There is a broad understanding for the need to fly less, as the aviation industry accounts for more than 2% of global CO2 emissions. Yet the data centres we depend on for computing already account for more than that, by some estimates up to 4% of global CO2 emissions.
But there are few calls or campaigns to compute less. If anything, it would appear that humankind has decided the best way forward is to compute more.
We are quicky becoming a generation of… generation.
Generate more images and video, stream your television shows, record your meetings, surveil your employees and customers, snap 10 photos of every scene to make sure you get the perfect one. Run it through an AI filter. Save everything in the cloud indefinitely. Keep feeding the generative tools with all that content. Rinse and repeat.
Except don't rinse.
All the while, oblivious governments are subsidising the establishment of more data centres to the detriment of local communities.
The data centres are the factories of our time. But we can not see them or their carbon footprint, so they are very easy to ignore. So we do. If we can stick with calling them clouds they even feel fluffy.
"A 2018 paper by researchers Lofti Belkhir and Ahmed Elmeligi forecast that computing would exceed 14pc of global emissions (based on 2016 levels) by 2040."
That was before generative AI.
« Data processing and storage has such a large carbon footprint for three reasons.
First, servers require electricity to run. Second, they need to be kept cool, which uses more power and also water. Third, the equipment itself is made from expensive resources and needs to be repaired and replaced.
“Computer hardware contains rare earth minerals and all sorts of stuff shipped from all over the world,” says Craven. »
« “One of the reasons why networking emissions are so high is because there is so little desire and capability to switch machines off because it will increase what we call the latency,” says Hussain.
Society demands that everything happens immediately, which means cloud services run constantly. “Everybody keeps everything humming at peak mode, just in case,” adds Hussain. »
A generation of generation. I mean, at least it's catchy, right?
@axbom Apparently somewhere along the way the fact that efficiency matters was forgotten.
We used to be taught to program efficiently and one would look up to the fellow students who solved a problem with minimal code. I'd to go Wow, how elegant, I wish I'd done it in such a succinct way.
That base philosophy spreads all ways: use all the data you need but only the data you need, don't invent the wheel unless it's necessary, use more efficient libraries... & measure speed and used resources!
It sometimes blows my mind to think back on how the first Desktop Publishing Software I used, powerful enough for producing print magazines, came on two 360KB floppy disks.
@axbom The impact of data giants on the #climatecrisis doesn't mean we should compute less, or pretend there's no such thing as AI or that r&d connected to it is unimportant.
What it does mean is that governments in developed nations need to pass stringent laws penalizing companies in massive financial terms for building or using data centers that are not carbon neutral. And by "building or using" I mean building or using ANYWHERE ON EARTH, not just within the borders of the developed nation.
@axbom problems with data giants is also they are way less regulated and doesn't really have natural cap. We can only have certain amount of planes on air. Obsession with get rich schemes with producing something while throwing shit at the wall can scale up way way more.
@axbom While data centers use water, they do not use up water. They take water - often from a local river - add heat, and return it (to the same river). There are problems with this, but water loss is not one.
Data centers are already moving to places where there is a lot of renewable energy on the grid as that energy is cheaper. Where I live the local utility generated 103% of all customer demanded electric from wind (of course wind doesn't blow all the time so I'm not sure what they means). Which is why Microsoft and Facebook have several data centers in the area, and Apple is opening soon. (I think Google also has one but I cannot verify that)
@axbom Computing is a growing issue for energy and water consumption, however storage isn’t. If there was only a demand for more cloud storage, we wouldn’t be there. Cryptocurrency mining and more recently LLM systems training and operation amount for the disproportionate part of computing’s carbon footprint.
One thing I'm hopeful about wrt to data centres is that they can be decarbonised relatively easily -- just add more renewable energy. And RE (esp solar) is gaining ground real quick.
This is in contrast to aviation where decarbonisation is a long way off
@peter@axbom I literally have no idea but just wonder what the upper limit is on producing renewable energy. Will energy needs rise so dramatically that at some point we simply cannot generate enough renewable energy to satisfy it all?
Plus: renewable energy production comes with its own environmental costs (materials, occupying space that could be habitats, etc.)
@axbom Seeing the latest hyped AI compute server at Nvidia and the people who celebrate AI for unemploying over 210,000 tech workers, I am scared. Nobody talks about how much energy it wastes. This is the other aspect. Most tech workers can work from home.
@axbom Yes, data & compute have big environmental impacts. Yes, aviation has big environmental impacts. However, pitting them against each other like this in a headline is a classic Telegraph "whataboutery" tactic. It encourages people to feel slightly better about their flying because, apparently, data giants are worse. The article would have stood up fine without comparisons to flying.
They do this a lot on environmental issues. For example, there are lots of pro hydrogen power articles, but really written out in a way that denigrates electric cars. Hydrogen cars aren't available yet, so why not stick to petrol/gas until they are? It's misdirection, and suspiciously always in ways that benefit fossil fuel companies. Don't worry about flying, worry about your number of photos.
Ignoring flight comparison, the article is informative for the general public, however...
There's not much mention of the fact that the electricity (in the UK, at least) has a decent chance of becoming carbon neutral in a much shorter time than jet fuel will.
Crypto doesn't get a mention. People use data centres for crypto mining still, don't they?
I'm not condoning frivolous usage of AI, given its energy use. I don't need Bing to give me a Co-pilot response on half my search results, it's a waste of energy.
@axbom I'm having some concern with the relentless march of power consumption, particularly for GPUs. 1000W each for nVidia's latest AI-focused silicon it seems?
@axbom In tech, everything is more, more, more. The whole model is based on massively increasing production and consumption. Digital is an accelerant on the fire. We much slow down, as you say, do less, consume less, compute less and think more about the consequences of what we are doing.
Yeah, it’s not obvious how to relate all the figures to one another. The article you shared says ”Around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions come from aviation” which is consistent with the data in the article I linked to as well.
I’ve not seen a ”percentage of global warming” figure for the IT industry but when it comes to data centers, CO2 is also just one aspect of it. Mineral mining, transportation (including flights), deliveries to and from facilities, massive water consumption, etceteras. It’s certainly up there.
That's actually an important aspect: the rise of computing has a lot to do with cost-cutting.
However: The equation misses all the external costs, which eventually the global society has to bear - not only in terms of money, but also in terms of human suffering and destruction of nature.
The main one is probably that the energy needs of aviation are hard to electrify, while computing is already electric. And power production can (& must) be switched to renewables.
So for computation the main problem is that the demand is growing fast while the transition of power production is lagging behind. For aviation there is not really a viable solution at all.
But both also have other issues than just their power needs, of course.
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