate to about 200 flights (assuming energy density of gasoline; in actual CO2 emissions it was probably less since likely cleaner energy was used than for running planes).
If I understand TFA correctly that's a claim it's covering and arguing against, not arguing for.
By TFA do you mean the author of the article? It seems to be using an outdated [and incorrect] claim (as far as I know, GPT-4 has no note of taking 200 flights of energy to train), arguing against it saying that those numbers are especially small, when they are potentially significantly larger.
> Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what.
The "I don't know so it must be huge" argument?
Not knowing what it's being spent on is separate to knowing whether it's being spent
I’m not an expert, but I’ve seen multiple reports that predict very large increases in electricity demand.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
The section on training feels weak, and that's what the discussion is mainly about.
Many companies are now trying to train models as big as GPT-4. OpenAI is training models that may well be even much larger than GPT-4 (o1 and o3). Framing it as a one-time cost doesn't seem accurate - it doesn't look like the big companies will stop training new ones any time soon, they'll keep doing it. So one model might only be used half a year. And many models may not end up used at all. This might stop at some point, but that's hypothetical.
It briefly touches on training, but uses a seemingly misleading statistic that comes from (in reference to GPT-4) extremely smaller models.
This article [1] says that 300 [round-trip] flights are similar to training one AI model. Its reference of an AI model is a study done on 5-year-old models like BERT (110M parameters), Transformer (213M parameters), and GPT-2. Considering that models today may be more than a thousand times larger, this is an incredulous comparison.
Similar to the logic of "1 mile versus 60 miles in a massive cruise ship"... the article seems to be ironically making a very similar mistake.
[1] https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~....
737-800 burns about 3t of fuel per hour. NYC-SFO is about 6h, so 18t of fuel. Jet fuel energy density is 43MJ/kg, so 774000 MJ per flight, which is 215 MWh. Assuming the 60 GWh figure is true (seems widely cited on the internets), it comes down to 279 one-way flights.
Thanks, I missed that 60 GWh figure. I got confused because the quotes around the statement, so I looked it up and couldn't find a quote. I realize now that he's quoting himself making that statement (and it's quite accurate)
I am surprised that, somehow, the statistic didn't change from GPT-2-era to GPT-4. Did GPUs really get that much more efficient? Or that study must have some problems
I am sure that’s intentional, because this article is the same thing we see from e/acc personalities any time the environmental impact is brought up.
Deflection away from what actually uses power and pretending the entire system is just an API like anything else.
The absolute best thing I've read on this subject is this article here: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-powe...
It talks at great length about data center trends relating to generative AI, from the perspective of someone who has been deeply involved in researching power usage and sustainability for two decades.
I made my own notes on that piece here (for if you don't have a half hour to spend reading the original): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-powe...
I find the following to be a great point regarding what we ought to consider when adapting our lifestyle to reduce negative environmental impact:
> In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the activity is to our lives.
The further example with a hospital emitting more than a cruise ship is a good illustration of the issue.
Continuing this line of thought, when thinking about your use of an LLM like ChatGPT, you ought to weigh not merely its emissions and water usage, but also the larger picture as to how it benefits the human society.
For example: Was this tech built with ethically sound methods[0]? What are its the foreseeable long-term effects on human flourishing? Does it cause a detriment to livelihoods of the many people while increasing the wealth gap with the tech elites? Does it negatively impact open information sharing (willingness to run self-hosted original content websites or communities open to public, or even the feasibility of doing so[1][2]), motivation and capability to learn, creativity? And so forth.
[0] I’m not going to debate utilitarianism vs. deontology here, will just say that “the ends justify the means” does not strike me as a great principle to live by.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42486481
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624
Sort of off-topic, but it does make one think about usage of compute (and the backing energy / resources required for that)...
i.e. it doesn't seem too much of an exaggeration to say that we might be getting closer and closer to a situation where LLMs (or any other ML inference) is being run so much for so many different reasons / requests, that the usage does become significant in the future.
Similarly, going into detail on what the compute is being used for: i.e. no doubt there are situations currently going on where Person A uses a LLM to expand something like "make a long detailed report about our sales figures", which produces a 20 page report and delivers it to Person B. Person B then says "I haven't time to read all this, LLM please summarise it for me".
So you'd basically have LLM inference compute being used as a very inefficient method of data/request transfer, with the sender expanding a short amount of information to deliver to the recipient, and then the said recipient using an LLM on the other side to reduce it back again to something more manage-able.
That sounds like the opposite of data compression (inflation?) where the data size is increased before sending, then on receiving it is compressed back to a smaller form.
Lossy data inflation.
The title does not match the content.
A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
> "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
Emissions directly caused by Average Joe using ChatGPT is not significant compared to everything else. 50,000 questions is a lot for an individual using ChatGPT casually, but nothing for the businesses using ChatGPT to crunch data. 50,000 "questions" will be lucky to get you through the hour.
