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199 points rguiscard | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.195s | source
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VladVladikoff ◴[] No.46240782[source]
If the goal is reduced CO2, wouldn’t it be better to take aim at plants, rather than fungi?
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otabdeveloper4 ◴[] No.46241312[source]
> If the goal is reduced CO2

... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.

Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?

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ragequittah ◴[] No.46241383[source]
The cow farts, the important forests being torn down far cattle, the important forests being torn down for soy beans that feed the cattle, the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised. The problem you dismissed is indeed far larger than the one you're worried about.
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otabdeveloper4 ◴[] No.46241937[source]
Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every possible way. Let's start with that.
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1. ben_w ◴[] No.46243172[source]
Meat was useful, back when we had not yet selectively bred fantastically better than natural crops of all kinds, back when we had not yet invented synthetic fertiliser that's now the ultimate source of 70-80% of the nitrogen in the body of someone in an industrialised nation, back when hunger was a bigger problem than obesity.

Now? Now meat's mostly a problem, not a good thing. Even if you ignore every ethical argument, regardless of if your concerns are your own health or the environment, meat's not good.

Data centres… well, I think this is a bubble, I also want it to be a bubble for various reasons, but the AI running on them today is in fact already useful.

Even if current AI wasn't at all useful (despite it having about half to one quarter of the market size as meat already), it does so at a cost orders of magnitude lower environmental harm than meat. Convincing half of the population to have "meat-free Mondays" (so, reducing consumption by 1/14th) would do more than switching off all the AI DCs, given the estimates from Greenpeace for AI https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector