By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Daily Caller.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm. New AI applications are announced daily. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and many companies tout plans for artificial intelligence capabilities. But the AI revolution is bad news for global efforts to achieve net-zero emissions.
The AI revolution is based on high-performance AI chips, which are capable of revolutionary levels of computer processing power and capable of sorting through vast amounts of stored data. Multiple AI chips reside on each of dozens of boards, housed in endless racks of servers, which are sited in warehouse-sized AI data centers. While the rack of a conventional server of a data center draws roughly seven kilowatts of electricity, an AI server rack can use up to 50 kilowatts of power.
Spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 44% over the next six years. Total data center power requirements will increase by at least a factor of six and maybe by as much as 10 times by 2029. Greenhouse gas emissions from AI data centers will increase by similar amount.
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers account for 1-1.5 percent of world electricity use and are responsible for about one percent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. But the rapid growth of AI infrastructure, coupled with a jump in electricity consumption as power-hungry AI server racks replace conventional server racks, will cause carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from data centers to skyrocket. Artificial intelligence will become a major contributor to global CO2 emissions by 2030, contrary to Net Zero goals.
Proponents define Net Zero as a zero balance between the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from human industrial processes and the amount removed from the atmosphere. They claim that Net Zero must be attained by 2050 to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5oC above the background temperature level of the 1800s. Wind turbines, solar panels, heat pumps, biofuels, hydrogen fuel, and carbon dioxide capture and storage are all promoted as vehicles to get to Net Zero.
But virtually nothing that our modern society does is “zero emissions.” If you build a house, sizeable greenhouse gases are emitted by cutting down trees for producing lumber, mining materials and manufacturing wire and components for electricity, producing plastic or copper for pipes, manufacturing drywall, roofing, brick, glass, concrete, and many other materials. Manufacturing of household furnishings, such as furniture, appliances, and computers, also emits large quantities of CO2. Transportation of all these materials emits greenhouse gases. Even a grass hut isn’t Net Zero. CO2 is released when you cut down grass and wood to build the hut.
Net Zero is fundamentally a zero-growth ideology. The United Nations, the International Energy Agency, and green leaders call for an eight percent reduction in world energy consumption by 2050. But energy consumption increased 47 percent from 2000 to 2021. They call for a 40 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. But global CO2 emissions increased by 44 percent from 2000 to 2021. The AI revolution and other programs for societal development run contrary to the zero-growth plans of Net Zero.
Today, about 700 million people do not have access to electricity. Another two billion people suffer from daily electrical power blackouts. If your home in the United States has an air conditioner, you consume triple the electricity that is used by people in one-third of Earth’s population. Net Zero demands for a global reduction in energy use run counter to history and common sense.
Far away from artificial intelligence, the residents of developing nations lack many things that we take for granted in wealthy nations. People in the US and Europe enjoy at least one vehicle for every two residents, compared to fewer than four vehicles per 100 people in India and Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, where daily temperatures often exceed 86oF (30oC), only one in sixteen people has air conditioning. Forty percent of these people don’t even own a fan. As another example, residents in wealthy countries use about 20 times as much plastic as residents in undeveloped countries. The people of developing nations will choose economic growth over the no-growth policies of Net Zero.
Driven by the expansion of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the need for economic growth in developing countries, there is zero chance that Net Zero will be achieved by 2050. Energy consumption and CO2 emissions will continue to rise for decades to come.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
By the Green Blob’s definition, there are too many people anyway, so why do they need energy?
It is the vision of the Ruling Class Elite to reduce the world population.
This is why they put so much energy in education, the media, and movies towards creating the Green Blob, aka mindless drones who run around with picket signs, screaming for people to cut off their nose to spite their face.
These very same Green Blobbers then get in their fossil fuel powered vehicles, return to their air conditioned homes, get food from their refrigerators, prepare it on their stoves, then sit down to watch Rachel’s Madnow for their evening lecture on how bad those evil people on the right are because they don’t demonstrate their care for and need to place planet over humanity. If it were not so sadly pathetic we might be able to laugh.
A reduction in world population is coming towards us regardless of what anyone does about emissions. Its pretty straightforward matter of demographics. We started out with a fall in infant mortality. This took some time to register, and initially women kept on having as many children as before. The result was a baby boom as more survived.
This boom then stopped when women realized that there was no need to have six kids to make sure two survived. It was possible to have two and be confident they would both survive. Consequently women have taken control and stopped having as many children. It turns out that endless childbearing is not what anyone wanted. What they wanted was a good life for themselves and a good life for a small number of children.
