Same is true for meat. Meat is to nutrition what AI is to intelligence. An extremely wasteful, ultimately unnecessary version with better alternatives.

The main difference for all the complainers is of course that they already don’t use AI. Not using meat would, in contrast, require actual effort beyond moaning and bitching.

If your morals depend on whether it requires personal effort, you’re not moral, you’re a hypocrite.

We aren’t, though, not even close. And we’ve also been holding back over the years. Trump even paid a german company to abandon an already approved offshore windpark.

Even still, I beg people to stop falling for the same sensationalist trick that makes every conservative foam at the mouth about immigrants. PUT ABSOLUTE NUMBERS INTO RELATION TO SOMETHING!! What is the estimated 34 million in 2030 in percent? What is the impact of non-veganism in the same time? What percentages are we looking at?

Our outrage and effort should be in relation to the negative impact of each problem. Animal AG has a gigantic impact in every sensible metric, and it’s far far far bigger than AI. Be honest, do you think even a fraction of the loudest complainers about AIs resource use are vegan?

Can we really believe people whose morality stops wherever they’d personally need to actually do more than bitch and moan?

I’d love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.

Animal agriculture: The FAO’s most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030

We really have literacy crisis on our hands. Their estimates put the industry (if we pretend it’ll not crash and keep growing) at 34 million tonnes of CO2. What percentage of USAs yearly emissions is that? 0,6% of net emissions.

It’s not the animal AG that’s doing it, not the oil industry, and not the car industry. It’s the 0,6% that MAYBE might happen.

I say this not to ignore those things, but to sensitize your valid impulse to fix global climate change issues to the real culprits. Most importantly, I’d like people to adjust their levels of effort and outrage to the actual impacts instead.

If you cared as much as you pretend you do, you’d already be vegan.

Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.

It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.

Napkin math:

• 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
• To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
• So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
• That’s 2% of all americans

That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…

By the way, what other resources are we saving?

• Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
• Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
• Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish

The sad irony of efforts like that and stuff like Lemmy or Mastadon is that they HAVE to stay just a little too fiddly, too inaccessible, too rough. Otherwise, they become a victim of their own success. Suddenly, “normal” people show up and ruin everything. Scammers follow, bots follow, advertisers follow, etc. It’s like with piracy, where any page that’s known to “normal” people is very likely going to be taken down.