That's a standard problem with ecology. I can't use a plastic straw which has negligible impact but fishing industry can dump 640,000 tonnes of plastic every year and that's fine. Let's just ignore that.
You go on holiday once a year with the efficient normal flight - bad guy. Ritch person uses private jet for no good reason - that's normal. Let's ignore those emissions and create special rules for the airlines so they don't have to worry about it too much.
Private jets pollution doubled during one year and it's probably the worst way to travel for the environment but I hope you have spent your life savings for a slightly better car to compensate that. We can't inconvenience ritch people, right?
It is this way because the rich people control everything. They won't lift a finger to change if they think they can scam 10,000,000 people into lives of utter inconvencience and guilt to "offset" their own pollution. Hint; every one of us could live in caves and recycle our everything with stillsuits and the rich's portion would just expand to fill the voids we left. This isn't a game with a high score. The hands of the many must join as one to cross the river of life.
It's why all carbon should be a currency distributed to all people like an UBI. Let's say sustainable amount of CO2 emissions is 8 billion ton and there are 8 billion people, so everybody gets 1 ton per year. You want to pull oil it if the ground, pay in CO2 coin and ask the buyer to pay in turn. Rich guy wants to fly a private jet, they pay the oil producer. Not enough coin, buy with dollars from someone poor that drives a bike and has excess CO2 coins.
It seems fair to me. Everybody is equal, it keeps the market intact while keeping capitalism within sustainable emissions and distributes some wealth.
Of course no rich guy or oil producer is going to accept that, at least not until some people figuratively start building the wooden platform and sharpen the blade to a razor edge.
pre edit: this is just a pointless rant. Your time is precious. Consider skipping it
Please don't take my statement as arguing against your point (I like where you are coming from).
I don't even need sources, I rarely believe metrics in the first place because it is so difficult to conceive and even harder to conduct studies at this scale. This isn't even a possibility in my mind, but:
If everyone that wasn't in the global top 10% of wealth went full Fremen, would the problem truly continue to exist? I doubt it because much of the much industry owned by our increasingly indulgent hoarders wouldn't be necessary. There wouldn't be regular folks to make or buy the product. We'd be hiding under the sand in a cave while drinking our own pee.
I'm not knocking it - I haven't tried it. All at once, anyways.
The gluttonous upper crust would still be jetting to the poles and burning tires for light, but I feel like that would be a much smaller burden on our planet's ability to support life as we've known it than industry on a massive global scale.
I don't know what my point is exactly. I don't think I believe we'll find a workable solution without a cataclysm. Let's go with: selfish assholes are gonna earn their title every time. Regular folks shouldn't be told that their combined efforts won't put a dent in the problem. The ultra rich process nature into poison in order to gain more wealth and power over their peasants. Weakening public education and access to healthcare helps them sell their low quality, single use poisonous trinkets. Having a bunch of money isn't useful if there aren't a lot of folks that have little or even less money. Power, money, knowledge - resource - however you want to frame it.
But then the rich could just overpopulate and use their least favorite offspring as peasants...
Ugh. I should just delete this comment as I don't know what my central statement is. I am certainly not disagreeing. Maybe its that we shouldnt accept futility even though our efforts may truly be futile. To encourage integrity and contentment among our masses. It's very possible for the inhabitants to overcome our downward trend - but if we end up failing, there is still no reason we should accept defeat and be the poor, uneducated, meager servants they see us as.
Fuck the powers that don't respect every life equally. Even if resistance isn't effective, I'd rather suffer than accept a darker future. (I won't have kids. Easy for me to say)
Ugh. Sorry if anyone reads this. I just needed to vent I guess. Thanks for being interested and making the post and conversation. Be well all
every one of us could live in caves and recycle our everything with stillsuits
I wish this was an option
Yeah let's not do anything because something else is worse.
In just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches. In the U.K., at least 4.4 billion straws are estimated to be thrown away annually.
Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. You're wasting time and money and not solving any problem in the process.
You also have a nice distraction while the actual source of the problem is getting worse.
UK has banned plastic straws in 2020 and guess what. Nothing has changed. We're still drowning in plastic. UK doesn't dump plastic waste in the ocean so the straws you see on the beaches aren't from here anyway. Never were. No problem was solved
Private jets is a very small part of airplane pollution and four people travelling in a Chevy Suburban with a big V8 actually use less fuel per km per passenger than the big passenger airplanes use per km per passenger. That's not even taking non CO2 pollution into consideration.
People in general rely on airplanes way too much, may it be for personal travel or to get shit shipped to them ASAP, it's not just a rich people issue.
AI disagrees but yeah. We need more trains
Private planes emit significantly more CO2 than passenger planes per passenger. Here's why:
- Fewer passengers: Private jets are designed to carry a small number of people, often just a handful. Passenger planes, on the other hand, can carry hundreds of passengers. This means the emissions from a private jet are spread out among far fewer people.
- More frequent takeoffs and landings: Private jets often take off and land from smaller airports, which can mean shorter flights. Takeoff and landing are the most fuel-intensive parts of a flight, so these short trips contribute disproportionately to a private jet's CO2 emissions.
Studies estimate that private jets emit 5 to 14 times more CO2 per passenger compared to commercial airlines [Transport & Environment].
But there are so many more poors. If we all do our very best we can come close to breaking even with the damage done by the rich and mega corporations and help alleviate them of any guilt they might otherwise experience.
The solution is obviously another coup in Guatemala to reduce their power usage
the vast majority of pollution is created by the richest people in the world.
99% of the planet could produce zero pollution for the rest of our lives and it wouldn't even make a dent in the amount of pollution created by the billionaire class.
This is just not true, unless you're counting manufacturing as part of the pollution from the billionaires. We consume the products produced in those factories, so we're not free from that blame.
That's true, manufacturing is a huge part. I just wish there were more regulations and enforcement of those. Maybe even some standardized labels on products for certified carbon neutral manufacturers. Otherwise it's next to impossible for most people to avoid certain products.
I'd be very interested in the source for this...
America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html
The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.
Take a look at the Cargill family, 14 billionaires. From the wiki about the current CEO:
In 2019, former U.S. Congressman Henry A. Waxman, in a report by Mighty Earth, called Cargill "the worst company in the world" and noted that it drives "the most important problems facing our world" (deforestation, pollution, climate change, exploitation) "at a scale that dwarfs their closest competitors."
Do you think that is because they use every cent to burn coal and oil in their backyard, or
do you think it is because they produce and sell products to consumers which can not be produced without harm to the environment?
99% of the planet could produce zero pollution for the rest of our lives and it wouldn’t even make a dent in the amount of pollution created by the billionaire class.
How do you think they would create that damage to the environment if nobody would buy their products?
The general public has sadly been guilted into the idea that dealing with the vast majority of pollution is their problem. Don't get me wrong, there is some personal responsibility, but much of it is out of our hands.
Marketing is everyone's common enemy.
With a cheap crappy product and a high ratio spent on marketing you can successfully sell absolute garbage to a large number of people and still turn a calculated profit. That shouldn't be possible. Taxation on advertising should be high enough to crush businesses that are almost exclusively marketing machines (I'm looking at you sugar drink industry).
Removed the common enemy (new ‘tube links be trackin’):
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/tHEOGrkhDp0?si=4ykOGtaMACaAs7i4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Please delete this, this is not a meme, this is real life.
:,(
For real. I thought I was in NotTheOnion.
I mean, there are good uses as well. Just as an example:
- Providing helpful information: People are looking for information to reduce their environmental footprint. Fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps uses AI to suggest routes that have fewer hills, less traffic, and constant speeds with the same or similar ETA. Since launching in October 2021, fuel-efficient routing is estimated to have helped prevent more than 2.4 million metric tons of CO2e emissions — the equivalent of taking approximately 500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for a year.
- Predicting climate-related events: Floods are the most common natural disaster, causing thousands of fatalities and disrupting the lives of millions every year. Since 2018, Google Research has been working on our flood forecasting initiative, which uses advanced AI and geospatial analysis to provide real-time flooding information so communities and individuals can prepare for and respond to riverine floods. Our Flood Hub platform is available to more than 80 countries, providing forecasts up to seven days in advance for 460 million people.
- Optimizing climate action: Contrails — the thin, white lines you sometimes see behind airplanes — have a surprisingly large impact on our climate. The 2022 IPCC report noted that contrail clouds account for roughly 35% of aviation's global warming impact — which is over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel. Google Research teamed up with American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy to bring together huge amounts of data — like satellite imagery, weather and flight path data — and used AI to develop contrail forecast maps to test if pilots can choose routes that avoid creating contrails. After these test flights, we found that the pilots reduced contrails by 54%.
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/report-ai-sustainability-google-cop28/
Even something like household phantom power currently uses more energy than AI at data centers.
I'm all for putting pressure on corporate climate impact and finally putting to rest the propaganda of personal responsibility dreamt up by lobbyists, but I don't know that 'AI' is the right Boogeyman here.
AI isn't the boogeyman, the corpos using it for dumb shit is.
Exactly: replace AI with "crypto mining" or any other waste of processing power in this paragraph and it is just as relevant...
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I personally find googles fuel savings optimistic and/or flat out misleading. "Hey, you could turn off your usual route here and get there in a similar time.... Or you could stay on your usual route and save 2% on gas" seems to be a very frequent occurrence for me.
I also don't think that needs AI. The pathfinding algorithm just needs to apply different weights to the choices based on things like changes in elevation, number of stop signs, total distance, etc. Navigation systems from yester-year could do this well before the prevalence of AI. That said, AI can be used to develop and/or tune these algorithms instead of having a dedicated team of humans focused on this specific area.
But see, that is AI, just not machine learning. It's classical AI.
How would contrails cause global warming? They're just condensation.
From the Report, Chapter 10.5.2:
If the conditions are suitable, emissions of soot and water vapour can trigger the formation of contrails (Kärcher 2018), which can spread to form extensive contrail-cirrus cloud coverage. Such cloud coverage is estimated to have a combined ERF that is about 57% of the current net ERF of global aviation (Lee et al. 2021), although a comparison of cirrus cloud observations under pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic conditions suggest that this forcing could be smaller (Digby et al. 2021). Additional effects from aviation from aerosol-cloud interactions on high-level ice clouds through soot (Chen and Gettelman 2013; Zhou and Penner 2014; Penner et al. 2018), and lower-level warm clouds through sulphur (Righi et al. 2013; Kapadia et al. 2016) are highly uncertain, with no best estimates available (Lee et al. 2021).
The 2 papers listed which quantify the effect:
- Lee, D.S. et al., 2021: The contribution of global aviation to anthropogenic climate forcing for 2000 to 2018. Atmos. Environ. , 244, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2020.117834. Link to paper
- Digby, R.A.R., N.P. Gillett, A.H. Monahan, and J.N.S. Cole, 2021: An Observational Constraint on Aviation-Induced Cirrus From the COVID-19-Induced Flight Disruption. Geophys. Res. Lett. , 48(20) , e2021GL095882-e2021GL095882, doi:10.1029/2021GL095882. Link to paper
So fucked. I can't even make a sarcastic joke (I tried) about how fucked we are.
I'm laughing because if I don't I'll cry
Wait... Wait... Is this just idiocracy? Like... We all joke, but now we have computers that will automatically lay off workers like in the movie?
Nah its actually dumber than they predicted: the manager asks the computer what to do today and the computer tells the manager to lay people off.
Original link for posterity: https://mastodon.social/@jimray/112133920866875045
I upvoted, but is c/Memes just Lemmy general now?
Is this not a meme? I thought this counted. Lmk if it doesn't belong.
If you wanna get technically, according to Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976) which first coined the term "meme", a meme is "a unit of culture—such as “tunes, ideas, catch‐phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.”
So yes, your post would count as a meme, but so would pegging
these two things aren't mutually exclusive, your can play your part and eat billionaires.
Theme song for this post: https://youtu.be/M0tBgQxur3g
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/M0tBgQxur3g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I don't think any data centers would be using ground water for cooling. They'd likely be on closed loop systems. And the power draw is only an issue if we decide to not fix where the grid gets its power from.
Of course the power draw is an issue. There's no 100% clean energy and our grid is still not 100% renewable. If we continue expanding the energy use in frivolous projects, we're barely moving the needle. We want to do both, reduce energy use and clean up the grid.
data center engineer here! incorrect
Found the escaped AI entity guys! It’s right here!
And the power draw is only an issue if we decide to not fix where the grid gets its power from.
So it is and remains an unavoidable problem with frivolous AI use for the foreseeable future?
