900,000 / 5 = 180,000
As of 2023, there are approximately 285 million registered motor vehicles in the United States, with around 96.9 million of those being cars.[1]
180,000 additional cars is something like less than one tenth of the decrease in registered cars between 2022 and 2023. There were five million fewer registered cars in 2023 than 2022.
900,000 / 50 = 18,000
Which is … random statistic comparison, about the same number of households in Bakersfield CA that are female householder with no husband present 2010 census) [2].
If there’s an argument to be made that AI is putting a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it certainly isn’t either of these.
Your personal CO2 emissions are more like a proportional fraction of global CO2 emissions. All of those factories and cargo ships and airplanes aren’t emitting CO2 just because. They’re doing it for individuals who buy those products and services, and therefore your household’s CO2 footprint is primarily external to the house itself.
Solar is so diffuse, just bringing it to where people need it has doubled the price purely in transmission infrastructure costs.
Reference: Australia - the place that’s supposed to be solar’s poster child has more than doubled electricity prices in the last three to four years because, unsurprisingly (we were warned), getting solar and wind to where they’re needed turns out to be incredibly expensive.
a dense battery with too much side effects (fumes, CO_2/etc. gases)
a less dense battery with much less side effects.
we did it for the fossil/oil infra, and that inarguably takes more time and energy compared to building solar farms.
Wave energy is dead in the water.
There are three big GHG emitting sectors, electricity, transport, and agriculture, and solar has only started to scratched the surface in a handful of countries electricity production.
The scale of solar / wind rollout necessary to make a significant impact globally is truly stupendous.
Look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Australia
The more solar and wind you have, the more gas you need.
Batteries, the ones that haven’t even been built yet, are only at hours-of-capacity scale. We need weeks of backup capacity, which is why we need gas.
I think they will point to the growth rate of capability and squabble over alternative histories.
Eg. If China was a friendly nation to its neighbors, the world would be more comfortable subsidizing their manufacturing and building out solar faster. https://share.google/images/fR5VmXmlygHn6yL2g
What's important is the cost of the total electricity production apparatus, seasonal storage and transport included. (and environmental cost and availability, meaning fossil fuels should be avoided)
And, a similar argument could be made that "just a tiny bit of uranium can provide so much power, why are we not using it?" completely disregarding the infrastructure cost of nuclear. So this argument does not make much sense IMO.
(to be clear, I'm not saying we should not do anything, just that it's not as easy as it sounds)
Also, consider that we have a connected grid outside of Texas and that the weather is not usually bad everywhere.
So 450 large planes flying that route.
I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.
Now, we just take the original prompter out of the loop, we can achieve a pure LLM "knowledge" economy!
Since my manager does not read any of that and wouldn't understand it even if he tried I can write down pretty much anything, making outrageous claims about my work and be happy about the highest salary increase in my team.
That's not nothing but also not that high relative to some other things. Addressing this is not going to do much to solve the overall problem that the US is emitting a lot of CO2. AI usage is probably going to grow over time. But it will have to grow a lot to get to displace e.g. transport, industrial heating, or agriculture as dominant sources of CO2 emissions.
Short term the tendency of AI data center providers to solve their energy needs with gas powered generation (mainly) is not great of course. It's opportunistic, there's extra underused gas generation capacity currently that's more or less readily available.
But long term there are some obvious cost savings there as well. Gas isn't cheap; even in the US. And gas turbines are actually scarce. Increased demand is hard to meet with just gas for this reason. AI data centers aren't picking the cheapest energy source but the easiest accessible energy source. Some companies are even looking at nuclear. And not because it's cheap. Likewise, some companies are apparently considering doing some AI compute in space (solar powered).
Long term, solar, wind, and batteries are likely to be the cheapest way to source energy in this sector as well as is already the case in other sectors. Energy is one of the largest cost components for providing AI compute and competition is likely to be fierce. There's no way that companies dependent on expensive forms of energy will be able to compete long term. The short term game is about grabbing market share. Surviving long term will require aggressive cost savings on energy generation.
1. Exploiting local laws to basically pollute in essentially residential areas. This is what's happening with Grok's Memphis DC [1]. The gas turbines count as "mobile" so don't need the same pollution controls;
2. Domestic electricity production is heavily natural gas dependent. This is significantly better than coal but obviously not as good as renewables. But we are creating all this new demand for natural gas that is going to do nothing but drive up the price for everybody. This isn't just data centers. It's the policy of massively increasing LNG exports; and
3. For those DCs connected to the local grid, dthey are essentially getting residential customers to pay for the infrastructure and to subsidize the energy usage. Thing is, we've been here before [2].
So we have people with less income because company spend is moving to AI and the money those people have is being further eaten away by higher electricity prices. This is going to be a problem long before the CO2 emissions will be.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
[2]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...
I'm seeing a big push back from just normal infra building but no one sees the other side - demand for AI is met. Taxes are paid. Jobs are secured.
