> Any time a new technology makes people uncomfortable, someone pulls the CO₂ card. We've seen this with cryptocurrencies, electric cars, even the internet itself.
I actually don't recall people "pulling the CO2 card" for the Internet. I do recall people doing it for cryptocurrency; and they were correct to do so. Even proof of stake is still incredibly energy inefficient at handling transactions. VISA handles thousands for what a proof-of-stake chain takes to handle a handful, and they do it faster to boot.
Electric cars don't contribute much CO2, so I don't recall much of that either. They do however have high particulate pollution amounts due to weighing considerably more (especially American-centric models like Teslas and the EV Hummer/F-150 Lightning) which aren't nothing to consider, and more to the point, electric cars do not solve the ancillary issues with infrastructure, like traffic congestion and cars effectively being a tax on everyone in a car-centric society who wants to be able to live. The fact that we all have to spend thousands every year on metal boxes we don't much care about just to be able to get around and have that box sit idle the vast majority of the time is ludicrously inefficient.
> But curiously, the same people rarely question the CO₂ footprint of things like gaming, streaming, international sports, live concerts, political campaigns, or even large-scale scientific research.
I have to vehemently disagree here. All scientific research, for starters, has to take environmental impact into account. Among other things that's why nobody in Vegas is watching nuclear tests anymore.
For another, people have long criticized numerous pop celebrities for being incredibly cavalier with the logistics for their concerts, and political figures have received similar criticism.
International sports meanwhile have gotten TONS of bad press for how awful it is that we have to move the stupid olympics around each year, both in the environmental sense, and the financial one since hosting practically renders a non-western country destitute overnight. Not even going into Qatar's controversial labor practices in building theirs.
> If we're serious about CO₂, then we need consistent standards — not just selective outrage. Either we cut fairly across the board, or we focus on making electricity cleaner and more sustainable, instead of trying to shame specific technologies into nonexistence (which, by the way, never happens).
No we don't. We can say, collectively, that the cost of powering gaming PC's, while notable, is something we're okay with, and conversely, powering plagiarism machines is not. Or, as people are so fond of saying here, let the market decide. Charge for AI services what they actually cost to provide plus profit, and see if the market will bear it. A lot of the interest right now is based on the fact that most of it is completely free, or being bundled with existing software, which is not a stable long-term solution.