This has happened all over the world, and its been helped by the increasing availability of sterilization and contraception. But even without that being universally easily available, humans have historically found ways to have sex without pregnancy. As Lady Asquith is reported to have said to a confidant, “Henry always withdrew in time, such a noble man”.
Quite so!
The determining factor is what women want, and given confidence in their kids surviving, what they turn out to want is leisure and work opportunities, to give the ones they do have a good future, and in country after country we see this leading to less than replacement birth rates. It is happening to China at the moment, just to give one very significant example, and it will happen in Africa sooner than anyone realizes. And its well under way in Europe, of course.
Malthus’s plan for survival was that the majority of the world’s population, the lower class undesirables, should be herded into dense cities where poor living conditions and easily transmissible diseases would reduce their life spans and numbers, making them easier to control. In this way the Earth’s bounty would be available for the better people, such as himself and his compatriots, to enjoy.
Ehrlich, perhaps the most vocal of Malthus’s later day followers, has decried that the projections of population decreases when economic and living conditions improve are an obvious, scurrilous lie. Does it seem that, just maybe, there are more busy closet Malthusians around the world than people who have the courage to openly declare themselves?
You make some good points but the Baby Boom was the direct result of the returning soldiers at the end of WWII and a lack of efficient contraceptive methods in cultures where abortion was illegal. I don’t deny that we are facing generational failure to procreate at sufficient rates to maintain or grow population rates. This is problematic in welfare states where the working middle class support a longer living retirement class placing a ever increasing burden on medicare and medicaid.
However, my point is that the Ruling Class Elite (RCE) who direct the Bureaucratic State with an assist from the Best Politicians their RCE money can buy, in economically prosperous countries’ such as the United States, UK, et. al., wish to significantly reduce their middle class population and replace them with an immigrant population to do the heavy lifting jobs along with a smaller subservient Bureaucratic middle class to direct the tasks of controlling the shrinking population of millennial/GenZ public school indoctrinated voting drones and government. Once the FCE gets past the obligations of aging Boomers they will be replaced by obedient generations who have been inculcated with self gratification and a decreasing libido.
The FCE is carrying out multiple strategies toward a One World Global Governance. This can be illustrated in the recent specific strategy of performing gain of function research inside a communist country with U.S. Tax Dollars, of a lab manufactured virus that targets the elderly and infirmed, for the intentional release into the general population, that percentage of the population who represent the heaviest burden to government expenditure. In the meantime, setting precedent using the Legacy Media Klaxon to condition GenX,Y,&Z to obediently accept lockdown by the FCE controlled Bureaucracy that created the damn virus to begin with.
It is not world population they are concerned about reducing, as you point out that will come naturally, it is the urgent reduction of energy and government funds consuming middle class that the FCE is targeting with no intention for their replacement when low paid illegal immigrants will serve nicely.
They also have warm clothes, warm shoes, warm houses, warm transportation, and warm workplaces to shield them from the cold.
Net zero / climate alarmism is just one of several means towards a totalitarian end. If it turns out that AI is a much more effective means in this regard, net zero will become a much lower priority.
When peoples’ AI stops working because the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, maybe they will look more favorably on nuclear power — safe, clean, reliable nuclear power.
If we kept developing nuclear for the past half century- our energy world would be almost 100% nuclear.
maybe the electrical generation part of it.
The environmentalists wanted us to use conventional(fossil) fuels instead of nuclear.
Or are covered in ice from the coming Grand Solar Minimum. NOAA is forecasting the Sunspot Number to start dropping in 2025 and to keep dropping to zero in 2040 when their forecast ends. Fewer sunspots mean colder temperatures for the Earth.
As the Bertolt Brecht lyrics from “Cabaret” put it,
“A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around,
That clinking clanking sound
Can make the world go ’round.”
What will be the source of all the money that’s needed to maintain the AI revolution? To whom will the AI producers sell their product? Governments will be interested but AI is a threat to put them out of business, just as it is other forms of management. OK, Chat GPT can sell quality term papers to overworked college students but where does it go from there? There’s a limited demand for AI constructed art in the style of Jasper Johns or the depressing fiction of Cormac McCarthy. It’s possible that McKinzey & Company could grab the handle bars of AI but its economics would only lower their astronomical billings. Perhaps AI could reinforce the claims of the anti-fossil fuel freaks just on the basis the mountains of published bogus evidence. And will the various varietals of AI agree on everything? How will the AI disputes be resolved, should any arise?