Those businesses aren't crunching data just for the sake of it. They are doing so ultimately because that very same aforementioned Average Joe is going to buy something that was produced out of that data crunching. It is the indirect use that raises the "ChatGPT is bad for the environment" alarm. At very least, we at least don't have a good handle on what the actual scale is. How many indirect "questions" am I asking ChatGPT daily?
> given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
Why? I regularly hear people trying to argue that LLMs are an environmental distaster.
Learning a new model (like GPT-4) is way more costly than running it.
The article needs to exist because the idea that ChatGPT usage is environmentally disastrous really has started to make its way into the human hive mind.
I'm glad someone is trying to push back against that - I see it every day.
Such a stupid post, I know people on HN don’t like absolute descriptors like that and sorry for that.
Obviously the LLMs and ChatGPT don’t use the most energy when answering your question, they churn through insane amounts of water and energy when training them, so much so that big tech companies do not disclose and try to obscure those amounts as much as possible.
You aren’t destroying the environment by using it RIGHT NOW, but you are telling the corresponding company that owns the LLM you use “there is interest in this product”, en masse. With these interest indicators they will plan for the future and plan for even more environmental destruction.
It's not like they are mixing that water with oil and pumping into the aquifer. Water evaporate, turn into clouds, that precipitate into rain that fall on the ground and water bodies, where it can be used again. So what's the problem, with datacenter water usage? Has the water cycle has stopped and I was not informed?
Fresh water is finite. Infinite in reuse, but we can only take so much from a river before that river ceases to be. If you have a megabit connection, it doesn't matter that your cloud backups have infinite storage, you are limited by bandwidth.
Water vapor stays aloft for wild, so there's no guarantee it enters the same watershed it was drawn from.
It's also a powerful greenhouse gas, so even though it's removed quickly, raising the rate we produce it results in more insulation.
It's not a finite resource, we need to be judicious and wise in how we allocate it.
Read about water usage by datacenters. This is a well documented subject that there is no excuse for you to be ignorant about.
Plenty of companies have revealed exactly how much energy and CO2 they have used training a model. Just off the top of my head, I've seen those numbers are available for Meta's Llama models, Microsoft's Phi series and DeepSeek's models - including their impressive DeepSeek v3 which trained for less than $6m in cost - a huge reduction compared to other similar models, and a useful illustration of how much more effect this stuff can get on the training side of things.
Similar feelings about the repeated references to the apparently agreed consensus that individual action is pointless vs systematic change like switching to a renewable energy system. Jevons Paradox would like a word.
I don’t care about energy usage. How exhausting it must be to be a climate hysterical person and try to factor the climate cost of every single action you take in life.
Charge the consumer of energy the requisite price. If you want to make them pay for some externality, great. But I refuse to worry and be burdened by anxiety over every single unit of electricity consumed. Such a tiring, bullshit part of life the progressives have foisted on elites. And it is elites only as poors don’t give a shit
A lot of conversations regarding the environment feel so frustrating because they are either qualitative or use aggregate high level data or are like we'll be dead in 50 years (lol my personal favorite)
Why not start capturing waste/energy data for all human made items like nutritional data on food? It won't add much overhead or stifle economies as people fear
That way when I log in to use any online service or when I buy/drive a car or when I buy an item I can see how much energy was consumed and how much waste I produced exactly
Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-cent...
"personal carbon footprint" is a term invented by BP and is the single hack that derailed the environment discussion by making people personally responsible and removing the actual polluters from the discussion.
If you use chatgpt somehow saves you from making one trip to the doctor in your car it can offset the entire year worth of chatgpt usage in terms of co2 impact.
if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I would be very concerned
ChatGPT is probably adequate to provide a slightly more user-friendly but also slight-less-reliable replacement for a reliable consumer-oriented medical reference book or website for the task of determining whether self-care without seeing a doctor or seeing a doctor is appropriate for symptoms not obviously posing an immediate emergency.
Early days, but not as crazy as it sounds: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points (95% CI, 2-30 percentage points; P = .03) higher than the conventional resources group."
Most doctor visits are for benign matters...
The point of the doctorate is for them to make that determination.
My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use of resources.
More constructively, the middle ground of asking a doctor about some minor symptoms over async messaging or tele-appointments (whatever the term for those is), is probably always something to consider for the trivial stuff.
Yes and no, you really don't need a deep expertise to diagnose the very common illness.
And that's where chatgpt is doing great.
There is no need to nitpick obvious comments. If you have a running nose and fever in winter, it's 99.99% a cold and a doctor visit will do nothing to help you, yet millions of people waste doctors time for that
If ChatGPT somehow makes you eat more burgers it could make it makes water consumption worse.
The use of ChatGPT doesn’t replace the others it comes on top of that.
MS is missing its CO2 targets because of AI not because of burgers.
The whole argument is, it’s not bad because other things are worse.
We are racing towards the abyss but don’t worry AI only accelerates a little more.
what does "water used by data center" even mean? Does it consume the water somehow? What does it turn into? Steam? So uploading a 1GB file boils away nearly 1 liter of water? Or is it turned into bits somehow in some kind of mass to energy conversion? I sorta doubt that. Also this means data centers would have cooling towers like some power stations. Are we talking about the cooling towers of power stations?
I think at least that graph is complete non-sense. I will try and have chatGPT explain it to me.
> what does "water used by data center" even mean?
This doesn't clarify what exactly it includes, but there are two main things that generally are included:
(1) Direct water use for cooling, (which, yes, ends up as steam rom cooling towers), and
(2) Water used in generating electricity consumed by data centers, which, yeah, is again evaporated in cooling towers.
Yes, datacenters have cooling towers. There are lots of good articles about this topic. A good starting point is "water usage effectiveness" (WUE) which is one way this is tracked.
The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed - its just temporarily unavailable.
Also why doesn't uploading a 1GB file to my NAS boil a liter of water? are maybe all the switches and routers used between me and the datacenter water-cooled? I mean I can see such switches existing but I don't see them be the norm. Why doesn't the DSLAM on the Street outside emit steam. Is there maybe one bad switch somewhere that just spews steam?
What I am saying is that at least that graph is without further explanation... bad.
> The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed
Water consumption in all contexts is mostly fresh water returned from immediately usable form to either evaporation or the ocean. It is not "extremely misleading", because when it returns to immediately usable form by, e.g., precipitation, that's when new water is considered to be made available. The normal definitions are internally consistent and useful.
I did a bit of research and even water just "involved" in the process is counted as used in this context. For instance river water that is used for cooling and returned is counted.
I think these sort of graphs are simply misleading and should not be used.
Using it, sure, now do operating it and building it.
> It is extremely bad to distract the climate movement with debates about inconsequential levels of emission
This. So we should focus on optimizing transport, heating, energy and food.
To me the "ChatGPT is destroying the environment "card always felt somewhat like bad faith arguing from the anti-AI crowd trying to find any excuse for being against AI. Like, the same people who complained about "using AI is destroying environment" seemed to have no issue with boarding a plane which would emit a bunch of CO2 so that they can have a vacation in Europe or the like. Selective environmentalism.
Who is this person you’re constructing? Being concerned about plane emissions and travel is an incredibly common thing and people are adjusting their lifestyles accordingly - lots of overnight sleeper train lines are reopening due to demand.
I mean, it's a literal net new expenditure of power and water. I also deeply doubt they have "no issue" with plane travel. You're just assuming the worst and most hypocritical position to someone, which seems deeply bad faith as well.
It's literally true that most of the AI vendors and their data center partners are writing off energy and water conservation targets they'd had for the near future because of LLM money. That is actually bad in the short and likely long term, especially as people use LLMs for increasingly frivolous things. Is it really necessary to have an LLM essentially do a "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google Search for you at some multiple of that environmental cost? Because that's what most of my friends and coworkers use ChatGPT for. Very rarely are they using it to get anything more complex than just searching wikipedia or documentation you could have had bookmarked.
A person has a choice of if they take a flight and if it's worth it for them. They have no power except for raising a complaint in public on if OpenAI or Google or whoever spends vast amounts of money and power to train some new model. If your bar is that no one is allowed to complain about a company burning energy unless they live a totally blameless life farming their own food without electricity then random companies will get to do any destructive act they want.
It's less bad faith, more a meme that has become so prevalent that it's impossible to dispell as it's something too nuanced for social media. I've seen more than a few social media posts asking "do they really cut down a rainforest every time someone generates an AI image?"
You are talking about hypocrites.
What about the people who take the protection of the environment seriously?
They got now a setback because not only didn’t we reach our previous goals on lowering energy consumption but know we put new consumption on top of that. Just because the existing one ate worse doesn’t make it good.
There is a reason why MS missed its CO2 targets and why everyone is kn search for more energy sources.
They all create more CO2.
It's discomforting to me when people compare resource usage of ChatGPT, a computer, to the resource usage of a human being.
I've seen charts like this before that compare resource usage of people to corporations, implying corporations are the bigger problem. The implication here seems to be the opposite, and that tone feels just a little eugenicist.
In my country there's a lot of institutional hype about green algorithms. I find the whole idea quite irrelevant (for the reasons explained in this post) but of course, it's a way to get funding for those of us who work in AI/NLP (we don't have much money for GPUs and can't do things like training big LLMs, so it's easy to pitch everything we do as "green", and then get funding because that's considered strategic and yadda yadda).