This is really the most alarming thing about the AI boom: it's so much like 2000 and the dot-com bubble because so many companies never had a business model or revenue let alone made a profit.
That's not something you have to worry about because the risk is taken primarily by the companies themselves. ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly active users. That is humongous, considering such a new technology.
I wonder what your stance would be if the companies do start making profit and become rich through data centres. If that happens are you okay? Because I see that also a problem that people propose - companies getting too rich and extracting wealth. What’s the ideal situation?
In any case, I find this anti infra building a bit annoying if I may be direct. People want AI. Data centres are built to meet the demand. Profits are likely.
The likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle will survive by cuttings costs (ie firing people) and probably getting bailed out by the government, either with direct loans or simply with government contracts.
We're already seeing massive increases in homelessness. Now imagine if unemployment goes to 8-10%. We had higher unemployment in Covid but the government opened the money faucet to avoid a complete collapse. Unemployment peaked at around 10% in the GFC and it was both a massive wealth transfer to the already-wealthy and a massive decrease in real wages as entry-level positions disappeared.
You don't spend trillions in corporate investment to have the bubble collapse and society not to feel the pain.
This is not the case for any well run utility. Commercial customers will pay their share and have their own rates.
Residential power rates are heavily regulated and require a lot of work and justification to raise.
The one case you’re citing appears to be some failure or perhaps corruption. It’s not a universal rule.
The portable gas turbine units are already very efficient and have surprisingly good emissions controls. Especially the aero derived variety. The problem is dumping the exhaust at ~ground level. This can create hotspots of nitrogen oxides. Especially with so many units running at once. If you exhaust at 100'+, the chances of hazardous accumulation are negligible by comparison.
There's really no clean way to do this fast. You typically need FAA approval to build a stack that would be tall enough to be effective. The best hope for local residents is a rapid crash sometime soon.
Can't you make the same argument about anything consuming a scarce resource? Airplanes suck they use oil and make gas prices more expensive for drivers! Amazon sucks because their delivery trucks use oil and make gas more expensive for drivers! Of course, you can argue that airplanes and amazon provide some sort of value and therefore it's worth the consumption/price rises, but that just ends up being a roundabout way of saying "I hate airplanes" or whatever.
Thank you for putting it in perspective. All of these headlines that quote isolated emissions numbers without anything to compare it to are deliberately useless. It’s meant to ride the wave of anti-data center and anti-AI outrage, not to be actually useful for forming an opinion.
It’s also unhelpful when data center emissions is compared to personal household use or cars. The real comparison should be to other industrial and commercial operations. If we started putting datacenter emissions in context with other processes like global shipping, aluminum production, or other industrial scale activities people would realize it’s not a problem. Journalists aren’t doing that, though, because they want to tap into the anti-data center outrage in the zeitgeist right now.
I would go beyond that and say that they're deliberately misleading.
They're not quoting a big scary-sounding number out of context to try and be unhelpful - it's an intentional and active choice to push a specific narrative.
I have the same objection with the scaremongering titles "electric cars emit a ton of CO2! (If you assume they get all their energy from coal, anyway)".
Yes, cars use energy, AI uses energy, so do lots of other things. We should cut down on frivolous uses of energy, but we should definitely, immediately transition away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy. Then the title would be "AI adds no CO2 because how would it?".
https://www.homercityredevelopment.com/project-overview
Even if it does not provide base load (which the co-location with the AI data center suggests it may come close to), that single power plant will emit millions of tons of CO2 per year.
For some perspective, air travel produces on the order of 1 billion tons of CO2 annually. In other words, this AI adoption CO2 number is 1/1000th of the CO2 emissions of air travel alone.
Anyone doing hand-wringing about AI CO2 emissions but not giving a second thought to major contributors like air travel or industrial processes that produce many orders of magnitude more CO2 isn’t actually concerned about CO2 emissions. They’re just looking for reasons to be angry about AI or data centers.
Then there are the pause AI sorts that try to cash in on regulatory politics.
22.2% Nuclear
19.5% Renewable
31.7% Natural gas
26.0% Coal
0.6% Petroleum
And never mind a modern power grid vs an old one causing waste of 15-16%.
This small amount can easily be reduced to zero.
People keep raising AI’s environmental impact to me as a concern, and I’m open to learning more, but at this point it seems potentially even long term neutral if it really does insert the efficiencies to productivity that many claim it will.
For example: look up the co2 impacts of gas powered lawn equipment. By one number I found that in 2020 it released 30 million tons of co2 in the US alone. Yet, when this equipment was coming into popularity no one expressed the moral panic they are over AI.
I know people who will stomp around about how AI is bad, and then go use their gas powered leaf blower for a few hours.
Who is claiming this is an increase? What would the money have been spent on otherwise?
zahlman•1h ago
> This is not a small amount but equates to a relatively minor increase when viewed in the context of nationwide emissions.
About 64,000 people worth (or as the article frames it, 0.02% of said nationwide emissions).
The study itself is https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0e3b .