and the lights go out, and the AI factories shut down, and your AC stops working, and people will drop like flies . . .

And the lament will be . . . why didn't AI warn us about this?

The article cites "Sierra Club data," which apparently arises because at the Sierra Club, they seem to have discovered that dangerous natural gas is not clean energy.

As a default, our "but her emails" and "Joe Biden is too old" media refers to the Sierra Club as an "environmental organization." (They do the same for the ignorance promoters at Greenpeace.)

The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir to resist the industrialization of wilderness, specifically the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is now underwater because of a dam that today provides so called "renewable energy" (and water to San Francisco).

John Muir lost his battle.

This is similar to the Republican Party which was founded in the mid 19th century to fight - or at least limit - the embrace and expansion of racism. Now the Republican Party functions effectively as an arm of the Ku Klux Klan; there are no forms of bigotry the Republican Party fails to embrace.

The membership of the modern day Sierra Club has never seen a wilderness it didn't want to convert into an industrial park for wind and solar energy, a failed reactionary scheme that has done nothing to address the extreme global heating now being observed.

On the other hand, the Sierra Club actively opposes the only form of immediately scalable energy with a low environmental impact, nuclear energy.

Two peas in a pod in my view, organizations that have abandoned their founding principles to embrace the opposite principles.

If the membership of the Sierra Club wants to understand why dangerous natural gas plants are being planned, rather than count how many there are being planned, the use of a mirror would help elucidate the matter.

The problem is not so much data centers, including those running this website, and the Sierra Club's websites. The problem is selective attention piled on top of ignorance.

Relating to the environment, I'd also suggest an informative & relevant reading below. It reveals a lot of what Altman and other AI developer/owners are hiding -- that they run an extraction industry.

Theirs is the untold high and unsustainable cost of planetary degradation and human suffering worldwide, from mining areas to "ghost workers."
As San Francisco (with the highest homeless population in the 3rd largest country) has been built on gold mining, so Silicon Valley is now built on lithium, the new "gray gold."

One example from chap 1, on one of the materials AI is built with...
"Silver Peak, NV (pop. 150) is the site of the only operating lithium mine in the U.S. It was acquired from Rockwood Holdings, Inc by chem company Albemarle Corporation in 2014 for $6.2 billion.

Elon Musk and other tech tycoons gather their wealth from Silver Peak's and other lithium and precious metal mines in other countries.
There are roughly 6.4 billion smartphones on the planet; smartphone batteries contain 3/10 of an ounce of lithium.

Each Tesla Model S electric car needs about 130 pounds of lithium for its battery pack. And while lithium batteries are the only mass-market option, they have a limited lifespan; and so once degraded, they're discarded as waste.
Elon's Gigafactory, 200 mi north of Silver Peak, is the world's largest lithium battery plant. Tesla also is the #1 battery consumer in the world, purchasing them from Panasonic and Samsung and repackaging them it its cars and home chargers.

Tesla is estimated to use more than 28,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually -- half the planet's total consumption. So Tesla could more accurately be described as a battery business..."

Lithium is only one example of what AI and Silicon Valley products are made of; 20 precious metals are mined worldwide to make electronic devices that are consumed and then dumped as waste.

Lithium is only one example example in a chapter that describes where and what (as previous gold mining polluted waterways and destroyed forests in the West) destroys whole ecosystems worldwide. AI history shows, like many entities of a democratic market economy, that while AI was once developed to do good, the unintended consequence today is that, so far, it's built for the power and profit of the few corporate owners in Silicon Valley at the expense of a) vast swaths of Earth and b) more humans than AI serves.
AI does have the potential to do greater good than harm, but humans have to apply the lessons of wealth "mining" -- an untold history -- and know its cost to Earth, humans, nations' social, economic, political relationships.
As it turns out, this is a worldwide problem that only a smart democratic administration of government can help with at scale.

Thanks for reading.




Throwing this in for perspective...

...sustainable.

Regrettably, there remains a large subset of people who believe that batteries are the "cure" for the inherent unreliability of so called "renewable energy." Huge industrial scale battery farms are being built around the world, including but hardly limited to California.

In response to a "renewable energy will save us" person writing here about how beautiful Tesla Powerwalls would make the solar and wind scam "green," I wrote this post, which refers to how much cobalt would be required to cover a (then) recent "Dunkelflaute" event in Germany:

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.

An excerpt from that post::

I'd point out that one reason restoring reactors is trending is to power AI development.
It's a "gift" that has done good and can restore cleaner energy at scale, but it's also being converted to corporate AI use. Any benefit humans get seems more like a consolation prize.
These guys need to think beyond consumer/national good, and much more toward worldwide unintended consequences of AI to humanity's future.
Amazon
Anthropic
Databricks
Google
Google DeepMind
Hugging Face
IBM
Imbue
Inflection
Microsoft
OpenAI
Palantir
RAND

One of these is extreme global heating. The other is the massive death toll resulting from air pollution. The unintended consequences of the use of fossil fuels is enormous, perhaps the greatest problem facing humanity. Nuclear energy is not risk free, nor is it without consequences, but that said, it is vastly superior to all other options and we ignore this clear reality at extreme danger to ourselves and future generations.

A problem that the nuclear industry has faced is the elevation of potential risks, and observed risks, over the massive benefits of clean energy it might provide. I believe firmly, and will not be dissuaded after decades of consideration, that the maintenance and building of nuclear reactors is the last best hope we have of saving what is left to save, and restoring what can be restored.

The use of energy is hardly limited to the use of computers or high end computational systems. We all use energy, and do so irrespective of the social and economic systems in which we live. Our conversation right now is energy intensive. Without energy neither you nor I would know what the other thinks.

It is unrealistic, and I think, unwise, to condemn any technology because it can be, or even is, abused. The question is ethical, not technical.

I agree that ethics are complicated in a culture which values money above all other values, but that said, I'm not about to become a luddite. I believe we need to be aware of both the risks and rewards of any technology and, as a society, choose to embrace the good while rejecting, or at least minimizing the bad. This of course, is not easy, and will not be addressed by any glib commentary I, or anyone else, might offer.

I have been involved in the use of high technology that has been used to save human lives. I would be equally capable of working on technology that could cost human lives. I have made a choice of which path to follow by virtue of my ethical training. I do believe that all engineering and science education should involve ethical training, but sadly it often doesn't.

This said, almost any high technology will involve people harmed by it, even if the overall benefit to society as a whole is huge.

There was a time at DU when the likes of Elon Musk was seen as a hero because of his stupid electric car. I remember this period here with some jaundiced amusement.

Now of course, he's been recognized as a racist thug, something he always was. He didn't morph into a racist thug. He started as one, a child of apartheid South Africa who did not make any effort to reject his upbringing.

The belief that electric cars are clean is at best dubious, as I've noted:

A paper addressing the idea that electric cars are "green."

Nevertheless the belief was and is widely held on the left because we haven't looked into the details. In technology, the details matter a great deal.

Thanks for your comment.

Folks need to bookmark this for future reference. Too much important DU information is not bookmarked, then is too often forgotten and has to be re-learned when these topics resurface on the main page.

Hopefully we'll build collective human capacity here to better deal with questions that affect future humans.