“Chat GPT can sell quality term papers to overworked college students ”
Instructors will design class exercises that do not require term papers.
“Copy and paste” has been used for years. AI term papers and other such work will have no value. Anti-learning tactics predate Pythagoras.
The best approach will be to restrict educational experiences to those that want to learn.
I remember quite well that one engineering professor told his class that he gave only open book exams – bring as many as you wanted. Implied was that lazy professors had closed book exams, relying on memory – what was that now: F=?
And?
I don’t know about term papers, but I see a lot of articles and posts (fb linked in etc) that are VERY clearly AI generated. There’s a tone to them that makes it pretty obvious.
I don’t know enough to know if there’s a way around that, though.
Ergo, they’re simply a form of spam.
Yes, but will AI reveal the TRUTH….the Dark Side of rooftop solar panels?
Depends on what you mean by AI
https://youtu.be/SKFf1PFb7OE?si=UDeOxqaCMjm5YoQA
When I grew up it was Artificial Insemination!
Now it’s Artificial Information Insemination!
Artificial Indoctrination?
“AI” — A misnomer if there ever was one — has to be trained. Who will program it and who will train it?
The machines become self aware and get rid of the humans and their silly climate neuroses….
Don’t Panic!
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
By Richard Brautigan – 1968
Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology.
There is also a 3 part documentary of the same title by the BBC, available on Vimeo:
A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Richard Brautigan is, perhaps, best known for the novel Trout Fishing in America (1967). Some found it interesting — “comical critiques of mainstream American society and culture”.
Lovely. Thanks.
Story tip – A Look at the Fundamental Hypothesis of Global Warming – American Thinker
Story tip – Tesla battery on fire at Bouldercombe energy storage site, Genex confirms – ABC News
The solution must be to mask AI´s before King Charles climate clock runs out of time – yet – again.
Charles the Halfwit doesn’t know what day of the week it is
There’s an app for that.
Story tip:
“ U.S. automaker Ford Motor Company announced on Monday that it would be pausing the construction of a billion-dollar plant in Michigan due to uncertainties surrounding its ability to operate competitively”
https://civildeadline.com/ford-backoffs-ev-plan/
Ford U.K. is depending on government diktats for EV sales
Reportedly, Ford loses $60K per EV. $60K!
Good news
Alok Sharma will be standing down at the election
https://order-order.com/2023/09/27/sir-alok-sharma-to-stand-down-at-next-election/
Those net-zero muppets haven’t any sort of clue what they’re dealing with
Apart from and also, that every effort they make to reduce emissions:
Take as a baseline Douglas Fir trees in their native land/soil
They pull down 5 tonnes per acre of CO₂ per year and if they’re not ‘harvested’ or burned, most ## of that stays within the forest.
‘Most’ because all plants feed (typically about 30% of all the) sugar they make to the soil bacteria.
Those bacteria make, in equal measure, more bacteria and release the rest as CO₂
So do we guesstimate 4 tonnes per acres per year of captured CO₂
Take that to a rainforest covering Australia, as there should be and was till humans destroyed it
A rainforest covering Aus would capture 9.6GTonnes per year = to about 1.1ppm
Take that to a rainforest covering ‘Sahara‘, as there should be and was till humans destroyed it
A rainforest covering Sahara would capture 89GTonnes per year = to about 12.3ppm
As the compounding annual rise of atmospheric CO₂ is about 2ppm, those 2 measures turn the rise to an annual fall of about 11ppm per year
“Why bother with Australia when Sahara does the heavy lifting? you might wonder.
Because a forest on Australia would switch off ENSO.
The forest would work to destroy the high pressure ridge/system / ‘heat dome’ that normally sits on Aus so there’d be much much more onshore winds than presently
And those winds (along the eastern seaboard) would drain the energy out of the warm pool that accumulates in the waters there = the warm pool that causes El Nino when it gets too big and collapses.
As El Nino appears to be the only thing which actually causes any measurable rise in ‘global temperature‘ – the warmists would have nothing left to rave about.
i.e. CO₂ levels would be falling (emissions would seem to have stopped) and temps would no longer be rising
jobz a guddun
and whatever puny amount of sea level rise we currently have would stop, probably reverse.
because in a forest, the carbon there is incidental to what trees actually are.
Trees are huge water storage tanks/sponges/cisterns and, via the mecahism of feeding sugar to soil bacteria, they pump a lot of water into the ground.
Thus, trees could be made of Aluminium, Iron, Titanium, Silicon or anything that would ‘hold them up’ and give them shape, structure and form.
Their important function is the absorption, storage, leakage and controlled release of water.
