today at 8:27 AM
For 2025 the grid carbon intensity in Texas was 363gCO2eq/kWh, while it was 22gCO2eq/kWh in Sweden, so 16,5x more in Texas. Right now it's 427 in Texas vs. 50 in Finland ie. 8,54x more, like in the article (yes I looked the wrong country at first).
The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.
today at 8:31 AM
Oh. We should probably stop using them then.
today at 7:44 AM
The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test
[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.
Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.
But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...
today at 8:34 AM
Thanks for the ragebait. Reminding myself that the flaw here is obvious, there’s no need to respond, arbitrary „tests” aren’t binding to anyone, protecting the future is perfectly defensible as a moral stance even at cost of present convenience.
today at 8:26 AM
“You’re just acting like your dead grandpa!” I holler, as I push the earth towards ecological collapse
today at 8:30 AM
Is getting in touch with nature, appreciating the value in things and protecting complex ecosystems really 'Acting Dead'?
I would say 'Acting Dead' is actually sitting at home ordering on Amazon/Temu, watching brainless TikTok/Instagram/Netflix/YouTube videos, and talking to a transformer model all day.
today at 8:02 AM
This is a fallacy. People 100 years like your great grandfather ago solved problems they had 100 years ago. People today solve problems they have today.
today at 8:04 AM
This is about a dead grandfather as he is decomposing in the ground. Not about his life which might have been more energy-intensive than that of many moderns.
today at 8:10 AM
Not sure about your great-grandfather, but mine didn't own a car, didn't travel on vacation by airplane, and, while he may have used a stove to heat his house, he probably only used it sparingly, because coal was expensive. So I doubt his life was more energy-intensive than mine.
today at 8:32 AM
Now I'm wondering what the CO2 efficiency of a modern airplane per tonnage of cargo/people is compared to coal fuelled ships, obviously ignoring the aspect of _where_ aircraft emit their exhaust in the atmosphere which IIRC makes a difference.
It's nothing relevant to your comment, I thoroughly agree, but just got me curious.
today at 8:19 AM
Mine drove a gas-guzzling GMC CCKW 353 truck, putting out up to a kilogram of CO2 per 1 km on inefficiently planned (but scenic) routes.
today at 8:09 AM
What a shitty way to dismiss anyone with any concerns whatsoever.
today at 8:07 AM
Is this some sort of straw man against trying to stay within your CO2 Budget? I really don’t understand the aim of this comment.
today at 8:10 AM
It's a really dumb test. You can apply it to argue against reducing or stopping literally anything. My dead great grandfather uses no fentanyl and commits no murders. If we're not doing those, we're as good as dead!
today at 8:31 AM
well thank god for the US citizens then taking one for team earth <3
ill keep supporting my local politicians who take a private jet for 100 kilometer journey to advocate for co2 reductions
today at 8:32 AM
I think it’s along the lines of “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. These little micro optimizations take your attention and energy away from places that might be less visible and less enjoyable but more consequential.
today at 7:53 AM
Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".
Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.
I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".
I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.
today at 8:03 AM
Yeah, the average Swede emitted 3.43 tons of CO2 in 2023, which is less than a quarter of what an average US citizen emitted. Does that mean that a US citizen is four times more "alive" than a Swede?
today at 8:08 AM
Yes exactly what's the problem with profiting from child slavery if I only do it every 3 or 4 years? Pfff, get good guys.
today at 8:31 AM
What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.
Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?
This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.
today at 8:13 AM
[dead]
today at 7:47 AM
It's funny because this comment reminds me of something else... cope.
today at 7:49 AM
You can apply the same to FIRE if you want to trigger half this board.
today at 8:06 AM
Good that he didn't or the comment would be long [dead]!
today at 8:11 AM
This is true of ~everything that uses electricity, not just AI https://app.electricitymaps.com
today at 8:32 AM
Well yes, it’s not like GPUs belch CO2 from their bellies.
The point is that they use a lot of electricity, and this is an active concern to many Americans who see electricity prices go up and polluting energy sources being used more as data centers roll into their state.
today at 7:29 AM
The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.
today at 7:13 AM
Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.
[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon
today at 7:36 AM
And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
today at 8:34 AM
Where did you get those stats from? Curious.
today at 7:51 AM
True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.
today at 8:14 AM
That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
today at 8:14 AM
why not both? some perspective:
0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
today at 7:48 AM
I think that is a bit out of the blue. But it is fun to imagine a billboard-sized app for a referendum on burgers or AI.
That will put some sweat on some brows :)
today at 8:00 AM
I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?
today at 8:06 AM
today at 8:15 AM
A costs less than B so we should do A is hardly a moral argument.
today at 8:25 AM
and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.
but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.
today at 8:10 AM
Your comparison only makes sense if you also consider how many requests are being made.
The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.
And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.
today at 8:22 AM
It might not help the cause, but ultimately it's an uncomfortable truth. It's easy to dismiss a fact as 'moralising'.
It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.
I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)
today at 8:10 AM
It's not an or/or is it.
today at 7:39 AM
I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
today at 7:41 AM
Why not treat both as bad instead of pointing to whataboutism to make a point?
today at 7:49 AM
Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
today at 7:57 AM
AI data centres are a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.
What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.
today at 8:13 AM
Have a look at a graph of meat consumption in the US. We are also adding to that. That's my point, we don't need to add to meat consumption, we can make reductions.
today at 8:09 AM
what benefit is it giving to the search engine is what you have to ask.
if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money
today at 8:07 AM
Eating more meat is a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.
Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.
today at 8:09 AM
The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions.
Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.
today at 8:12 AM
Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.
today at 8:27 AM
We didn't get to where we are as a species without it.
today at 8:34 AM
We didn't get to where we are as a species without violently killing each other, or forcing people do to work for us, or killing our young, etc. Doesn't mean we should keep doing it.
today at 7:45 AM
Source?
today at 7:50 AM
The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...
today at 7:54 AM
That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?
today at 8:03 AM
Presumably based on the numbers in the article?
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
today at 8:30 AM
Thanks. My next question would be what's a typical request. The article defines it as "production-typical request of 5,000 input and 387 output tokens, weighted by a typical day's traffic" for the Kimi K3 model. Not sure how that translates to my scale of the blue button to RIIR.
today at 7:43 AM
Could as well stop breathing to make way for the Super Intellect, that's what every sane transhumanist must do!
today at 7:39 AM
Giving up AI would be much easier and less disruptive.
today at 7:41 AM
Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".
today at 8:08 AM
Giving up private jets and cruises would be less disruptive than giving up AI.
today at 7:38 AM
today at 8:07 AM
too many things can happen in the ai provider's backend which won't be observable from the outside. for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't. i looked at your berget-ai/co2-calculator repo and you're expected to provide this yourself. it also uses "measuredResponseTimeSeconds" as a metric even though it's impossible to know how much of that time was spent rate limiting the user during hours of high activity
today at 8:15 AM
> for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't.
From the article:
A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.
-> So the comparison is based on the assumption that identical hardware is used.
Also from the article:
Emissions estimates are based on the current average emissions intensity of each regional electricity grid, which has been the norm in greenhouse gas accounting.
today at 8:27 AM
So it's just an incredibly stupid way to compare the power grids in Texas vs Sweden. It's not even accurate because the marginal watt during the day looks very different than the overall grid average.
today at 7:58 AM
Site is HTTP 503. It does make sense that an nginx 503 would cost much less to serve.
today at 7:52 AM
Is this site getting a death hug? I got a 502, then 503, then incomplete page load.
today at 8:16 AM
same for Germany which has roughly the same Co2 per kwh.
today at 6:41 AM
Based on a newly released model for calculating this that is open sourced.
today at 7:37 AM
today at 7:38 AM
Worry not, AI people! Greenhouse gas exemptions will be made for the future of work, maths and art, the salvation of the humankind, the genie that is out of the bottle, etc, if only at the expense of taxing your and your dog's fart.
today at 7:45 AM
it's remarkable how it only took one week of "AI bad for math" headlines for snarky redditors to incorporate it into their collective conscience.
today at 8:09 AM
This assumes people did not already have these thoughts/ideas ?
today at 7:49 AM
These snarky redditors, their go-to way of making an argument by picking at a single word in the whole sentence checks out every time!
today at 7:26 AM
Yeah I don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas. AI isn't latency sensitive. Put them in some remote location surely?
today at 7:44 AM
One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.
today at 8:24 AM
Last I checked waste heat isn't energy dense enough for large-scale district heating. Small pilot projects yes, but it won't heat whole towns.
today at 7:28 AM
> don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas
Power connections.
today at 8:13 AM
Probably so they have no problems getting people who work there and provide technical services. I mean that seriously without any sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek, it seems the most likely explanation to me.
today at 7:56 AM
They need drinking water apparently.
today at 7:52 AM
[dead]
today at 7:27 AM
This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.
today at 7:40 AM
You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
today at 8:01 AM
Or efficient ways around those regulations.
today at 8:20 AM
I think "people in left wing areas" is weird phrasing. There is nothing inherent about an area that makes it left or right wing. "People who live under governments who are responsive to collective issues such as climate and energy prices" would make more sense.
today at 8:33 AM
Here in America, it's the left wing that's more interested in ai regulations and bans. Cares about green tech.
today at 7:29 AM
Less waste of resources is still waste of resources.
How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?
today at 8:25 AM
Some of it is useful, and from an environmental perspective, if it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.
I would agree that there should be some tariffed token usage based on CO2, efficient datacentres pay little, polluting ones pay a lot - would help even the field and export good practice.
today at 8:16 AM
Except you don't actually ban it, you just move it to texas.
That content is coming either way.
And if you require them to over offset their load to the grid, it's literally fossil fuels burned over all.
today at 7:32 AM
Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.
today at 7:16 AM
We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.
today at 7:20 AM
Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.
today at 7:23 AM
Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.
today at 7:27 AM
> "Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed"
This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?
They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
today at 7:42 AM
There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.
today at 7:34 AM
> this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?
today at 7:29 AM
> Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed
By what?
You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.
today at 7:36 AM
Perhaps they are mistaking Sweden with Norway (whose nearly 100% hydropower system is constrained)
today at 7:45 AM
Most of electricity in Sweden is produced by:
1. Hydropower 40%
2. Nuclear 27%
3. Wind 22%
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...
today at 7:32 AM
It is.
today at 7:20 AM
I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.