this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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You can power a datacenter with solar panels and hydro, there is no green way to raise cattle.
There is absolutely no green way to extract all the material needed to build a datacenter.
There is plenty of green ways to raise cattle, however with these ways you can't feed everyone beef at almost every meals.
Just when I'm ready to give up on this hivemind, you go and make a sane comment.
Thanks, I'm glad to see I'm not only one.
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.
So you're agreeing with him, right?
I'm just pointing out that the level of exploitation you apply into something play the biggest role in making it green or not.
Yeah but that's what the guy you replied to was also saying, so you're agreeing with him right? (Genuinely asking because I'm not sure i understand you, no ill will, i hope you understand)
What was the green way to raise cattle (asking as a cheeseburger lover). I don't see any real way to do so. Seaweed in their feed is a good way to reduce methane production I've read but I've never raised cattle, just a few hens in the backyard for eggs. They roam around eat the bugs, weeds, grass, etc but are all around an easy pet(?) to have.
5 hens, no roosters, roughly 2 dozen eggs a week. Obviously supplement with feed but care is easy. Hose down the coop on the outside, and replace pine chips which last a decent bit, but they compost/biodegrade and with chicken shit on them I think using them for mulch in the garden should be good for the garden as well..... The chickens may eat your garden though haha
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.
Energy is only a fraction of the issue and easily solvable, I'm not a 100% certain but I think that some mines are even powered with renewables energy.
The main issue is tailings, millions of cubic meters of toxic, sometime radioactive, full of heavy metals mud. The tailings are piled up behind dams that regularly breaks and contaminate entire regions.
Even of the dams don't break it is still hundred of square kilometers of land that is contaminated for millennia.
That is a massively easy problem to get around. I'm really not sure how you think there aren't safe ways to mine lol. Flouting shitty industrial practices in the name of getting people a $100 phone is the problem by shipping them to people viewed as cattle in less developed areas is the problem. One that's not even hard to fix.
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.
You can also not power a datacenter that's only for generating powerpoints and instead use the renewables to replace coal plants. Until all our necessities are covered by renewables and we've retired fossil fuels, we should be dialing back the conspicuous consumption.
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.
The worst thing about political activists is that in general these types of people have never built a real world solution to anything, especially large scale problems. These people will always be obsessed with the next ideological struggle allowing for more and more protests, demonstrations, riots, and revolutions instead of coming up with workable solutions to material problems.
Like problems politics and awareness are useful for, activists see the climate crisis as an ignorance and malice problems with easily solvable lack of awareness and systemic oppression. Maths, logistics, economic, and practical engineering considerations don't enter the arena in emotionally satisfying ways so they are considered trivial or already solved. Most activists would have no trouble cancelling someone because they said something mistaken once a long time ago. Maybe this is changing, but only because of public backlash. Not because they actually understand the consequences of publically shaming someone.
/s
Do you get it now? That's what it's like to be told you are the problem and you aren't capable by people who themselves can't solve this issue independently. If climate change is ever going to get solved we are going to need technical solutions while also trying to change things like systematic oppression and the problematic aspects of capitalism. Things like solar panels and wins turbines come from engineers not political activists. Carbon taxes and shale gas bans come from political activists. We need to work together, not be at each other's throats.
You can absolutely raise cattle in an energy neutral (or potentially even energy positive) way. Cattle, in nature, consume grass. Most of the energy the cows get from the grass comes from solar energy. If they're being raised on land that is not being used for anything else and no equipment or anything else is used, the area gathers more energy than it costs.
However, this is generally not how cattle is raised. In order to meet the large demands of our society other methods are used that cost more energy. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it won't be done on a large scale.
Unless you find a way to prevent cows methane farts, being energy neutral won't solve the problem.
The Methane is generated from chemical reactions involving what they eat. The corn they're fed frequently in the US (because of our massive corn subsidies) makes them worse than they would normally be. No matter what though, they expel what they take in. The carbon for the Methane is gathered by grass from carbon dioxide in the air. Methane breaks down relatively quickly back into CO2. It's mostly a non-issue if it were done in a healthy way.
Again, we aren't and won't be doing it sustainably (at a large scale), so this is all a thought exercise. If you were to raise cattle yourself on land that doesn't otherwise have a use, it'd be carbon and energy neutral. It's all a part of a system. Humans break that system, but cattle don't need to. They only do when humans are involved.