That water storage alone would put the brakes on sea-level rise..
But also, those hot dry places would no longer be raising immense amounts of dust, both airborne and water-borne.
Some of us would suggest that that dust alone, via Archimedes when it falls and is washed into the sea, is what’s causing ‘most all the observed sea-level rise anyway
The increased CO2 has lead to an increase in greening of the Sahara equal to the area of France and Germany combined.
Turn AI against them starting with methods to undermine hopeless policies while improving the lot of citizens with better education, navigating red tape, watching the FBI and DoJ, and detecting gold bar accumulation by dear leaders. AI assistance in uncovering the remaining secret bank accounts in Switzerland would also help.
He who controls the AIs controls the people.
What is the reference for this requirement? Is it for running queries (‘prompts’) against a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model, or just for training the models?
The difference in these two kinds of effort is analogous to the difference in effort of reading a novel or writing a novel.
GPT-4 outshines its predecessor GPT-3 with its 100 trillion parameters, compared to GPT -3’s 175 billion parameters, where a parameter is basically a weighted variable using in transforming inputs to outputs.
As these models grow in size, their skill increases (theoretically:) with subsequent decrease in the need to retrain the models.
In comparison, the Google Search Index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over one million terabytes in size (spread all over the world in Google’s power-hungry empire of data farms)
| The AI Revolution Is Bad News for Net Zero
[Answering my own post] I believe that this alarm about the energy requirements is baseless. In other words, these so-called “AI” data centers are just a fraction of the size of Google’s own server farms, and are, in effect, competing with conventional ‘dumb’ search engines. So if they’re successful we can expect at least two things to happen:
1) These “AI” servers will merge and replace the dumb ones.
2) The AI servers are more efficient than the dumb ones, in the sense that their responses will be more comprehensive and detailed. (Accuracy? Well they said they’re working on that. Google isn’t close to perfection in this area either.)
And, as I pointed above, I don’t think we’re talking about training the GPT models (think bitcoin mining). That won’t be done on the public servers (correct me if I’m wrong). These servers are just running queries against the “pre-built” models. No training required, right? So I don’t think that merely running a GPT prompt will require any more energy than an old-fashioned Google query. And as the models evolve, they will become evermore efficient and ubiquitous.
So, don’t worry about being roasted in an AI oven, worry instead that these clever little bots will become so efficient and tiny that, someday soon, they will be hosted inside your cranium!
Story tip:
Is AI grid battery management fit for purpose?
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2023/09/27/tesla-megapack-on-fire-at-bouldercombe-big-battery-in-queensland/
Battery goes up in smoke during commissioning. Excellent detailed article.
Very nice. I have a couple questions. I don’t understand the whole computer processing thing but something jumps out at me. If AI is using way more processors and each processor has more stuff what is the life expectancy of all that stuff in each processor and the life expectancy of the processors themselves? Is all of this stuff recyclable? I see massive recycling problems ahead the same as wind and solar.
As for the problem of not achieving net zero, I don’t think the CAGW monsters are concerned with that. My reason was apparent when I read your definition of net zero.
“Proponents define Net Zero as a zero balance between the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from human industrial processes and the amount removed from the atmosphere.”
The key phrase is from industrial processes. They will move the goal posts and redefine net zero so that we are only addressing problems like industrial processes and things like that not AI.
Bloomberg’s green-energy research team estimated will cost $US200 Trillion so stop global warming by 2050. All the stocks, gold, saving, and money in the world add up to $189 Trillion. Nobody would vote for spending all of their money stop a degree or two of warming.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain#xj4y7vzkg
“Nobody would vote for spending all of their money stop a degree or two of warming.”
Especially if there is no guarantee that spending that money will have any effect on Earth’s temperatures. And that is the case: There is no guarantee, and in fact, these people are just speculating when they claim to be able to control the temperatures by controlling the amount of CO2. There is no evidence CO2 is the control knob of the climate.
The greens are totally unaware of the numbers that the article presents, or they like to pretend they don’t exist.Or that people without these basic amenities have to be prepared to live without them because what’s more important than saving the planet?
Bloomberg green-energy research team estimates $US200 trillion so stop warming. All the gold, stocks, savings and cash in the world add up to $US187 trillion. That whole scheme is completely unaffordable, if it even made sense.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain#xj4y7vzkg
4.6 million die from cold-related weather causes, mainly from increased strokes and heart attacks from blood vessels constricting due to the cold raising blood pressure, each year compared to 500,000 dying from heat-related causes.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext