Only if that same warning is attached to literally everything else you do. It's unfair to single out AI for using energy.
Even driving your car around you at least are somewhat aware of the gas you are burning.
Emissions should be fixed on the production side (decarbonization) not on the demand side (guilt/austerity).
Scaling up battery production makes EVs more appealing on the demand side. How do you disincentivize fossil fuel production?
The problem with fossil fuels isn’t that they pollute, but that most of the negative impact of that pollution is borne by others. This results in an artificially low price which distorts the market and results in economically inefficient overuse.
Capture that cost by making producers pay a tax of the corresponding amount, and market forces will use the “right” amount of fossil fuels in ways that are a net benefit.
That’s what I said?
> Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles.
Demand can be reduced by increasing fuel prices. Either at the pump through consumption tax or at production. The effect remains the same.
> You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up.
Obviously. What does that have to do with disincentivizing fossil fuel production or consumption?
Or, even worse God forbid, think about how much carbon is produced to create a single bottle or carton of water. Then consider how casually people down bottles of water.
A google search claims water use uses 12.7% of US energy.
Another search gave 11.7% US energy goes to powering AI (projected to increase to roughly 25% by 2030).
Taking into account hydropower power provides 6.2% of US energy, I feel comfortable saying your statement isn't true.
To further strengthen my statement, I would like to point out another statistic. NPR gives us an estimate of 300K gallons of water use/day to cool the average data center. That pretty much guarantees an LLM query produces more carbon than my filling a cup from a gravity fed water system filled by rain.
Funny how this suddenly became a thing after electrification became a thing. Need to find a new way to wag the finger after all.
The biggest problem with tailpipe emissions used to be horrendous smog. That was mostly solved in many places, and now the biggest problem is the impact on the global climate.
The biggest issue with childhood mortality used to be disease. Now we (correctly) focus more on accidental deaths.
EVs solved tailpipe emissions, but they’re not perfect. Their biggest problem is just something else.
The oil industry is a conglomerate of degenerates spamming boomer logic all the way down to the workers. Their memes propagate throughout society and lead to the other boomer characteristic of rewriting personal and societal history.
The finger waggers now are being programmed to pretend they talked about tire particulates and the carheads are being programmed to pretend they never cared about 0-60. This another "We have always been at war with Eastasia", just like they all opposed the Iraq war from day 1 and didn't cancel the Dixie Chicks, et cetra.
This may have been discussed in specialist literature somewhere but even when I did ecology courses in university circa 2001ish, I never heard about tire particulates, while I did hear a lot about greenhouse gasses.
It's a concern but not a civilization ending concern like climate change. I low key resent these attempts to move goalposts to satisfy the writer's urge for negativity.
Consider that a bus has six to ten tires that each weigh around ten times more than a typical car tire. This is presented as the alternative to cars, is it even any different? Not implausible that it could actually be worse, especially if the bus isn't at full occupancy at all times.
Meanwhile the weight difference between EVs and petroleum cars is emphasized in the complaints, even though it isn't very large, while the much larger weight difference between any cars and buses is ignored. Because the point isn't to complain about tires, it's to complain about EVs.
And if the point actually was to complain about tires then you still wouldn't be talking about EVs, you would be talking about tires and how to make them shed less or construct them out of lower toxicity materials etc.
My city buses in peak travel hours have anywhere from 20 to 75 people on them. Even if we assume that every one of those folks would have carpooled (which rarely happens), we're looking at a lot of cars, and thus tires, on the road.
This is really the problem with buses outside of extremely high density areas. (And extremely high density areas should have subways.)
You get off work at 5PM, you want to go to an entertainment venue and then go home at 10PM. You can find a full bus a 5:15PM that will take you there because it's rush hour, but then you can't get home on the bus because there is no bus service after 9PM. Which means you can't take the bus there during rush hour either, because you need your car to be there so you can get home.
Or, you can run mostly-empty buses in the darkness hours, but there goes your efficiency.
To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity. Volume lost per mile driven is basic high-school arithmetic, and the only real questions are regarding data quality and whether the self-imposed constraints (e.g., examining real-world wear rather than wear given optimal driving or something) are reasonable.
Harder rubber seems like it could make a difference, but then you could also put tires with harder rubber on a car.
You can get a heavier vehicle to have the same pressure at the road by using more and bigger tires, but then the problem is that the tires are bigger and there are more of them.
> plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.
Isn't a city bus constantly starting and stopping, both as a result of city traffic and picking up and dropping off passengers?
> To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity.
I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.
And I expected the difference to be even more, but I guess that goes to show how much the weight argument is motivated reasoning if ~7x the weight is only ~3x the tire wear and then people are complaining about something which is only ~1.2x the weight.
Pardon me if I ask the obvious question, but did you divide your result by the average number of people moved? Because that's the actual utility of mass vs. individual transport. I would find it rather surprising if tire wear was the one measure were buses didn't win out.
No bus tires to not typically last 500k miles. <100k is the norm, and really not more than a long-life car tire.
They do get retreaded more often than car tires do, but that just means they get new rubber added regularly.
Tire temperature also will play a big roll in tire wear, and I wouldn't expect bus tires to get very hot only rolling half the time and at a lower speed than the typical car.
And of course you also gotta factor in passenger count. Buses generally have more than just 1 or 2 people, while the vast majority of cars will have 1 or 2 people most of the time. And even if a bus tires were to wear out twice as fast as a car's tire, that is still less wear per person than a car.
Is there a way to quantify this? My experience as well is that the tire particulate pollution has mostly been an anti-EV talking point.
There’s been decades of lies about climate change. And once the truth got out society was already massively dependent on it. For cars specifically it was a deliberate policy to make e.g. the US car-dependent. And once the truth got undeniable the cope was switched to people’s “carbon footprint” (British Petroleum). In fact there are rumors that the cope echoes to this day.
Zoom out enough and it becomes obviously unproductive to make “mass ignorance” the locus of attention.
Do you really think the average person could within 2 orders of magnitude when estimating their carbon footprint for a year?
Why? AI isn't a human being. We have no obligation to be "fair" to it.
“We care”. Because British Petroleum told us to care.[1] Now the new scapegoat grift is how many prompts you use to make your “creative” wedding invitations. Nevermind industrial use though. We’ll just hammer every little API or just endpoint, slurp up the data, then do the same thing tomorrow because why cache? Keep it simple. It’s not our cost.[2] No one will scold us (that can get to us).
Public service announcement huh. Let’s just fall for it again.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046315
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...
Political lobbying.
I can picture an Elizabeth Holmesian cartoon clutching her diamond necklace.
"Oh, won't somebody think of the tech billionaires?!"
If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet
The basic premise of the modern tech industry is scale. It's not one person running a microwave for a couple of seconds, it's a few billion people running a microwave for the equivalent of decades.
So yes let’s hand wring over AI and continue to do nothing about everything else. And we’ll probably do nothing about AI either, but the endless articles will no doubt keep people distracted.