I keep hearing promising things about certain types of seaweed being an additive to cattle feed that dramatically lowers their emissions.
But that costs money, so I'm not holding my breath on factory farms implementing it on their own prerogative.
I'd rather switch the datacenters to green energy before trying to convince people to give up cheeseburgers.
We cannot afford to do one before the other. We're need to do both
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Quick googling shows that in 2021, agriculture produced 10.9 billion tons of emissions, while fossil fuels produced 36.8. There might be some overlap between the two, but I'm assuming not for ease of math.
The way I see it, doing both would be nice, but if we try that, fossil fuel companies and bacon enjoyers are going to end up on the same team, and that's going to be very difficult to fight. The corporations can easily push propaganda like "Fight this legislation, they want you to eat bugs and tofu instead of real meat for your Fourth of July barbecue," and then nothing gets done.
On the other hand, if we target fossil fuels first, we may be able to cut 77%, and by doing so we overcome the "it's too late, there's nothing we can do about it" mindset, and no longer have fossil fuel industries trying to fight us when we target agriculture next. Plus, getting people to drop meat keeps getting easier as meat alternatives get better.
We've got to strategize. Targeting both at once may be the only way we can hit the target, but it's so much less likely. I'd rather stop emissions after missing the target than fail to stop them at all.
Those figures are likely to be concerning CO2 emissions only because I know that methane, a significant part of agriculture's climate impact, increases climate heating far more than CO2 does, per ton, and this makes it hard to quantify climate harm due to emissions. (Though I'm not personally familiar with the figures or how they're calculated, so it's possible that yours were an aggregated comparison or similar)
I understand what you're saying about lobbying forces clubbing together, but we simply don't have time to attack one, then the other: Consider a world where we win the fossil fuel fight, but we're still fucked because of all the other sectors killing the planet — how do we overcome the "there's nothing we can do about it" when it too late. Ofc, "too late" isn't a hard cut off deadline (because if it were, we'd have already passed it), but we are exponentially heading to a complete climate collapse.
I'm arguing that if we want to avert the climate catastrophe, the average bacon eater does need to eat a heckton less bacon. But it's not the average bacon eater I'm worried about, it's the massive agricultural industry, which has financial interests that massively overlap with the fossil fuel industry. They're functionally already on the same side, and my opinion is that we won't start making progress in the battle against climate change until we acknowledge that.
Are these datacenters doing scientific research or are they generating AI images and crypto? These things do not have equal value to society.
I'm not computer worker person but I'm pretty sure most are just serving websites and podcasts and music and all the shit we actually love about the Internet. Websites like this, and Netflix, Amazon (horrible company but so glad I can buy shit on my phone that shows up in an hour or 2) even ones like Plex, pirate Bay types, or foss things. But also crypto and AI bullshit, and probably sex trafficking and illegal dangerous goods . Modern luxuries we enjoy come with bullshit attached. It's all or nothing as far as I see.
Crypto and AI are crazy power intensive to run. Far beyond what it takes a streaming service to send you a video file and considering many people are choosing streaming over driving their gasoline fueled car to the theater, it's a net gain.
That’s not the kind of data center its talking about
You know very well what the data enters in question are doing. They’re making money, that’s why they get funding. Science does not make enough money to fund it.
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.
Or you could use the materials necessary to create that data center and its energy production infrastructure and instead shut down coal and petrol energy generators.
You realize you need data centers for the platform you are using now, right?
You realize the point of decentralization is to not have to use data centers?
You realize there's a major difference between what we're doing here and the processing power necessary to train LLMs?
No that's not the point at all. Most of these instances are hosted on public clouds. Lemm.ee which is the instance I use is hosted on Hetzner I believe. Maybe you should actually listen to what instance admins are telling you instead of guessing.
Also the cloud is decentralized. Data centers are spread all over the world. Splitting them up smaller wouldn't reduce their power usage either. If anything it would increase it.
I agree, but I guess the scope is more about oppurtunity costs - "At maximum expanse of renewable energy, should we use that energy for fancy justifications of layoffs of middle to owning class tech jobs or for e.g. electrified heat pumps and vehicles for working and middle class people"
Isn't the majority of the problem with cattle the diet which causes more methane?
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.