I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my family has found ways to generate remarkably little garbage, and other “nice” things, but it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s all theatre compared to the damage we do with our car, jobs, community and provincial infrastructure we depend on, etc.
I feel like I’m willing to change my life, and I have already I guess. I’m just not willing to give up my livelihood when it means so little in the bigger picture. I’m no different from someone working on an oil rig or forestry or whatever. What I do looks nicer, but my rationale is no different.
It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.
The tragedy arises in aggregate. When every industry contributes negligible amounts at the same time the aggregate contribution is no longer negligible. Rational individual action leads to total destruction.
Yeah we are all guilty. Even when we contribute negligible amounts.
What? No.
You need to look at it by sub industries in industries. That's more closer to the logical perspective people are acting on.
> Indeed, making the much bigger model, the GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, emitted over 550 tons of CO2e while consuming 1,287 MW hours of electricity, per computer scientist Kate Saenko. It’s the same amount of emissions as a single person taking 550 roundtrip flights between New York and San Francisco.
Specifically, I struggle with the interpretation where this is presented as significant amount. To me, training GPT-3 at the cost of about a SINGLE New York-San Francisco return flight is practically negligible. I wonder whether for example at a conference like NeurIPS the carbon cost of all the experiments is exceeded by the carbon cost of participant travel to the conference. My guess is that probably yes.
[1] https://carboncredits.com/how-big-is-the-co2-footprint-of-ai...
Computing infrastructure is one thing, but then there's also the enormous waste footprint of electronics in general. So many billions of people are now cycling through devices, and our recycling story is disturbingly poor. My job is quite close to this problem, whether it directly supports it or not. My livelihood more or less depends on humanity using connected devices, so this problem works in my favour (so to speak).
Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that solar panels are typically profitable within a handful of years for an average household, let alone if you can 100% offset the kWh generated because all the energy can be used in-house?
It very likely could, and I'd happily pay for it. Like, my Mac Studio with an M2 Max in it probably took, all said, and absurd about of resources to create... But it only cost me $3k or something. Well, if it works as long as it should, it'll easily help me earn over half a million dollars. I'd rather pay far more for the computer and cover the expenses of the externalities of its production, but I don't have the choice.
Otherwise, a lot of the energy used in the production could be sustainably produced, but it's not incentivized enough in the countries (or any countries, I suppose) in order for that to occur.
Perhaps I could make improvements by switching to different computers. I know the framework offers opportunities to reuse the same chassis such you can use mostly-the-same hardware for a very long time, and that could be the right path forward. I love the philosophy.
As for the driving issue, that's very hard to overcome. I personally ride an electric bike just about all the time, but at the moment I'm on vacation in Whistler, BC, having driven through 2 full tanks of gas so far on my way from Victoria, to Squamish, now Whistler, and all the little stops in between. My Toyota Highlander produces more pollution than any other single thing in my life. My wife drives it for work and we both regret the purchase quite a bit. Yet, something electric would take a very long time to "break even" on the footprint before improving on our situation, even with how clean our electricity is here in BC. I need to do more research to understand how I could purchase my way out of this problem.
IIRC the break even point when powered by renewable energy was about 60k kilometers.
Depending on where you live and your driving habits that could be seen as a lot, but considering that after those ~40k miles every mile can be considered 'clean' I don't think it's all that bad.
Edit:
Source in Dutch: http://publications.tno.nl/publication/34616575/gS20vf/TNO-2...
TL;DR: Assuming a car lifespan of 220k km (136k miles) and including emissions for fabrication, repairs, etc. emissions will be 70% lower for an electric vehicle powered by renewables. When powered by non-renewable energy it's still 30% less total emissions than a regular petrol car. Other than that you also emit less of various other pollutants. And (personal opinion alert) it's just a way nicer drive ;-)
Of course, replacing a fossil car that is still nearly new is the greater evil. I fully support driving on gasoline if that's genuinely the better thing to do.
What one can do in the meantime is use one of the available options to suck the CO2 back out of the air. It's expensive, but if you say you're happy to pay the premium given your income if only there were options, well, that's an option, and can be applied to the computer purchase or electricity production, too. It does get prohibitively expensive when including every emission, but it's not all or nothing, and also, with solar panels reducing the electricity need, a green energy provider covering the grid demand (that's the best one can reasonably do after solar panels), etc., it should be possible to reduce the need for carbon capture quite a bit already today, and more in the future as more industries greenify
Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.
Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.
We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.
This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.
It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.
I moved to a location that is not going to see negatives from climate change. Even if your location isn't great, just work on what you can do. Stop consuming junk on Amazon and start freecycling in your neighborhood. Spend more money to buy goods that have a lower environmental impact. If you own a home, there's a lot you can do to improve the environment. Compost, install rain barrels, maybe solar panels, use native landscaping, plant more trees that will provide shade.
The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.
For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.
But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.
> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.
Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.
I’m personally quite optimistic, because I’ve already made most of the necessary adjustments, and it wasn’t very hard at all.
Unfortunately this future is inline with the the pessimistic viewpoint.
It's not about pessimism or optimism in the end. It's about logic. He's right. It's done. Likely the worst case scenario for global warming will play out. We already crossed the permanent threshold.
The above is my mockery of how I expect we will in 40 years
If I change my own behavior but everyone doesn't then my actions are negligible.
Rationally my best course of action is to not change.
Remember it is each individual acting extremely rationally and logically that in the end contributes to global warming in aggregate. That is why it's so hard to reverse this. The tragedy of the commons.
So we don’t have to change we live, we just have to change the way we generate our energy.