Just when I'm ready to give up on this hivemind, you go and make a sane comment.

There's a billion obese people in the world and tons of food get wasted every second. Same for hardware, there's disposable ecigs and they put leds on packages now. Unlimited greed and excess can hardly be green in every case scenario.

There is absolutely no green way to extract all the material needed to build a datacenter.

Isn't this just energy dependent lol? Renewable energy and safe mining practices is all it takes. Let alone space mining, dyson spheres, cold fusion, even regular nuclear.

Actually there are ways to do that. Recycling of materials used in various technologies (including lithium batteries and solar panels) is always improving. Chip companies like Intel are increasingly pushing for conflict free minerals. Just because something isn't being done in a sustainable way doesn't mean it can't be done sustainably, just like with farming.

What is the difficult part for datacenters, that isn't true of every other building? I was under the impression that the most inefficient part of most electronics is the batteries, which is a problem looking to go away with new chemistries.

The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.

Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.

Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.

Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.

This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.

There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!!! This isn’t aimed at you.

Unless you find a way to prevent cows methane farts, being energy neutral won't solve the problem.

We cannot afford to do one before the other. We're need to do both

To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

(emphasis mine)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357

Are these datacenters doing scientific research or are they generating AI images and crypto? These things do not have equal value to society.

People giving up cheeseburgers and SUVs has been on the table for at least forty years. If you’re younger than forty, that’s your entire lifetime. It has never not been a problem. It has always been exacerbated by republiQans. It will not change, it will not go away, it will never be wrong. Give up cheeseburgers and SUVs or kill the planet with arrogance and greed.

Guess which one we’ve picked for forty years. G’head. Guess.

You realize you need data centers for the platform you are using now, right?

There's also a food chain issue. Vegan diets are less CO2 intensive per calorie. There are ways to have some meat with negligible CO2 impact, but it's not going to be coming from factory farms.