It's funny, but sad, how no one calls the billshit because we would be sabotaging ourselves.
Comparing magnitudes does not prove the headline, poor analysis.
I published this as a comment as well, but it's probably worth nothing that the ChatGPT water/power numbers cited (the one that is most widely cited in these discussions) comes from an April 2023 paper (Li et al, arXiv:2304.03271) that estimates water/power usage based off of GPT-3 (175B dense model) numbers published from OpenAI's original GPT-3 2021 paper. From Section 3.3.2 Inference:
> As a representative usage scenario for an LLM, we consider a conversation task, which typically includes a CPU-intensive prompt phase that processes the user’s input (a.k.a., prompt) and a memory-intensive token phase that produces outputs [37]. More specifically, we consider a medium-sized request, each with approximately ≤800 words of input and 150 – 300 words of output [37]. The official estimate shows that GPT-3 consumes an order of 0.4 kWh electricity to generate 100 pages of content (e.g., roughly 0.004 kWh per page) [18]. Thus, we consider 0.004 kWh as the per-request server energy consumption for our conversation task. The PUE, WUE, and EWIF are the same as those used for estimating the training water consumption.
There is a slightly newer paper (Oct 2023) that directly measured power usage on a Llama 65B (on V100/A100 hardware) that showed a 14X better efficiency. [2] Ethan Mollick linked to it recently and got me curious since I've recently been running my own inference (performance) testing and it'd be easy enough to just calculate power usage. My results [3] on the latest stable vLLM from last week on a standard H100 node w/ Llama 3.3 70B FP8 was almost a 10X better token/joule than the 2023 V100/A100 testing, which seems about right to me. This is without fancy look-ahead, speculative decode, prefix caching taken into account, just raw token generation. This is 120X more efficient than the commonly cited "ChatGPT" numbers and 250X more efficient than the Llama-3-70B numbers cited in the latest version (v4, 2025-01-15) of that same paper.
For those interested in a full analysis/table with all the citations (including my full testing results) see this o1 chat that calculated the relative efficiency differences and made a nice results table for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/678b55bb-336c-8012-97cc-b94f70919d...
(It's worth point out that that used 45s of TTC, which is a point that is not lost on me!)
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03003
[3] https://gist.github.com/lhl/bf81a9c7dfc4244c974335e1605dcf22
Enforce a global carbon tax, price it in, and tax the land
International tax agreements are crucial if any progress is to be made on preventing climate disaster.
Which major parties support it? Who is even talking about it?
It’s such an obviously needed mechanism, but hard to get anyone enthused about it.
This group have some proposals on the topic —
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_the_Taxation...
The major players in AI are collectively burning 1-2 gigawatts, day and night, on research and development of the next generation of LLMs. This is as much as my city of a million people. The impact is real, and focusing on inference cost per query kind of misses the point. Every person who uses these tools contributes to the demand and bears some of the responsibility. Similar to how I have responsibility for the carbon emissions of a flight, even if the plane would have flown without me.
I'm saying this as someone who finds LLMs helpful, and uses them without feeling particularly guilty about it. But we should be honest about the costs.
"Other bad things exist" does not mean this thing isn't bad. Or absolutely could be that all these other things are huge energy wasters AND chat gpt is an energy waster.
We have to stop thinking about problems so linearly -- it's not "solve only the worst one first", because we'll forever find reasons to not try and solve that one, and we'll throw up our hands.
Like, we're well aware animal agriculture is a huge environmental impact. But getting everyone to go vegetarian before we start thinking about any other emissions source is a recipe for inaction. We're going to have to make progress, little by little, on all of these things.
Except that's not the point of this: the point is that humans have absolutely finite time to think about problems, and so the way you distract from a problem is by inventing a new more exciting one.
LLMs are in the news cycle, so sending all the activists after LLMs sure does a good job ensuring they're not going after anything which would be more effective doesn't it? (setting aside my thoughts for the moment of the utility of the 'direct action' type activists who I think have been useless for a good long while now - there could not possibly be more 'awareness' of climate change).
Maybe because we didn’t make real progress in the existing pollution and have a greater chance stopping a new polluter.
How long are climate change and its reasons known?
In the end people vote climate change deniers because they don’t like the inconvenient truth
Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene. Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where most of us were up until very recently.
What about training it?
Just build nuclear.
That doesn't solve the problem
Indeed, it doesn't solve the problem that people will misinterpret data and spread misinformation to justify their bad feeling about AI with invalid arguments.
I mean.... doing most things are bad for the environment. Do less of everything that you don't need to.
In the same way that leaving food out doesn’t create a cockroach infestation.
Yeah, there are lots of things worse than LLMs. But, at least, they are useful and profitable.
This guy must work at Microsoft.